Yes, Egyptians eat it with a spoon. When I was there we used bread because we shared this and other stuff and I enjoyed adding more carbs, because I was very hungry.

I always liked how Koshary has all kinds of carbs: rice, pasta, lentils and you even eat it with bread (and your hands). It tastes great and with the typicall serving size, it's impossible to be hungry afterwards.

You're out of touch with reality with this idealist conception of wages as a result of knowledge. The value of labor is the cost of its reproduction. Capitalists pay workers exactly as much as they need to for them to turn up again the next morning. Knowledge does not directly factor into their calculation. Don't expect to be rewarded for the work you put into your education - the system isn't fair and doesn't work like that.

Instead, wages are the result of a collective power struggle between labor and capital. High wages occur either when labor is strong and capital weak or when you betray other workers and aid capital in their exploration.

Now expert knowledge is one of many things that might help by increasing bargaining power in the struggle with capital, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. For example an automotive engineer might have just as much knowledge as a chemical engineer, but where I live, chemistry earns you about 50% more, because the chemistry union is stronger.

So union power, strikes and social movements are a big factor. Others are location, the average rent, international competition, the reserve army of labor. At any specific time, the boom and bust cycle of periodic crisis strongly effects wages.

The organic composition of capital plays an indirect role: If the degree of automation suddenly rises, this will lower workers bargaining power short term and lower profits long term which increases pressure on wages.

So if you want a career with stable, high wages but don't want to help exploit others, look for sectors with a long-term chance of a strong bargaining position for labor.

I'd also like to be pinged, thank you.

Twain also wrote often about meeting annoying US tourists on his travels and going out of his way to avoid them. For example in "A Tramp Abroad", after describing a particular annoying interaction with one he writes:

And away he went. He went uninjured, too—I had the murderous impulse to harpoon him in the back with my alpenstock, but as I raised the weapon the disposition left me; I found I hadn’t the heart to kill him, he was such a joyous, innocent, good-natured numbskull.

Hi, just a small correction: the title said week 3, but the body of the text said week two.

Many plastics (thermoplastics) would actually be recyclable, if they didn't put so many additives in, like for UV resistance. But then the color would get a slightly yellow tint after some years of exposure to sunlight. And who would want that? /s

So much self-reflection, that's impressive! I'm not a parent, but I feel like I get a lot of this, because it's articulated so well. Also sounds, like you really intend to do your best!

The goal when communicating is to remove "you" from the message. As a small example, "You need to clean up your plate and fork!" could become "I see a plate and fork still in the table!"

That's like classic non-violent communication by Marshall Rosenberg. There is more to it and it helps with adults too, not just with children.

So yeah. Its a struggle. It's exhausting. Being exhausted makes everything harder.

Maybe forgiveness might help with the exhaustion. For the mistakes of your own caretakers, for yourself, for your children. Most importantly for yourself. You can more easily try your best every day, if blame for not getting it perfect all the time doesn't become so strong, that it gets in the way. Not sure, if this applies at all to your case.

It's cool, that they are so well adapted to live at the ocean, even though their feathers aren't even fully waterproof and have to be dried all the time. If they were fully waterproof, they would be probably be too buoyant to dive as well as they do.

It's like they took a risk and threw out the one feature every aquatic bird was supposed to have and it paid off.

Thank you for hosting! I loved this book!

1. What was your biggest takeaway from reading The Will to Change?

Two main things: A lot of personal reflection about my own socialization, that can't quickly be put into words and a renewed resolve to strive for kindness and compassion towards others and myself, especially where it goes against patriarchal conditioning and expectations.

2. How has the book's material and hooks' insights affected your everyday life?

It gave me room to think about things and I recommended it to many friends. I'm more aware of patriarchal behavior.

3. How can we apply hooks' lessons on healthy, non-patriarchal masculinity to improve the site culture of Hexbear?

I don't know and I don't understand enough about hexbear to suggest anything. I hope, that it already helped a bit. In the last chapter, hooks says she used to wonder if there was a place, where patriarchal men, who did hurtful things and were accordingly excluded, could turn to. Where they could go to change and grow. I don't know, if a virtual thing like a website can ever be that place. I can't imagine us stopping to ban toxic people. Maybe the best we can hope for is to encourage people to try and find a place like that in their lives and maybe help those who have the will to change along the way. And like I said, this book club might already have done a lot for the people who participated.

For a practical takeaway, here are some ideas, that might have been tried before: Leftist spaces in real life should actively encourage masc-socialized people to engage in self reflection. Within any org or movement, there could be a feminist structure, where men do group meetings and learn and share. And they could also be tasked by the awareness team with staging interventions if a man in the group engaged in any form of patriarchal violence. They could then work directly with the preparator (given the consent of the affected) and do a large part of the often neglected long-term work of community accountability and restorative justice.

That way, men who hurt comrades, but want to change wouldn't be automatically excluded from the org or movement. And the burden to deal with more of their patriarchal bullshit, which will probably come up on the way towards healing, wouldn't fall on women and marginalized genders, but on people with male privilege.

No, it's never been able to compete on the market in terms of cost per kWh without massive amounts of government money. Just try building a nuclear power plant. Without this funding, no bank would give you credit, no insurance would insure you or any bank stupid enough to finance you. And alternatives are only getting cheaper, while trying to deal with the enormous risks continues to highten the costs of nuclear.

And that's not even talking about the enormous hidden costs off loaded on exploited people who have to mine the uranium. Or on future generations who are forced to take responsibility for nuclear waste in the only realistic way: actively guarding ever more and ever larger high security buildings full of poison (yes, the toxicity is just as problematic as the radioactivity) and hoping really hard against probability, that no natural or human made disaster will ever strike in basically all eternity.

it seems like differences in worldview stem from a disregard of the universal ethical principle

and it makes sense then that common ground cannot be found when opposing viewpoints are rooted in incompatible principles.

That's a very normative and idealist worldview, that itself fails to regard other, opposing principles and thus doesn't live up to the standards it pretends to set. In reality, differences in worldview often have material reasons rather than ideological ones. For example all the brilliant dialectics of Hegel ultimately amount to him embracing the Prussian monarchy as the ultimate end result of history. The final goal of all human morality. It just so happens, that he was a privileged intellectual, comfortably living under Prussian rule.

I'm an amateur too and yes, personally, I think one should definitely "hop around" between authors before engaging more deeply with one of them. Or else be prepared for a rude awakening once you finally managed to work through one author (any author) and the next one just completely destroys their core premises in a few sentences. Yes, this will totally happen with Kant.

universal ethical principle stating that one should always respect the humanity in others, and that one should only act in accordance with rules that could hold for everyone.

That's an incomplete description. Kants real categorical imperative claims we should always act in such a way, so that we can, at the same time, wish for the principles of our actions to become universal law. For example Kant says it's always wrong to lie, no matter the context, because if everyone lied, no one would understand each other and lying would become pointless. So if a murderer asks you were you hid their next innocent victim, you are compelled to answer truthfully.

A dialectical critique of Hegelians against Kants categorical imperative lists many examples where it leads to absurd conclusions. For example is it ethical to give to the poor in order to reduce poverty? Not if you follow the categorical imperative, because if that became universal law, poverty would be eliminated and charity would be pointless. So, strictly speaking, you can not act in this way and at the same time rationally wish for your action to become universal law. In the same way, the categorical imperative can be seen to fail to address any material contradiction on a society wide scale.

I'm not saying Kant isn't worthwhile(although it almost does seem as if he made his writing hard to understand on purpose). Any philosopher can be criticized and many still have a lot to offer us. It just helps to know what you're getting into.

For a general overview and if you like podcasts, you could listen to "history of philosophy without any gaps" with Professor Peter Adamson. The main series is about philosophy in Europe and the Islamic world (which includes Jewish philosophy). It's engaging and funny and starts with the Pre-Socratics and over 450 episodes later is still going in the Renaissance. There are also spin-off podcasts for African, Chinese and Indian philosophy.

Studying history, you'll get a good understanding of why people call the entirety of philosophy merely "Footnotes to Plato". Also it helps in understanding any philosophical text to know what context philosophers react to (for example Kant reacted to Hume, Hegel reacted to Kant, there is no consensus on who had the better arguments). You also definitely go away from the podcast with a sense of "history isn't over".

Studying history helps understanding how contemporary philosophy isn't "better" or "worse" than philosophy at other times in history. People have always been smart and always had complex ideas. And who knows if philosophy of our time will later be remembered as an important contribution. Another important lesson from studying the history of philosophy is that it's easy to attack any philosophical system, but hard to build one. You can very quickly go from "wow, this makes a lot of sense" to "this is completely absurd" and still gain a lot from engaging with the material.

For a good sense of how well a particular philosophy holds up against it's critics, I like reading the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy as well as articles linked in the sources.

This article is just the tip of an iceberg of very publicly available facts. US people have been indoctrinated to believe in nuclear power because of nuclear weapons and centralized energy corporations high on government funds. Elsewhere it's long between accepted as a scientific and economic fact that it can never be the solution. It's never been economically viable. It's ecologically destructive. It's technologically outdated. Other countries only need it to support or deter the imperial hegemon. US leftists need to finally rise above almost a century of propaganda and face the truth: in a peaceful communist world, no one would ever even think about building something as ineffective (in cost per kWh) and dangerous as a nuclear power plant.

Add me please. Thanks for managing this.

On the second question: It's not an answer but this maybe helpful. Read from left to right and line by line, this lays out the basic structure of argument of capital one, as Harvey sees it. As you can see, it's not a "line of argument", but rather an interlinking chain of contradicting forces, which hints at a dialectic method.

This implies that he may prove things to himself behind the scenes, and only explain his findings in popular form in the book

Yes, but I think he does intend to show everything and make it as accessible as possible, it's just, that he has the three volumes in mind from the beginning. That's why chapter one might be too early to answer both questions actually. Or rather it might be useful in reading capital to keep the totality in mind. Here is another picture by Harvey intend to help with that.

It's too bad, because economically it makes total sense. It might just have been too ambitious to definitely locate the phenomenon in time and space(in European middle ages). It probably took place then to some limited degree quantitatively, but the qualitative change came later and closer to modern times.

I'm still convinced by the core economic idea, I just think about it happening mostly after the enclosure of the commons: The division between paid productive labor and unpaid reproductive work is useful for capital in dividing the working class and providing an initial push for the circulation of capital similar to the enclosure of the commons and colonialism. But it also creates a contradiction. And while this is not the first origin of patriarchy, it determines the form that patriarchy takes under capitalism.

1.) About the dividing the working class part: I imagine male workers, who were driven from their land and whos commons were confiscated, who had to move to the cities work nothing but their ability to work, who still remember the ability to live off the land first and only then surrender part of the harvest as surplus. They are made complicit in their own exploitation by the promise, that, when they come home from the factories and mines, at least they are the absolute patriarchal ruler of the household, served by women and children. The newly doubly free worker might even have asked: "But how am I ever going to marry, if I have nothing to my name? Which woman, or her family, would accept me?". And the new version of patriarchy answered:"Don't worry, for they will have even less than you. Without wages or land or commons they will depend on you and be forced to serve you".

But most of this probably took place after the middle ages during industrialization. If one really wants to find the early beginnings of this in history, I think it would be worthwhile to look at medieval Italian city states and later the Dutch trade and finance empire, like Giovanni Arrighi does in "the long twentieth century", except with a feminist lense.

2.) About the part on an initial push for the economy: This is tricky to locate historically without extensive economic data, because there is a dialectic at play here. Depending on the development of the productive capacities, class conciseness and the rate of profit, it can be advantageous for capital to have women and children work for wages in factories or for free at home. That's why capitals approach shifted multiple times over history and the corresponding ideology shifted with it. It's roughly similar to how both outsourcing and inhousing can be advantageous for companies, both mergers and splits, depending on circumstances.

In the same way, women and children where in some places put to work first in factories, because they were easier to exploit than men. Later they were told to stay at home when men were integrated into the work force and unpaid reproductive labor contributed indirectly to profits, as long as profits were high and margins large. Then in our times, they were told to get a job and shoulder the double burden of productive and reproductive work, because the rate of profit fell fast enough and other possibilities to expand the circulation of capital were exhausted. And now this helps to expand the mass of capital by enlarging the workforce and even keep up profits too by keeping wages low. Both became necessary under circumstances of a falling rate of profit and smaller margins and fewer markets left for capitalism to expand too.

All this complicates matters and some (not all) of the critique against Federici might even come from misunderstanding dialectics, where people assume cause and effect are always linear and always point in the same direction, disregarding the totality. Like in the linked post, where the author claims that some portion of women marrying late and working in cities at some point in time disproves the core of Federicis thesis. It doesn't from an economic perspective, but I get why it can be disappointing for historians.

I think, it's possible. Also mentally, people can invent themselfs anew and start fresh even without moving. Some make smaller gestures, like getting rid of a lot of old stuff (which might be necessary for moving anyway), getting into new things or meeting new people.

Private space. I used to share one room with my siblings. It was alright as a child, but I don't want to go back. And I know that many families around the world have very little space for two, three or four generations living under a roof.

If reddit and lemmy (to a lesser degree obviously) have anything in common, it's that they both desperately need perspectives from outside the US to be heard more. I mean just knowing what is meant by "foreign", shouldn't happen. Like foreign to which country? Oh of course the global hegemon again... Why is this the default on an anti-imperialist site?