People now going to appeal to this republican to help them save women from being forced birthing machines.

Also "point of viability" sounds good to me too, because when not wielded as a completely made up, non-medical notion by anti-abortion misogynists - which is what it is, and what they all are - that would be the baby at term.

Yes but girlboss energy.


(But like, just one girlboss, not all the others who might say, drop dead from ectopic pregnancies).


The American ability to fetishize and grovel at the feet of their most powerful and most elite members of society will never not surprise me.

Even God's representative on Earth recognizes the Western role in provoking the mass death of Ukranians.

Pope Francis said that the “barking of NATO at the door of Russia” might have led to the invasion of Ukraine and that he didn't know whether other countries should supply Ukraine with more arms.

The pope at the same time deplored the brutality of the war and criticized the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church for defending the invasion in religious terms, warning that Patriarch Kirill of Moscow “cannot turn himself into Putin’s altar boy.”

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-2022-05-03/card/pope-says-nato-may-have-provoked-russian-invasion-of-ukraine

It is unfortunate that cancer did not kill justice Ginsburg earlier than it did.

I wonder if the distinction between desire and interest is comparable to that between the virtual and the actual , or perhaps between the intensive and the extensive. — Joshs

Yes, desire belongs to the order of the intensive: "We say that there is assemblage of desire each time that there are produced, in a field of immanence, or on a plane of consistence, continuums of intensities, combinations of fluxes, emissions of particles at variable speeds". (Dialogues). As it happens, in the works in which desire becomes a concern - from Anti-Oedipus onwards, basically - 'the virtual' more or less disappears as a category, and becomes more or less collapsed into the intensive.

The burning begins, hopefully.

Gosh I hope Biden gets his $33 billion dollars to fight for the rights of people in *checks notes* ... Ukraine.

So is what you're saying is that any interest in attaining x is motivated by a prior engagement with whatever structure x belongs to? — Albero

Yes, I think this is a good way to put it!

but walking over a floor is a fact — Michael

That I walked over a floor, is (or is not) something extra-linguistic, but that I walked over a floor is not itself something given in the state of things. One might say something like: the extension of a fact is extra-lingusitic; the intension (not to be confused with intention) of a fact is not. Facts are double-headed in this way. Inseparably so. Until you get this distinction you will continually miss what is at stake. Facts, insofar as they are facts, must be "prepared" one way or another (which is just to say they must count-as such and such). And those countings-as are always institutional.

A useful distinction that Deleuze (and Guattari) make with respect to thinking about this is the one between interest and desire. For Deleuze, interests are defined by lack: I have an interest in this or that romantic partner, in this or that social position, and I make moves to attain it. But to have an interest presupposes a libidinal investment in the very structures by which something becomes of interest: an interest in a romantic partner presupposes a prior investment in the social institution of amorous monogamy; the interest in attaining a certain social position presupposes an investment in a society in which such and such a position might be held to be valuable or esteemed or powerful. These investments are investments of desire and they are productive of interests.

"Beneath the conscious investments of economic, political, religious, etc., formations, there are unconscious sexual investments, microinvestments that attest to the way in which desire is present in a social field, and joins this field to itself as the statistically determined domain that is bound to it." AO183

"It is doubtless true that interests predispose us to a given libidinal investment, but they are not identical with this investment. Moreover, the unconscious libidinal investment is what causes us to look for our interest in one place rather than another, to fix our aims on a given path, convinced that this is where our chances lie." AO345

If interest accounts for what one wants, desire accounts for the fact that one wants such and such in the first place. Check out Daniel Smith's Deleuze and the Question of Desire [PDF] for a fuller account of this.

which would then mean that those extra-linguistic things whose nature and behaviour does not depend on our language are either institutional facts or not facts at all. — Michael

The latter of course: facts are not themselves "things". We attribute facts to the world, but the attribution is, precisely, ours. I see a stone; I walk over a floor; but I neither see a fact nor walk upon one (this is not exactly true: perception is conceptual - cf. the duck-rabbit - but we'll put that to one side, other than to gesture at the implication that perception is institutional). Language is ideal through and though; its 'references' are, through and through, nothing but linguistic effects. There is an inescapable grammar of facts, and all grammar is a matter of human institution. The immediate objection would be that this is a thoroughgoing anti-realism: but realism doesn't depend a lick upon how we speak or think about the world, the latter being utterly, completely indifferent to the former.

Words (often) refer to extra-linguistic things, and the nature and behaviour of those things does not depend on our language. — Michael

Which is why it is a good thing that nothing I have said argues this.

Whether or not something is an element with 79 protons has nothing to do with what we mean by "gold". — Michael

Yet it depends on what we mean by element, or protons, or number for that matter. It's instituions all the way down. And up, for that matter, insofar as many of these terms reciporcally implicate each other in their respective definitions.

That we are what maintain the meaning of the term "gold" isn't that we determine whether or not this is gold. — Michael

That we are what maintain the meaning of the term "gold" is that we determine whether or not this is gold. Being so, not being so. A fact nonetheless.

Once we have fixed the meaning of the terms "gold" and "bishop", whether or not this is gold has nothing to do with us — Michael

Because this is about as straightfoward an example of a contradiction as one could imagine. This 'fixing' is not metaphysical. It is not an act that, once accomplished, like God's will, stands outside and beyond it's creation. Human agency maintains such fixing at each and every moment of conceptual employment. I cannot but repeat myself: if it is the case that, once we have fixed the meaning of "gold", whether or not this is gold has nothing to do with us, this "nothing to do with us" is maintained by no one other than - us.

From the fact that a description can only be made relative to a set of linguistic categories, it does not follow that the facts/objects/states of affairs,/etc., described can only exist relative to a set of categories.

Ah, I see the issue. The problem is that it is not one. It is objecting to something which is no way follows from the acknowledgement that all facts are institutional facts: the idea - which is wrong - that such an acknowledgement implies that facts/objects/states of affairs/etc can only exist relative to a set of categories. That is, at no point is the existence (or nonexistence, for that matter) of such things, relative or absolute, ever in question at all. Or as I said to @Banno, neither realism nor antirealism is it stake at all.

To borrow a distinction from Stanley Cavell, at stake is not the fact of something's being so, but the fact of something's being so. These are two entirely separate issues. The issue of something's counting-as such instead of sich, has nothing to do, nothing at all, with it's existence of not. The issue itself is, as it were, existentially indifferent. Cavell: "providing a criterion for claiming that something is a goldfinch equally provides the basis for claiming that it's a stuffed goldfinch. The criteria (marks, features) are the same for something's being a goldfinch whether it is real, imagined, hallucinatory, stuffed, painted, or in any way phoney". But these criteria are inescapably institutional. They are also inescapable when making any and all factual claims.

I think it is wrong and unjust to control people, to confiscate the fruits of their labor, or to impose someone’s will upon another’s if they do not deserve it. — NOS4A2

Lmao you don't give a shit about any of this. Libertarians like you simply want to make sure these actions are privatized, nothing more.

Never heard Trump described that way but OK.

Tell me again how much you hate the state while fellating your selected head of state.

Most of the time libertarians like NOS are just mad they can't feel up little boys and girls without government interference, which is why they worship sexual predators like Trump.

By progressive change, I mean live alongside their neighbours peacefully. — Punshhh

This simply won't happen so long as the US retains its world imperial ambitions - ambitions which it not only holds, but continues to actively pursue, and which is both a major cause of the present Ukraine crisis, and a major element in its deepening. It is simply the case that the US economy exists precisely to the extent that wars and deaths continue to feed it. America is a necrogenic empire, whose condition of existence is the production of dead bodies and shattered lands beyond its borders. Any analysis of Ukraine that does not begin from this most basic of facts - which includes the outsized American role in bringing this about - is irrelevant and beneath consideration from the get-go.

So calls for 'progressive change' that aim outwards at second-rate Italian-sized economies like Russia with regional ambitions are nothing more than shitty, reprised, versions of white men's burdens, repurposed for propagandized morons who cannot but get their news direct from the US state department via CNN and NYT.

Western intervention hasn’t worked for 40yrs or so. — Punshhh

I'm not sure what this means, - worked for who? - or why this matters. Western invention continues to help stave children to death in Yemen, treat Palestinians like animals, subjugate Iraq, agitate for 'regime change' in places like Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, produce famine in Afghanistan, fund and produce global Islamic terrorism, and deprive and debase its poor and "middle class" at home as a condition of all of the above. Western intervention works spectacularly well for the capitalist class, and the idea that it 'doesn't work' is meaningless from the perspective of all those for whom it has worked to the point of their annihilation. It continues to work in Ukraine.

I note, that this is usually against the wishes, or agreement of the peoples of these states. — Punshhh

These "wishes" are far more ambiguous than you make out to be. The fact is that Ukraine has been a tinpot country and a mess for decades, economically the worst in Europe, with forces buffeting it from within and without every which way, with a weak state and a politically fractured populous. Not to mention teeming with Nazis. The idea that there have been some univocal set of "Ukranian wishes" - either for or against both Russia and the West - is a complete back-projection that is largely a myth.

France, of course, will be required to send at least half of it's GDP split proportionally among among Haiti, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Vietnam, Congo and a bunch of others for the next say, century or so. Also all the stolen colonial art in the Lourve and elsewhere is gonna have to be returned, naturally.

Let's goooo. Let's fuckin' do it. Hell yeah.

The state doesn't create capitalists, capitalists create the state. — ArmChairPhilosopher

Perfect, entirely correct.

No, I still have no idea what you are talking about.

The point is that the separation you have made between the interests of the Russians and the 'west' — Paine

... could you quote (me) what you are referring to?

Um, yes? This is obvious? One could add that Europe continues to fund Ukrainian death day in, day out? What exactly is the point you are trying to make?

Because Western imperialism exists on an infinitely wider scale obviously. And as it so happens, I don't think I'm arguing with any Russian imperialists, last I checked. Mostly just propagandized Westerners who like to repeat state department memos back to me like they stumbled upon them first.

I'm not sure what the question has to do with anything. I have no doubt that Russia is being driven by a defense of it's own murderously extarctive model of capitalism.

The 'west' did not require the failed state of the USSR to transfer it's wealth into fungible goods and Capital secured in global markets. That is on them. That is why Russia is called a kleptocracy. — Paine

Oh my sweet summer child. You actually have no idea what happened after the dissolution of the USSR do you? Here's a hint. It was called, famously, shock therapy.

Are you on board with that program? — Paine

I would like to see America sink beneath the sea more or less, but Europe can probably stay once they burn Brussels to the ground. Mostly metaphorically. So, er, I'd have to ask Apollo of he's on board with that.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/29/americans-believe-nothing-is-getting-better-biden-feeds-that-disillusionment

Or, why Biden is nothing but a Trump red-carpet:

now things have stalled, and Biden seems intent on accelerating – rather than combating – a rising tide of disillusionment. Tossing the Republican party a lifeline, he has reverted to his familiar formula: he promises big changes that could help the working class – and then prevents those changes from happening. He speechifies about the need to address crises he then makes worse. He blames Congress for gridlock but will not pressure lawmakers or use his executive authority to do things. He promises policy reforms that his own agencies decline to implement.

The public seems to sense the gaslighting: Biden’s approval ratings are plummeting and anti-government sentiment has spiked as his strategy Joker-pills the country. As his poll numbers crater, Biden appears to be offering no course correction, and he still hasn’t signed a stack of executive orders on matters ranging from debt cancellation to drug pricing. Caught between the electorate and Democrats’ campaign sponsors, he appears to have decided that he cannot – or does not want to – stop the spread of the Joker pill. So he is now just mainlining its active ingredients into America’s veins with bold promises and even bolder betrayals.

In the face of all this, Democrats’ campaign apparatus has gotten downright desperate. It is now airing ads boasting about a “historic middle-class tax cut”, a tax credit that has already expired, and an insulin price cap that hasn’t actually been passed into law – as if no one will be infuriated by those realities, even though data suggests many voters already are. Amid an explosion of child poverty following the end of the expanded child tax credit, the Washington commentariat wonders why so many polls show an electorate enraged at Democrats — and it’s certainly true that right-wing media has successfully duped a chunk of voters into not believing some basic economic realities.

If I were a Trump supporter, I would be a manic Biden supporter. There would be no one better to ensure Trump's return.

There is a third option, progressive change in Russia. This is what many hoped for after the end of the Cold War. But something turned sour. — Punshhh

The Western calls for, and attempts to institute "progressive change in Russia" is the direct reason why Putin exists, and why people are dying in Ukraine today. No, the West has caused every single problem whose "change" it now so conveniently calls for. It simply ought to fuck off, if only for it's own good. If there is a new cold war coming - if it isn't already here - it will be thanks to a West who cannot fathom the idea of it's being unable to intervene and shape the world at it's will and whim. The slow death of Western empire - and we are living through it now - will be littered with continued events like Ukraine.

The so-called "progressive change" you want is nothing but a regressive change to the days in which Western intervention could simply call the shots as and when it likes. Those days are over. And thank God.

Laissaz-faire is not even an ideal for capitalists. Any history of capitalism that doesn't come from shoddy ideologues will tell you that the ubiquitious attempts to secure the so-called autonomy of markets has always relied on enormous and continued interventions by states, often payed for by rivers of blood. "The economy", understood artificially and wrongly as a seperate and independent entity from "the state" is an invention, whole cloth, of the state, and requires the state's perpetual and never ending intervention in order to keep it that way. There's a reason capitalists are obsessed with state capture - i.e. effective control of government and its regulatory apparatus - because they know very well just how much they are dependant upon the state for their continued survival.

The literal only people who believe in laissaz-faire are idiots who have been sold the fantasy of it and take it to mean: no state intervention that would interfere with capitalists getting their way. Law and legislation, and enormous amounts of it, including huge trans-national cooperation in order to organize and coordinate it, has always been the basis for the artificial and violent 'seperation' of state and economy. What it means in practice is simply: the violent demolition of any democratic control over how people live their lives, turned over instead to tiny minorities of people and entities with enormous amounts of money. Laissaz-fair is a myth, and so is the meme - and it is nothing but a meme - of the fake antagonism between government and economy.

Without massive amounts of state intervention, "the economy" will die. Anyone who hasn't understood this since 2008 in which government intervention has been made obvious to anyone with a pulse with respect to it's role in continually propping up the economy, is either an idiot or a propagandist. As a communist I would really like a heap less state intervention in the economy too: it's the only thing that ensures the continued and continually violent survival of capitalism.

Huh. It took until the resident fascist to actually mention the single qualifier for being on the left at all, let alone the far left.

Expected, I guess. With the exception of the left, fascists have always had a relatively clearer understanding of political stakes involved in the political spectrum than others. Which is why they tend to murder socialists first long before going after anyone else ("first, they came for the socialists..." as the poem goes).

The end of states and the reign of private property. But this is not quite the thread for that.

One might begin modestly by calling for the US to fuck right off outta Ukraine.

And to be fair, also asking Russia to fuck right off outta Ukraine.

The veiled point I’m making is that this is probably as good as it gets. — Punshhh

Yes, this is what conservatives always believe. It is always wrong.

Examples of advice for classroom practice:

Provide students with opportunities to give feedback to teachers about the classroom and instruction.

• Verbal Example: Fist to five, How well do you understand what we talked about today? Fist to five, How well did I teach this today?
• Classroom Activity: Exit tickets or surveys that ask students to identify how well teachers taught, what helped them learn, what got in the way of their learning, etc.
• Professional Development: Conduct regular surveys and disaggregate data on teacher practices.

--

Incorporate the history of mathematics into lessons.

• Verbal Example: Why do you think we call it Pythagorean’s theorem, when it was used before he was even born? What should we call it instead?
• Classroom Activity: Learn about different bases and numerical ideas: Base 2, binary and connections to computer programming, how the Yoruba of Nigeria used base 20, and how the Mayans conceptualized the number 0 before the first recording of it.
• Professional Development: Learn the history of mathematics. Take a course, go to a conference, read historically and culturally accurate books, and use the resources in this workbook. Focus on different approaches to learning concepts.

--

Consider what grades really mean to you, and articulate a plan that is consistent with those values.

• Professional Development: As a department, consider how you would proceed with teaching if no letter grades were to be given. Review alternative ways of grading (standards based, mastery based, A/B no pass, etc.). Emphasize formative assessment.
• Professional Development: As a department, review current assessment and grading practices to determine what values are reinforced for the purpose of making grades more purposeful.
• Professional Development: Develop formative assessments that highlight student knowledge rather than deficit knowledge. Consider bringing in experts to help design this.

So uh, yeah, if anything thinks this amounts to 'math is racist' then they are pretty straightforwardly wrong.

I took a gander through the actual materials linked in the article and .. it's really not that bad. Most of it has to do with pedagogy in general rather than any specific mathematical practice. The advice they list is really quite trans-disciplinary. Eg:

Too often students are tracked based on the notion that adults know what the right thing is for them, which does not allow room for student agency, reinforcing paternalism and powerhoarding. Often, placement into different tracks reflect subjective metrics of innate ability without acknowledging prior opportunities or experiences. Following the same vein, leadership often decides which teacher is right for which course without allowing input from the teachers, students, or parents.

While access to grade-level content for every student is the responsibility of schools and essential for equity, a focus on content alone is insufficient for achieving meaningful mathematical power for all students. When only focusing on content without applying a culturally responsive lens or strategic scaffolding, there is a risk of perpetuating white supremacy culture and inequities. A hyperfocus on individual standards requires teachers to function under a system of urgency to “cover” all the material that will be on the test and not focus on actual learning of the big ideas. This approach is not only disengaging, it also limits opportunities for teachers to connect the content to students’ lives in meaningful, relevant ways.

"Best practices" for math pedagogy often exclude the unique needs of Black, Latinx and multilingual or migrant students. This reinforces either/or thinking by reinforcing stereotypes about the type of mathematical education that certain groups of students receive. It allows the defensiveness of Western mathematics to prevail, without addressing underlying causes of why certain groups of students are “underperforming,” a characterization that should also be interrogated. It also presupposes that “good” math teaching is about a Eurocentric type of mathematics, devoid of cultural ways of being.

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

Like, sure, some of this might be quite contestable, but it's quite a far fry from 'math is racist'.

Putin wants his own regionally based, vertically run capitalism, operating by rules not commensurate with the Western neoliberalism. This is something the West cannot abide. And, short of using nukes, Russia will likely lose this contest in the long run. If anything, the Putin's values are triumphing in the West, considering that we are two years away from the neofascicts resuming power in the US, and that now it's effectively illegal to protest in the UK, among other symptoms.

Lol the US is literally ruled by clowns. Like, actual, singing clowns.

Also how symptomatic is it that, precisely when the US finds it's global hegemony being challenged on the world stage, it becomes imperative that a "Disinformation Governance Board" is created? When you start to lose control, you try to add some new ones.

For anyone who isn't an aristocrat and a bootlicker for said aristocrats. Here is the bit where I tell you to read Fredric Jameson. Seriously.