Otto Kretschmer

Why is this happening? Don't posts by new users require to be approved by a mod first?

For Plato, that was math.

Well... maybe.

According to Plato, our observable world is just an imperfect reflection of the Realm of Ideas which is, well, perfect (this is likely where the meaning of "ideal" comes from). The Realm of Ideas is where the perfect forms of various things exist, including beauty and justice but also dogs, cats, tapeworms or asteroids - since Plato argued that the real world is constantly changing and therefore it isn't a reliable source of knowledge. True knowledge, according to Plato, can only be deduced by pure thought (math and logic, not observation) So, what would the Form of Horse Dung be like? This is a half serious thread obviously.

Marxist analysis of capitalism is really a separate thing from Marxist philosophy, Marxist economics is a development of the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo while the philosophical part is based on Hegel + Feuerbach. There is a think called Analytic Marxism which takes the Marxist analysis of capitalism but combines it with analytic philosophy in place of dialectical materialism.

In Norway a leftist coalition won elections a few weeks ago and Geert Wilders just lost in the Netherlands, there are signs of hope at least in a handful of places.

The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s was a result of a perfect combination of several factors, namely government overspending in the US (related to the Vietnam War and the Great Society) without raising taxes, decoupling of the US dollar from gold and the 1973 oil crisis. Without these the post war Keynesian consensus could have lasted decades longer, possibly until today, blunting ideological radicalism.

US situation is the outcome of decades of both rising inequality and propaganda (from the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and other similar NGOs).

Is the situation so bad that folks are seriously discussing a civil war in the US?

Nikolai Vavilov (a world class botanist and agronomist) would not be executed for sure.

A curious fact - dialecical materialism had its dark sides too, the most famous one being Lysenkoism which banned genetics, even rejecting chromosomes as "bourgeois constructs". Theory of relativity and quantum mechanics only narrowly avoided getting banned under Stalin because Igor Kurchatov told Beria that if the USSR bans them, it may forget about building the atomic bomb. Stalin told Beria "leave them (i.e. the physicists) alone, we can shot them later".

Ok, you won. I cannot pronoune that weird sound.

Easy. Not a challenge at all.

Yes, except "t" and "s" aren't separate consonants but a single one, like ts in English "cats" pronounced very fast as a single sound.

She should try this:

The dominant form of Marxism in early 1900s was Orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky, this tendency became discredited in 1914 when socialist parties subscribing to it supported the entry of their countries into ww1, this included the Mensheviks whom Lenin later portrayed as traitors to the working class. It supported parliamentary democracy and believed that societies must first go through capitalism in order to be ready for socialism, among other things.

This is better:

My native language is Polish, I might sometimes make mistakes in English - which I did here by writing "shitton" instead of "shit ton".

My apologies then.

Telling.

There are really two separate parts of Marxism: The economic part which is the analysis of capitalism in Das Kapital, based on a shitton of empirial data The philosophical part. Marx took Hegel's dialectics (which Hegel had invented mostly on the basis of Plato and Kant) and replaced God and the Spirit with materialism and class struggle.

Is A brief history of time a good pop sci book in your opinion? It was written in 1988 if I recall correctly, understanding of some things in physics might have changed since then.

So what's your opinion about Hawking's book mentioned by me?

The subject matter seems quite different though.

Is A brief history of time by Stephen Hawking still a good book? It's from late 1980s, I bought a Polish version in 2018 but never read it, I plan to read it after finishing three books on Soviet history.