FunkyStuff [he/him]

GOOD post

Where in other subjects the knowledge you gain is related but not completely contingent on everything else you were taught, e.g. you don’t need to remember too many exact details about the Mayflower pilgrims to understand the American Civil War, math requires a solid throughline from the basic arithmetic, through algebra, geometry, and so on. You can’t really do anything with trigonometry if you didn’t understand algebra well. You can’t really do algebra if you didn’t understand arithmetic. You definitely can’t do calculus if you struggled with any of the previous areas.

So the problem is the continuity required, combined with the way most students learn simply not being thorough enough to completely internalize the intuition for each math concept they’re being exposed to. Ask a 9th grader about the differences between rational numbers and irrational numbers that they may have learned in 7th grade: you’ll probably get answers that are about right, but might start to get a little vague or confused. Thankfully I might be overstating the interconnectedness a bit, but I know I definitely had some hiccups in college related to how I had only learned some of the advanced concepts halfway in previous courses, which led to me just barely understanding the really abstract concepts I started to get into like Stokes’ Theorem and Greene’s Theorem at the end of Calc 3.

I haven’t read through all of it, but Federici’s Caliban and the Witch is really good. bell hooks’ entire works seem appropriate to recommend, especially The Will to Change, sadly though I haven’t read them myself so I can’t be all that specific!

As for other media, I think Waymond from Everything Everywhere All at Once is a great male role model.

It’s indeed on the interest of the imperialist aggressor that there’s no resistance.

What imperialist? What is imperialist about Russia?

It’s tiresome that non argument that the only way to stop is for Ukraine to surrender.

Are you under the impression that the war could end any other way? How is Ukraine going to turn it around and make Putin surrender when now they depend on Europe for arms and Europe has even less capacity to sustain Ukraine than the US did? They were steadily losing with the US fully supporting them.

I can tell Putin to go die on a trench if he wants war so much.

Yeah, I agree. No question there.

I love how you say this isn’t good vs evil, then basically say that Russia is justified because NATO is evil.

I never even said Russia was justified, I just explained the reason why they invaded. Like, we can at least agree that Russia didn’t just invade for no reason, right? They may be justified or not, I don’t know what your ethical framework is. I don’t think it matters whether any of us thinks it’s moral or not because nation states are amoral and unfeeling entities. The only thing that matters is power and who wields it; the power to stop Russian aggression is not held by the citizens of NATO countries, that’s my point. The power to stop NATO aggression, on the other hand, does fall on those of us who live within the NATO world (I mean, if you believe liberal democracy works, which it objectively doesn’t but that’s another discussion). So basically what I’m saying is that Russia won’t stop the war on NATO’s terms because Russia obviously will win by attrition anyway (at the cost of even more slaughter), so it’s ridiculous to suggest that Ukrainians should keep throwing themselves in the meat grinder for no other reason than to weaken Russia, a military objective that only matters to the ruling class of NATO countries. They should take the peace deal, put the guns down and go home.

I never said they’d stop for good. They’ll keep opposing NATO as long as NATO is hostile to Russia, obviously. If you want to think of Russia like they’re just evil people who want more power or whatever Harry Potter model of the world then I’m sure that sounds really scary, but if you drop the good guys vs bad guys view of the world you’d understand that it’s not in anybody except imperialist’s interest for wars to keep going infinitely.

It’s funny it’s up to Ukraine to stop the war.

What am I supposed to do about Russia’s side? I can only pressure my own government. If my government keeps giving Ukraine weapons and stopping peace talks, more Ukrainians and Russians will die in a meaningless war. It’s not fair to Ukrainians to lose part of the territory of their nation state because Russia invaded it, sure, but it’s also not fair to anyone that NATO wants to do brinkmanship against Russia and decided to fight a proxy war through Ukrainians. I don’t see how any of the points you’re bringing up are supposed to make anyone feel like peace in Ukraine is a bad thing.