tpaine posted:
I'm Reinhard Klopfer Needershiltzen, General of the Prussian Army, son of Alois and Gerta Needershiltzen, and I pray to directly to mecca several times a day.

astagfirullah

babyfinland posted:

i was going to send this aroudn to the various people that i thought would be interested in this but i figure its actually like a majority of the regulars here so i'll just post it as a thread

the last 5 min or so of this vid fit in with something i was thinking about after reading disciplines thread about evil but couldnt' quite articulate. ima just rant for a bit in ~loose posting style~ and see if this makes any sense to anyone

discipline posted:

maybe it’s because I’m an american, but I always thought that if there was a revolutionary socialist movement they might be… uh… rallying for revolution? I thought if a space existed to discuss these issues they could take root. but evidently they wouldn’t get the space if they were any threat. I’m tired of the flesh on the billboards and the youth in their cups vomiting on the sidewalk and failing out of school, I’m tired of shrugs and changing the subject, I’m tired of wearing it on your sleeve like a fashion statement. I’m so tired! if you’re young and have fire, you need to seize that and really do things that lock you into that passion. you need to train and work hard and prepare, keep yacking because the older you get the more people listen to you. refine your arguments and take direct action. stay focused. get serious and stand tall, with dignity. laugh and love and learn how to temper mercy with justice.

the thing that caught my eye here was "if a space existed..". one thing that i've been thinking about a lot and that i hope to expand on in that ag thread when i get some more time is how space comes into play when we're thinking about the state, about subsistence routines, and about the evolution of ecosystems (in which i include humans and their activities) over time.

the thing i noted about space in the ag thread is that the advent of tarmac, combustion engines etc is what enabled state space to climb & expand beyond its traditional boundaries and to fill up the nominal borders of a "nation". that is, burning ancient sunlight to compress distance and flatten terrain friction. but it's not just about physical space, it's about psychological and cultural space, it's about force and resistance, it's about complexity and obfuscation. those are all really complicated phenomena but they're all underlaid by the same thermoeconomic reality which is that energy flows through "the system" (global capitalism, the corporate state, the nation-state, local economies) have exploded over the last 2-300 years.

this is obviously simplistic and reductive but if we take Ilya Prigogine's points about dissipative structures, one of the things he shows is that increasing energy flows through a system allows for (and is generally accompanied by) an increase in complexity. stretching this from an organismal or biochemical level to a societal one is a bit precarious but i think it holds up pretty well. what we see in high-energy-flow societies, whether they're classical or modern (but to a MUCH greater degree in modern ones), is increasing occupational specialisation, increasing involvement of the state in the minutae of life, proliferation of bureaucracy and regulation, expansion of state space geographically and psychologically, etc etc. in a sense the only reason i can spend all day doing scientific work no one will ever care about and still feed myself is because oil, mechanisation, etc allowed a transfer of labour from the fields to the cities and thence to specialised occupations.

part of the despair contemporary first world leftists have i think comes out of this reality where the corporate state has access to all of these flows and uses them to weave this kind of veil of force that prevents us from assuming responsibility over even the most basic aspects of our lives, whether it's subsistence routines or shelter or whatever. like i'm working right now on some plans for siheyuan-style housing for the farm (i am gay for chinese vernacular architecture) built using local materials, and the number of hoops you have to jump through to evade the whole construction industry complex and prevent the state from coming in and demolishing your shit is really daunting. my bourgie academic background has blessed me with friends with backgrounds in engineering and architecture, and that's pretty much the only way i'm able to navigate it at all. and i mean we're talking about building a timber frame house, something that poor-ass immigrants to this country were doing more or less on their own for hundreds of years, but we can't even do that shit anymore without engaging deeply with the corporate economy and with the state, even if that's just to deke around it.

but we know this is all going to change. we know that energy flows are decreasing now as we speak, they're going to continue on a bumpy trajectory downwards, and relocalisation of economies and spaces is going to happen whether anyone likes it or not. but what i'm coming to realise is that "relocalisation" is kind of a misnomer because you can't relocalise a delocalised global economy or a delocalised global culture. so in fact what we're going to have are vacuums all over the place, physically, culturally, spiritually. and i think what discipline's saying about getting ready, for me, that's what i'm getting ready for.

one of the things that makes me so excited about starting to engage with the islamic tradition in a serious way is that this is a tradition that came up dealing with this reality for centuries! you know, when Shaykh Murad is talking about the role of the state in relation to local communities, that's what's going to happen anyway. State space is going to get patchy, physically and temporally. States aren't going to be burning precious fuel sending building inspectors out into the boonies to check on our houses every other day. Cultural spaces are going to open up, spiritual spaces. And we've got this whole tradition, way of life, that is intimately familiar with dealing with a weak, often unstable state governing a fairly arid, difficult-to-cultivate region and nurturing humans and their souls in spite of that. so inshallah lets learn as much as we can from it and adapt it to our local circumstances

thanks for the vid!!

discipline posted:
I mean london is spending £85 mil on a goddamn electric fence y'all, you don't do that in a time of austerity when the people are sovereign

What's it for

discipline posted:
but I digress, the point is that the state has a reach and massive power like never before seen. in fact, a STRONG CENTRAL STATE is emerging, we just do not see it in that way because we see stuff like the "lessening" of the state in our communities or in our decision making process. it's not gone, friend, it's still there and bigger than ever, we just don't see it because what we learned to think of as "state" DOES indeed no longer exist. but don't for a second think that this massive militarization of the police or whatever is because of crime or some sort of arms industry or whatever, no, it's because the state has become that strong, where it no longer needs to court us for votes. we will vote one way or the other, right? drag our sorry asses to the polls and cast a vote for the "lesser evil" and things will just keep getting more and more evil coz how else am I gonna get my iphone. how else am I gonna get a job.

look at how much of what you're saying is rooted in the oil age, though. where does the power of the state come from? i mean it's literally "powered" by oil. there aren't legions of cops in SUVs without it. you don't run a military-industrial complex off hydroelectric (and you don't run hydroelectric w/o oil- metal for turbine blades is mined, refined, shipped, etc w/ oil). even the labour/capital/state model is an oil age model!!

we have to stop thinking like this imo. the state is actively retreating from education, from welfare, from healthcare. it hasn't done so from the regulation of daily life in most of the first world but it actively doing so in many developing countries. there are spaces opening up, and the fact that energy flows are being redirected from peripheral state activities and the buying-off of labour with these kinds of social programs and knicknacks to a straightforward repressive apparatus is indicative of this (the state is literally reducing its ambit to what Murad is describing- monopoly on force, elite wealth pump ("dancing girls")). this is part of what i mean about psychological space- this is all about legitimacy. non-state groups gain legitimacy when they start providing in these spaces, states lose legitimacy when they stop.

i don't disagree with your point that the state isn't going to "fall apart", obviously it's not (and i'm not arguing that this process has begun in earnest yet anyway, just that we're starting to see the first cracks). states are here to stay. what is going to happen is that their grip on the totality of human life is going to weaken, is weakening already, and will eventually revert to something like the traditional boundaries of state space, defined by lower energy flows. obviously cities will always be the heart of the beast, they're all about settling labour into a manageable area, but cities as they're currently arranged are flat-out unsustainable (ie without massive fuel subsidies they're going to be basically inoperable). there are big, big changes coming and if we go into them with a 20th century oil age marxist mindset, we're going to get fucking clobbered imo. so that's where my heads at and why i think we can learn so much from looking at the operation of this stuff in a pre-oil context and trying to adapt it to a post-oil one

shennong posted:

shennong posted:
the thing i noted about space in the ag thread is that the advent of tarmac, combustion engines etc is what enabled state space to climb & expand beyond its traditional boundaries and to fill up the nominal borders of a "nation". that is, burning ancient sunlight to compress distance and flatten terrain friction. but it's not just about physical space, it's about psychological and cultural space, it's about force and resistance, it's about complexity and obfuscation. those are all really complicated phenomena but they're all underlaid by the same thermoeconomic reality which is that energy flows through "the system" (global capitalism, the corporate state, the nation-state, local economies) have exploded over the last 2-300 years.

is this meant to be a parody of tom friedman writing in a pomo style

iFederico posted:
you literally plagiarized 'the world is flat' by thomas friedman in a more pretentious and stupid way.

i didn't think it was possible.

actually he posts a lot about that stuff and has explained it in an illuminating way in previous posts, far from 'pretentious and stupid'. thx for stopping by