“I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing the line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly fell into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.”
― Huey P. Newton :huey-wut:
Huey Newton, born on this day in 1942, was a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary who, along with fellow Merritt College student Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party (1966 - 1982). Together with Seale, Newton created a ten-point program which laid out guidelines for how the African-American community could achieve liberation. In the 1960s, under Newton's leadership, the Black Panther Party founded over 60 community support programs (renamed survival programs in 1971) including food banks, medical clinics, HIV support groups, sickle cell anemia tests, prison busing for families of inmates, legal advice seminars, clothing banks, housing co-ops, and their own ambulance service.
The most famous of these programs was the Free Breakfast for Children program which fed thousands of impoverished children daily during the early 1970s. Newton also co-founded the Black Panther newspaper service which became one of America's most widely distributed African-American newspapers. In 1967, he was involved in a shootout which led to the death of the police officer John Frey. Although arrested for the murder of Frey, the charges were eventually dismissed.
In 1970, after his release from prison, Newton received an invitation to visit the People's Republic of China. Newton made the trip in late September 1971 with fellow Panthers, Elaine Brown and Robert Bay, and stayed for 10 days. At every Chinese airport he landed in, Newton was greeted by thousands of people waving copies of the "Little Red Book" and displaying signs that said "we support the Black Panther Party, down with US imperialism" or "we support the American people but the Nixon imperialist regime must be overthrown."
By mid-decade, Newton faced more criminal charges when he was accused of murdering a 17-year-old sex worker and assaulting a tailor. To avoid prosecution, he fled to Cuba in 1974, but returned to the U.S. three years later. The murder case was eventually dismissed after two trials ended with deadlocked juries, while the tailor refused to testify in court in relation to assault charges.
Despite graduating from high school not knowing how to read, he taught himself literacy by reading Plato's Republic and earned a Ph.D. in social philosophy from the University of California at Santa Cruz's History of Consciousness program in 1980. In 1989, he was murdered in Oakland, California by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death. We will have to be driven out with a stick.”
― Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide :huey-wut:
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Black against Empire The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Waldo Martin (no black panther party emote :angery: )
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Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War by Sean L. Malloy :marx-ok:
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Oakland Community School Huey P. Newton Interview :huey-wut:
The State and Revolution :flag-su:
:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:
Remember, sort by new you :LIB:
Yesterday’s megathread :sad-boi:
Follow the ChapoChat twitter account :comrade-birdie:
THEORY; it’s good for what ails you (all kinds of tendencies inside!) :RIchard-D-Wolff:
COMMUNITY CALENDAR - AN EXPERIMENT IN PROMOTING USER ORGANIZING EFFORTS :af:
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Are there any paying gigs in the realm of computation linguistics/natural language processing, that isn't doing something completely evil to the world?
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There are in academia, for sure, but those positions are very competitive and take a long time to work towards.
Beyond that, maybe something like JetBrains or Atlassian would be up your alley? I also wouldn't personally consider a role developing Swift, for example, to be evil just because you work for Apple (but I realize that others might feel differently.)
To elaborate more on my other comment, most direct work is going to be "evil" or "evil adjacent", because only a few big orgs like the DoD, Google, and maybe like NASA (which wouldn't be bad, but that would be a really hard gig to land) invest in pure research. More typical development is almost always going to be a mix of stuff, where you might make significant use of your computational linguistics knowledge, but it won't be the only thing you do. That can be fine though!!
I will also say, I currently take evil money to do what I want to do and... idk... I try to do as much good as I can with the money I get, and also the things I discover or develop will be useful for all sorts of non-evil applications when I'm done. And that doesn't excuse it--I'm not just giving myself a pass--but it's also not so cut and dry to talk about individual impact in a systemically broken world.
I remember seeing a post by @sailorfish recently about some pretty cool research she was doing in linguistics. I dunno if she’d have any ideas, or whether the situation in her area is at all relevant.
And sailorfish, hopefully you don’t mind the ping!
I never mind discussing linguistics :)
However, I'm super deep in academia and genuinely don't know what the corporate market's like. In academia, an interesting recent subfield is "computational sociolinguistics". It combines large scale modelling and data analysis with sophisticated linguistic theories. Stuff like analysing sociophonetic variation in non-standard spellings on Twitter (so more linguistics-heavy). Alternatively people are also working on things like word embedding software in academia too. I mean, academia doesn't pay great, but linguistics does need more people who can code @Mouhamed_McYggdrasil. :')
Otherwise... machine translation start-up? Haha..
Oh hell yeah! I actually started a little project two or three years back, where I downloaded a giant zip of reddit posts, and collected the posts from a few subreddits I identified as "left leaning" (such a this one) or "right leaning" (such as The_Donald). My initial goal was to try to build something that'd be able to identify someone's political leanings based on the content and style of their posts. I eventually got side-tracked when I stumbled onto something that was really good at organically clustering terms based on parts-of-speech, but I'd absolutely love to pick back up on the original intent, too
Oh that sounds fun! I've worked with the same Reddit corpus too (pushshift.io I'm assuming?), for my acronyms stuff. It's amazing how much you can do with these huge chunks of natural written communication nowadays
Ah, I did get the impression that you were active in academia and that you might not know too much about the private sector situation (that was my situation when I was). Oh well, it was worth a shot, and maybe you’ve offered valuable information nonetheless