Coming up on a month of not drinking which is the longest I’ve gone since I was like 16. I’m well over a month of not smoking weed.

very proud of you!

I really want to buy a motorcycle but whenever I get close to deciding which one to get I end up in a weird depressed state where I realize how pointless it is and a waste of what little money I have it would be.

not gonna tell you whether to make a financial decision like that but I guess whether it’s a good idea or not depends on why exactly you like driving motorcycles, over, say, a car or a regular bike (if the commute is feasible with one where you live).

as in, if it’s for the thrill of driving it, if you really wanna save money and not get one then perhaps you can replicate that thrill somewhere else and feel a bit better about not getting one? if any other activity wouldn’t be the same then maybe go for it? same process for other factors like cost or easier parking or so on

As an example of how I take notes (in Remnote), this is a paragraph from Desai’s Geopolitical Economy (2013):

“Part 8 of Capital Volume I, devoted to ‘The so-called primitive accumulation’, famously underlines the state’s critical role in establishing capitalism by separating workers from their subsistence. However, not only does such primitive accumulation continue into capitalism’s maturity (Luxemburg, 1913/2003; Harvey, 2003), it is closely tied to the expansion of the state’s role for combined development through ‘the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection’. The national debt permitted the state to ‘meet extraordinary expenses [such as for colonial ventures] without the taxpayers feeling it immediately’ while the resulting taxes and wage goods inflation separated more artisans and peasants from their subsistence. The effectiveness of this system of primitive accumulation was further heightened by the ‘system of protection, which forms one of its integral parts’ (Marx, 1867: 921).”

and these are my unedited notes for that paragraph:

my notes are only like 10% shorter than the actual thing right now (thanks to me adding a brief example/explanation, which is extending it) but I’ve actually reduced like half the wordcount of the chapter as a whole when accounting for wordier/extraneous paragraphs, while also making it more readable to me, and I haven’t even editted it down and glued together sections that are similar yet. You can get some even better compression on less dense books, but this is one of the denser ones.

An added benefit is that as you get more and more books in there, you’ll perhaps notice that certain subjects are brought up a lot and so you can, using RemNote at least, create entries/mini-documents/whatever you want to call them, dedicated precisely to that topic, giving a basic overview. Books on many Western countries’ recent politics will probably bring up the 2008 financial crisis for example, and that might be explained from scratch in each book, so instead of having like 10 different note sets each with its own distinct set of paragraphs on an overview of the timeline of the financial crisis overall, you can just have a single version and save some words and time.

I’ve got through a lot of note-taking methods tbh. Even as I went through my university course, it’s something that I never really got the hang of and was satisfied by (part of it is that I was usually too busy with the workload to really do a deep dive and perfect any particular one).

I’ve tried doing it on paper (or devices you can handwrite on) because of all the scientifically-supported benefits it gives you in terms of concentration and memory and so on, and I don’t doubt those benefits, but ease of access and searchability and connectivity are just way too important to be flipping through papers as soon as your notes reach a certain size.

So I do it via keyboard, usually on a device that isn’t connected to the internet to avoid distractions (with the PDF or epub predownloaded, or the book next to me if I have it physically). There’s a lot of note-taking apps out there and they each have their own benefits; I found that I dislike pure memorization/flashcard apps like Anki because I do actually just need a big place with my notes not all separated by flashcards.

I found that I dislike various pure Zettelkasten-y apps like Obsidian. A Zettelkasten, literally “second-brain” is kinda like a massive decentralized mind-map which focuses on connections between pieces of information rather than maintaining a strict set of notes, if you’re unaware. I found that I actually quite liked having the ability to have a place for all my notes from a certain book to just read through and not scattered around (and a Zettelkasten is kinda explicitly about not memorizing stuff because, y’know, your second brain is meant to have the information and not the brain in your head, but I quite like just memorizing stuff so I can use it without referencing a giant mindmap).

Notion is pretty good and I still use it for a lot of things. It’s a fairly basic app where you can take notes but that also has functionality for to-do lists and tables and so on.

I think I like RemNote the most. There’s a lot of complicated stuff you can do with it, but at its heart, it’s a notetaking app where you can generate flashcards inside the app and it’ll do spaced repetition schedules automatically, which is nice because there’s some things that I would like to flashcard but definitely far from everything. I also just like the structure of the thing, it’s been good to encourage me to break away from agonizingly long paragraphs and instead break them up into bitesize pieces that are nonetheless connected together.

But at the end of the day, the app used isn’t really what’s important, because it’s very easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re being productive by messing with settings and doing youtube tutorials about XYZ or TOP TEN TRICKS FOR PRODUCTIVITY, etc.

As for the strategy while taking notes, there’s also a ton of them out there which boast wild success. Again, I don’t think any of them are wrong necessarily, but there’s a lot of them that feel either needlessly complicated/require a lot of extra thought (“oh gee, what do I colour-code this? is this categorized as a fact, an idea, a concept, or commentary in my elaborate classification highlighting system?”) when you should just be thinking about the book and its contents, or they feel like they’re designed for specific subjects; what works for literature analysis won’t work for medical school, which won’t work for mathematics, etc.

I think the best way I’ve found is to simply read through the book and try and summarize what the author is saying in your own words and add examples. There’s really only three guidelines I’d go for:

1. Keep your paragraphs relatively short to keep your notes in relatively bitesize chunks of information and explanation

2. If you’re ever just typing things in from the book verbatim for more than a couple sentences at a time, you’ve probably lost focus - you might need to take a break for like 5-10 minutes or check you actually understand and aren’t just pretending to understand so you can get through the book faster. It’s fine to repeat decent stretches because there’s only a few concise ways of saying something, but make sure to break it up by at least changing a word or re-ordering a paragraph to make sure your brain is still actually doing stuff.

3. If you don’t understand something, then don’t just repeat it verbatim in your notes because you’ll just confuse yourself later. This is where a lack of internet connection can be a real pain, so maybe keep it on if you’re dealing with something dense and confusing

Sometimes putting things in your own words is actually longer and less concise but uses less complicated jargon so it’s actually easier to understand overall. There’s usually a lot of extraneous/unhelpful information or padding that can be removed though, so my edited notes are very often like a quarter/third of the size of the actual book, maximum.

You can edit them from there after you’ve read the chapter/book. Often, you’ll find that the author goes back over ground already covered just to remind you, and you might not catch this while going through it (especially if it takes you a week or two to get through it). Other times, you’ll find that information you wrote down just wasn’t that relevant. Obviously we aren’t studying for a test here, there’s no chance it’ll be on the “exam”, so delete parts at your own discretion.

I think even if you go for more exotic notetaking things, it’s better to just get raw sentences down and then go back over the notes afterwards with the colours and referencing and tags and such.

The whole process takes a lot longer than just reading the book without making notes - a frustratingly long time, even - but it means that you’ll never have to read it again in your life, if done right, and you’ll memorize much more of it (especially if using flashcards in addition), so it’s much more efficient and time-saving over a, say, 30 year timespan.

Getting back into reading after a hiatus of a couple months. What tends to happen is that I pick up a book, read half of it, realize that I’m getting confused, decide to read something more politically/economically fundamental to provide a better foundation, and repeat for like 5 books in a row.

it’s like
“blahblahblah, this British politician in 1827 did this… oh god I think I lost the plot like 50 pages ago, I need to have a better overview of the British Empire”
“okay, here’s a book on the British Empire that’s more general… blahblahblah, they did this policy. oh fuck I just realized that the economics of the policy they’re discussing in a big blind spot for me. I need to go find a book which deals with that.”
“okay, here’s a book on economic policy… blahblahblah, this is how trade duties and tariffs work. shit, I just realized that I’m unsure how this actually all fits together in a Marxist framework, I need to go find a book which deals with that.”

etc, and then once I get to the bottom of that process, I work my way back up

luckily I take notes so I don’t have to reread what I’ve already read for the most part

it would probably be more productive to get all the foundational stuff done first. like, you know, books tend to gloss over parts by being like “over the 1900s and 1910s, X party rose to power, and then…” as they’re working with a larger narrative and then I think you’re meant to fill in the very large gap in understanding by reading a book about precisely how they came to power, and so on. but the large foundational stuff also necessarily tends to be more abstract and dense in theory so it’s hard to get through it.

those four oblasts are looking awfully annexed for a “failed annexation”

Making good progress on my c/news goals. Felt like I was shoveling snow slower than it was falling down for a while but now there is an actual light at the end of the tunnel.

Also going to bed earlier, which is great. I think I just have to ditch my phone entirely past like 10pm. Even with the best of intentions, I end up spending too much time on it at night.

How was your January?

Overall, a lot more chaotic than I thought it would be; hoped things would calm down after December.

Do you want to share something that you’ve done this week or month?

The news megathreads and posts therein have taken a backseat to trying to find more literature and decent news sources.

As a sneak peek as to what I’ve been trying to cook over the last few weeks (that the news mega people won’t see unless they’re also here, or scour my profile I suppose), I wanna shift from daily+weekly news posts to daily+monthly news posts, as with nearly two years of experience - good fucking lord it really has almost been that long - I’m coming around to the idea that a week is actually kind of an awkward timeframe. It’s not really long enough to allow most events to play out, and for shorter term events, you want the granularity that daily updates gives you rather than having to wait a week. So, daily posts are staying, but I want to do monthly posts. The actual logistics of this is what I need to work out, and it’s taking me longer than I thought as I only have so much free time in a day.

As I said, I’m also trying to find more literature, and this is to get the geopolitics reading list up from its barebones state to something actually useable. The problem is that most literature of the communist variety tends to be focussed on the big hits - the Russian Revolution, or the Chinese Revolution, or events from the 19th century, etc. The rest of it is very general, like on imperialism in general, or on Marxism/anarchism in general, or on Africa in general. If I want to find a useable, relativelt recent, and definitive text on, say, Gabon, then where do I go? Repeat for 200 countries, of which ~150 are either fairly obscure, or known but are usually oversimpified. Like, geopolitics is kind of my thing now. I want to be the mythical Geopolitics Understander, and I can’t do that unless I actually fucking know what’s going on (and has been going on) in Tanzania, or Mongolia, or Peru. In general I wanna minimize the sense of events overtaking me - as in, I don’t wanna be like “Oh, looks like [country] has popped off into revolution/war/crisis, anybody got any articles or reading about this?”

So that is my current task, and I’m not gonna say it’s going badly, but it’s harder than I thought it would be.

Do you have some plans or goals for February?

Well, continuing this, and finishing it up hopefully. I really hope I can put something together for January, but I can’t promise anything. On top of that, I do wanna get into cycling again.

Solidarity forever, comrades.

I think it’s important to talk about this stuff, because habit building/self improvement/recovery is usually more like an upward trend on a chart with lots of little dips and gains and not one continuous line upward.

100%. A “trick” I developed over time with this sort of thing was like… mentally “flipping” around my perspective of improving and being a better person.

As in, when I break a habit for a few days or even a few weeks, I used to be like “Oh no, I’ve regressed back into the person I was before I started this journey, and now I need to start again.”

Whereas now, when I break a habit, I’m like “Oh, this is fine. I am still ‘the person that does this habit’, I haven’t regressed, I’m still on the exact same journey that I’ve been on this whole time, and I’m not restarting because there’s nothing to restart, I’m just getting back on track.”

I personally find this mental framing to make it a lot less daunting when shit happens, as it tends to do. Imagining that you’ve fallen all the way back down the mountain, when in reality you just paused the climb for a little, makes resuming the positive habits seem exhausting and makes missing a few days intensely demoralizing.

It’s quite racist (and antisemetic) to think that just because things look similar that they were intended to be the same thing. They’re not.

“Oh, you think that this fantasy race that has many of the anti-semitic tropes of Jewish people might in fact be a reference to Jewish people? Well, you’re the one who associates those features with Jewish people, not me. Just saying.”

This is where the moronic “maybe the curtains are just blue” reddit-tier analysis of literature gets you - completely unable to see any kind of allegory or metaphor, especially when bigots say that, no, that person in that book totally isn’t a racist caricature, it’s just a person with those traits!

If I wrote a book about a fantasy world where I used lots of sexist stereotypes about women - that they’re less intelligent; that they’re inherently subservient to men; that they “belong in the kitchen”; that they should be “barefoot and pregnant”; etc, and without ever even making a critical judgement of those traits or showed that the men in that society are bad for maintaining this status quo, then I would rightfully be called a raging sexist by people. They would probably believe I was one of those tradcath, alt-right MGTOW incel people. If I turned around and said “Uh, it says a lot about liberals that they think these traits are stereotypically true of women! Maybe they’re the real sexists, not conservatives?” then you would, hopefully (though I’m not so sure given your lack of sensitivity towards Jewish people) call me a total fucking dipshit.

Very true, so long as it begins with the most carbon-emitting people (e.g. western billionaires who own large pollution-emitting corporations) and works its way down

The correctness of an idea is totally independent of how many people believe it, and to believe otherwise is to be some dipshit who says “Idiocracy is a documentary!!!” and invoke Hanlon’s Razor instead of having actual good, materialist analysis of the world

they demanded anarchists become MLs if they wanted bullets.

Stalin literally gave them hundreds of tanks

Personally, I think that someone leading insurrections against institutions that have overwhelming popular support due to actively working to give people healthcare, food, etc. is clearly a counterrevolutionary prick and an anarchist who opposes a project that feeds the children for the first time in centuries because it’s not a syndicate is being myopic at best, but that’s just me.

If we were in a hypothetical revolutionary situation led by anarchists that was genuinely and successfully challenging state capitalist power here in the UK then I, as a Marxist-Leninist, wouldn’t be like “Erm, guys, you haven’t sufficiently considered Lenin! Aren’t you aware that the hijacking and reconfiguration of the state for socialist purposes is a necessary transition period towards communism?” I would get behind the fucking barricades with them.

There’s a difference between opposing lesser evilism in the context of Western capitalist electoral politics between two bourgeois parties, and like, being anti-ML or anti-anarchist in actual revolutionary situations (and not stupid fucking hypothetical internet arguments) because “it’s not doing communism right.” Unless there were like, REALLY fucking big problems with what the group is doing, I would just shut up and not weaken the overall movement. As Awoo stated, this is literally what ML groups are doing in Palestine as we speak.

Because arriving at a party when there’s not many people around can be awkward especially if you aren’t already friends with the host. So you wait for more people to arrive first.

While many Palestinians do hate the Zionists and vice versa, framing the conflict as between two powers that hate each other for religious reasons or racist reasons or what have you is what leads to such terrible “Two religions fighting again for the billionth time!” analysis.

Israel is a modern colonial state. While most outright colonist countries are no longer around, Israel is the exception. One of the reasons why it’s allowed to be the exception is because it’s a stronghold for American interests in an incredibly important region - whoever controls the world’s oil supply, controls everything that depends on oil, which is a LOT of things. Lately, it’s also increasingly a weapons manufacturer and cybersecurity base - their technologies are tested out on Palestinians as if they are guinea pigs, and then these systems are sold to various countries for use in their own populations. In general, Palestinians today have low qualities of life and the amount of territory they control shrinks by the year as Israel shoves Palestinians out of their homes and puts Israeli settlers in those homes instead. Naturally, the Palestinians are not happy about this at all, but resistance is difficult even when you’re not surrounded on all sides (Gaza has the sea, Israel, and Egypt bordering it, and Egypt is currently sympathetic to the Israeli side due to a coup that put Sisi in power; while the West Bank has Israel and Jordan, and Jordan is also sympathetic to Israel currently).

Palestine wants a state for themselves, which is a fairly reasonable thing to want. Israel absolutely does not want a two-state solution let alone to give Palestine all its land back. The two are therefore at an impasse - there’s a fundamental contradiction here that cannot be solved by some middle of the ground solution. Palestine has attempted on numerous occasions to try and resist, both peacefully and violently - both methods get them killed in the thousands while the West says nothing, because again, it’s extremely important to have Israel in the region as a Western imperialist outpost. Have you ever noticed that the only time the phrase “… has a right to exist”, it’s always in reference to Israel? Few other nations seem to have this “right” in the West’s eyes. Yugoslavia sure didn’t. Neither did the USSR, or for that matter modern-day Russia given the rhetoric going around a year or so ago about how they wanted to subdivide Russia into a dozen oblasts.

There are other powers in the region that are against Israel, with the weaker ones being Syria and Lebanon, while the strongest is Iran. Up until fairly recently, while Hezbollah (a sort of state-within-a-state military force separate from the rest of Lebanon but also integrated into it) has scored a few points on Israel in the past, they were broadly speaking outgunned by Israel. Additionally, Israel has nukes, which made a war to actually overthrow Israel essentially impossible without the risk of nuclear bombs being dropped on Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, etc. This has changed in the last few years, due to a mixture of Israel (and the West broadly speaking) becoming relatively weaker because so much military aid has been sent and destroyed in Ukraine, and Iran and friends becoming stronger. The threat of nuclear annihilation still exists, and it’s one of the major problems still for the anti-Israel resistance, but given Hamas’ victory in Gaza a week ago, there is blood in the water and the sharks are coming.

I hope this all shows that thinking along the lines of “X hates Y and so they’re fighting” obfuscates a lot of what’s actually going on geopolitically. It’s extremely important to say that the fact that Israel is a Jewish state doesn’t mean that they have, according to various right-wing conspiracy theories, some kind of outsized influence over so-and-so countries. Israel does have an influence over various countries because their propaganda department is very active in the West to shut down anti-Zionist (which is unequivocally NOT the same as anti-semitism) viewpoints, and the aforementioned cybersecurity and weapons development programs, but this is a two-way street. The West needs Israel. Israel needs the West. The United States is essentially what has kept Israel alive for the better part of the last century.

This isn’t to say that Zionist and Islamic beliefs have no impact on the calculus here - they have a lot to do with it, in fact - but merely to say that this isn’t just some inherently religious war.

Israel created Hamas!

It was already being razed in slow motion. It was an open air prison in desperate poverty. It was a concentration camp that the demons in charge of Nazi Germany would have given their fullest approval.

Dunking on them, or doing idiotic “play stupid games, win stupid prizes!!!” shit is like watching Jewish people trying to escape the Warsaw ghetto in an uprising and then watching the Nazis exterminate them and then saying “Well! If they didn’t want this to happen, the Jews shouldn’t have resisted! They should have calmly and peacefully allowed themselves to be taken to the concentration camps!”

Palestine had the choice of a guaranteed slow death by drowning, or a quick end to the conflict - one way or another. Decades have gone by and nobody outside of the Middle East (apart from the DPRK and a couple others) really give a shit about Palestine. All the back and forth of “ohh where should we put our embassies? ohoho, should we acknowledge that Palestine is a state? ohoho!” achieved nothing. Ten million people could have protested across Europe every single day for decades for the liberation of Palestine, and it would have accomplished less than a single Palestinian soldier making a single rocket to be shot down by the Iron Dome. All the diplomatic shit means nothing. It has meant nothing for decades. Even peaceful protest of Israel in the form of BDS is basically outlawed in some places, and largely ineffectual regardless.

Palestinians shouldn’t, and almost certainly don’t, give a shit about the condemnations of western countries. About what western politicians are saying about them. It means nothing. Their strategies should be independent of “how it looks to outsiders”. A Palestinian could throw a pebble in the vague direction of an Israeli soldier and receive more condemnation from the media than Israel murdering a hundred thousand Palestinian civilians in bombing raids in retaliation. “If you didn’t want the bombing raid, you fucking stupid idiot, then MAYBE you shouldn’t have thrown that pebble! Play stupid games!” Who gives a shit about “how it looks” anymore.

I do have a question for you: let’s say Russia takes, say, Kramatorsk, surrounding it such that no civilians could escape. Imagine those civilians resisted, made Molotovs, fired improvised explosions at the Russians, and the Russians responded by carpetbombing Kramatorsk. Hundreds of civilians dead every single day. I then say “Well, looks like the civilians have guaranteed their own deaths, then. Well done, fucking idiots. Shouldn’t have fired those rockets at the Russian military if you wanted to live.” Would you be in my position, angry that you could possibly think that about a group of people valiantly resisting? How you could possibly look at the buildings being toppled by Russian bombs and think that was justified?

To demoralize Israel. Which it has been, severely.

Alright, cool! What is your strategy for the Palestinians to get their land back?

They peacefully protest - they get shot. They don’t even protest at all - they get shot. Do you want them to vote? Should the Palestinians call their representatives in Tel Aviv and say that they won’t be voting for them if they don’t end the occupation? Oh, I know - they should try to elect a third party to the government!

Oh my god, he’s being such a petty little shit about it.

Ali Sekou Ramadan, an aide to Niger’s deposed President Mohamed Bazoum, told The Associated Press that Bazoum requested that Macron withdraw the French ambassador, Sylvain Itte, “in order to reduce tension.”

In an interview with the France-2 and TF1 television networks, Macron said he spoke to Bazoum on Sunday and told him that “France has decided to bring back its ambassador, and in the coming hours our ambassador and several diplomats will return to France.”

He added, “And we will put an end to our military cooperation with the Niger authorities because they don’t want to fight against terrorism anymore.”

Mom said I have to stop punching you while we play. So I don’t want to play with you anymore! Get out of the Awesome Club treehouse!

The extent to which France exploits several African countries is just unbelievable. France literally issue their fucking currencies, and more:

At independence, former France’s colonies in Africa were forced to sign humiliating agreements which effectively tied independence to continued economic and political dependence on France. Those agreements reserved strategic resources like hydrocarbons, uranium, and other minerals for France. Additionally, France gained privileged access to African markets, ensuring its companies had priority for exports and were exempt from customs duties. Prime Minister Michel Debré underlined those policies on July 15, 1960, addressing the future President of the Gabonese State: “Independence is granted on condition that the State undertakes, once independent, to respect the cooperation agreements signed previously. Two systems come into effect simultaneously: independence and cooperation agreements. One does not go without the other.”