The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. It explains Modern Monetary Theory in a way that doesn't give you tired head like most economics texts. A key takeaway from MMT is that all the hysteria about the national deficit and debt is nothing to worry about at all, and is (surprise!) just political theater used to slash social programs and push privatization.
I don't know about MMT, but the deficit is most definitely deliberately engineered. The same people complaining about it started it with tax cuts and increased spending, and their solution is not to cut that spending, not to adjust those tax cuts they implemented, but to cut back on government spending on things they have a bee in their bonnet about. Its obviously engineered so they can use it as a cudgel against any public spending.
Currently reading manufacturing consent, have heard many "chomsky is just a lib" takes, but I think it's a pretty good read if you're willing to dive into details of the cold war (like an alleged plot by the KGB to kill the pope which was just propaganda)
That's just angry teenagers saying that.
The Bulgarian Plot is interesting, the people promoting that were Claire Sterling and Michael Ledeen.
Sterling had been a disinformation agent for the British in the 1940s and 50s and by the 1980s was banding about claims that the Soviets were behind every single terrorist organization and every act of terrorism and responsible for every revolutionary group and war that had been going on since the 1970s and it was all a massive plot to destabilize the west and undermine the USA - her work was being cited by CIA chief and other administration officials who refused to believe CIA analysts telling them not only was there was no basis for her work but some of it was based on stories the CIA had itself planted in the foreign press!
Ledeen is a long time neocon grifter who may be an agent of the Italian military intelligence, SISMI, or even the P2 Masons. I shit you not. He worked with a SISMI agent promoting anti-Carter smear “billygate” in 1980 trying to claim is party animal brother Billy Carter was some how connected to Kaddafi. He was connected to Iran Contra through introducing Manucher Ghorbanifar to several of its players. In the 2000s he was a big supporter of invading Iraq and has connections to the Niger Letter forgery. Today he promotes the “clash of civilizations” view positing America must lead the world in a war against Iran.
Cryptography papers, and also Robspierre for when I get around to the next history of socialism effortpost I've been doing every week.
- Wage-Labor and Capital
- Critique of the Gotha Program
- Theses on Feuerbach (Chapo short attention span book club)
- The Body Keeps The Score (about trauma)
- All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (Chapo fiction book club)
- Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley
- Two Faces of American Freedom (Chapo nonfiction book club)
- The Next Revolution by Murray Bookchin
- Pearls of Lutra (Redwall #9)
how is two faces of american freedom? I downloaded but it's on my "to-read" list
Currently: John Berger's Portraits
Re-reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed for a chat with a comrade and writing about it.
The Plague by Camus.
Two Faces of American Freedom is pretty damn awesome. It's introducing me to a lot of new concepts which is why I'm having a hard time describing why the book is so useful, but suffice it to say it illustrates the history of Republicanism and Populism and how they have transformed throughout American history. To me the book's thesis provides a roadmap for how socialists in the United States can reclaim classical Republican concepts like freedom and liberty.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman.
Interesting look into the machinery of American imperialism, but we aren't gonna be saved by hoping someone in power suddenly grows a conscience.
I found myself skeptical about that book. I can't really quantify it, but the author seemed slightly untrustworthy. I don't know if I was just too lib at the time I read it, but even in my darkest days I was always hardcore anti-imperialism (really I've never been a very good lib, just closer to that particular nastiness than I am now), and maybe his need to wring his hands about his past came off as borderline narcissistic.
I got that same vibe. Read something authoritative instead like Killing Hope.
Oh I totally agree. It's a fascinating look into the mechanisms of US imperialism. But I can't believe that there isn't way, way more to the story than author's narrative of going from a master of seizing poor countries by the balls, to SUDDENLY realizing that, "hey, am I the the baddie?"
Though I haven't finished the book yet. Maybe it will come later.
It does a little bit - he talks about his daughter, if I'm not mistaken, and her making him feel guilty. Something of the sort.
I tried reading that years ago, it didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know from more reliable sources and the writer just came off as a bit flakey and trying to present himself as a Hunter S. Thompson-esque character.
Economics: a User's Guide by Ha Joon Chang. He's a lib but it's helping me fill out my basic understanding of capitalist economics which I am not strong in.
I am fairly new to the whole not being a lib thing so I have to catch up on a lot of reading, someone on here mentioned Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti recently, and so far I am really enjoying it. Also just finished Management of Savagery by Max Blumenthal (Thank you Verso book club), which I would highly recommend for a great info dump on American imperialism in the middle east.
I got a copy of mismeasure of man but never got around to it, but it's very obvious that IQ was and continues to be a tool of oppression. That book on meditation sounds extremely interesting. I know the last interview RevLeft had with Michael Brooks he mentioned something similar.
Not just biological determinism but to try to say "see their problems are their own fault nothing we did" + argue to cut public services since its just wasted on people who cannot do 'better'.
Charles Murray is a big Koch crony too, and Charles Kochs father was a co-founder of the John Birch Society and Charles was also a member.
And the Birchers were major opponents of the Civil Rights Movement and School Integration. And Murray is just one of many people Charles has continued to support with unusual ideas about race.
Reading through Inventing Reality. It's really eye-openeing even at 30% through. For example, the state essentially controls the big media apparatus. The FBI outright owns several news and publishing companies and the CIA has minimum hundreds of people on their payroll in all the big channels and papers. And this book was written in 1986, so it's guaranteed to be even more tightly controlled now. Knowing this, it's clear why bernie blindness is a thing. You could probably hand this book to any bernie bro and every single thing will start to click into place for them.
Also, I'm young-ish so i wasn't around before the Fairness Doctrine in reporting - it basically required all viewpoints to be allowed to air on TV and time for alternatives. But even then, of course, no communists were ever on air. (But we have nazis on TV now, so fun!) So even at our most liberal, we've never truly had a free press. At least, not in a long time. So it's like, at what point how is that any different than just having a state media. And it's a step worse than that, because it's not even labeled as being reported as state news.
The FBI outright owns several news and publishing companies and the CIA has minimum hundreds of people on their payroll in all the big channels and papers.
Source for that?
don't have time to find the source in the book, but i think it was referencing this article
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propaganda-network-built-by-the-cia-a-worldwide-network.html
Capitalist Realism - Read it a while back, but I'm reading it again for a reading group discussion.
Bullshit software engineering courses unfortunately. I'm going to be so happy when my exams are done so I can drop these stupid fucking studies, start studying philosophy and become the beautiful failson I was born to be.
Software engineering? Like firmware or medical stuff?
Or are you talking about programming that has very few real life responsibilities that actual engineers deal with?
I know I'm being pedantic but I'm curious if the abuse of "engineering" reaches into tech academia. I would hope that higher ed stuff would avoid the misrepresentation but I don't know what to expect from Americans anymore.
No worries, I'm Belgian and here we have general engineering studies that we call "civil engineering", this is divided in subcategories like "material, mechanical, chemical, etc." For example at the moment I'm studying software and electrical engineering, which amounts to a bit of programming but with a large focus on the maths and theory behind it, designing processors and a fuckton of algebra. I'm not sure what that translates to in other countries. I'm guessing the US idea of a civil engineer would be more of a mechanical engineer or an engineer-architect. Anyways in my case the responsibilities would be largely gone and I'd probably end up working behind my laptop all day, which is why I'm quitting these studies in the first place. Hope this cleared it up a bit!
Nice, hope that goes well with you :3
In the US there are legal consequences and liabilities involved with using the title of "engineer" but the word is still casually (and not-so-casually) used to describe programming occupations.
Software engineering is almost always about architecture and infrastructure, rarely touches on programming. In fact most software engineers aren't exactly amazing programmers. That still holds true in the US.
Source: am software engineer at a startup
Software never gets into any engineering. Even if it's in a car, plane, or maglev train, software makers aren't involved in the legal and ethical regulations and guidelines licensed engineers have to go through. Software workers aren't apprenticed, nor are they tested by the state. The tech industry has grabbed at the term "engineer" just so their unreliable work can at least be legitimized in marketing alone.
software makers aren’t involved in the legal and ethical regulations
This is wrong
guidelines licensed engineers have to go through
This is also wrong
Software workers aren’t apprenticed
This is wrong in a lot of cases
It sounds like you have kind of a chip on your shoulder about this term and are wrong about a lot of things that software engineers do. Just because the solutions designed are not physically real (which especially holds true with infrastructure as code) does not mean that they are not engineered or architected.
If you wish to take "engineer" as a verb then yeah, people engineer and manufacture and plan and whatever. "Engineer" as a noun, or as an occupation, is different. Software "engineers" don't go through FE tests. The legal ramifications are simply not comparable.
I do have a chip on my shoulder because two of my siblings are real engineers, not "techies with degrees and an ethics class maybe".
Oh lord you're gatekeeping something that doesn't even impact you. Literally half the engineers I work with came from other disciplines like electrical or mechanical but ended up in software because they preferred it over their background. What a very odd hill to die on.
Not an odd hill to die on. The names of professions shouldn't be dictated by marketing teams, especially when the names they think of have serious legal implications.
What serious legal implications are you on about? I work with three security teams, an ethics board, and legal. My software doesn't even touch anything that would come close to causing harm, and that's just in my area.
I mean, the term has existed since '60s so it's not like this is a marketing thing that's brand new or anything, and the NCEES used to offer it. I dunno if I give a shit what Texas state law says about anything, really. But again I don't get your weird gatekeeping over the term, it sounds kind of like a pet peeve that's not even yours that you've picked up as a cause.
The term "software engineer" has been used since the 60's in an effort to elicit some kind of sophisticated creation of software for the purpose of handling NATO nuclear warheads. There was a pretty obvious and explicit desire to have reliable code for something that deadly, and the care into making that software could be described as "engineering" but the use of the term was nonetheless criticized anyway because it took decades for the related software development to be satisfactory for NATO.
And, to be perfectly honest, I don't think it's as important to get your stuff made right as it was for NATO.
There was no single source. Margaret Hamilton used it entirely unbidden by that application to describe what she was doing for the Apollo missions.
I've worked with dozens and dozens of mechanical, electrical, optical, and environmental engineers as well as scientists and you are literally the first person I've ever spoken to who has given any shits about this.
okay I concede it's silly of me to be pedantic with someone who does softwares in such a multi-disciplinary implementation
I mean if that's the case aren't you still risking being pedantic with others without knowing what they do?
I mean I have met run-of-the-mill web devs and Java coders that call themselves "software engineers" so the term is abused too much to bother giving many graces.
Yeah I again don't really see any issue with that nor have any of my colleagues expressed any concern over that whatsoever. It's sort of like getting mad at the number of deans in American colleges like yes, there's a sort of title spam happening there, but it's irrelevant because who gives a fuck
The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett. Gotta keep it light sometimes, and they're beautiful fast reads.
So today I finished my first reading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But I got some revising and re-reading to-do, as I was going through it with a friend. But now it's less pressure so I can switch to other things — expect a write up soon.
I started Portraits by John Bergers and I have "what is to be done?" by Lenin pinned on my chrome bar.
Waiting on Long Twentieth Century to get re-stocked and that's gonna be my final purchase for my collection this year.
