I like Cuttlefish so damn much
https://youtu.be/8ruiudiWcpw?t=1445
It really does need to be made that a bunch of epistles be sent out banning eating behavior against intelligent and sociable animals like cuttlefish, octopus, monkeys, chimps and other simians, dogs etc and reempahsizing the ban on eating things like pork unless you have to to survive, in spite of how repellent certain porcine behavior may be. I find it ironical how fuck is that an english word I listen to Runglish too much here we had a good thing going and people did not understand certain dietary and moral restrictions, before the discovery of things like germ theory and the cross pollination of zoonotic illnesses. Clearly the Han are repellent in more ways than one, and their iniquity routinely blights this world with their immoral behavior. I am more convinced than ever the Great Dragon is in reference to China but do not know who "Michael and his angels" represents at the national level.
This is all an aside but briefly it should also be noted how much and to what degree astrology was commonplace as "science" back during the times of John the Revelator and fact that certain constellations could likewise be used in association with national animals. The field of astrology, as in ancient astronomy, not moronic horoscopes for middle age women, was a sort of symbolic language and study of the movement of the heavens necessary to understand the language of the ancients but I digress.

Truly this is a wonderful and fascinating animal and it horrifies me that some people eat it, likewise as with hunting and eating whales. I think that we do need a new religion, and one that refreshes certain misunderstandings about moral failings with revealed sciences like why it is an abomination to eat bats and monkeys, but we are still in a terrible and dark secular materialist age that only seeks to understand cause and effect of the physical. I find it interesting that many of them seek discredit the notion of animals being any more than biological machines, and hence unable to feel pain and "soulless" and the preachers of this doctrine are thus preachers of evil and falsehood, likewise to justify their own abominable experiments on animals in the Wect in equal measure of reprehensibleness in their tortures of rats, monkeys, cats, dogs, and so on, as those on the far Eact who eat them.

I'd really like to populate a planet with crabs and cuttlefish and plankton if we can discover a habitable world that doesn't have it's own biome yet, which likewise needs to be regulated as being free from earth contamination, and that rather than rely upon the malleable and easily erased doctrines of men and their fake laws that are ephemeral, be enshrined within religious doctrine which is nigh unbreakable. We simply need one to not be an open scam or similar faggotry as a Utah cult, as it is now.

>all these stupid hypefests over muh new grafiks muh raytrace muh efpee es

Look I've really got to ask at this point are there even any new games which remotely justify the purchase of a new graphics card? Or is this all just memery? While I do think that RT has got some very interesting applications it's still really primitive in how much power it takes to merely bounce the light once, as opposed to whatever the hell GPU bricks will be like when we can bounce it three, four, maybe five times with many more times the resolution and millions of polys.

But see here's the rub which is principally something with which I'd imagine Russia would agree, that there's just no games. Like Control and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, what the fuck even is that? I've been so turned off by triple A shitfest games I can't even imagine there being something good enough to justify blowing up to a thousand burger dollars on these things.

Is there even anything new at all coming down the pipeline by 2022 release which is good? Like anything at all?

I decided to check out the VTMB2 website first time in ages and my god is it going to look like shit
https://www.bloodlines2.com/

>preorders
>paid zeroday DLC
>weapon skins

Fuck sake. You know it really was the vidya industry that fully broke my embrace of Capitalism. Look at this dogshit and they'll then convince the alt retatards muh es jay dubyas ruinin gayming when it's been made abundantly clear to me that the real problem with VTMB2 is going to be unrestrained Capitalism. I cannot even imagine at this point how shit it's going to be once hardsuit, Paradox, and whatever that triple A ubisoft faggot gets done with it. The utter destruction of the Dead Space series is but one of many case studies in how corporate greed is ruining gaming and meanwhile GPU prices keep inflating alongside healthcare, education, and every other cost, all of which relies on usury to maintain corporate fiefdoms. It almost makes me wish we had proven cases of Socialism working and not getting assaulted by capitalist Wect the way everything from Libya to Venezuela got ruined. They couldn't even leave me in peace with my vidya.

I know it's a rant but it's also a genuine question as to what game exactly I'm even supposed to be excited for coming out in the next 18 months which could possibly justify blowing over $700 on a new GPU to run it. While they're not that old as things like Might and Magic or Wing Commander I don't think there's even any games I really play that much or have any interest in that couldn't run well on a RX 580 or 1070 or 1660 or something. The only interesting games lately are Industries of Titan, Wasteland 3, and Baldur's Gate 3 I can think of and I doubt any of them need that kind of power unless expanded VRAM and enhanced speeds gives serfdevs toiling for their corporate overlords more excuses to cut corners and release horribly optimized games which require 16gb VRAM and high speeds and 200gb installs because making it a 6gb VRAM 80gb install requires real effort that could be better profitized elsewhere by coding lootcrates and 50 custom weapon skins for $4.99 each.

Also why the fuck does my proprietary phone keep deleting files in my download folder and why the fuck can't I change the download pathing to my microsd card. I hope Google gets absolutely fucked in this antitrust lawsuit.

Finally finished it, since it's quite an amount of pages it took me some weeks reading it in parallel with other stuff.
The book is quite well written, one might think popular scientific publication, dunno it comes from Harvard University Press and most of the argument they say has been published in journals beforehand. I also enjoyed it, because it was actually scientific reasoning about a field I don't look into, so yeah reading some psychology for a change was good.

My summery of the introduction might give a bit of orientation:

Mercier and Sperber pursue two questions: Why has reason developed only in humans and why does reason not fulfill the (evolutionary) purpose traditionally attributed to it by humans ( meaning that humans contrary to popular belief do not proceed objectively and logically, that they are systematically biased and therefore reason does not bring about better decisions and more knowledge) [@mercier2017, 4].
Proposition of the book: Reason has two functions

>Reason, we argue, has two main functions: that of producing reasons for justifying one and that of producing arguments to convince others. These two functions rely on the same kinds of reasons and are closely related.

Reason is important to coordinate human coexistence (we cooperate with strangers as well as family etc., we have long-term goals and that needs trust). What motivates us, what ideas we have and what we want to do must be communicated and reason helps. Reason also helps to evaluate the other person's arguments, while reason is also used to convince others of us and our ideas and intentions [@mercier2017, 8f.].
Reason, in communication/discussion, works well, because it is made for exactly this purpose (interactionist approach) and tends to the better argument / opinion, while as "solitary reason" it runs lazy and biased [@mercier2017, 10f.]

Especially the last one is interesting as I often have the feeling of getting deeper about things when talking to others. So in evolution it has a social function. We want to convince and we need to evaluate others and their reasoning that tries to convince us. Mercier and Sperber argue that lonesome reasoning is lazy and biased but gets challanged and refined in interaction and through counterarguments, thus leading to better beliefs by argumentative interaction. They cite noumerous experiments with individuals and groups going on about the same problem, but also in the "wild life" of the everyday and not just in psychology labs.

One part is also about what reason is:
Reason is not logic faculty or something, one "superpower" but there are lots of inference modules (assumption), that are highly specilaized to draw certain inferences and the reason module

>Reason is, we argued, one module of inference among many. [...] reason is indeed specialized; it draws intuitive inferences just about reasons. [@mercier2017, 328]

Did not really get that part, representations and metarepresentations are important concepts there.

I read "A People's Tragedy" by Figes Orlando, an extremely interesting and insightful work on the Russian civil war. The book is fairly popular and often cited in the circles of people interested in the revolution, for example the Khrushchev's memoirs I read had less than 50 ratings on goodreads.com, Archipelag Gulag has there 6000 votes, "Ivan's life" (an obscure imperial book on the livehood of Russian peasants published in 1902) had 137, and "A People's Tragedy" got 3600.
I am pleasad that the author focuses not only on center stage personalities like Nicholas, Witte, Stolypin, Lenin, Rasputin, Trotsky, Kerensky, Lvov or Stalin, but also on smaller individuals without a wiki page, the author likes to tell the story through the lenses of a small peasant progressive and other fairly obscure personalities of whom not even Russians have heard but who are neccessary to represent those who experienced revolution's brute force firsthand.

The civil war was a giant clusterfuck but the author dedicates only around 300 pages to it, the other 700 are dedicated to political struggle between parties and personalities. This is one of the few times when I read a long book and say that I want MORE, apparently the author often skips the details and I often found things in Wikipedia that were not listed in the book. I can't say it's useless or flawed, or spends too much time on uesless things but rather it's too short despite being a huge 1000 pages long Bible. For example, Orlando doesn't touch at all the rumor (it's disputed) that Stalin drowned thousand of former trasirst military officers in Volga after being appointed a commissar in Tsaritsyn (the city whose future name will be known to every human with slight interest in WW2, Stalingrad). The book often quotes seemingly obscure information and I am deeply happy to see Orlando quoting people's diaries, mentioning not only the famous Witte's memoirs or Durnovo's letter that I showed to you, the man who profetically warned Nicholas 2 about the consequenses of the future world war, but also quoting diaries of obscure people whose names are not grand enough to deserve a wiki page. I wonder if he read Bukharin's and Khrushchev's memoirs, or were they too obscure even for a professional historian? I am sure, for example, that only a part of the Bukharin's prison writings were translated into English. I will quote my favorite disjointed paragraphs that should hook you up if you can't decide whether you are willing to spend your time reading such a gargantuan book:

Count Witte, Russian minister of finance, suggested Alexander that the time had to instruct the heir to the throne in the affairs of the state. Alexander seemed surprised. 'Tell me,' he asked the Minister, 'have you ever spoken to his Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Tsarevish (Nicholas 2)'? Witte admitted that he had. 'Then don't tell me you never noticed that the Grand Duke is a dunce!'

The most famous scandal took place at the Yar, a well-known gipsy restaurant, in March 1915. Rasputin had gone there with two journalists and three prostitutes (what a promising beginning!). He became drunk, tried to grab the gypse girls, and began to boast loudly of his sexual exploits with the Empress. "See this belt?" he bellowed. "It's her majesty's own work, I can make her do anything. Yes, I Grishka Rasputin. I could make the old girl dance like this if I wished" - and he made a gesture of the sexual act. By now, everyone was looking at Rasputin and several people asked if he was really the famous holy man. Rasputin dropped his pants and waved his penis at spectators. The British agent, Bruce Lockhart, who was in the restraurant downstairs, heard "wild striecks of women, broken glass and banging doors". The waiters rushed about, the police were called, but no one dared evict the holy man. Telephone calls to increasingly high officials finally reached the Chief of the Corps of Gendarmes, who ordered Rasputin's arrenst. He was led away and imprisoned for the night. But the next morning orders came down from the Tsar for his release.

By 1920 the left wingers had got their way: money was being printed at such a furious rate that it was pointless to defend it any longer. The Mint was emplyoing 13 000 workers and, quite absurdly, using up a large amount of Russia's gold reserves to import the dyes and paper needed to print money. It was costing more to print the rouble than the rouble was actually worth. Public services, such as the post and telegraph, transport and eletricity, had to be made free because the state was losing money by printing and charging rouble notes for them

The economist Preobrazhensky dedicated one of his books: "To the printing presses of the Commissariat of Finance - that machine-gun which shot the bourgeois regime in its arse, the monetary system"

I highly recommend to play AGEOD game "The Revolution Under Siege" after reading that book. It is a very deep strategy that enhances experience of the civil war and allows multiplе alternate history scenarios. Very fun.
Here's some good atmospheric old Russian music about the Civil War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SzrtszwCOo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydjBg8oErHI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmmQP8E1dXQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkaqxO2BczQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5CpT4EwmYU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im71Kez2E_0

>>47491
Looks very good, added to my reading list. Interesting that

>The book chronicles Russian history from the famine of 1891-1892, the response to which Figes argues to have severely weakened the Russian Empire, to the death of Lenin in 1924, when "the basic elements of the Stalinist regime - the one-party state, the system of terror and the cult of the personality - were all in place".

Fitzgerald's the Russian Revolution instead takes it from 1917 to the great purge, with solid arguments for it. I suppose I should read it because after reading that book and while reading Kotkin's Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, one really takes away that 1924 really wasn't a significant shift in party policy - something more like the solidification of certain maxims and ideas.
All this increasingly makes me think that perhaps there is some book out there that takes the Russian civil war and localizes it more, as readings about the overall period - which all seem to emphasize that the war and this revolutionary period were like hundreds of localized societal conflicts - possibly lack the insight one would get from just reading about the national picture. I have no doubt that the experiences of say, Tambov were vastly different from Irkutsk but I lack any real insight as to how so other than SR/green army activity in former.

>Orlando doesn't touch at all the rumor (it's disputed) that Stalin drowned thousand of former trasirst military officers in Volga after being appointed a commissar in Tsaritsyn

Kotkin has a subchapter on the barge prisons in Tsaritsyn and their role in Stalin's attempt to fight against military specialists as a means of weakening Trotsky's power - with some detail on the horrid conditions they were kept in with the cynical scapegoating and executions, but does not mention mass drownings.