chobeat @ chobeat @lemmy.ml

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221

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273

Joined

6 yr. ago

Money is not a measure of power. Power is always relational, positional. You can position yourself better and build relationships using money, but you can also waste a lot of it to gain very little power.

It's ultimately about what actions you enable for the people who side with you, and money is a great enabler, but if we are talking about private entrepreneurs, usually the vast majority of their wealth cannot be freely allocated to political projects, but it's blocked to generate further capital. The portion you decide to spend to garner political, social and mediatic capital, and how you spend it, matters more than your total wealth.

Rodrigo Nunes.

There's no self-organization, neither in politics nor anywhere. There's no spontaneity. Political change is a function of environmental conditions and systemic decision-making.

Fascism is a symptom of chaos and lack of order. Political action is the creation of order (organization) towards coexistence.

Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict ideas: it consists in constructing the powers necessary to alter the existent (potentia) and deconstructing the power that keeps things the same (potestas). Anything that happens and doesn't alter this balance of power between potentia and potestas is simply a reproduction of the present in a different form.

Contrary to most people, most of my thoughts are in the form of a dialogue. When it's a monologue, it's still a monologue delivered to a crowd. So the language basically depends on who I'm thinking to speak to. Sometimes the mechanism is faulty so I snap out and realize I would never speak English to a certain person.

For context, I'm Italian, living in Germany with an American partner.

Most people don't study history. A lot of those that do, do want specific patterns to repeat.

Also humans don't form their political positions through knowledge and reasoning, but primarily through relationships. If everybody around you is right-wing and you want to fit in, you're going to be come right wing, rationalizing any knowledge of history you might have into supporting your right-wing position.

The vast majority of people I know has no cooking skills, no time to cook or no energy after work. Pretty much all the middle-class and lower-middle-class people in this group order delivery for most of their evening meals. The people who 10 years ago were eating microwaved food, now order out: it costs a bit more, but it's definitely tastier.

It's very poorly written anti-DDR propaganda. You must obviously expect to be fed propaganda in a museum like that, that's the purpose, but it's very... passive-aggressive. The tone is not very rigorous and after a few years it got pathetic because the things they use to make fun of the DDR, today would be considered middle-class privileges.

that's not how information and journalism works, but ok bro, keep believing in "objectivity" lol

Your opinions are all influenced by the outside. The distinction is just between influences you ignore/accept and influences you reject. We are not born with opinions.

The outcome is responsibility of the whole environment. This project didn't come out of nowhere.

It's not just who's doing but who allowed it. If somebody murdered children in my hometown I would hold social services and mental health services responsible for that.

I live in Germany and I'm not from the USA. It has nothing to do with the USA. Many Germans do want this genocide to happen and they still defend it. It's a daily lived experience, it has nothing to do with online discussions, let alone with Americans. Germany doesn't have the same concept of military-industrial complex like the USA (even though they might have started rebuilding it recently), but universities do research to enable genocide, like many universities around the world.

I'm Italian, and Leonardo does the same with universities in Italy, using young naive researchers to build weapons used in Palestine or by other undemocratic governments throughout the world.

I don't get what's so weird to you: universities have alwasy been complicit of horrible stuff.

The word "state" doesn't appear a single time in reference to Germany in the whole article. Germany, despite their pervasive state-oriented mentality, is not just its state. It's the society, the people and other institutions.

Also TU is a public university, so it's still an emanation of the state, state-funded and state-controlled.

Many of my direct friends lost their job for doing it. Look up "exposing Zalando".

Here in Berlin it's a regular occurrence that any exhibition, cultural or political event criticizing Israel receives at the very list a threatening call and a visit from the police. Sometimes it escalates into vandalism or violence, sometimes with getting raided by the police, sometimes with defunding if it's a public thing.

If they silenced Albanese and banned Varoufakis, they can silence anybody.

You might have missed a lot of news about Germany. They passed a new law that suspends freedom of speech when it's against Israel. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643

There has been plenty of extra-judicial retaliation, i.e. against Francesca Albanese or Oyoun, and we got close to having 4 cases of extra-judicial extradictions without an accusation against pro-Palestine protesters, which a judge eventually blocked.

I live in Alexanderplatz and I work in food. The area is mostly tourist traps (bad ones at that, we are in Germany, not in Italy). If you want something very casual, Bahn Mi Stable is the closest decent thing from Alexanderplatz. If you want a proper sit-down restaurant try Trio (German), Soopoolim (Korean), or Pizzeria Standard on Torstr.

Ignore completely the reviews on Google Maps or tripadvisor, they are totally unreliable.

If you want touristic stuff, the city center is quite boring but you have a lot: museum island, branderburgertor, Gendarmenmarkt, Checkpoint charlie and all the surrounding areas. If you want something more interesting, the Soviet Memorial in Treptowerpark, Victoria Park, the various memorials in Hellensdorf. Also avoid at all costs the DDR museum, lamest waste of money you can think of. Other museums in the center are ok.

In the book for instance she says how books should be written to increase competence among the people who already agree. I think that since she's coming from an experience of writing about science (as I also do), she feels very strongly against those liberal science popularizers who think that by providing information, you change minds and educate the "public". In the book she highlights how a lot of liberals think that reactionaries choose the policies and politicians they do because they are ignorant, and therefore providing more information will solve the issue. She escapes this by clearly targeting the "converted". At least to some degree. A lot of the book is also addressing the doubts of liberals or far-Left people who are on the verge of abandoning "18th century politics" of public debate and conflict of ideas, hence making the book as something you can give to your peers to give a last push.

I'm just liking the book and I think it's a very necessary book, so I'm promoting it. I have no business or personal connection to the author, except having offered her a drink after the book presentation in Berlin. That's it. Also I copy-pasted the blurb from the editor's website: I thought putting it in quotes would make it obvious I didn't write that part.

the book is saying exactly that the public discourse is irrelevant and doesn't lead to better policies. It doesn't even influence politics at all. I'm not sure how you understood the blurb because the book, as the title implies, is very against public discourse as a political tool.

She explains in a passage the role of books in politics and how they play into the main topic of the book. Also it's what I asked the author at a meeting after the presentation of the book: "so, after all of this, why writing a book?". She gave a very compelling answer, but there were private informations so I won't share it.

datus/data means "given", as in the metaphysical sense of the word, since the word started being used for statistics in a period where measurements were considered an objective observation of material reality, which was in fact considered "given" and not interpreted.

I did in a shot. It doesn't taste like egg.