still reading a lot

• the bulk of edgar snow's red star over china. the detailed description of the long march is especially awe-inspiring.

• ernest mandel's chapter summaries of marx's grundrisse.

• whole load of articles and speeches given by chinese economist chen yun, around the time of the adoption of socialism with chinese characteristics.

still on my reading kick.

started going through plato's phaedo for the first time, and i'm waiting to find the passage about materialism that leibniz talked about in the discourse on metaphysics.

i also spent time going through the stanford uni philosophy encyclopedia. i read the articles on leibniz and wilfrid sellars very carefully.

over the last two or so years i have been having a weird crisis of faith in the traditional materialism and atheism that is the orthodoxy in australian radical leftism.

it's not so much that i have any religious or spiritual faith, but that, like leibniz, i am very worried that radical leftism is in a state of chronic forgetting.

large sections of the left are fans of taking a scalpel to the history of ideas and cutting concepts out as if they had never existed.

it is at this point that i look at this zeal for leftist iconoclasm and despair. i truly feel like being faithful to the revolution requires not piety and purity of the mind, but a critical understanding of the sum total of history.

it does not work the way they say. you may erase something from cultural memory, but history has its own plans. i am no nietzsche fan, but his concept of the 'eternal return' seems to capture what i am getting at.

my personal attitude is that i would rather know and sit uncomfortably with the truth than live in blissful (wilful) ignorance.

like hegel said, you must 'tarry with the negative'. mere negation is half the process of achieving truth and finality. the only way to solve a contradiction is to go through the contradiction, not just simply suppress it.

finally getting around to reading leibniz's discourse on metaphysics, it's quite short so i will be done soon.

i reread parts of kant's first critique to settle me into actually reading leibniz in his own words. leibniz is one of the few philosophers kant mounts systematic argumentation against in this text.

it seems to me that kant was much more influenced by hume than i realised--i used to enjoy the savaging of the 'scholastic rationalist' leibniz by kant, but now after having given leibniz independent attention i am fed up with the whole noumena/phenomena distinction.

and, frankly, kant's whole philosophy strikes me as far too skeptical. hume may have awoken kant from his 'dogmatic slumbers' but is the alternative adopted actually any good?

having spent a long time as a post-grad, i can tell you that in analytic philosophy you are only permitted to speak favourably of hume, and to some extent kant. metaphysics, plato, rationalism--everything linked to leibniz is taboo.

more people wrong on the internet today

capitalism is all about waste. ultimately the reason why is the reign of private property.

i do not see any reason why we should not treat computer resources the same as any other under capitalism.

so perhaps the observation that modern computers are still slow is due to the fact we are wasting significant amounts of their power.

this could be a good direction for the @permacomputer project.

web browsers, mandatory AI at the operating system level, computer languages with huge runtimes... all these are a target for ruthless criticism.