Now in our second week of the conflict, we have seen continuing damage to both Israel and Iran, as well as direct US intervention which nonetheless seems to have caused limited damage to Fordow and little damage to Iran's nuclear program. Regime change seems more elusive than ever, as even Iranians previously critical of the government now rally around it as they are attacked by two rabid imperialists at once. And Iran's government is tentatively considering a withdrawal, or at minimum a reconsideration, of their membership to the IAEA and the NPT. And, of course, the Strait of Hormuz is still a tool in their arsenal.
A day or so on from the strike on Fordow, we have so far seen basically no change in strategy from the Iranian military as they continue to strike Israel with small barrages of missiles. Military analysts argue furiously - is this a deliberate strategy of steady attrition on Israel, or indicative of immense material constraints on Iran? Are the hits by Israel on real targets, or are they decoys? Does Iran wish to develop a nuke, or are they still hesitating? Will Iran and Yemen strike at US warships and bases in response to the attack, or will they merely continue striking only Israel?
And perhaps most importantly - will this conflict end diplomatically due to a lack of appetite for an extended war (to wit: not a peace but a 20 year armistice) or with Israel forced into major concessions including an end to their genocide? Or even with a total military/societal collapse of either side?
Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Tldr: skip to the fourth paragraph about Marxism if you do not want to listen to me painstakingly parse through what exactly engineering is.
Most of the insights related to the creation of electronics, or any engineering applications, are generally statistical in nature, rarely deriving purely from mathematics. Some things are mathematically related (acceleration is the derivative of velocity with respect to time) but even then most engineering (not all though) up until the advent of the electronic computer was based in mathematical approximations, compared against rigorous statistical analysis which is then used to create general formulas or find constants that improve those mathematical approximations. However, much of the fine detail engineering, as even engineers will attest, has no real basis in mathematics as the math is far too complex and is purely based off of experience and feel which is then verified by statistical data analytics that tell you if you hit your CTQs (Critical to Quality metrics).
In this way, engineering is quite literally a materialist dialectic, with the empirical metrics needed being the major driving factor of design. And it is more concrete in that it deals with the very literal objects that are being produced, even if it can be more imprecise.
That being said, it can often be at odds with the idealistic dialectic that is finance, as finance dictates that profit and/or growth, which are ultimately abstract measures of 'organizational financial health' (which can be compared to other more social democratic ideas such as 'total societal financial health', where the ball bearing company doesn't necessarily need to be profitable as long as all the other industries that use the ball bearings profits exceed the losses of the ball bearing company, which is why the state subsidizes it) be the fundamental driving force behind product design. These can also work in tandem, depending on if hitting those CTQs is also profitable for the company. You could also argue this is just rhetorical slight-of-hand, with profit and growth being a CTQ in of itself (though I think that is stretching it).
My point is that Marxism is not vulgar materialism, it is about how concepts like the Platonic ideal of a chair become the concrete reality of a chair, and how our experience of that chair then goes on to influence our Platonic ideal of a chair, ad infinitum until our ideal chair looks nothing like the ideal chair of 100 years ago, because it is based primarily in our actual experience of the chair that came before, even though our ideal chair does exist, which is against Hegelian idealist dialectics that says that there is only one platonic ideal chair, and we are constantly seeking to build that one platonic ideal chair, and when we eventually find it no one will build any other kind of chair because everyone who sits in it will instantly know that it is the perfect chair. And if you think I am exaggerating, I am not, Hegel has lengthy passages on aesthetics and how, conveniently, the culture of his time period is the ideal one.
There is a major epistemological difference.
Well, statistics is a branch of math. The relevant skills are taught to mathematicians and applied mathematicians, and some end up specialising as statisticians and end up working in math departments with that focus.
Furthermore, I don't really see how it can be argued that relevant things were made without such things as theories of differential equations in partial derivatives and integrals, frequency-amplitude decomposition using tools like Fourier transform, let alone even more simple stuff like integrals, differentiation, algebra (including linear), and especially basic geometry, arithmetic, logic. Not sure how transistors, long-distance communication, etc. were supposed to be discovered/developed without math.
Computational mathematics (which is where approximations are studied) is a branch of math. Not sure why any of that should supposedly be disregarded, unless I misunderstood what you were suggesting there.
Well, math is also dealing with 'literal objects' that are already there, so I'm not sure how stuff like engineering is 'more concrete' in this regard.
I've had at least two pure mathematics majors people argue strenuously with me that statistics, being applied mathematics, isn't really math, but that isn't really my point here.
The part here is that you completely missed actually reading the Marxism part. Statistics is math that is derived from empirical observations, the actual data you collect in the field. Without that actual data, statistics as pure mathematics is completely meaningless to the engineering process. I'm not saying math isn't involved, though in some areas, I have seen people just eyeball things and nail them due to experience. I'm saying there is a materialist dialectic that proceeds between the empirical, physical, observations made, and how math is then used to then depict, formulate and transform those observations into more empirical measurements, which then continues to transform those depictions. Quite often these days the math precedes the observation, but particularly before the advent of electronic computers it wasn't uncommon for the observation to precede the mathematics. For example, you absolutely cannot have transistors without the Fournier transformation, but you also cannot have transistors without the observed phenomenon and concept of electrical conductivity (or more usually talked about resistance), which was not originally conceptualized mathematically at all, though is now.
Math is not dealing with literal objects, it deals with the concepts of objects. For example, 1+1=2 doesn't have to reference any kind of object at all in order to be self-contained, logical and true. This can be explicitly shown in things like statistics, where you have a mathematically logical statement that is 'people in the U.S. have on average 1.5 children'. A nonsense statement if taken purely empirically, but the idea of how an average is mathematically created can make it logically sound, however it is also completely meaningless to us if that average wasn't generated from real data.
It is in this way that we know all kinds of things, like the tensile or compressive strength of 1045 steel, or the creation of formulas like the amount of time it takes a concentration of carbon to disperse in steel at a certain temperature. It is conceptualized mathematically now, but it didn't start as that, it didn't start as a formula, it came from some other ideas like 'lets make a more durable iron' and through our physical interaction with it has come to a point of conceptualized mathematics, and even then the mathematics doesn't always get it exactly correct, it often represents the ideal situation, which means that there are likely other, more complex methods of mathematics to conceptually represent any specific interaction, or maybe even some other kind of conceptual understanding that we can't even conceive of yet because we haven't encountered it's empirical predecessor (which I doubt, but my point is the current conception of the math isn't actually a perfect representation of the real).
Scientists and their benefactors wouldn't build the Hadron collider if just knowing the math was the answer. Math is not some dictating Hegelian universal ideal that we seek to appease.
I am specifically arguing against the idea of Marxism being opposed to mathematics, but I am also arguing that mathematics likely isn't the end-all be-all understanding of accurate conceptualization, which is why I understand why some Marxist economics people are math adverse, specifically when it comes to economic conceptualization, as economics is notoriously rife with edge-cases, 'rules' that have absolutely no historical statistical backing, and empirical observations that help little with understanding cause and effect, which comes from the problem that economics cannot ever actually isolate it's variables at scale in the way that scientists and engineers can. It can provide insights into human behavior, much like psychology can, and even attempt to model them mathematically, but again, it gives us about as much insight into human behavior as psychology, which is a problem because reading about psychology and economics has a tendency to alter your behavior, thus potentially creating a different outcome from the population should your study become popular and widespread. Hell if this wasn't the case, advertising wouldn't work. I know I certainly approach things economically differently because I have read things like Marx, since it is like playing a card game while having some general idea of the odds. Doesn't mean I will win, but it certainly influences my strategy. It's like how insurance brokers, despite using highly complex statistical mathematics for conceptualizing individual risk and profitability, can still sometimes go bankrupt. They too, are playing the odds, in a conceptually different way than I do.
That was extremely silly of them for a bunch of reasons, in addition to calling (applied) mathematics not mathematics:
This is especially amusing to me - a person who has studied as both an applied mathematician and as a pure mathematician, - as some of my classmates from all of the relevant groups specialised in the field of probability theory and statistics.
It isn't.
You can use statistics for empirical studies, but it itself is not studied empirically.
Just as arithmetic, just as geometry, just as logic, just as stuff like control theory, wavelet theory, theories of differential and integral equations, vector field theory, theory of switch functions (not sure what the English name of that one is, actually), etc.
What you are probably confused about is that relevant fields can be used for models used by engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, medical professionals, etc., and then jump to the conclusion that they must be studied empirically.
Okay? But how are engineers going to do their job without both the knowledge discovered by mathematicians and without other people's discoveries made using said knowledge? How would transistors come to be developed without relevant understanding of math, for example?
Firstly, that example does not actually show 'observation preceding the mathematics'.
Secondly, that example doesn't actually show how that development could be done without math. The fact that it also required empirical study and did not come about from pure reason is irrelevant if you are trying to claim that development and manufacture of devices that allowed the person I was initially responding to to make their comments could realistically be done without math.
It is.
For example, again, mathematicians study such objects as numbers, functions, sets, propositions, transforms (and their invariants).
Not sure what you are trying to say there.
The expression '1+1 = 2' refers to the proposition that some object referred to with the expression '1+1' (as we know, that is - in the standard context - a real number that is the successor of 1 in terms of Peano axioms) is the same object as the one referred to with the expression '2'. We could go into more detail here, but there are plenty of objects being referred to here.
What does 'self-contained' mean in this context? What does it have to do with references to any objects? What does it have to do with the rest of this conversation?
What does 'logical' mean? That the relevant expression refers to a proposition (which contradicts your claim that no objects are being referenced)? I genuinely do not know what the word is supposed to mean (other than 'not stupid' in a colloquial sense, which is not really applicable here).
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by 'taken purely empirically' without completely changing these two sentences to the point of the loss of any relevance to the conversation. Would you mind rephrasing that?
But also, not only is that not meaningless if it is not 'generated from real data', as that expression does have a meaning that I'm fairly confident is commonly understood, and that understanding of that meaning is not dependent on whether or not it is based on 'real data' (the data may be false, or it might not even exist to begin with) and whether or not one is presented with that data.
But also, not sure how this is supposed to be an argument against any of what I have said to begin with.
Again, I am not sure how this is supposed to be an argument against me claiming that relevant stuff was discovered/developed using knowledge about the objects that are studied in mathematics-as-an-academic-field.
Do you think that I claimed that engineering or physics, or other relevant fields do not engage in empirical studies? If so, then I'm pretty sure that I can even quote myself saying the opposite in this thread.
I never claimed that all that engineering and other relevant fields involve is just mathematics. What I did claim is that they all do use mathematics (not to the exclusion of empirical studies and knowledge developed through those).
If by that you just mean that knowledge about objects that are studied in math-as-an-academic-field is not sufficient for stuff like engineering, physics, chemistry, etc., then I don't think you have been contradicted here by anybody - not by me, at least.
Physicists: Nooooo, electrons don't travel along a circuit in a smooth continuous loop. Their average velocity with respect to the path of the circuit is not c noooooo
Engineers: Haha, billiard balls go zooom
Also Engineers: Pi and e are the same thing right?