5/5/2025
imho the famine that occured with the great leap forward, although preventable, was more due to environmental mismanagement and a lack of experts in the area, and to blame only the chairman is simply ignoring the material conditions china was in- rapidly industrializing a nation is no simple feat, especially after a long period of exploitation by the imperialist powers of britain and japan, and the raise in the quality of life for your average chinese citizen was completely unprecedented, bordering on miraculous considering such. this isn't to say mao was the best leader ever- in particular the purging of scientists during the cultural revolution was a horrific policy and certainly made the great leap forward fail. but that being said, i'd argue the biggest mistakes of china (in terms of long-term success) were in border disputes and dengist reforms: china's interventionist policy in taiwan developed as a response to the previous government fleeing to the island after the communist party gained power, and carried on much after the war was settled. imo, it would have saved them a lot of trouble to just cede this territory and accept that the borders of the previous nation would be different from the borders of the new one, but such is the process of fighting for a just cause. as for tibet, it was successfully claimed with a treaty (certified by the dalai lama of the time) in 1950, but the CIA formed, trained, and supplied insurgent groups in the region to destabilize china . while i disagree with the dismantling of monasteries in tibet, i also believe that the land reforms in the region were necessary for the process of creating a just chinese society. as for the dengist reforms, it's always been my personal opinion that deng's opening of the economy is what took china further away from the dream of a stateless, classless, moneyless society and closer towards the state capitalist society china has today.
5/1/2025
what got me into socialist and communist theory was actually third-world and decolonial thinkers- frantz fanon, paolo freire, and of course my beloved che guevara- and i've always taken care to balance the amount of continental philosophy i read with the amount of non-"western" perspectives. but i've recently realized through talking with some very smart women that i've totally been negecting female theorists! of course i consider myself to be a feminist of some variety, but how can i really embody a non-phallocentric attitude if i don't dedicate enough time to combatting it? so, i've decided to pick up some marxist feminist writers to splice in my regular rotation. i want to get some basics like angela davis and gerda lerner in, as well as some more experimental theorists like sadie plant ( ccru does not, has not, and will never exist :3 ). also, i saw a bit of laboria cuboniks' website the other day, and now i really want to study gender abolitionism and transhumanist feminism!!
1/23/2025
one: vibe science
why do we feel vibes? we can't deny the unconsciousness, but can we explain it?
vibes are small subconscious connections we make. pattern recognition. an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar. we as humans care about familiarity, and thus seek to categorize things on a spectrum of familiarity. this is because we need a form of threat assessment. familiarity, pattern recognition, and threat assessment, in other words, are the basis of our internal logical framework. however, as time increases, so does the amount of entropy, and so our categorical system becomes more complex. more connections are formed between more information, until there are infinite possible categories creating hyperspecific subliminal emotions. these completely unique "feelings" are an extension of our logic system, but also must be controlled by it.
two: metalogic
metalogic is humans seeking to create patterns for our patterns, and the feedback we receive from ourselves. mathematically, a system cannot be used to prove itself, but in humans, we are constantly seeking self-reassurance. we unconsciously create broader categories for our micro-categories, consistently seeking to simplify and thus familiarize our network of associations. without broadened categories, there would be too much data for our brains to handle, but without the networks of reinforcing associations, there would be no basis for the pyramid of category to stand on. there becomes a constant flux of expansion and simplification within ourselves. the familiarity bias leads us to continue seeking the flux, which creates yet another pattern.
three: narrative
the overarching image of the threads of association winding together into category after category creates our main framework: narrative. narrativism is the final meta interlocking all the previous metalogics, how we seek to fit the infinite meaningless datum into a definitive logical reality. in our minds, we see narrative as the end, the singularity, when in actuality it is the most simple possible explanation we can hold onto.