We should support every fight for liberation of the oppressed.

Feliz cumpleaños, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Ponte y Palacios Blanco 🫡.

Thanks for the words

Thanks for the relevant context. I should really stop trying to talk about stuff that I heard on youtube.

right to secede

This was such a terrible idea. Was there any rationale for this at the time?

Yeah, it was a mistake on my part. I forgot that Sign Language (at least the Brazilian one) works this way for example. Thanks for the correction.

This does make my point even clearer though: languages are really diverse.

Well, there’s Spanish lessons in the US as far as I know. It’s not Chinese but it’s the language of their neighbors.

Btw if you are curious see Creole languages. Creole languages are an absolutely amazing example of language “merging”.

There are two main problems.

First, global languages as a whole have barely anything similar to each other. For example, there are languages there isn’t any way to tell relative direction (so I would call one of my hands my “west hand” and the other the “east hand”, but if I turned 90 deg I would call them “north” hand and “south” hand). This is just scratching the surface.

If you had to list common features present in all languages globally, it would probably go like “all languages have vowels”, “all languages have nouns”, “all languages have pronouns”, “most languages use m sounds to refer to mothers and d/p/f sounds to refer to fathers” etc. Like, the bare minimum. You can’t even be sure if all languages have recursion (see Piñaha, although in my opinion the claim that this language doesn’t have recursion is bullshit). There is so much variation that any “composite” language speakers would necessarily take some choices. If you had to take the features of the most spoken languages of the world, then the result would sound like a tonal European language. European languages are the most widely spoken because of colonialism.

Second, languages carry culture. Change a language, you lose poetry, puns, traditional history etc. Change a language enough and you end up killing it.

Why is “to shit” a slur and “to defecate” is not? Because poor Anglo peasants spoke a Germanic ancestor of English (where the word “shit” come from), and the aristocrat Saxons spoke an ancestor of French (where the word “defecate” come from). Why care about Anglos and Saxons, and their respective social positions? Because the Saxons invaded England and your “is this word profane?” sense came in part from their social status. (This paragraph might not be accurate. See the comment from La Dame d’Azur)

Also, if you want to see a “composite” language, you are reading one right now. English took features from all over the world due to colonialism and it’s a mess. However, it is still relatively stable.

We are still technically on the iron age lol

AI might have changed how we interact with the internet but it hasn’t had the same impact as the transistor.

Maybe when AI gets used to generate stuff in the manufacturing sector we would call our era the “AI age”.

Yeah, writing got the entire concept of “history”

This is Jackie Chan erasure /j

I’m not defending him. Chomsky’s well known.

Yeah it’s sad. However I’m sure that the left in the west is gonna grow. The empire is dying. I hope that more people learn about communist leaders.

Donald Trump /s

Black Panther Party members like Fred Hampton and Huey P. Newton, and Michael Parenti.

If you include revisionists and reactionaries, maybe Noam Chomsky. He was the first “leftist” USian that I heard about.

Yeah he’s not that great of a guy (if I’m not mistaken, he’s also a transphobe).

Nevertheless I still think that it’s important to read his work since it helped the creation of Cybersyn.

Also, please avoid trying to learn everything. I know it’s tempting but you have limited time and it’s way more worthwhile to apply your knowledge in the real world. Oppose book worship.

Focus on reading Marxist works since they give you a good eye for reactionary thought. Before reading Trotsky, Kautsky, or some bourgeois history book to find insights and historical context, read Marx, Engels, Mao, Lenin, and Stalin. Do not try to challenge or critique reactionaries before doing the work of learning and applying Marxism.

For any book:

• How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler (1972 edition or later)
• Writing To Learn, by William Zinsser

Logic:

• How to Prove It, by Daniel J. Velleman. (Skip the introduction if you aren’t comfortable with math)
• How to Write Mathematics, by Kevin Houston.

Both books are focused on Logic in Mathematics. You don’t need to necessarily understand the math. You can treat it like examples or test-cases of Logic since Math is one of the best places to practice it.

Tropes and Media:

• tvtropes.org

Very lib but very comprehensive. Also has ads.

Western Thought:

• Elementary Principles of Philosophy, by Georges Politzer (good place to start)

Western Thought is a very wide topic. You should avoid non-Marxist philosophers from the 20th century since they tend to be either very hyper-specialized or very non-Materialist.

How structures work:

• Thinking in Systems, by Donella H. Meadows
• At this point you can choose to read books on Dialectical Materialism. See the Philosophy section on Cowbee’s reading list.
• Towards a New Socialism, by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell

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