• Cowbee [he/him, they/them]
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    edit-2
    2 months ago

    I really don't know what it is I'm missing there and keep feel like I didn't understand it properly but don't know what it might be since it all seems straightforward and boring philosophizing like logic calculus and set theory I had to do when starting studying math.

    That's difficult to explain, but an example is that it helps us analyze Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, and the necessity of it in the context of the struggles faced by the PRC under the Gang of Four and the Cultural Revolution. That's something that trips up a lot of left-anticommunists, they see the markets in China and believe it to be Capitalist, because they analyze static units rather than a moving system in the context of a transitional Socialist State.

    It's certainly possible to correctly come to the right conclusions without it, but it's extremely useful if you want to do your own analysis, rather than rely on comrades.

    Idk, but every link to an outside site like their lulu.com store has a google.com URL prepended so google knows what you (your to google pseudonymous you) clicked when you left the site.

    Thanks comrade, purged it from my comment history. I liked it a lot more than Prolewiki's good but minimal beginner guide, and felt it flowed better than Dessalines's Marxism intro, so I actually linked it quite a bit (which, again, I have purged). It's a shame, Communists shouldn't be sending data to google like that, thanks for pointing that out order-of-lenin

    • CantaloupeAss [comrade/them]
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      2 months ago

      Just for some color commentary: Google Analytics is used to track site traffic and the flow of users into, out of, and through a site. You can also use it to track which pages cause people to buy things and click on ads.

      Sometimes you will see it in random places like this because some webmaster is curious about page hits and doesn't want to pay their domain provider for some premium stats package, or maybe traffic data is not provided. So you sign up for Google Analytics and add a tracking script to your website which is free, but it's free because you're bartering your users' data for your site analytics.

      It's not always done with a malicious or surveiling intent and honestly probably would amount to nothing, but God only knows what Google will do with that user data, so I think your instinct is correct that it's inappropriate for a commie site from an opsec perspective.

      • Cowbee [he/him, they/them]
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        2 months ago

        Yep, I don't doubt that it could have been innocent, but the fact that it's there regardless is unacceptable for commie sites. Thanks for your input!

    • mathemachristian [he/him]
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      edit-2
      2 months ago

      I had a bit of a think about it and perhaps the problem was my expectations of it. People kept posting about how it revolutionized their entire life and how they interact with people which hadn't happened for me.

      But what that might have been is people thinking about their day-to-day life in a more abstract manner, or rather bridging the gap between abstract theory and how it presents in reality, because I remember having such a revelation from my introduction to mathematical thinking.

      Because taken by itself set and logic theory, the backbone of math, really aren't that awe-inspiring, but being able to reduce complex problems to a set of easily formulated axioms certainly made me approach real life issues in a different manner. It's how I fell in love with the field itself.

      And so just like set theory seems rather mundane on its surface even though it forms the backbone of the entire field of mathematics so it's with dia-mat.

      A couple of carefully chosen minimal axioms that form the backbone of the whole field, making them vital to study for anyone who wants to learn about it, that are supposed to be obviously true since they are taken for granted, i.e. without proof or even much justification.

      Also I'm thinking about changing engels for stalins intro to diamat so it's 1. wagelabor and value to kind of get a feel of what it's all about, 2. diamat to make sense of state and revolution and then 3. state and revolution as the "magnum opus" or whatever.

        • GarbageShoot [he/him]
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          2 months ago

          I've thought about this for a while and I'm not sure what to say. I don't think I'd go so far as to say that reading any single book "revolutionized my entire life", I just got useful information and perspectives from them. I think that your guess is at least partially right, that some of the people who have the strongest enthusiasm are probably ones who haven't read much philosophy before and therefore are getting more groundwork covered in reading State and Rev [or whatever] than you and I did, because a fair amount of that stuff was already familiar to us.

          Reading theory generally shouldn't be revelatory in some grand sense, this isn't a religious text and you aren't supposed to fall into some kind of transcendental rhapsody, you're just developing your understanding point by point.