gedankenrausch – gedanken;-rausch

Total surveillance and resistance

Posted on 2018/07/29 by gedankenrausch

Surveillance is becoming increasingly an issue for political activism. Some people think that the state moves towards a dystopia similar to the one pictured by George Orwell in the book 1984. It seems frightening to know that your political opponent is using advanced technology [1] like facial recognition to identify you and repress any political action. Still I argue, that this will not stop resistance or even revolutionary struggle.

The general assumption in this statement is quite easy to prove, since state repression is not the act of identify and solving the cause, but only suppressing the effects. The current state in a bourgeoisie capitalist society is neither willing to solve the cause nor is it able to. The state is an instrument for some classes to rule over other classes. Thus the state would have to abolish itself to solve at least one cause (class conflict) why people stand up and fight.

Thus, a more precise question would be, if repression is becoming more effective? To measure this, we need to look at various dimension: Does it take less time till a crime is reported? Are more crimes reported? Does it take less time to identify a person? Are more crimes ‘solved’? What is the time span from the report until somebody is found guilty? And how many crimes are prevented before they happen?

Instead of looking at exact figures and comparing them – which would be something very valuable, though quite time consuming – I like to look at the general tendencies. For example, looking at the failure of airport security [2], we see the phenomenon that even the best secured places have security holes. This also means, that gathering more data (e.g. through body scanners), does not necessarily mean that security is becoming more effective. If anything, it may even indicates the helplessness of modern surveillance technology to improve its effectiveness. There is this wrong understanding of development as movement due to outer circumstances that enhances the thing itself [3]. To the contrary we need to think about surveillance and privacy as contradictions and from this standpoint we need to analyze technological development.

Simply spoken, movements will adapt to changing surveillance/repressive conditions and in turn this will be the motor that changes the conditions. For example despite the Anti-Socialist Laws in the German Empire the left was still able organize itself in taverns and pubs [4]. In current times the left is already adapting to new conditions, as we see in the rise of encryption and other privacy enhancing methods/tools, like pgp, signal, tor and tails. These methods and tools secure the precondition of a left organization (at least in the cyberspace): to freely speak to other people.

Offline interactions should not be secured by technology, but only by the absence of it. People are realizing that their smartphones are bugs and every serious meeting nowadays is phone-less. One exception could be technology that scans for surveillance devices as radio frequency signal detectors. But the greatest threat has always been other humans spying for the repression state. In a bourgeoisie capitalist society it is dangerous to be revolutionary and it always will be. As already said, the left has always been under repression and developed ways deal with it.

One fundamental method to resist repression is to go underground or in other words become illegal. Due to technical advancements, so its said, it becomes easier to track these people, to find their current location if the use a telephone or are captured on a public surveillance camera. This seems not the case with old members of the German Red Army Faction which are living successfully underground for nearly 29 years, still robbing banks from time to time [5].

I even argue that total surveillance is not feasible. Even though this ‘system’ – which is still highly divided and probably will never be unified – gains more data, it also necessarily must learn to analyze and interpret increasing data volume and more diverse data at a faster rate [6]. A comprehensive surveillance, analyzing all data, will be slow [7], lacking in responsive time. This might be acceptable for the repression state when it is analyzing massive actions afterwards like G20-summit in Hamburg 2017. But even there it is highly debatable if the repression is more effective, since this does not necessarily mean that more people are convicted [8]. It may even result into courts being overloaded. Though I won’t agree that this is a promising counter method to repression, I must underline the argument, that still humans are required to execute the will of the state.

However, responsive time is vital for a dystopian total surveillance. This is only solved by having surveillance on certain key points like train stations, airports, toll stations. These can key points can be avoided quite simply, if one knows of them. Predictive policing tries to solve this problem by moving repression forces to the location where a crime is likely to happen – in a sense this is mobile surveillance. It is even likely that surveillance technology will try to filter these masses of data by an algorithm that tries to predict through meta-data (time, location, …) in which dataset it is likely to find crime related data. This is similar to XKeyscore, where people where put on a surveillance list, when they used certain tools or keywords [9]. But predictive policing is only a dystopian wish [10], since it can not analyze all data to be precise and still be responsive – it must sway between these opposite poles.

It is likely that the state will not be able to pay all the new technologies and will use cheaper private companies that are specialized in this field and are trying to make profit. They might have their own data centers where they analyze all the incoming data. As already stated above, this means that humans are involved in this process and it also means that surveillance industry takes a crucial part in repression. On one hand this opens the field for cyberactivist fighting these companies, destroying key infrastructure, and on the other hand this means striking is still one of the effective protest forms. It comes down to the old question how many people are needed for the machine to keep running.

This is the stance, that we should not be frightened of the current development of surveillance technology. Fear – which actually prevents us from fighting – is a crucial part of state repression. Instead we should develop new methods (offline and online) and technologies to counter act the surveillance. One of them should be the solidarity to others that are objects of state repression. And yes, this consequently means to delete your Facebook/WhatsApp account, since you endanger the privacy of others through it [11]. Privacy is something you must fight for along with the fight to overcome a repressive society.

[1] In this article the term technology only refers to digital technology and not for example the hammer as a tool.
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/airport-security-fails-the-test/
[3] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Socialist_Laws
[5] http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/ex-raf-mitglieder-kehren-mit-geldtransporter-ueberfall-zurueck-14022955.html
[6] https://www.zdnet.com/article/volume-velocity-and-variety-understanding-the-three-vs-of-big-data/
[7] This is only an assumption, as you can see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
[8] https://de.indymedia.org/node/23066
[9] https://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/NSA-targets-the-privacy-conscious,nsa230.html
[10] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/can-predictive-policing-prevent-crime-it-happens
[11] Did you ever mention a non-facebook friend over a Facebook/WhatsApp chat? Facebook/WhatsApp knows your time patterns, so it can assume when you are offline having a (political) meeting with others – this increases significantly when the group is bigger and multiple users are offline at a certain time. This is only one example.W

Make piracy great again

Posted on 2018/06/24 by gedankenrausch

The numbers of people using the music streaming provider Spotify have risen to 170 million in May 2018 [1]. A little less than half of the users have a premium account (about 44%), paying money to get high quality audio and an ad free service [2]. Meanwhile YouTube introduces their own premium model with similar features as ad free videos [3]. The highly wanted feature to play videos in background on the YouTube smartphone app is now behind a paywall. The internet is becoming less and less free, nothing spectacular in a capitalist society.

So, why even bother to complain about it, when all of us – hopefully – know that we need to fight for another model of society to fix this? Because this is not merely the usual struggle of picking between providers the one that seems to have the most human attitude. It is not about where I buy my clothes, or where I buy my food, if it is fair-trade etc. As others have shown this approach won’t change the root cause and even give you the false perception of having a influence while keeping you in a consumerism. This is a struggle about property.

Former free content is put behind walls. While Spotify allows users free access to its audio content, it gradually takes steps to build walls – even if not intended. First of all you have to create an account even if you want to use the free service. This only makes sense in the context of Spotify as capitalist entity – as every other company – which needs to generate money. As a free user the only value you provide is either the possibility that you will pay in the future, advertise this service to other people who will pay in the future, or you watch/listen to content that somebody else paid for (a.k.a. ads). There is virtually no other reason, why content is given to you for free by companies. In order that this logic works out, all other services that give you the same (not similar) content for free needs to be destroyed or at least inaccessible.

No wonder that Netflix boosts its anti-piracy team [4]. The problem for Netflix is not so much, that the firm loses money when its content is pirated, but rather that property is the *condition* for the business (as every capitalist company) to make money at all. Nobody will buy food, if they can get it for free in the same quality. The struggle about virtual property is still highly active. This is so because the internet has a highly democratic beginning [5][6]. Though YouTube was never really ad-free, you had the ability to use an adblocker and there exist a variety of tools to download the content and share it with others [7]. This changes with the recent development to closed source apps for your smartphone in opposition to open source websites – http is an open protocol, and html/css/js is easily changeable. This is the condition that allows YouTube to ask for money, for something as minor as continuing playing a video, while the app is closed. Even setting up and adblocker becomes quite complicated. Luckily there exists apps like NewPipe, but only if you have an android and if you look outside the PlayStore [8].

But enough of ads, lets go back to the property issue. The reason that the Spotify app exists is not only for your convenience, but also because it makes it harder for pirates to access it and make it available for you. In the anonymous cyberspace the security code is the police women that fulfills the orders of the class that profits from the exploitation. To deanonymize people on the internet is an interest of this very class to make privatization of free content possible since it is the condition for their profit.

This is a bold comparison, but lets have a look at the enclosure during the land revolution in England [9]. Common land is privatized, creating one of the condition for the working class, as they do not own anything else than their own ability to work. Thus creating the need to work to survive. You don’t have access to the forme shared land any more, only if somebody from the land owner class grants you access or if you somehow are able to ascend to the land owning class by buying a piece of private land – but you probably will have never enough money for it. Though Spotify is not the reason that you have to work to get a barely livable life – if you not wealthy enough – it still shows the very process why this still remains as it is: privatization of goods or in other term private property.

But privatization is not something that needs to be done one time, and then the owners can live in peace – far from it. Every day the structure of this society needs to be enforced again. Every police women that hinders you taking a bread from a store without paying is enforcing this property law. It is so common in western ideology that we barely recognize it, only in extreme instances as land grabbing for example [10]. As former free content is put behind walls it seems more and more acceptable for people that this is so. One of the main argument is that the people who created the content – this is where the common land and common good comparison failed – need money to survive.

First of all, this ignores the situation, that not the people who create, but companies who make profit out of them, get the money. It does not matter if Spotify pays to less or the music producer (or even both), it is the old conflict between work and wage [11]. Though services that pay the artists directly seem more likable, the reason why anyone needs to sell is ability to work and the product of it did not change at all. The system of private property is one of the main reasons why people need to work in shitty jobs, not because you didn’t pay for the music. By merely accepting these circumstances – because you can afford the premium account – other people lose the ability to enjoy content because they can not afford it. This may seem harsh, but as I said earlier, you are only valuable for the service when you either pay (at least in the future [12]) or watch ads – which implies that you’re only valuable for the ad provider if you are likely to buy these things. This does not mean that the service provider will necessarily deny access to all poor people. But it will certainly ensure that people with money do not easily get the same content with the same quality for free. Which implies that it gets more difficult for everyone.

This is exactly the state we see the piracy community in. Illegal streaming services are taken down one after another, one of the easiest method to watch a movie for free, even in your language. Sites that allows you to download YouTube content cease to exists after enormous pressure [13]. If you want to pirate via peer to peer you often need to use a VPN, making it difficult for beginners. Content in non-English is very difficult to find since all the users seem to be already using these services (at least in Europe). Where the heck are all the people that once had a huge disk full of pirated media? It seems only people working in tech still have these. My concern is not to call upon the users, but to call upon the techs to create piracy software that is easy and secure to use.

Piracy is not the revolution, not even close to it. But not only is access to knowledge one condition of a revolution, furthermore piracy is one element of the struggle against private property. Join the struggle!

[1] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/spotify-statistics/
[2] https://www.spotify.com/int/premium/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/premium/about/
[4] https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-seeks-to-boost-its-global-anti-piracy-team-180623/
[5] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
[6] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7282/
[7] https://youtube-dl.org/
[8] https://newpipe.schabi.org/
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure
[10] https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/land-grabbing.html
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify
[12] This is the same argument why some people declare piracy valuable for the movie industry: You pirate movies that you wouldn’t have payed for anyway, but you still watch the good movies in the cinemas where paying is enforced. This argument misses that the movie industry is not fighting against piracy because of its loss but because it is the condition to earn any money at all. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/10/hollywood-director-piracy-is-necessary-and-doesnt-hurt-revenues
[13] https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-download-sites-throw-in-the-towel-under-legal-pressure-180614/

How to be rauschfeindlich

Posted on 2018/06/23 - 2018/06/24 by gedankenrausch

Note: This is an older text, but I find certain ideas quite valuable.

Rauschfeindlich – hostile to rausch – is the general state of a capitalistic society [1]. Though capitalism does allow rausch in general, but only certain kinds of rausch. This happens through a life-time of socialization and by organizing the society around you.

Here are some basic rules how to be rauschfeindlich:

1. Capitalism
First of all you should create a surrounding that only let certain kinds of rausch exists. If you starve when you don’t have money, you surely realize quite quickly that the Arbeitsrausch (rausch when working) will bring you a lot of food. If you get fired when you come late to work, you realize that the caffeine rausch will help you keep your job. If you only have a little bit time of relaxation during work time you realize that the nicotine rausch makes this time a bit better. Or the MDMA on the weekend to have at least one moment, when you do not think what will happen on Monday.

2. Passiveness appearing as activeness
In you free time you surround yourself with interactive-media that ties you to it. You watch a movie, afterwards you think you done something and didn’t realize that the movie required all your attention. Ever found yourself in a situation where you couldn’t find the attention for a book? But you can stay on the computer for hours, watching Netflix and YouTube all along? A Internetrausch (rausch of using the internet) keeps you active while doing nothing. And your smartphone needs attention all the time. You are in a state where you think you’re doing something, but actually are completely passive. This is good, because then you won’t change anything.

3. Consumable
But we can not eliminate all other rausch-evoking surroundings, as long as we have culture (a library, a concert, a football game, roller coaster park). We allow most of the ones you can consume. Because everything that you can consume will firstly give us money in return and secondly stops you from getting into a Arbeitsrausch when there is nobody who makes money out of it. Get your Adrenalinerausch (rausch when you body produces adrenaline) at the next extreme sport, but make sure you have the money for it.

4. Non-accessibility
Other ones we neglect and/or make them boring. We don’t need so many intellectuals who are interested in learning, so we don’t need to invoke a Wissensrausch (rausch of knowledge). Have you ever tried to find interesting books about science? No, because you don’t need to know that shit, only the people who actually get paid for it need to.

5. Rationality
We have a good system of suppressing rausch kinds, that we don’t value. Most of the times we call it ‘rational’. Have you ever thought about what it exactly means? For example, if you start something you should think beforehand if you have the time for it, if you can really finish it and if it will help you at your career. Otherwise it makes no sense to start it! Therefore we are denying the value of a process and only looking at its – hopefully profitable – output. No reason to get into a Kreativrausch (rausch of creativeness) to write a book that you never finish.

6. Impossibility by reasoning
Surely this is self-understandable [2]: If you can not do it, there is no reason in doing it.

7. Dealing with emotions
One of the best things of rationality is, that you unlearn how to listen to your emotions and how to deal with them. A lot of people – most of the time even unknowingly to them – develop this quirk where they harm themselves because they don’t know how to deal with a emotion. So we know for sure that a Wutrausch (rausch when angered) will not be canalized into a revolution. Let’s better drink a beer and forget about it.

8. Rauschlimit
And obviously we make sure that the society it self uses some particular rules to forbid some rausch. Don’t enjoy too much food in a Essensrausch (rausch of eating) or you will be judged. Don’t consume too much cannabis or you are a looser. Well anyway, if society thinks, something is wrong with your behavior, you are addicted. We make sure, that you think that something is wrong with YOU and not with society.

9. Time when acceptable
Some we only allow on certain conditions. Get into the Alkoholrausch (basically drunk) when ever you want, but not during working hours [3]. We have a lot of complex rules, morals and ethics for that. If you are drinking to early you are an addict. Smoking weed all day or drinking coffee at midnight? Certainly an addict. Kokain to finish your paper that is due to tomorrow? Certainly okay!

There we go, this are some basics rules that this society needs to follow to be rauschfeindlich. There is not much space you have in between these rules and never think of crossing them! It’s not rational!

[1] https://gedankenrausch.noblogs.org/post/2017/10/17/what-is-a-rausch/
[2] Tip: a good exercise is to always ask: Why do I understand something? Often you will come to the result that there is an underlying ideology you were exposed to.
[3] Did you noticed that you will get asked many questions when you drink before the accepted time, because it’s socially not accepted or marked as sign of worrisome state? Ever heard that drinking during work was okay and even desirable? How come? It must have something to do with our knew knowledge about drugs, right? RIGHT?

Materialistic Dialectics

Posted on 2017/11/06 by gedankenrausch

Some weeks ago I was looking into the “The ABC of Materialist Dialectics” from Leon Trotsky for no particular reason. I then realized that the text had some interesting similar thoughts to the ones I had in my opening article, where I tried to deduce the difference between a big change and a small one, between revolution and reformation [1]. I asked: When everything is changing all the time what does it make the same object in the first place? Trotsky phrases this so:

Again one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true—all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves. A sophist will respond that a pound of sugar is equal to itself “at any given moment”.

Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of this “axiom”, it does not withstand theoretical criticism either. How should we really conceive the word “moment”? If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that “moment” to inevitable changes. Or is the “moment” a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time; and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation; time is consequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist. [2]

Further on I stated, that it is people who consider a change as either small or big one, making it either still the same object or a different one. Again, Trotsky phrases this a bit differently since he comes from a different viewing angle:

To make use of the axiom of ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’ with impunity is possible only within certain limits. When quantitative changes in ‘A’ are negligible for the task at hand then we can presume that ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This is, for example, the manner in which a buyer and a seller consider a pound of sugar. [2]

For the buyer and seller a pound of sugar is the same even though it has quantitative changes, because it is “negligible” and not important for them. But Trotsky is not talking about small or big changes, but quantitative and qualitative ones:

Every worker knows that it is impossible to make two completely equal objects. In the elaboration of baring-brass into cone bearings, a certain deviation is allowed for the cones which should not, however, go beyond certain limits (this is called tolerance). By observing the norms of tolerance, the cones are considered as being equal. (‘A’ is equal to ‘A’). When the tolerance is exceeded the quantity goes over into quality; in other words, the cone bearings become inferior or completely worthless. [2]

This concept has some advantages, since you can talk about big and small quantitative changes and big and small qualitative changes: 1 pound sugar compared to 2 pound sugar or 20 pound sugar, white sugar compared to brown sugar or chocolate. The limit when quantitative change becomes qualitative – when sugar ceases to be sugar – is called tolerance.

In my earlier article I alleged that this tolerance for social concept is defined by the people, how they relate to it. If they perceive it as an important change, as significant one, it is one. Concluding that a revolution is a revolution when it is considered as a big change. Trotzky has another approach, a more scientific one:

Our scientific thinking is only a part of our general practice including techniques. For concepts there also exits “tolerance” which is established not by formal logic issuing from the axiom ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’, but by the dialectical logic issuing from the axiom that everything is always changing. “Common sense” is characterised by the fact that it systematically exceeds dialectical “tolerance”.

Vulgar thought operates with such concepts as capitalism, morals, freedom, workers’ state, etc as fixed abstractions, presuming that capitalism is equal to capitalism. Morals are equal to morals, etc. Dialectical thinking analyses all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which ‘A’ ceases to be ‘A’, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state. [2]

# Materialistic Dialectics

Here we have to leave Trotzky for a while and dive deep into dialectical thinking. The dialectical method originally comes from Greek philosophers (e.g. Aristotle), picked up again by Hegel in the beginning of the 19th century. Hegel created the “first systematic form of dialectical method” which then was transformed by Marx, Engels and Lenin into materialistic dialectics [3]. We won’t really look at the history of the term and directly go to the materialistic dialectics. Wikipedia simply states:

Dialectical methods demands the users to examine the objects in relation to other objects and to the whole system, and examine the objects within a dynamic, evolutionary environment. Dialectical method is usually contrasted with metaphysical method, which examine the objects in a separated, isolated and static environment. [3]

Or in the words of Engel, when he is talking about non-dialectical science:

But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. [4]

Dialectics has three notable laws, though they don’t explain the whole of dialectics [5]:
(1) The Law of the Unity of Opposites
(2) The Law of Transformation of Quality into Quantity and vice versa.
(3) The Law of the Negation of the Negation

# Unity of Opposites

Lets start with the “Unity of Opposites” and a very good introduction from the glossary on marxists.org:

The unity of opposites is a way of understanding something in its entirety. Instead of just taking one aspect, or one part of a certain thing, seeing something as a unity of opposites is recognizing the dialectical content of that thing. Because everything has its opposite, to understand it one must not only understand its present form and its opposite form, but the unity of those two forms, the unity of opposites. [6]

So far so good, but what does this actually mean and why do we need this? Maybe it gets clearer if we mix a bit Lenin into the recipe:

The identity of opposite […] is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society). The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their “self-movement,” in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. [7]

Basically Lenin gives us here the context why we need to bother with the unity of opposites: to understand development.

Development is the “struggle” of opposites. The two basic […] conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites […].

In the first conception of motion, self – movement, its driving force, its source, its motive, remains in the shade (or this source is made external—God, subject, etc.). In the second conception the chief attention is directed precisely to knowledge of the source of “self” – movement.

The first conception is lifeless, pale and dry. The second is living. The second alone furnishes the key to the “self-movement” of everything existing; it alone furnishes the key to “leaps,” to the “break in continuity,” to the “transformation into the opposite,” to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new. [7]

Through the unity of opposites we are able to understand a process as struggle of the opposites and we don’t need an external force anymore.

# Transformation of Quality into Quantity

Next on the list is the “Transformation of Quality into Quantity” and as you maybe have guessed already, this article started with Trotzky explaining this law. Here is a pretty good summary:

Quality is an aspect of something by which it is what it is and not something else; quality reflects that which is stable amidst change. Quantity is an aspect of something which may change (become more or less) without the thing thereby becoming something else; quantity reflects that which is constantly changing in the world (“the more things change, the more they remain the same”). The quality of an object pertains to the whole, not one or another part of an object, since without that quality it would not be what it is, whereas an object can lose a “part” and still be what it is, minus the part. Quantity on the other hand is aspect of a thing by which it can (mentally or really) be broken up into its parts (or degrees) and be re-assembled again. Thus, if something changes in such a way that has become something of a different kind, this is a “qualitative change”, whereas a change in something by which it still the same thing, though more or less, bigger or smaller, is a “quantitative change”. [2]

I did struggle with the difference between the quality of an object and the object itself, but came up with a simple example: A bicycle is an object which has multiple parts as two wheels, a frame, brakes, handlebars. If you take a wheel off a bicycle, you probably would still call this object a bicycle, but it loses the quality that makes it to a bicycle: allowing you to cycle from A to B. This quality itself is not attached to the wheel alone, but to the bicycle altogether. Now if you still have two wheels and only take off the brakes you maybe – with good luck – still get from A to B, but here it is debatable, if the bicycle lost its quality.

Engels provides us with an example in Chemistry:

[…] the change of the aggregate states of water, which under normal atmospheric pressure changes at 0° C from the liquid into the solid state, and at 100°C from the liquid into the gaseous state, so that at both these turning-points the merely quantitative change of temperature brings about a qualitative change in the condition of the water. [8]

And later on Engels gives us examples for the social realm:

As for example the fact that the co-operation of a number of people, the fusion of many forces into one single force, creates, to use Marx’s phrase, a “new power”, which is essentially different from the sum of its separate forces.

[…]

In conclusion we shall call one more witness for the transformation of quantity into quality, namely — Napoleon. He describes the combat between the French cavalry, who were bad riders but disciplined, and the Mamelukes, who were undoubtedly the best horsemen of their time for single combat, but lacked discipline, as follows:

“Two Mamelukes were undoubtedly more than a match for three Frenchmen; 100 Mamelukes were equal to 100 Frenchmen; 300 Frenchmen could generally beat 300 Mamelukes, and 1,000 Frenchmen invariably defeated 1,500 Mamelukes.” [8]

# Negation of the Negation

Let us take a grain of barley. Billions of such grains of barley are milled, boiled and brewed and then consumed. But if such a grain of barley meets with conditions which are normal for it, if it falls on suitable soil, then under the influence of heat and moisture it undergoes a specific change, it germinates; the grain as such ceases to exist, it is negated, and in its place appears the plant which has arisen from it, the negation of the grain. But what is the normal life-process of this plant? It grows, flowers, is fertilised and finally once more produces grains of barley, and as soon as these have ripened the stalk dies, is in its turn negated. As a result of this negation of the negation we have once again the original grain of barley, but not as a single unit, but ten-, twenty- or thirtyfold. [9]

The process Engels describes here is very general:

It is obvious that I do not say anything concerning the particular process of development of, for example, a grain of barley from germination to the death of the fruit-bearing plant, if I say it is a negation of the negation.

[…]

Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes. […] And further: the kind of negation is here determined, firstly, by the general and, secondly, by the particular nature of the process. I must not only negate, but also sublate the negation. I must therefore so arrange the first negation that the second remains or becomes possible. How? This depends on the particular nature of each individual case. If I grind a grain of barley, or crush an insect, I have carried out the first part of the action, but have made the second part impossible. Every kind of thing therefore has a peculiar way of being negated in such manner that it gives rise to a development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea. [9]

# Think Dialectic

Dialectics, however, is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought. [9]

And thus dialectics enables us to explain movement and development in the social sphere. This is exactly what Marx and Engels are doing.

We started with Trotzky who gave us an introduction into some basics of materialistic dialectics. He did this to explain something about the state of the USSR. I don’t want to focus on that in particular but note the approach he describes of a dialectical materialist:

The definition of the USSR given by comrade Burnham, “not a workers’ and not a bourgeois state”, is purely negative, wrenched from the chain of historical development, left dangling in mid-air, void of a single particle of sociology and represents simply a theoretical capitulation of pragmatism before a contradictory historical phenomenon.

If Burnham were a dialectical materialist, he would have probed the following three questions: (1) What was the historical origin of the USSR? (2) What changes has this state suffered during its existence? (3) Did these changes pass from the quantitative stage to the qualitative? That is, did they create a historically necessary domination by a new exploiting class? Answering these questions would have forced Burnham to draw the only possible conclusion the USSR is still a degenerated workers’ state.

The dialectic is not a magic master key for all questions. It does not replace concrete scientific analysis. But it directs this analysis along the correct road, securing it against sterile wanderings in the desert of subjectivism and scholasticism. [2]

Remember how I – in my first article – stated that the difference between revolution and reform is basically how people relate to it. Materialistic dialectics enables us to approach this social concept in a more scientific way.

Dialectical thinking analyses all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which ‘A’ ceases to be ‘A’, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state. [2]

—

Note: I have the feeling that I need to emphasize that I merely showed some aspects of materialistic dialectics and have only a rough understanding of it.

[1] https://gedankenrausch.noblogs.org/post/2017/09/15/txt-01/
[2] https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
[4] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch02.htm
[5] https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/a.htm#laws-dialectics
[6] https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/u/n.htm#unity-of-opposites
[7] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/summary.htm#LCW38_360
[8] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch10.htm
[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch11.htm

What is a Rausch?

Posted on 2017/10/17 by gedankenrausch

Rausch is a unique German word, that is really difficult to translate into English. A online dictionary suggest words such as frenzy, intoxication, rapture, rush, jag, inebriation, exhilaration, flush, ecstasy, rage, inebriety, drunkenness, high, transport, delirious state [1]. But all these word only grasp aspects of a Rausch (plural is: Räusche). If you change from German Wikipedia to English, you will be redirected to “Substance intoxication”. And on top of that, you get a completely different article. If you would try to translate the beginning from the German article in to English, you would end up with something like this [2]:

Rausch is a emotional state of exaggerated ecstasy or it is a intensive feeling of luck, which lifts somebody over his normal emotional state. In the medical sense, the definition of Rausch is not connected of feelings of luck and defined as a state after a intake of a psychotropic substance with disturbances of consciousness, cognitive abilities, perceptions, affect and behavior or other psychophysiological functions and reactions. The disturbances are connected to the pharmacological effect of the substance.

Before we try to explain anything of this, lets note how there is a reference made to a so called “substance”, also known as a drug. In this definition it is indicated, that a Rausch occurs after taking a drug. However, the word Rausch also covers emotional states that are not connected to any particular substances. For example in German you have the word “Kaufrausch” which could be translated into “buying frenzy”, it’s a certain state of mind and emotions you get into while buying things [3]. And in this particular case it can also refer to a compulsive buying disorder. As you can see, even in German the definition of Rausch has no clear borders.

For example Daniel Kulla argues, that Rausch is actually an ability from the nervous system of our brain to cope with certain situations [4]. It is a evolutionary strategy to survive or in other words: Rausch exists because species survived which has the ability for a Rausch. Kulla names some of the important brain states/Räusche: Euphoria, Alertness, Appetite, Realization, Dream and Dissolution. Euphoria in simple terms is “pleasure” and we know that we can induce it with certain substances like Opiotes [5]. But other substances are not necessarily needed for Euphoria, for example when we care to take a closer look at the practices of meditation [6]. Actually, Kulla says, Opiotes trigger Euphoria, because our nervous system already learned how to do it by it’s own. The list goes on with Alertness, that mode where the brain constantly tries to detect dangers and to evade them. In a life threatening situation your body releases Adrenaline and you find yourself able to do things you didn’t even know you can do [7]. But we also deliberately invoke this Rausch in non life threating situations like riding a roller coaster or watching a horror movie. Speed is one of the substances that increase this alertness, without having a real threat. I will skip Dream and Dissolution for now, but I highly encourage you to hear Kullas own explanations. Nonetheless, I think the point is made clear: Rausch is a state of the nervous system and our brain is just altering between them. This also indicates that there maybe isn’t even something like a sober brain.

It is important to notice that we have learned ways and invented tools of invoking and controlling a Rausch without any substances. I already mentioned meditation and Kulla mentions martial arts as a way of controlling a adrenaline Rausch. Attending a religious mass, everyone around you singing and exposed to bright light in a church can invoke a Rausch. Through breathing techniques, the lack of sleep or sensory deprivation [8]. There are many techniques and they are constantly used. Something we seem to oversee, because we mostly connect Rausch to a drug.

Kulla tries to find some very basic mechanics how a Rausch works and comes up with following: First of all the capacity of data processing in the neural system and the sequence of signals is changed. The neural capacity can be increased or decreased depending on the Rausch, basically meaning the capacity of the data that the brain can process and make sense of – a altered susceptibility and responsiveness of the nerves. A change of sequence in signals could mean that signals which the human brain normally synchronize are not any more. Consider this example: You see a dog and hear him barking. Actually what you see is him moving its jaws first and it takes a while till the sound travels to you, but fortunately our brain synchronizes these two signals together. That’s why in our every day life we rarely notice that the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound. Our brain has a limited capacity of data processing and to simplify things we could say, that it merges information into one frame. If you see a series of pictures of a figure going from right to left, you will eventually start to perceive it as a single motion when the process is speed up. Our brain simply can not process these pictures as individuals anymore [9]. Signals and information that belongs together are squeezed into one frame.

In a desynchronized state we happen to have gaps in the signal sequence and we have stacked signal, where several signals at once are coming in. The brain tries to fill the gaps with something, for example with a memory or an self-image of the optical nerve. Even in a synchronized state the brain tries to fill in the blank as you probably never noticed that your eye has a blind spot [10]. On the other hand stacked signals are merged to one new information, depending if we actually have the capacity to process these signals all at once (neural capacity). We actually find these informations stacks quite often in dreams, where we find somebody who we met yesterday is also representing a long term friend.

I find this whole mechanic of Rausch highly interesting because it enables us to connect informations we wouldn’t normally have connected before. Most of the connections probably makes not much sense but some of them do giving us a new perception of things.

[1] https://www.dict.cc/?s=rausch
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rausch
[3] https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rausch
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyognyfSDbY
[5] http://psychonaut3z5aoz.onion/w/index.php?title=Opioid&_=
[6] http://psychonaut3z5aoz.onion/wiki/Meditation
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinephrine#Strength
[8] http://psychonaut3z5aoz.onion/wiki/Sensory_deprivation
[9] http://nerdist.com/your-brain-has-a-frame-rate-and-its-pretty-slow/
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_%28vision%29

Rant on liberalism

Posted on 2017/10/07 - 2017/10/07 by gedankenrausch

Have you ever had this feeling, that you hit a wall in a discussion? That it does not matter anymore which argument you bring forward, your idea itself is already dismissed as non-acceptable? That you get answers like: “We can discuss all along, but you won’t change my mind” or “You have your opinion, I have my opinion”. When you are in this state of a discussion, the discussion can be highly frustrating. Recently I’m wondering if it’s even worth to continue this dispute then.

All the above reactions are hints, that you are presenting an controversial idea and your discussion partner is defending her believes. We need to be careful here, since this could also mean, that you are not really discussing the topic but rather trying to convince somebody, _knowing_ that you are right and the other is not (limiting your perception of truth). This is something I do not want to support, but this is not the issue I want to write about today. I rather want to write about this wall you’re hitting on the other side.

Since I’m new to revolutionary history I speak about it quite often at the moment and try to share these interesting ideas with other people. And then I’m hitting this wall. A wall you don’t see first, but when you try to get through you can not.

If you grew up in the so called western world, you probably grew up with anti-communist propaganda [1]. And the bad thing is you didn’t even know that this was propaganda, because it is presented either as facts (mostly one-sided) or is neatly weaved into mass media. For example, it is likely that in your younger years were introduced into a comparison between Hitler and Stalin. Through the term Totalitarianism – which usage rose during the cold war – a link between fascism and the Soviet Union was created [2]. Basically the argument is: since we know fascism is evil, the Soviet Union must be as well. Surely you can not deny that a lot of cruelties happened under the name of communism, but by dismissing it so easily we also forget all the achievements of communist movements. We are bombarded by anti-communist propaganda, which only shows us the bad side. How many articles and books have you read, how many documentaries and movies have you seen that also name at least some few good achievements? And does this lack of good representation mean there were no good sides? I leave this question to you. If you care about it, I’m sure you find people who will tell you a different story.

A lot of people also grew up with a believe in non-violence. Although I find this a worthwhile ethics, I also think it has its limits. First of all the popular conception of violence is in my view fundamentally wrong. I will try to explain this in a few words, maybe I have to extend this in another article. Simply said, state violence is often not considered violence anymore. You have people who saying that the cop who is punching a demonstrator is right in doing so. On the other hand you have people who say it is wrong and the cop must be convicted, but as an individual. But here it is not viewed as a fault of the state. My stand point is that every act of police is violence since their very reason of existence is to be violent to certain people. If we put somebody into jail, this is a violent act. At this point people understand that some violence is necessary but must be under control. It our case it is in control of the state.

Now, if you come to the understanding that the state is not very good instrument for getting a fulfilled life (aka you want to abolish the state), you are actually opposing the state and its force. But even if you’re not opposing the whole state, but merely have other interest than the ruling class, you will be faced with a force that will act violently and most of the time won’t even stop to think about it. If you look at the history of revolution you find a lot of revolutions that were opposed from the former ruling class (and its army) with a counter-revolution [3][4]. The believe of general non-violence plays into the hands of the ruling class, since every movement that want to take power into its own hands is either missing the means to do this or will be criticized by other people for its usage of violence and therefore loses the approval of people. All I’m saying is, that we shouldn’t disagree with violence in general but rather should judge violence on it’s purpose and content.

The anti-communist propaganda and the believe in non-violence are part of the same wall I’m recently hitting hard. And it seems while having this discussion I forgot to whom I’m speaking to. Most of the time I’m discussing with people who are pretty fine with capitalism, who don’t see any reason to have some major changes. Yes, some small ones, but overall it is alright. Simply put, these people are not struggling under capitalism. They have privileges and certain rights others don’t have. I don’t want to deny that they also suffer under capitalism, but most of them have too much to loose to actually oppose it. And now I understand Marx final words in the communist manifesto [5]:

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

In my case I’m talking about the world of academia. About students who unknowingly defend liberalism and thus are anti-revolutionary. And I certainly was one of them, but I care to be not any more.

I want to end this post with three worthwhile short reading exercises and one song, all of them touches some of the points I was talking about:

Stalin – Marxism versus Liberalism – An interview with H.G. Wells – 23 July 1934 [6]
Mao Tse-tung – Combat Liberalism – 7 September 1937 [7]
M.N. Roy – On Non-Violence and the Masses – 10 November 1923 [8]
Against Me! – Baby, I’m an Anarchist [9]

[1] http://www.kuriositas.com/2013/10/the-red-menace-anti-communist.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
[3] Friedrich Engels – Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany
[4] e.g. Venezuela: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Documentary)
[5] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch04.htm
[6] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/07/23.htm
[7] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_03.htm
[8] https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1923/11/10.htm
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVldfXHFlCU

Note on numbers

Posted on 2017/09/26 - 2017/10/07 by gedankenrausch

Lately I was wondering why we write 134 when we want to say one-hundred thirty four. Why don’t we write 431 and say four thirty one-hundred? Why do we begin with the most significant digit and not the less significant?

The answers to that question are actually quite chaotic. Maybe a bit history about the decimal system will help.

Around the 1st and 4th centuries the Hindu numeral system was invented by Indian mathematics [1]. The revolutionary idea about this number system is that it is designed for positional notation. Basically this means that you change a number to zero if it oversteps nine and add one to the higher significant digit. 09 becomes 10 if you add one, 29 becomes 30 if you add one. The Hindu numeral system used the nine symbols from the Brahmi numerals and added the zero that was needed for the positional system just described [2]. The Brahmi system had specific symbols for ten, twenty … one-hundred, two-hundred. Brahmi script was written left-to-right and it seems that the numbers were written with the most significant number at the left (hundreds, tens, units). Why the most significant number is at the most left stays unclear to me, and maybe is only resolved when we find the ancestors of the Brahmi numbers.

However it becomes even more confusing when the Hindu numeral system is introduced to the Arabic language. Arabic is written and read from right-to-left, so for the reader a number appears first with the units then tens then hundreds and so on [3]. It is quite logic to also speak them this way and it seems it used to be this way [4]. However, now is seems that in Arabic a number is read and spoken from left-to-right, changing the reading direction just for the number. But you still find old fragments, for example 13 is spoken in Arabic as as three ten [5].

Actually you find this in a lot of languages for example [6]:

French: 91 = quatre-vingt-onze = four x twenty + eleven
English: 13 = thirteen = 3 + 10
German: 23 = dreiundzwanzig = 3 + 20

This might be the remains of “counting in a language” which existed much longer than the Hindu numeral system, which was only introduced into Europe in the 10th century.

To make everything a little bit more confusing try to write a telephone number in a language that is written from right-to-left. You have to read/write it from left-to-right since this is the convention for telephone numbers. If you would read it backwards it wouldn’t make any sense for the telephone system. However if you read a number backwards, but leave the power system intact (lowest power at the right) it still would be understandable. You could read 134 as four and thirty and hundred. It will be awkward four you, but this is merely because we are not used to it. But we could see that in some language we are used to it for smaller numbers (like the 23 example for German).

And then we have the binary system. 134 in binary is:

--------------------
128 64 32 16 8 4 2 1
1   0  0  0  0 1 1 0 = 128 + 4 + 2
--------------------

What is the reading direction? In this example we actually don’t have one because the reading direction is not necessary as long as the lowest power (x * 1) stays on the left and the highest on the right (x * 128). However computer algorithms usually starts with the lowest power working their way up to the highest, for us this looks like they read from the right-to-left if we look a the binary table above. This is actually just a conversion to our thinking because a stream of numbers has no left/right direction, it merely has a beginning and an end [7]. Computers don’t care from which direction they start as long they read every number in the same direction. The two writing/reading systems are called big-endian and little-endian [8]. Where the decimal number 134 in big-endian is stored as 1 3 4 and in little-endian as 4 3 1 when we assume that left is the lowest memory address and right is the highest memory address. And then you get really confused when your assumption is wrong and left means high memory and right means low memory.

If we want to convert “hello” into binary, we first would convert it into ascii-numbers and these numbers into binary:

h	 e   	  l   	   l 	    o
104 	 101 	  108 	   108	    111
01101000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111

We don’t know really in which order these zero and ones are stored in. I used to imagine how they are written from left to right into this fictional memory and then imagined an algorithm that reads from right to left to convert these values back to decimal and then to symbols.

It is clear that I image the numbers to be written from left-to-right because thats the convention how we write in the Hindu numeral system. But why do I imagine that it is read from right-to-left?

I think it is because I’m not familiar with the position of the powers values in binary. To explain this, lets go back to the decimal system and Hindu numeral system to see how we actually read a number. If I want to speak out the number 134, the first thing I have to do is to count how many numbers I actually have. In this case I have three numbers, meaning that the first number will be a power of one-hundred, so I can start saying one-hundred … thirty … four. And you know instantly that when you see six numbers (e.g 450000) that it starts with the power of one-hundred-thousand.

In a binary system: What is the power of the first number, when you see six numbers? I do not know, I start counting 1 2 4 8 16 32. This way of counting actually means it becomes easier to start from the opposite direction because then you can work your way up the powers and you don’t have to know the power for a specific number of numbers. This would be the same case for decimal numbers and that’s why I think reading a number from the lowest significant on would make much more sense, because you don’t have to count all number beforehand. And then you would write in a left-to-right language 431 for four thirty one-hundred and in a right-to-left language 134. But we are stuck we this weird notation and my mind is not used to binary numbers at all. I always try to convert them into decimal numbers to make them understandable to me. However this process becomes quite awkward because you change reading/writing directions quite often and mix everything up.

The lesson I learned from this is, that it is amazing how much a numeral system affects our thinking. We see it as normal to say one-hundred thirty four, and in conclusion think that’s why we write it as 134. Not knowing that saying four thirty one-hundred would be also a perfect working system. I never really saw the numeral system at something separate from the language, but it becomes quite clear when you consider that the reading direction stays the same for numbers even if you’re reading from right-to-left. But this convention was brought with time and is actually not so united as we think when we consider all the languages that say some of the small numbers from low significant to high significant number. And what about the remains of the Sexagesimal (60) system that came from the Sumerians: an hour contains sixty minutes.

When we talk about mathematics we think about the decimal system, but the decimal system is merely one representation of numbers. As languages are a representation of a thought. But on the same time the decimal system and the Hindu numerals influences our thinking as does a language system. The decimal system sounds so logical to us, that we have to wonder why some people used other systems and why have they never thought about this clever decimal system. The answer to this is that we only think that decimal numbers make sense because we are already using them. It wouldn’t make sense to not use it when everything around us is represented by it.

The question remains is: What did our language and number systems shape and which thought do they allow and which not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_system
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_numerals
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-23605,00.html
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iwcaVUAK_4
[6] https://www.quora.com/Why-do-German-speakers-read-numbers-from-right-to-left
[7] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/891445/why-binary-is-read-right-to-left
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal

txt.01

Posted on 2017/09/15 - 2017/10/07 by gedankenrausch

This is a birth of something new. It is build on old foundations. You clearly can see the lines that differentiates new from old. And you see the similarity between old and new, the contingency of the old in the new. If _this_ would be a social movement we maybe would call it a revolution. But _this_ is merely a weblog and still I’m using _it_ as a separation… an distinction between old and new. And surely you find the old here as well. Everywhere, in the words I’m writing, in the context I’m referring to, in the services that let you access this content.

What distinguishes the two parts that belong together? Something must have changed. Since everyting is changing all the time, this thought would end in insignificance. Maybe it – the thing we are talking about – must have somehow changed a lot and therefore the change itself has become significant. I say it is the other way around: It is mostly people who decide that something has significance and therefore changed a lot. Basically people define when they consider something as new. I’m not speaking about science here, but rather about philosophical thinking. In other words: if I try to compare one object to itself at different points in time (tp), the question is “What made it the same object in the first place?” [1]. We track all the small changes from one tp to tp + 1 to track the _same_ object trough time, and still maybe end up with a change that is considered big (significant). You maybe say: “What if the change between tp and tp + 1 wasn’t small?”. And I say: “Therefore we need to look into the time between tp and tp + 1!”, creating smaller time fractions, one hop = tp to tp + 0.1. This results in never ending loop if we assume that time is always dividable, which is probably still a hypothesis [2][3]. I argue: It is people who relate to it as a important change.

This concludes into a simple thought: people make their revolution. Simply because they relate to it as one. I have to make one thing clear: I’m not trying to say that a revolution is made up in your head or that it is something your merely imagine. I say: you relate to it as one; meaning that your surroundings (language, thoughts, social constructs, physical objects and so on) do this as well. I left this deliberately vague, because this is still a thought I’m looking into.

Did I show that a revolution is based on a reformation? No, because we have to be precise with the word _change_ and what it differentiate from _revolution_ and _reformation_. Change tries to be a objective measurement. Revolution and reformation are social concepts that are referring to a change – primarily social ones – by pointing at the difference between old and new. And because everything is changing every time, revolution and reformation refer to changes that are considered to belong to the same overall change. Again: revolution is something that is _considered_ as a big change for society. On the other hand: reformation is something that is considered as a small change for society. Don’t get stuck in the ‘1 hop = tp and tp + 1’ loop, when thinking about what is considered as a small change for society and what as a big change. You will end up here again, because my explanation is self-referential: Changes are big, when the are considered big. And they are considered big, when the are big – meaning the are considered big.

I consider something as revolutionary when it allows something that wasn’t possible before [4]. But it is the content that makes a revolution worthwhile. And specifically about this content I want talk about here in this weblog. Making it part of a revolution that has to come.

The correct title of this weblog is “Gedanken;-rausch”, containing two German words and two symbols. The first word is easy translated from Gedanken to thoughts (and is probably very difficult to define). The second one is not translatable. In English there exist many words that don’t describe the word all together: frenzy, intoxication, rapture, rush, jag, inebriation, exhilaration, flush, ecstasy, rage, inebriety, drunkenness, high, transport, delirious state, buzz … the list probably goes on. This is why I chose a German title in the first place and I’m thinking of spending early writings of this weblog on the meaning of Rausch. For me the semicolon implies a break between two thoughts. Lets quote good old wikipedia here [5]:

The semicolon or semi-colon (;) is a punctuation mark that separates major sentence elements. A semicolon can be used between two closely related independent clauses […]

On the other side hyphens (-) are used to join words. Together these two symbols might represent the contingency of two things and the break between them. We consider Gedanken and Rausch as two different _something_. I want to show how these two _something_ are interlinked. And how the interlink Gedankenrausch forms something new.

Rausch, Gedanken (thoughts), new, old, distinctions, contingency, society, revolution, Gedankenrausch … this is a deliberately vague range of topics and more will come. Because the content still has to be written, it will be born from the old and tries to be something new, invoking a social change.

One final word: this weblog becomes significant in the way how people relate to it. Practically this means that I hope to encourage people to own thoughts, that the weblog produces new knowledge and that it evokes at lot of disagreements. Especially the disagreements that are constructive, in the sense that they create new thoughts, knowledge and disagreements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_divisibility
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno’s_paradoxes#Dichotomy_paradox
[4] compare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semicolon