I started rebuilding my #website using a #StaticSiteGenerator and aim at relaunching it this year. It will consolidate the contents of services I deployed to establish a #wiki and a #blog, for example. As a #FLOSS#musician I'd like to share not only the finished music, but also the #sources of it and those of my #infrastructure available via a #VersionControlSystem in order to make the whole process transparent and inspire you to follow this #philosophy.
The interview stresses the difference between full-fledged psychopathy and malignant narcissism (which borders on psychopathy). Sinwar, Yassin, and other leaders of terrorist groups are capable of impulse control, delay of gratification, and utter brutality in following thgeir goals. If they were psychopaths, they wouldn't be able to run such highly effecitive organisations.
Also important is the emphsis of "secondary psychopathy", i.e., that children raised in organised crime familes and terrorist circles often learn those values and even adopt imitations of such psychopthic behaviour although they may not clinically be malignant narcissists or borderline psychopaths.
To me this latter reminder is important as it seems to confirm a bit a thought I was having on authoritarian societies, be it Nazi-Germany, Russia, or Gaza: That there is no significant distinction between populace and regime, esp. not the one typcially made (and used as exculpation) between terrorist regime and suffering but innocent poplace. (I admit that by that I cannot explain the existence of the obvious resistance movement in Iran.)
Edward Jeremiah, "The Development, Logic, and Legacy of Reflexive Concepts in Greek Philosophy", Journal of the History of Ideas
Vol. 74, No. 4 (October 2013), pp. 507-529. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43290159
«When and for what purposes does reflexive language enter the philosophical lexicon and become a key component of its discourse, and why do philosophers lean so heavily on reflexive concepts? My argument will limit itself to literal reflexive concepts, in other words concepts articulated via the use of reflexive pronouns, and proposes that the formation of reflexive ideas is primarily shaped by two philosophical goals: firstly, the attempt to think totalities, and secondly, the search for foundational principles, whether they be ontological, epistemological, or ethical. Reflexivity appears to be a general structural tendency of foundational principles and totalities. If this is true, then it can be shown that some of the contemporary philosophical systems which claim to either deconstruct or replace the hierarchies of traditional metaphysics do so mostly in a superficial sense. The essential skeleton of ancient thought is conserved, and with it the conceptual magnetism foundational ideas display for reflexivity. This argument highlights a crucial continuity between ancient and modern philosophy, while at the same time locating an important difference. Though reflexivity is important for both as a primary ontological process, ancient philosophy treasures self-identification, but modern philosophy self-differentiation, as the foremost operation of being. Finally, I suggest that the reflexivity of philosophical "beginnings" (archai) reflects the human being as a reflexive subject.»
«The International Energy Agency now projects oil, gas, and coal use will all peak this decade. This constitutes a dramatic shift from the last 150 years when the thirst for fossil fuels persistently rose. But now this growth is nearing its end sooner than many expected, driven in part by a surge in renewables.
This significant event, however, masks a more striking possible future: One in which total global energy use peaks and energy’s weight in world affairs diminishes. [...]
In a broader sense, just as history has included the stone, bronze and iron ages, we have been living since the Industrial Revolution in an energy age. But this age, during which energy has dominated so many economic, geopolitical and other dimensions, may be coming to an end with peak energy.»
A bit confusing is the author's talk of "energy peak" which seems to lumb together energy and electricity demands. Thus, whereas I can see a decline in energy demands, I don't see them with regard to electricity demands. (Esp. with all the decarbonisation of industries necessary to accomplish mitigation with climate change.)
Anyway, an interesting piece with a lot of interesting links. Surely countering my musings on #peakrenewables with #peakenergy as the broader concept.
Valery Garbuzov, "Russia needs knowledge, not myths, for self-knowledge"
(About the author: Valery Nikolaevich Garbuzov - Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Institute for the USA and Canada Academician G.A. Arbatov RAS).
The points the author makes are not that different from those Western observers have held for years. Interesting is that this rather scathing critique of Putin and his regime, brought about in a historical narrative of Russia suffering from a post-imperial syndrome that makes her laspe into longings of greatness and imperial expansion that don't fit today's realities, is published in a Russian paper/online magazine at all.
Rarely since the early 1990s (with the books by Michael Ventura) has an author from the U.S. influenced me that much.
Although his book review essays vary in quality, his style of presenting as a debate the views of selected authors which he confronts with each other to lead that discussion to the topics he's interested in, is of high intellectual and thus educational value.
Pursuing such "monologue-styled debates" publicly, in magazines and papers, continues a centuries-old tradition. To have his voice from the (more or less) progressive side is a rare exception to the dominance of the conservative tradition that found its master in the late works of Lionel Trilling (who started out as contributer to the Partisan Review).
It's good to see that Scialabba dedicates his new book to Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader and offers his thanks to people like Barbara Ehrenreich and Richard Rorty.
In 1977 the German author Klaus Theweleit wrote a two-volumes account of #fascism which he called "Männerphantasien" / "Male Fantasies". Concentrating on the Freikorps soldiers of World War I, who roamed the streets of Weimar Republic and became a bedrock and driving force of the SA of the Nazi reign, he dives into their "fantasies", the absence of their own spouses and children, their pursuit of perennial war, of their "production of death" as a specific way of living. Other than various theories of fascism (Marxist, psychonalytic, etc.), Theweleit insists that the Freikorps men didn't pursue their actions because of delusions or of yearning for substitute enactment, but because they decided to live that way, because they wanted to do what they did. In that, Theweleit insists that "fascism" is not some aberration but ingrained in every "normal man", detectable in his way his prefers to treat women, minorities, communism, the working class...
Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a foreword to this translation which I recommend to read. Some connections of themes, thoughts, and justifications sound dated today – in particular the argumentative jump from "male suppression of women" to "human exploitation of nature" (which was a common topos in the late 1970s to 1990s) – but in her preparation of the reader of what is to come in the book, she does a very good job.
The first idea that came to my mind reading her was to compare the depiction of the Freikorps men with the mercenaries of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s «Wagner (PMC)» as well as with the human rights violation by many in the Russian army vis-à-vis Ukrainian civilians. I'm earger to dive into Theweleit because his insistence of fascism and cruelty as deliberate choice is something that sounds very realistic. It may even provide further explanations why in totalitarian regimes the identification of regime and population is so strong till the end.
But Musk is not alone in that or even the first. In 2019 Zuckerberg planned the same for Facebook with the introduction of the crypto-currency Libra.²
At that time Libra seemed to have gone nowhere as Visa, Mastercard, ebay, and PayPal pulled out of Libra project in 2019.³
Still, the fintech Libra Networks was registered in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2019 for Facebook (2,5 billion users in 2019) and its subsidaries Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger (each about 1 billion users).⁴
So the difference seems to be that whereas Zuckerberg in 2019 tried to establish financial services based on crypto-currency throughout his platforms, it is not clear whether Musk wants to rely on crypto as well (as crypto was one major reason the aforementioned Visa, Masertcard, PayPal pulled out of Libra).
But both projects planned to become an "online bank" of sorts. With the difference that as a fintech, by siphoning off user data, data of purchases, and behavioural statistics no bank is allowed to do, they can create financial products much faster and distribute them via their platofrms far more widespread than any bank could.⁵
In fact, back in 2019 Zuckerberg didn't seem to realise but Musk now does seem to understand that both platforms are not or are no longer in the ad-business but in the online banking business. That is: Hitherto both platforms thought of their business as creating profits by selling ads to users who in exchange for their eyballs are permitted the free use of these platforms. But should the transition from ad-business to fintech prove successful, this will have major impact on the global financial markets and banking sector -- up to the default of major banks.
Obviously, the syphoining-off of behavioural user data is not only relevant in the financial and banking sector but in all areas where "prediction products" can contribute to manufactoring, product development, AI training, purchasing optimzation, etc. These "prediction products" can even themselves be traded in what Shoshana Zuboff has called the "behavioural futures markets".
Combine state surveillance with capitalist surveillance, and the separation of people in two groups (the more or less hapless customer-citizens on the one hand and the unaccountable producer-citizens on the other) has significant consequences on democracy as "asymmetries of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power".⁶
But even without the societal and political ramifications, the economic and financial look most impactful. No wonder that Musk expects Twitter/X to "be ultimately extremely valuable"¹ And it may explain why Zuckerberg shows interest in the #fediverse. He who creates the first global "banking app" will rule the field. A pretty dire development from the days when m-pesa was created to link African agricultal communities an dcustomers in 2007.⁷