tsinava posted:

i cnat read the thread whats it about

basically he made a thread about grover furr's blood lies and invited the sa goons to criticize it, which they proceeded to do by attacking the soviet union in the most aggressive and sophomoric way possible, showing literally no interest in the text itself. there must have been over a dozen personal insults on the first page, along with demands for answers for every single atrocity alleged against the soviet russia without any evidence to back them up.

when swampman pointed this out, there was some arguing about where the burden of proof lied, with them literally saying history wasn't scientific and that the burden of proof lied with the person defying consensus opinion.

aerdil posted:

it usually requires constant mockery which isn't allowed in d&d, so the format itself kills the kind of conversion necessary. which is why lf was so successful in bringing liberals around and ultimately led to it's destruction by the hands of the counter-revolutionary mods who never ventured in there.

this is the most frustrating thing. i'm not proud of it, but i argue a lot on gamefaqs politics board, which is precisely the cesspool it sounds like, but i've had some success persuading people there because, even though it's very hostile, the mods aren't political enough to punish me for simply slinging shit back. contempt and sarcasm are important ways to create context for someone else's idiotic views. even if you're totally civil to everyone, you'll always sound like a crackpot if you can't expose their idiocy directly.

this is what got swampman probated. you can tell the mods were literally lying in wait to strike with the first pretext that presented itself, regardless of how tenuous it was:

OldMemes posted:
Do you also not enjoy hospitals that have power? I guess you would love the rolling blackouts that North Korea has frequently! Of course, there's no point in looking at the stars when you're too weak from starvation to care, too uneducated to appreciate it, and taught not to be curious or think for yourself!

The people in the pictures you've posted don't seem to be starving to death and I can't tell by looking whether they're too uneducated to enjoy starlight.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

i mean that is one stupid goddamn post swampman is responding to. his sarcasm is well-earned by even the most stringent standards of forum etiquette.

aerdil posted:

it usually requires constant mockery which isn't allowed in d&d, so the format itself kills the kind of conversion necessary. which is why lf was so successful in bringing liberals around and ultimately led to it's destruction by the hands of the counter-revolutionary mods who never ventured in there.

you can post articles and facts all day long in an earnest environment like d&d but if no one ever actually bothers to read it or take it seriously and critically there's not much you can do.

this is 100% correct. of course irl this is how discussion works. but D&D is like a dystopian Chomskyan linguists dream in which language only communicates information and anything naturally understandable (which means empirical evidence, theory, or sociological investigation are unnecessary against pure reason) is true. that Chomsky thread got me thinking about it and D&D is a great case study for how reactionary pentagon backed linguistics are.

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

I don't know what made up part of linguistics you're referring to but nobody thinks that

I'm referring to that criticism of Chomsky in the other thread:

In integrating his new version of linguistics with computer science, Chomsky dispensed with concepts such as ‘intention’, ‘context’ and ‘meaning’ in favour of an insistent and relentless focus on ‘syntax’. It was Alan Turing’s great discovery that machines can be designed to evaluate any inference that is “formally valid” - that is, valid by virtue of the internal syntax of the pre-installed code. No machine can genuinely talk, because speaking entails understanding what other speakers may have in mind, as they draw on their memories and experiences of themselves and others on the biological, social, cultural, religious and other levels inhabited by human minds. Machines are, and always will be, hopeless at passing themselves off as humans.
...
Such a system, however, cannot cope with vagueness, with polysemy or with metaphoric or connotative connections - in other words, with the stuff of human language. Consequently, Chomsky’s followers simply stopped talking of meaning, replacing the idea with ‘computability’ instead. Linguists now spoke not of intention, belief or agency, but of mechanical ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ - notions not too different, as Bruner points out, from the ‘stimuli’ and ‘responses’ of the behaviourists who were supposed to have been overthrown.

Writing of Chomsky’s overall scientific contribution, Geoffrey Leech comments: “It has the advantage of maintaining the integrity of linguistics, as within a walled city, away from the contaminating influences of use and context. But many have grave doubts about the narrowness of this paradigm’s definition of language, and about the high degree of abstraction and idealisation of data which it requires.”

I'm not an expert in linguistics, however I see parallels with other research fields that had similar movements toward information and away from knowledge during the anti-communist reaction of the 50s and 60s: philosophy and economics as examples. So maybe the article is wrong, I'm basing my ideas off that.

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

Universal syntax just means that the capacity for language is prefigured in the human brain structure. Which is probably true but neuroscience is extremely difficult so it can't be proven or disproven

But this was already acknowledged before Chomsky's time. You can keep this narrow and say that within the academic field of linguistics Chomsky is significant for formalizing this idea and this is probably true since academia function in that awful compartmentalized way. It seems to me though that for the theory to have significance for human understand of language and not just academic formality the significance of the theory is seeing the brain as an information processor which independently arrives at language without social interaction. Which is an extremely disturbing idea as the article points out.

I can imagine few hold onto this extremely crude idea in the present, which I think you already implied in an earlier post, but I doubt the fundamental paradigm has been challenged since it's identical to logic-obsessed analytic philosophy, neoclassical economics, realism in political science, etc. All of these in the modern day disavow the extreme forms of these theories while secretly clinging to them because the whole paradigm falls apart otherwise. All of them also came into being at the same time and in the same place (Anglo-american academia) because they mirror the wider socio-political extreme repression of communism at the time.

• I've never seen the word "whataboutism" before but i saw it in there like a hundred times. apparently it's the word anticommunists use when they're mistaking an attempt to establish evaluative symmetry for a tu quoque
  
  
• constant LUL WHAT ABOUT POLAND derails seemed like a deliberate ploy to shit things up and generate heat rather than light. as far as i could see none of them even disagreed with any factual claim Furr made about it; whether they realized it or not, their disagreement was theoretical in nature, disputing the theory of state that Furr employs (which takes a hard position against the status of governments in exile). there's probably loads of much more interesting debates to be had on that topic than anything anyone on SA could muster
  
  
• that "Az" poster was very good at posturing as a shitheel academic but if you distill their posts down to the actual germane points you realize it was all a load of text-heavy prestidigitation. yes, those lend-lease numbers are very pretty, but how do they relate to the book? and why are you so hostile to a simple request that you indicate where you got them?
  
  i find the "i'm too legit to post sources" conceit to be odious, in particular when the user in question started deploying it against Losurdo. Specifically:
  
  

  Even the Rosa Luxemburg foundation accuses him of being inconcrete, creating homogenous abstracts in an effort to obfuscate, naked apologia and my favorite, cynical bean counting styled attempts to compare Stalin to Churchill and FDR, in an effort to muddy the waters true to whataboutist fashion.

  
  
  "Even the Rosa Luxemburg foundation" is the closest we'll get to a citation from this person. I took it upon myself to hunt for the foundation's official denunciation on the various sites the RLF (or Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung in german) keeps. the only one that returned hits was the german site (follow along! enter the search terms "site:rosalux.de" and "losurdo" into google).
  
  Most of these were either essays that cite him in the standard way (that is, favorably or in support of a point) or conference talk listings or the like. among four pages of results, literally the only work I could find critical of him consisted of two articles by the same author: Christoph Jünke, whose top writing interests appear to be anti-"stalinist" screeds and Leo Kofler (who apparently also invested a lot of ink in the former topic). So, no, no "foundation" said any such thing; just one dude with an axe to grind who mostly hangs on an epithet invoking a scary mustachioed sorcerer.