I've done some digital privacy violation acts throughout different periods, that I'm not very proud of. Some of them involved some people with whom I shared personal trust. Last year in 22 Jul, I discussed them with a close friend and we made a journal for all of them. I realized then how most of these incidents (almost all of them, the exception goes for a single one) I was not the one to behold liable of the violation, rather, it's usually another entity that he or she had shared the information with (usually inadvertently) which I dealt with (for example botnet-as-a-service providers and RAT markets). Obv, وَمَا أُبَرِّئُ نَفْسِي, I am guilty for doing it in the first place, but what I'm pointing out here is that most people who are getting digitally violated (that, basically, most of tech illiterates out there) chosen not to care much about being violated by someone at the first place, it only mattered to them when that shared information was delivered to someone relevant, i.e. to me.

"Life is tremendously sad" While I don't totally agree with his life perception, I really love how Louie is so consistant on his philosophy. I'm pretty sure that the show was written with an intense care for ideas and different philosophies, as it even discusses many moral issues as of the course of it. This same part that louie talks about here in the video reminded me of that episode (too lazy to reference the exact one) when his Hungarian girlfriend leaves, and he tells the doctor about it and the doctor tells him that what he feels now is "love", or like he puts it in the linked reference: "Sadness is poetic, you're lucky to live sad moments".

View on the Catskill, Early Autumn. The details on the painting are incridable, they were even difficult for me to comperhend. It reminded me of cartoon shows that I used to watch in my childhood of heros having adventures in a very big jungles. #Art

The Late Show episodes from the Louie show are really interesting. They give me a deep gloomy vibe as they used to when I watched them for the first time. For some reason I believed that this really happened with Louie CK in the real life, but I think it might be symbolic to something else. Funny enough that I used to watch it when I started interviewing for the first time, so it was very relevant. It was also the reason why I stopped watching Louie. I remember asking Antar: "Hey, is it going to be depressive starting from season 3?".

This is an LLM written introduction into the theory of value. It's easy to understand and I thought it might be useful for people who want to quickly understand how value works. "Workers don't own what they produce. The products of their labor become commodities owned by capitalists and sold back to workers in the market." for me, this part is the most painful, when I work under a capitalist system.

The Be Right There episode is probably the most heartbreaking episode of Black Mirror. I was rewatching it right now. I just noticed how Jack gave his mother a fake smile in that old photo, the girlfriend says "Well, she didn't know it was a fake one", "That makes it worse" he responded. Which is the whole point of the episode. I love this kind of symbolism. #Postmodern Abyss: Black Mirror

View of the Pont au Change from Quai de Gesvres by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot I noticed how almost all Corot paintings are not very colorful, his era is the beginning of less vibrant art. #Art

• [2025-08-05 Tue 21:49]
  Another example is Souvenir of the Villa Borghese (1855).

I spent some time today reading about the Maxist Internet Archive history. I used to contribute to the Arabic section back in the day before realizing that this was not really helpful [I'm not talking here about Marxism, but contributing to Arabic translation, such contributions are not really helpful at this point, as you can not reach such an advanced point in learning something without mastering the lingua de franca.]. Anyway, I found it quite funny that it didn't take them much time to have their first fight: " By 1996 the website, Marx.org, was hosted by a commercial ISP. This was followed by an increased activity from the volunteers. In the following years, however, a conflict developed between the volunteers working on the website and Zodiac, who retained control of the project and domain name. As the scope of the archive expanded, Zodiac feared that the opening toward diverse currents of Marxism was a "slippery slope" toward sectarianism. The volunteers who had been undertaking the work of transcribing texts resented having little influence over the way in which the archive was organized and run. In early 1998 Zodiac decided that Marx.org would return to its roots and that all writers other than Marx and Engels would be removed.

Raksit Lelia's music video is one of the best music videos I ever watched. It's really impressive that Sinno contributed to such an amazing work when he was only 20 years old. #Music

There's an observation that I thought about as a kid watching that movie, powerful training montage where Mulan is struggling to complete the challenge of retrieving an arrow from the top of a tall wooden pole. The movie supposed to go in the theme that after some life-changing exercises, effort, and most importantly mindset, she is finally able to do this very hard challenge. But She actually were never able to, what happens instead is that instead of letting the weights drag her down, she uses them as tools. She loops the straps of the weights together to form a grip, anchoring herself on the pole. While this sounds smart and everything; it is not what the exercise is meant for, otherwise there would be many other smarter and easier ways to get the arrow, the exercise was meant for bare brute strength, not thinking differently. #Cinema

Using Intel processor for all these years, which is quite slow compared to Apple Chips, made me spend a lot of work to optimize my single-threaded favorite display editor. The experience was pleasant overall, but using it now on a very fast computer, it is not just pleasant it is blazingly fast. The difference is just unimaginable. #Emacs

The rise of Whatever: I'm not sure if the author is aware of that, but this nice article up there is a really good critique of capitalism and how it ruined almost every small shred of goodness on the internet. #Capitalism #Selected Good

I found a claim that women in Middle Ages Europe used to poison their husbands to keep them close. I watched Phantom Thread (2017) a couple of months ago, which had a similar theme to this claim. I wounder if it was inspired by this myth. Phantom Thread is one of the movies that I don't think I will ever have the courage to rewatch. #Cinema

I have been reading(Hunt 2011) recently, which contains a very nice, raw, critical, philosophical definition of capitalism; it correlates the existence of capitalism to consumerism, which I have not seen a lot in multiple trails to define capitalism (my old post The Age of Commodity might be related here). The definition from chapter no. 1:

It is, of course, simplistic to say that attempts to understand capitalism began with Adam Smith. Capitalism as the dominant social, political, and economic system, first of western Europe and later of much of the world, emerged very slowly over a period of several centuries . As it emerged people sought to understand it.

To survey the attempts to understand capitalism, it is necessary first to define it and then to review briefly the historical highlights of its emergence. It must be stated at the outset that there is no general agreement among economists or economic historians as to what the essential features of capitalism are. In fact, some economists do not believe that it is fruitful to define distinctly different economic systems at all ; they believe in a historical continuity in which the same general principles suffice to understand all economic arrangements. Most economists would agree, however, that capitalism is an economic system that functions very differently from previous economic systems and from contemporary noncapitalist systems. This book is based on a methodological approach that defines economic systems according to the mode of production on which the system is based. The mode of production is, in turn, defined by the forces of production and the social relations of production.

The forces of production constitute what would commonly be called the productive technology of a society. These consist of the current state of productive or technical knowledge, skills, organizational techniques, and so forth, as well as the tools, implements, machines, and buildings involved in production. Within any given set of forces of production there are certain necessary costs that must be met in order to insure the system's continued existence. Some new resources, or raw materials, must be continuously extracted from the natural environment. Machinery, tools, and other implements of production wear out with use and must be replaced. Most important, the human beings who expend the effort necessary to secure raw materials and to transform these raw materials into finished products must have a minimum level of food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities to sustain social life.

Modes of production that have not satisfied these minimum requirements of continued production have vanished. Many historical modes of production successfully met these minimum requirements for a period of time and then, due to some change in circumstances, were unable to continue doing so, and, consequently, became extinct. Most modes of production that have continued to exist for very long periods of time have, in fact, produced enough to meet not only these necessary costs but also an excess, or social surplus, beyond these necessary costs . A social surplus is defined as that part of a society's material production that is left over after the necessary material costs of production have been deducted.

The historical development of the forces of production has resulted in a continuously increasing capacity for societies to produce larger social surpluses. In this historical evolution, societies have generally divided into two separate groups. The vast majority of people in every society has toiled to produce the output necessary to sustain and perpetuate the mode of production as well as the social surplus, while a small minority has appropriated and controlled it. In this book, social classes are distinguished accordingly ; the social relations of production are defined as the relationships between these two classes. A mode of production, then, is the social totality of the technology of production (the forces of production) and the social arrangements by which one class uses these forces of production to produce all output including the surplus and another class appropriates the surplus (the social relations of production).

Within the context of this general set of definitions, we can define capitalism, the particular mode of production with which the thinkers surveyed in this book have been concerned. Capitalism is characterized by four sets of institutional and behavioral arrangements : market-oriented commodity production; private ownership of the means of production; a large segment of the population that cannot exist unless it sells its labor power in the market; and individualistic, acquisitive, maximizing behavior by most individuals within the economic system. Each of these features will be discussed briefly.

In capitalism, the products of human labor are valued for two distinct reasons. First, products have particular physical characteristics by virtue of which they are usable and satisfy human needs. When a commodity is valued for its use in satisfying our needs, it is said to have use value. All products of human labor in all societies have use value. In capitalism, products are also valued because they can be sold for money in the market. This money is desired because it can be exchanged for products that have a desired use value. Insofar as products are valued because they can be exchanged for money, they are said to have exchange value. Products of human labor have exchange value only in modes of production characterized by commodity production. A society must have a well-developed market in which products can be freely bought or sold for money in order for commodity production to exist. Commodity production exists when products are created by producers who have no immediate personal concern for the use value of the product but are interested only in its exchange value. Thus commodity production is not a direct means of satisfying needs. Rather, it is a means of acquiring money by exchanging the product for money, which, in turn, may be used to acquire products desired for their use value. Under such conditions, the products of human labor are commodities, and the society is described as a commodity-producing society.

Under commodity production, a person's productive activity has no direct connection to that person's consumption; exchange and the market must mediate the two. Furthermore, a person has no direct connection to the people who produce the commodities he or she consumes. This social relationship is also mediated by the market. Commodity production implies a high degree of productive specialization, in which each isolated producer creates only one or a few commodities and then must depend on other individuals, with whom he or she has no direct personal relations, to buy the commodities on the market. Once the person has exchanged the commodity for money, that person again depends on people with whom he or she has no direct personal relationship to supply on the market the commodities he or she must purchase in order to satisfy personal needs.

This type of economy is one in which extremely complex economic interrelationships and dependencies exist that do not involve direct personal interaction and association. The individual interacts only with the impersonal social institution of the market, in which the individual exchanges commodities for money and money for commodities . Consequently, what is in reality a set of complex social and economic relations among people appears to each individual to be merely so many impersonal relations among things namely, commodities . Each individual depends on the impersonal forces of the market-of buying and selling or demand and supply-for the satisfaction of needs.

The second defining feature of capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. This means that society grants to private persons the right to dictate how the raw materials, tools, machinery, and buildings necessary for production can be used. Such a right necessarily implies that other individuals are excluded from having any say about how these means of production can be used. Early defenses of private property spoke in terms of each individual producer owning and therefore controlling the means of individual production. But very early in the evolution of capitalism things developed differently. In fact, the third defining feature of capitalism is that most producers do not own the means necessary to carry on their productive activity. Ownership came to be concentrated in the hands of a small segment of society-the capitalists . An owner-capitalist needed to play no direct role in the actual process of production in order to control it; ownership itself granted control. And it was this ownership that permitted the capitalist to appropriate the social surplus. Thus, ownership of the means of production is the feature of capitalism that bestows the power on the capitalist class by which it controls the social surplus, and, thereby, establishes itself as the dominant social class.

The fourth and final defining feature of capitalism is that most people are motivated by individualistic, acquisitive, maximizing behavior. This is necessary for the successful functioning of capitalism. First, in order to assure an adequate supply of labor and to facilitate the strict control of workers, it is necessary that working people produce commodities whose value is far in excess of the value of the commodities that they consume. In the earliest period of capitalism, workers were paid such low wages that they and their families were kept on the verge of extreme material deprivation and insecurity. The only apparent way of decreasing this deprivation and insecurity was to work longer and harder in order to obtain a more adequate wage and to avoid being forced to join the large army of unemployed workers, which has been an ever-present social phenomenon in the capitalist system.

As capitalism evolved, the productivity of workers increased. They began to organize themselves collectively into unions and workingmen's associations to fight for higher wages. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after many hard battles and innumerable setbacks, these struggles began to have an impact. Since that time, the purchasing power of the wages of working people has been slowly and consistently increasing . In place of widespread physical deprivation, capitalism has increasingly had to rely on new types of motivation to keep working people producing the social surplus. A new social ethos, sometimes called consumerism, has become dominant, and is characterized by the belief that more income alone always means more happiness.

The social mores of capitalism have induced the view that virtually every subjectively felt need or unhappiness can be eliminated if one can buy more commodities. The competitive and economically insecure world within which workers function generally creates subjective feelings of anxiety, loneliness, and alienation. The cause of these feelings has been perceived by most working people as their inability to buy enough commodities to make them happy. But as workers have received higher w ages and bought more commodities, the general unhappiness and anxiety have continued. The problem, they have tended to conclude, is that the increase in wages was insufficient. Misperceiving the root cause of their condition, they have frequently gotten aboard an Alice in Wonderland treadmill, where the more one gets the more needy one feels, the faster one runs the more inadequate one's pace appears to be, the harder one works the greater appears to be the need for even harder work in the future.

Secondly, capitalists have also been driven to acquisitive, combative behavior. The most immediate reason for this is the fact that capitalism has always been characterized by a competitive struggle among capitalists to secure larger shares of the social surplus. In this endless struggle the power of any given capitalist depends on the amount of capital that he or she controls. If a capitalist's competitors acquire capital-and hence size and economic strength-more rapidly than he or she does, then it becomes highly likely that he or she will face extinction. So continued existence as a capitalist depends on the ability to accumulate capital at least as rapidly as competitors. Hence, capitalism has always been characterized by the frantic effort of capitalists to make more profits and to convert these profits into more capital.

Consumerism among capitalists has also been important for the successful functioning of capitalism. In the process of production, after the workers have produced surplus value, the capitalists own this surplus value in the form of the commodities that the workers have produced. In order for this surplus value to be converted into monetary profit, these commodities must be sold on the market. The workers can usually be counted on to spend all of their wages on commodities, but their wages can purchase only some of the commodities (or else there would be no social surplus). Capitalists will purchase many of the commodities as investments to add to their accumulation of capital. But these two sources of demand have never been adequate to generate enough spending for the capitalists as an entire class to sell all of their commodities. Therefore, a third source of demand, ever-increasing consumption expenditures by capitalists, has also been necessary to assure adequate money demand to enable capitalists to sell all of their commodities.

When such demand has not been forthcoming, capitalism has experienced depressions in which commodities cannot be sold, workers are laid off, profits decline, and a general economic crisis ensues. Throughout its history, capitalism has suffered from recurring crises of this kind. A major concern of most of the economic thinkers discussed in this book has been to understand the nature and causes of these crises and to ascertain whether remedies can be found to eliminate or at least to alleviate the crises.

Noam Chomsky also has a nice video on the nature of consumerism: https://youtu.be/Mg50wCe-Z7U #Economics #Capitalism

• William-Adolphe Bouguereau
• William Bouguereau, Unparalleled Brilliance and Dedication [video]
• What We Love About: William Bouguereau [video]

#Art #William-Adolphe Bouguereau

Form Papers and journals: "Encounter on 30 Nov., when they were doing Two Days, with an unknown but beautiful lady (she spoke German) – she was alone in the stalls with a little brother – she understood the music." It's an interesting remark. It's really interesting to see someone who understands the music. #Kierkegaard

I found in the journals of Kierkegaard today an entry very similar to what I include in my homepage by René Descartes about the method of life: "Probably few fields of study bestow on man the serene and happy frame of mind that the natural sciences give him. Out into nature he goes, everything is familiar, it is as though he had talked with the plants and the animals beforehand. He sees not only the uses man can put them to (for that is quite secondary) but their significance in the whole universe. He stands like Adam of old – all the animals come to him and he gives them names." My old post about math might be also related: A Prelude Over Mathematics. #Kierkegaard #Modus Vivendi

I was reading What Would Kierkegaard Do?. This part made me laugh a lot: Did Kierkegaard offer anything on Muhammad and Islam? Hong predicts there won’t be much. Osama, if you’re reading this, now’s the time to turn the page. #Kierkegaard

TIL that Robert W. Floyd is not the real author of Floyd's cycle-finding algorithm: The algorithm is named after Robert W. Floyd, who was credited with its invention by Donald Knuth. However, the algorithm does not appear in Floyd's published work, and this may be a misattribution: Floyd describes algorithms for listing all simple cycles in a directed graph in a 1967 paper, but this paper does not describe the cycle-finding problem in functional graphs that is the subject of this article. In fact, Knuth's statement (in 1969), attributing it to Floyd, without citation, is the first known appearance in print, and it thus may be a folk theorem, not attributable to a single individual. I wonder if anyone asked Donald Knuth about that in an interview. #Programming #Representations and Implementations of Graphs

The art works of Aagaard are very touching, it reminds me of my old town, some obscure places in which you wold only notice such moments that are in his paintings. It is sad that most of them are not available in high quality online, probably purchased in some rich palaces around the world. #Art #Carl Aagaard

Alexey Bogolyubov had a very beautiful skies in his work. I spent my dusk looking into them while listening to String Quintet in E Major, G. 275: III. Menuetto by Luigi Boccherini/Orpheus Chamber Orchestra: Moonlit evening in Constantinople, Alexey Bogolyubov,The seashore, Alexey Bogolyubov, Castel Sant'Angelo, Alexey Bogolyubov, Italian Coast, Alexey Bogolyubov, Moonlit night. Grand Canal (Venice), Alexey Bogolyubov, Smolny as seen from Bolshaya Okhta, Alexey Bogolyubov, View of the Smolny Convent from Bolshaya Okhta, Alexey Bogolyubov, St. Petersburg. Sledging on the Neva, Alexey Bogolyubov, St. Petersburg at Sunset, Alexey Bogolyubov and Mosque in Istanbul, Alexey Bogolyubov #Art

#Poetry

The Massacre of the Monks of Tamond by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema origins – I liked this painting a lot and I felt the urge to learn more about its history, but looks like we do not know anything about what Alma-Tadema refered to there, he was 19 years old when he painted it. It's either: A fictional or imagined scene created by Lawrence Alma-Tadema early in his career, or a reference to a now-obscure historical or legendary episode—possibly medieval or religious in nature—that hasn't survived in mainstream records. #Art #Giuseppe Abbati

TIL that Constanze Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wife, was married latter to Nikolaus Von Nissen, one of the people who admired Mozart a lot and worked on writing a biography for him. I'm wondering if he liked the man that much to marry the same woman who lived with him, or did he just used her for his project, or, in fact, loved her. #Music #History

I was never interested in Kierkegaard's personal life. Today I read this:

Kierkegaard told Emil Boesen, a friend since childhood, who kept a record of his conversations with Kierkegaard, that his life had been one of immense suffering, which may have seemed like vanity to others, but he did not think it so.

I downloaded his biography. Very interested to learn more about the man's life. #Kierkegaard

Giuseppe Abbati paintings are very touching, I feel like I want to live inside them; specifically his Country Road with Cypresses, Marina in Castiglioncello and The Window. #Art #Giuseppe Abbati

Carl Jung, “The Love Problem of a Student,” in Civilization in Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978, vol. 10 of the Collected Works), §§231-2, 111-112:

. . . Love requires depth and loyalty of feeling; without them it is not love but mere caprice. True love will always commit itself and engage in lasting ties; it needs freedom only to effect its choice, not for its accomplishment. Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. If this sacrifice is not made, his illusions prevent the growth of any deep and responsible feeling, so that the very possibility of experiencing real love is denied him.

Love has more than one thing in common with religious faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. And because this is so difficult, few mortals can boast of such an achievement. But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights.

URL: https://thematamixta.blogspot.com/2024/12/let-no-man-seek-to-make-it-easy.html #Philosophy #Modus Vivendi

Henry David Thoreau, Journal, March 31, 1852 (emphasis mine):

Why the moaning of the storm gives me pleasure. Methinks it is be cause it puts to rout the trivialness of our fair-weather life and gives it at least a tragic interest. The sound has the effect of a pleasing challenge, to call forth our energy to resist the invaders of our life's territory. It is musical and thrilling, as the sound of an enemy's bugle. Our spirits revive like lichens in the storm. There is something worth living for when we are resisted, threatened. As at the last day we might be thrilled with the prospect of the grandeur of our destiny, so in these first days our destiny appears grander. What would the days, what would our life, be worth, if some nights were not dark as pitch,—of darkness tangible or that you can cut with a knife? How else could the light in the mind shine? How should we be conscious of the light of reason? If it were not for physical cold, how should we have discovered the warmth of the affections? I sometimes feel that I need to sit in a far-away cave through a three weeks' storm, cold and wet, to give a tone to my system. The spring has its windy March to usher it in, with many soaking rains reaching into April. Methinks I would share every creature's suffering for the sake of its experience and joy. The song sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow,—have they brought me no message this year? Do they go to lead heroic lives in Rupert's Land? They are so small, I think their destinies must be large. Have I heard what this tiny passenger has to say, while it flits thus from tree to tree? Is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and significant than I have dreamed of? Can I forgive myself if I let it go to Rupert's Land before I have appreciated it? God did not make this world in jest; no, nor in indifference. These migrating sparrows all bear messages that concern my life. I do not pluck the fruits in their season. I love the birds and beasts because they are mythologically in earnest. I see that the sparrow cheeps and flits and sings adequately to the great design of the universe; that man does not communicate with it, understand its language, because he is not at one with nature. I reproach myself because I have regarded with indifference the passage of the birds; I have thought them no better than I.

URL: https://thematamixta.blogspot.com/2025/01/something-worth-living.html #Modus Vivendi

I wrote about the Industry and Consumption of Pornography a while ago. Today I learnt that Jean Baudrillard has a related theory(Lenoir 2023, p.45) that reminded me of the Social Learning theory in the sociobiological theories of rape: Jean Baudrillard wrote the following maxim: "Sexuality does not hide in tolerance, repression, or morality, it is certainly hidden in what is more sexual than sex itself: pornography." In Baudrillard's view, the global success of pornography is not a result of sexual liberation but rather the triumph of capitalism, which turns everything into a commodity, including bodies that lose their ability to enjoy and experience desire. Hans Blüher continued where Baudrillard’s works left off and tried to show that the transition from sexual desire to pornography marks the boundary of the "unforgivable violation" with absolute permission—driven immediately by the urge to fulfill expectations and fantasies. This, he claims, signals the end of otherness in sexual and romantic relationships. The body of the other is consumed and discarded as if it were a consumable and disposable object. The desire for the other becomes a desire for oneself alone. We now strive for comfort, safety, and ease in the field of unity and isolation. Today’s love is free of all excess and all sin (…). Eros aims for the other in an emotional sense, yet does not allow itself to recover in the system of the self. In this identical, increasingly homogeneous society, contradictions no longer exist, and hence no erotic experience. This assumes a state of both internal and external dissonance.