Should I chill on the spam? I thought this one was pinned. Arguably it should be pinned to the top of the site #noneofmybusiness

My idea was basically create a bunch of hyperlinks to the books within the site so we could have discussion long-term by linking to them later but I am now realizing this is just spam and nobody posts in this comm am I lowkirk rude?

I’m trying to read Das Kapital and doing a summary of it. It’s good to do it after having some grasp of dialectics. If you observe the movement between concrete labor to abstract labor, abstract labor to exchange value, exchange value to money measurement of value, money measurement of value to price… These are all dialectical transformations and the result of multiple contradictions. Then you observe Das Kapital can be read as a onion, where you peel each layer before going to the next one.

Another one is “Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems”, from Hiroki Sayama. I’m trying to teach myself about complex systems analysis. And maybe use it to understand economics :-).

I finished Children of Memory the other day. 4/5. Solid sci-fi, different to the first 2 books in the trilogy. But of a trip with how it unfolds, and well executed I think.

Also been listening to the audiobook version of John Lee Anderson’s biography of Che Guevara. This is much more entertaining than I expected and very well written (and read). Just getting on to the Cuban Missile Crisis with about 1/3 left to go.

Copaganda by Alec Karakatsanis.

In the introduction to his most recent book, Copaganda, which was published yesterday, Alec Karakatsanis describes watching incarcerated parents in Flint, Michigan, press their faces against their prison windows, straining to read messages that their children have scrawled in chalk on the sidewalk below. Over the past twenty years, he writes, many jails have eliminated free in-person visits, and phone calls are often prohibitively expensive, so families resort to writing messages on the ground—things like “love u,” and “ur not alone,” and a drawing of a birthday cake decorated with candles. Karakatsanis describes watching jail employees with hoses wash some such messages away: “The vibrant chalk drawings,” he writes, “were reduced to splotches of muted color, like an abstract expressionist’s representation of bureaucratic cruelty.”

It’s all part of what Karakatsanis calls the “punishment bureaucracy”—the system by which the American political establishment devotes immense resources to policing the violation of certain laws by certain people. Karakatsanis writes that offenses that involve wealthier perpetrators—things like wage theft and corporate negligence—are rarely addressed with the brute force and cruelty meted upon poor people. “Punishment bureaucrats have produced a structure of mass human caging that is unlike anything that any other society has ever attempted,” he told me recently. “Let alone any other society that thinks of itself as a democracy.”

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