quarrk

I'm a casual philosophy learner, but afaik Hegel was significantly influenced by Spinoza especially regarding the topic of negation. Here's a paper by Yitzhak Y. Melamed on Spinoza's famous line et determinatio negatio est and its relation to the systems of Kant and Hegel. Again, I'm a casual learner myself, but I found it to be accessible. If there are any philosophers here then I'd be interested to hear more on this.

Spinoza's view is that an object is not determined (defined) by what it is in the positive sense, but by what it is not or negates. This idea underlies the truism that there is no light without dark and vice versa. Spinoza was trying to answer the question, why does the world present itself as a collection of innumerable and heterogeneous objects? What causes this differentiation? If this mechanism can be understood, then we might be able to work in reverse to discover a single underlying essence or idea for everything. I believe Spinoza understood this single thing to be God; and so did Hegel, in his own way.

As Melamed writes, "while Hegel does credit Spinoza with the discovery of this most fundamental insight, he believes Spinoza failed to appreciate the importance of his discovery."

I believe Marx writes somewhere (perhaps in German Ideology or Grundrisse?) that the historical origin of human contemplation (consciousness) lies in the recognition of the self, distinct from everything else or other, as opposed to an unconscious perception of the world as one undifferentiated whole.

This discussion might give some new insight into Marx's afterword to the second German edition of Capital vol 1:

Hegel's system recognized and placed principal importance on negation. Marx accepted the way in which Hegel's system works, but he rejected the object to which Hegel applied his system. Instead of investigating the determination of concepts, Marx investigated the determination of material things and processes, e.g. capital. The task in Capital is to understand how the manifold forms of capitalist society (value, price, profit, surplus value, etc) are determined.

go back to being a dev instance

.ml is short for Machine Learning, right guys? Right??

racist bullshit about Nordic societies being more civilised and hard-working and intelligent than others

When Bernie ran, remember how everyone said Nordic-style socialism only works in the Nordics because they lack diversity?? Like what was the implication there? It didn’t make sense to me but this notion was very common.

I can’t understand it any other way than: social democracy cannot work in the US because a racist social hierarchy is natural; so, if there is only one race, then there can be no hierarchy. (Which isn’t even the case in any of the Nordics, but try explaining that to an American lol)

Well I don’t mean to hijack a c/sino discussion, but I think the behavior and tactics of capital depends on its power relative to labor. Finland has relatively strong labor in part because of the welfare state. Capital can only demand so much before workers strike or quit. There have been multiple large strikes in the past months.

If and when the economy declines in Finland, all the meager social-democratic gains won by the socialists in the 20th century will be lost. And once they are lost, we probably won’t see them again without a revolution. We are already trending this direction as the social entitlements are being eroded by the current center-right government.

Complaining about not being allowed to do whatever you want in another sovereign nation

My name was supposed to be about physics, but people assume I’m a Trekkie. Now everyone thinks I’m a nerd

The “yeah but X is hard” cliche is certainly reddity. Claiming authority over what counts as common sense, well I’ve heard that from all types of people. Heard it plenty in the Southern US arguing with conservatives. Anyone might whip that phrase out when, upon being pushed to justify a political view in the mildest way, they realize they have only a gut feeling or simple programming passed from their parents.

Coming to Finland from the US, I was surprised at the relatively higher use of machinery at things like construction sites. For example, using a bulldozer for moving small piles of dirt that I think in America would have been handled by a couple guys with shovels. Environmental question aside, the use of machinery in this way is good for labor QoL and longevity. Americans don’t realize how much harder they work for less pay.

There are a lot of good people in Baltimore. AFAIK relatively high number of leftists. Remember they all marched in the wake of Freddie Gray’s murder.

I would think that bridges should have redundancy such that taking out a single support doesn’t cause total failure. Idk I’m not an entomologist

My hot take is this shouldn’t be possible to occur as an accident during normal operations. Either the bridge is dilapidated or poorly designed, or ships that large should not be allowed under it.

Shit like this will occur with increasing frequency in America, and it will be normalized as an unavoidable, just like mass shootings.

they are the type of physicist who still upholds the plum pudding model

It’s worse than that, even. The plum pudding model IIRC was always understood to be an approximation.

Vulgar economy is less forgivable. It is essentially anti-scientific, by rejecting the possibility of economic laws which are not identical with appearances. The vulgar economists are like astronomers still clinging to the Ptolemaic system (geocentric model), because the sky in fact appears to rotate about the earth. Marx here plays the role of Galileo, using science to prove that there are deeper laws governing the motions of celestial objects.