This is a hit job. What's up, my name is Giggs, welcome to another video guys. So in today's video, we are going to talk about ticket symbol NIO. This is a company that I'm very bullish and I've done videos here on the channel recommending this particular stock from like $5 and now all the way to hitting high of about $54. But last Friday, they had a massive, massive pullback because one of the short sellers out there, Citroen Research, actually put a hit job on NIO and now people are starting to panic. So we're going to take a look at that, look at, hey, what is the next price target for this stock? And maybe if you usually start looking for a strategy to secure some of the profits that everybody's been making from NIO. But before we get started guys, if you're new to the channel, we talk about how to earn money. How to invest and build wealth. So if you have something that interests you, go ahead and hit that subscribe button and any notification bell so you don't miss out on new content. So if you have been following this stock again, like I said, I've done a ton of videos here on the channel. If you've been following this stock, you see that last Friday NIO actually took a massive beating in the market. So in what that did to the stock is it went from a high of about $54 and pulled back all the way to like $42. And the reason for that, again, like I said, if you can see here in the news, notice short selling company actually went out, they put a hit job on NIO and the stock just pulled back. If you see right here, this is a company that had, I mean Citroen actually recommended NIO two years ago as a huge buy and they had a price target about $25 and he had since exceeded that price target all the way to $54 and I think they were looking at it as like, it's time for us to take some profit. And so they put out this hit job. I personally, I mean, I wasn't a fan of when I saw this message because all these particular news because I knew what that meant for the stock. I mean, I didn't like seeing the stock taking a beating like that, but I'm still bullish on NIO. So this is not going to change my view on the stock. Again, you see every time there is that massive climb, you would see some of the short sellers are going to come in and do a hit job so they can make some profit too because it nearly just been going up and up and up. I thought it was about time they take a beating. And again, if you remember, I think two months ago, when Nikolaj ticker symbol NKLA also took a beating because of a short selling company, Henningberg's research did a hit job on them too. And that Nikolaj took a massive beating. So again, you see the stocks go up and down, short sellers are coming with their research and do it. So as of the time I'm doing this video right now, NIO is somewhere at about 44.6 from a high of $54 and some change. So again, if you didn't have the stock, I think this would be a good entry point for you to kind of go in there and start because if you look at everything about NIO, they have been doing pretty good. Actually, last month, they actually exceeded 5,000 cars per month living their production line, which was a new record for them. And then the earnings report is coming out tomorrow after hours, I think. So you want to go in there and take a look and see. Earnings reports are going to be good, again, based on the fact that even during COVID, they have been doing really good, producing 5,000 cars, like I said, last month. And so sales are probably going to look excellent. But again, you still have to watch out. So I'm anticipating that tomorrow after their earnings report, which is going to be excellent, people are probably going to jump back in and the stock is going to get back on track, it's like moving up in.  So this is again, this is just kind of some news asking like after that hit job on them, do you think their earnings report is going to help them? Well, we'll see after hours tomorrow because nobody really knows.  So it's the market, it's really, really tricky. For NIO, if you are but NIO a while back, so you're sitting on some profit. I want you to have a strategy here to secure some of that profit. So you can start looking at, hey, maybe secure some of that profit by putting stop losses along the way. Or if you're like me, where I try to take out my initial investment and only play with house money. I don't hold a stock. If I go in $1,000 and it doubles, I take $1,000 out. I know some people don't agree with that strategy. But it's my strategy that protects me. And so I take $1,000 out and then I use that $1,000 and invest it in something else as opposed to having all my chips in one basket. So again, it's profit. So I take $1,000, I go and invest it somewhere else and I'm just playing with house money. So that's my strategy. You figure out what works better for you and then you can kind of start putting together your own strategy to secure profit when something like this happened. Again, I am still bullish on NIO. This particular hit job from Citroen didn't really push me away from the stock. I still see the potential there because after COVID, after we get a vaccine, after the economy opens up, you're going to see China is going to start pushing NIO as your own Tesla. That's again, that's my view of it. That's the way I see it. They want competition. They don't just want everything to be dominated by the United States. So they're going to start exploring third world countries, no African market, no South American market, Asian market. They're going to push NIO in that space as the Tesla of China. So that is huge. Just within China alone, with over a billion people, you anticipate that if NIO only takes 10, 15, 20% of the market share for electric vehicles. I mean, you have Lee Otto and all the other guys that are in that same space. If they only take 10 to 20%, that is too massive in an economy where they have over a billion people. So again, Citroen here, and I want to highlight this for you guys so you see it. They have set the new price target of NIO down to 25.  That is 50% of the price of NIO. So make sure that you have a strategy to not give back all those profits and go all the way back to 50%. Secure some of those profits so that if the price even pulls back to 25, you buy more and continue to ride it. So that's what I'm going to do. I hope you guys have a strategy. So question of the day, what do you think about this? Do you think that this is just a no-brainer? I'm not selling anything. I'm sticking with the program. Or you think, man, I need to have an exit strategy so that when something like this happens, I don't lose all the gains that I have. Let me know in the comment section. If you have an exit strategy that's different from what I just said, I just explained here. Definitely go ahead and share that in the comment section so people can benefit from it. And as always, guys, remember to always do your homework, do your research, don't be a greedy savage, secure profit when you have to, and stay motivated.


The study assessed the knowledge, attitude and practice of considering Buddhist astrological recommendations among patients undergoing elective surgeries in Bhutan, revealing that participants had poor knowledge about these recommendations and a more favorable attitude towards them based on their level of understanding. This article was authored by Dorji Getshin, Thinly Dorji, Mungal Singh Guru and others.


When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s and kind of learning about science, we were in what's now considered kind of the normal period. You know, we defined climate by a 30-year average, 1950 to 1980. And after 1980, there was a dramatic warming and we're still experiencing this warming. So now we're in an abnormal period compared to those earlier 30 years. And we believe the primary cause of that is the emission of so-called greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. People have probably heard of that. But also influenced by other things in the atmosphere like the ozone layer that blocks ultraviolet light that would otherwise be giving us skin cancer and so on down at the surface. So we've gone through this dramatic change and however in past climate, before human population grew to the 7 billion plus that we are now, still there was climate change and one of the major players in the past has been the sun. So the question arises, how much is the sun influencing things now? And is the sun tending to add to the global warming or make it less than it would otherwise be? And so that's something we're trying to understand.


Hello students! It's Shayna, your teacher at espressoenglish.net and today I'm back with another lesson about phrasal verbs. To remind you, this month I'm doing a daily lesson where I teach you one phrasal verb every day. So today our phrasal verb is pay off. Before I start, I wanted to remind you that you can join my phrasal verbs in conversation course to learn a lot more phrasal verbs. So if you like these videos and you want to learn the phrasal verbs that native English speakers often use in daily life, check out my phrasal verbs in conversation course. You can click the link on the top right corner of this video or down in the description to get more information. So let's get started.  Here are the three options for the definition and meaning of pay off. Only one is correct. So as I go through these and I'll give you an example, try to think about and try to guess which is the correct definition. So one possibility is to have good results after effort. Another is to give money back to someone. And the third option is to be responsible for yourself. Okay, so start thinking about which one of these is the correct definition. Here's an example of the phrasal verb pay off. Let's imagine that you go to college.  And then after that, you spend two more years in graduate school getting your master's degree. And then after that, you spend four or five additional years in a doctorate program getting your doctorate degree or PhD. And finally, after all those years of study, after more than 10 years studying and preparing, you finish your studies and you get a great job. It's your dream job. It's with a company that you wanted to work for and it's doing something you enjoy doing.  Okay, now that I have my dream job, I can say that all those years of study really paid off. So based on that example, what do you think the phrasal verb pay off means? A, B or C. I'll give you a moment to think about it and write your answer maybe in the comments. Okay. All right. Are you ready to learn the correct answer? Pay off means to have good results after effort. So in this example, you put in a lot of hard work and a lot of effort through many years of studying in college and graduate school. And then it paid off. It had good results because the result was you got your dream job. Okay. Now don't get confused. Some of you might have chosen B, give money back to someone. That's a different phrasal verb.  Okay, pay back. But today we're looking at pay off and pay off really has nothing to do with money. It just means to have good results after you put in usually a lot of hard work and a lot of effort. All right. So let's put it into practice. What's something you did in the past that paid off that had good results after all the time and effort and energy you put in? Or maybe you can write a sentence about something that you are hoping will pay off in the future. I'll give you an example for me. I'm doing these daily videos every day in February and I hope it will pay off in terms of getting more YouTube fans and more people watching my lessons. Those would be the good results that I hope to see after putting in the effort to prepare and record these lessons. All right. That's all for today. Remember if you want to sign up for phrasal verbs in conversation, click the link here or in the video description. I hope to see you in the course, but if not, I will see you in tomorrow's video. Bye-bye.


Coming up on DTNS, Apple may do subscription bundles, big tech and big government team up to manage big elections and an epic fight with Apple. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, August 13, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the shores of Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. And from my house, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I like that one from your house. It's easy. It's simple. You can remember it. We're just talking a lot about a little bit more about the impact of that Foxconn announcement about China being no longer the factory of the world. We were talking a little bit more extended about the epic Apple fight. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter launched its API V2 version two today after delaying the launch after that phishing attack on the platform that affected multiple high profile accounts last month. The API V2 is the first complete rebuild of Twitter's API since 2012 and offers third party developers access to features like conversation threading, poll results, pinned tweets on profiles, spam filtering, and a more powerful stream filtering and search query language. A free level launches today and then an upcoming elevated level won't have those API call limits, but will cost users although Twitter isn't saying how much. That crunch sources say bite dance and India's reliance industries limited have been in talk since late July to secure a reliance investment in TikTok and a move to help bring the app back to the country. India was TikTok's largest market outside of China, but it has been banned in the country since June 29th. TikTok's business in India is reportedly valued at over $3 billion. Break up TikTok. They're like the Yankees. Lyft said President John Zimmer said Lyft will suspend operations in California if it is forced to reclassify drivers as employees. Uber said Wednesday it would temporarily suspend operations if forced to reclassify. Lyft kind of left it more open-ended. California is suing both companies over the classification based on a new California law passed on January 1st. Another page texts John Prosser sources say that Apple will announce a new watch in iPad by press release the week of September 7th and then hold an iPhone 12 event the week of October 12th with basic iPhone 12s shipping the next week and pro models in November. Cannellus estimates iPhone sales rose 10% in Q2 in the U.S. while total smartphone shipments in the country fell 5%. Apple and Samsung accounted for 7 out of every 10 devices sold in the U.S. for Q2. LG had 11% for the market followed by Lenovo and its Motorola brand NTCL. A merger has begun of G Suite's Gmail and Google Meet video conferencing as well as Google Chat, which in G Suite means a Slack-like product. Organizations that have the Chat preferred option checked will see the merger roll out on web and Android. Non-G Suite users are going to see a little bit of a change. You might have seen it already. The HabBar shows up in your mobile version of Gmail with labels for mail and meet so you can more easily access the video conferencing feature there. The next web reports that China may have half the world's electric vehicle charging stations but the fastest growing nation is the Netherlands. The Dutch have increased charging infrastructure by 162.4% between 2017 and 2020, just nudging past China's 158.1% growth. France is in third place, followed by the U.K. and then Norway. The next web also notes that there are one million charging stations worldwide. All right. Let's talk about it. That epic Apple fight. Oh, baby! Rarely do things in tech yet this petty, this loud, this fast. Epic Games announced a permanent 20% price cut for Fortnite's in-app currency V-Bucks. This is how it all begins. If you buy it on console or PC versions of the game, Epic also introduced a new direct payment option on both iOS and Android that sends users to a payment screen to input a credit card or PayPal for payment, which also gets them the new cheaper V-Bucks. However, you don't get the discount if you use Apple or Google in-app payment options. No surprise Apple removed Fortnite from the store. Surprise Apple then does the fairly unlikely move for them and releases a statement about the Fortnite removal. No surprise the statement says Epic just needs to follow the rules that all developers have to follow if they want Fortnite in the store. Fortnite then shows a short film called 1980 Fortnite, which is a nearly shot-for-shot recreation of the famous 1983 Apple Super Bowl ad mocking the ubiquitous of the App Store and Fortnite's ability to crush it. Even more surprising, Epic then files a civil anti-trust suit claiming that Apple is acting in an anti-competitive fashion in its app distribution and in app payment markets. Epic says it is filing that it does not want money or special treatment but is seeking injunctive relief to allow fair competition for all developers. Tom, will Apple have to take the L as Epic does their dance in front of them in federal court? Oh, this is going to be interesting. Earlier today, all we knew was that Fortnite had added a non-Apple and non-Google payment system. I'm like, well, that's not going to last. Apple's certainly going to pull them. I wonder if Google will. We're still wondering as we record this, whether Google will or not, because Google has slightly looser rules but it's still in their developer rules says that you have to use their in-app payment system. So I'm curious how Google's going to approach this. Apple didn't surprise me at all when they're like, well, if you do that, we pull you from the store. In fact, I'm curious how they got this into Fortnite without Apple knowing it. They must have pushed it through one of the in-app updates that they can do without going through the store. But yeah, so what this means right now in case you're wondering is you can continue to play your existing Fortnite app on iOS, you won't be able to update it, which means when the new season of Fortnite rolls around, you won't get that new season and that will cause problems and you probably won't be able to play it anymore. If you don't have it installed and you did download it in the past, you can go into the App Store, into your purchased section of your profile, find it and download it. I tried that. It worked just fine. But you can't download it new. If you've never downloaded Fortnite before, you can't get it right now. And I imagine that now that a lawsuit has been filed, Apple's just going to stick to their guns. They're not going to put Fortnite back unless a court forces them to. How a court will view this will be very interesting. But what Epic has essentially done is said, we're not waiting around for the government to finally file some kind of lawsuit against Apple and the United States or not. We're going to force the issue. Yeah. I mean, I have to believe that Apple, unless for some reason Apple was like, we're never going to win in court, which that's very un-Apple of them, Fortnite must just not think it needs iOS that badly. Because if Apple pulls away with this and some, you know, a judge rules and says, yeah, these are the rules. It's always been this way. It's the same way across the board. You know, it's somewhat controversial whether or not Apple really treats developers all the same way. But that's what the company says it does. If Fortnite can do its own thing, then I guess the company prefers it that way. Well, Epic likes to make points, right? They polled their Android app for a year because they were trying to get Google to give in on the 30 percent cut they take from in-app payments and they ended up caving on that. And they ended up putting Fortnite back in the Android app store. They've got money to burn. They're willing to bet that most of their players will continue to pay for Fortnite stuff on other platforms. And more specifically, they know which way the wind is blowing politically. They watch that five-hour house situation with all these CEOs. They watch Tim Cook have to go and answer all these questions. They know that Apple Antitrust is something at the forefront of their mind as is Apple's new commitment to services and the money they make via that, more on that in a second. But they want to make this as loud and as uncomfortable as possible. And if that means running a parody of an ad that was released possibly 20 years before some of their users were born, then they want to make the biggest noise possible so everybody knows that this is a major issue and they are on the other side of it. Before we move on, just the mechanics of this. So the suit has been filed in the district court of the Northern District of California. There will be a trial. There will probably be attempts to dismiss. It will not be solved soon because this will drag on for a while. Once this is done, then there will be appeals. And if this is actually going to end up determining that Apple is violating antitrust law, it's going to have to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. So expect this to be a story for quite a while. Oh, boy. Well, on the subject of those services that Justin mentioned, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg sources say that Apple plans to launch a set of subscription service bundles in October internally calling Apple One. The base bundle would include Apple Music and Apple TV Plus. A mid-tier plan would add Apple Arcade. The next tier app, Apple News Plus, and then a top tier would include extra iCloud storage. Apple is also supposedly developing a fitness subscription offering virtual classes and workouts that would go in one of those higher-end bundles. And there are also maybe new hardware tie-ins like a free year of Apple Arcade with a new Apple TV, say all the bundles would support family sharing type thing. This isn't too surprising, though. Code found in iOS 13.5.5 did refer to a bundle offer. In a bundle subscription, we just have a little bit more information on what those look like now. I love the passing of the torch that these stories today have. John Prosser, the one saying that the Apple iPhone announcement will happen in October. Mark Gurman saying, you know, that's great, kid. Good job on that. Let me tell you one more thing that's coming in October, these subscriptions. I love watching that. I hope they're both right because this all makes sense. And I think it's super smart for Apple to do this. The only thing missing here is Tim Cook has sort of alluded that there might be a bundle that included payments for devices as well, because if you use your Apple card, you don't have to pay interest on payments over a certain amount of time. So nothing in Gurman's story about that. He says that that his sources didn't say that that was included. But I think it's obviously smart for Apple to make these bundles because the whole point of subscriptions is to tie people in, get them in the tent and keep them there. Apple is a services company now. That is what they want to grow. That is what they want to have it be bigger and bigger. It gets them. It gives them another landing pad, another stool or leg on the stool. As Steve Jobs was always a fond of saying, and this is a way to get further into that. I do think that this is part of the reason why they want to go make the big money offered to Martin Scorsese. This is the idea of getting into the fitness market. I think is very smart for them. However, they do have a hit or miss track record with content. They've they've been very good lately because they've been able to buy movies that may or may not be Oscar contenders like Tom Hanks's movie. They were able to use their big pocketbook to to to acquisition. But in terms of creating their own stuff, it has been hit or miss. So we'll see going forward because it it is content that will drive these kinds of subscription services. I know it's just sources now telling us what the tiers are going to look like. But the extra iCloud storage should be way more farther down. That's actually what I need. I'll go mid tier for something like that, which should be lower. Yeah. Yeah. Apple Arcade. Come on.  Whether iCloud is in the middle tier or the top tier, I don't know. But music music and TV as the bottom tier makes sense. Those are the those that makes a lot of sense. And listen, in the in the day and age we live in where everybody's trying to buy second hand, I don't know, barbells off Craigslist subscriptions, probably going to do pretty well. Good idea. Peloton stock took a little bit of a hit on this rumor. Intel chip fans. Listen up, Intel announced details on its Tiger Lake laptop processors. It's architecture day at Intel. These 11th gen core processors will use four compute cores based on the 10 nanometer Willow Cove architecture and be the first Intel processors to use integrated ZLP graphics. Z graphics on Tiger Lake will use 96 execution units, 50 percent more than outgoing gen 11 Intel graphics, running up to 50 percent faster frequencies with support for AV one codec decoding up to four four K displays and able to play back video at up to eight K at 60 frames per second. Tiger Lake is also going to support Thunderbolt for USB for PCIe 4.0 LPD DDR5 and will launch officially on September 2nd. We'll get model numbers and all the details then. Tiger Lake uses a 10 nanometer Super Fin design. No more plus signs. They were getting a little out of control. So Intel is using the designation Super Fin. The design offers better frequency speeds at less power consumption. So same voltage level as Ice Lake would give you a big performance boost Intel claims it's a 20 percent boost in performance. We'll see Intel also previewed its discrete gaming graphics processor, the ZHPG, that's XE HPG coming in 2021. It'll have hardware accelerated ray tracing support for GDDR6 memory and it joins the ZLP low power GPU for laptops. We just mentioned ZHP for data center and the Exascale ZHPC, which you may also hear referred to as Ponte Vecchio Intel says it will have the computer efficiency of the HPG. It will have the computer efficiency of its Exascale GPU, the scalability of the data center model, graphics efficiency of the laptop version and Intel is going to even ship a discrete version of the ZLP GPU as the DG1 later this year. Not because you want an integrated graphics card as a discrete card, but just I think to show that they can do it. Finally, Intel preview the 2021 launch of 10 nanometer Golden Cove cores as part of the upcoming Alder Lake series of chips. Generally, this is being seen as a good response to Ryzen 4000 Intel showing that even though it's it's having problems moving into the lower nanometer processes, that it's still got some impressive specs and impressive performance boosts because of the way it can design things. They're claiming that they're even keeping up with Moore's law at the 10 nanometer scale. So all in all, a good announcement for Intel. Checkpoint research. Oh, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just saying this is where Intel needed to be last year. So they're playing catch up, but this is a good catch up. Checkpoint research discovered a vulnerability in the Amazon. Alex will just go ahead and say mobile app that could be leveraged to gain access to some user data. The attack would have needed the target to click on a link that would let the attacker then copy Amazon cookies. Those cookies could then use the first vulnerability and misconfigured cores policy in the Alex app to send an age track request to the Amazon Skill Store, which would then return a list of skills. The second vulnerability allowed code injection. So a cross site scripting attack could be launched on track.amazon.com and skillstore.amazon.com to acquire a CSRF token letting the attacker perform actions as if they were the target. The attacker could then replace the legitimate skill that they found on the list with a malicious skill that had the same trigger word. The malicious skill could then harvest voice history records, getting info like phone numbers, home addresses, user names, banking data history, stuff you would not want them to have. The attack wouldn't last long as Amazon routinely reviews live skills for this kind of malicious behavior and then deactivates those skills. Amazon patched the vulnerabilities after disclosure back in June. Yeah, this is a good news story. I've seen a lot of scare headlines because that's what you do to get clicks. But honestly, this is checkpoint finding a somewhat hard to exploit vulnerability. A lot of things have to go right for this to work and getting Amazon to patch it. So good job. This is a good news story. There's one of those things where whenever you have a bug infestation, what you want to see is the big bugs and not the little bugs because the little bugs mean that the big bugs are somewhere you can't say it. I like these stories where it's a very hard exploit and we're seeing it. That to me means we're seeing where that is. That is the equivalent of the big bug that cool. We're getting these as they wander in and not any kind of larger, malicious kind of underlying issues. Yes, this means there aren't a thousand more in the walls, possibly. Yes, exactly. That's what I hopefully. In Chrome 86, Google will test showing only domain names in Chrome's address bar rather than the full URLs. The move is an effort to protect users against scams and phishing attacks using misleading URLs similar to what Safari does. Google will test the idea that if you get used to only seeing the domain name, you might look be more likely to notice a phishing scam that looks like the legitimate site, but has a different domain. The test will be rolled out to a random subset of users of the canary and developers build of Chrome, or users can enable the setting in Chrome's Flags page. Apple Safari browser only shows domain names by default. Yeah, I actually like the way Safari does this, which is like, you know, it will just do it. We don't say any downside. You can turn it off if you want, if you want to see full URLs. But why not? I'm not sure why Chrome's being so careful here. But that said, I'm also not sure how effective this is. And it'll be interesting to see what their test tells us. Because, you know, the idea is that people just start to see a big, long URL in their address bar and they just ignore it, no matter what it says. Whereas if you just have the domain name, they're more likely to pay attention to it and notice when you're like, hey, that doesn't say Wellsfargo.com. That's something else. Yeah, it's that is I'm not sure. I don't know. It's it's different. I'm so used to seeing the full string and it sometimes is helpful, depending on what I'm looking at. You know, if I'm looking for a particular page within a domain. But yeah, most of the time, it probably looks like gobbledygook to folks. So if it's helpful at all to to let kind of weird things stand out, that is good. Then folks like you and I could turn it off, right? Yeah, the point here isn't that it's the magic bullet. The point that it could be one thing that you see that catches your eye that might lead you to safer internet behavior. I agree. I think that this is probably something that Google should just or Chrome should just pull the trigger on like Safari did. And you know what? I had thought about it till just now when you were saying that it's probably good for you to help teach other people, right? Right now you're like, oh, look through that gobbledygook for this. If you have people who are just seeing the domain name, it's easier to explain to them what to look for. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Thursdays, we have Mr. Justin Robert Young, host of Politics, Politics, Politics on the podcast. And this week, the social networks of the world obliged us with lots of news about how they're preparing for the upcoming U.S. elections in November on Thursday. Thank you, social networks. Justin, let me run down the stories and then give us your perspective on them, if you would, sir. Yeah. Facebook launched its Voting Information Center for the U.S. It will appear in the menus for Facebook and Instagram. It will help users check their voting options and rules, list any related deadlines. Facebook will attach labels that lead to this voting information to all voting related posts, not just posts made by famous users or political leaders. Google is going to direct searches to verified voting information, showing candidate information panels when searching for federal candidates on YouTube, even, and adding more information on paid political ads to its transparency reports. Twitter plans to expand rules against content that, quote, undermine civic integrity, like voting misinformation. More tools are going to be added to help find voting info on Twitter. And Snapchat is putting a voter registration mini tool that, depending on the state, will allow you to register to vote from within Snapchat, as well as their own voting guide with official vetted voting information. Before we get to the big meeting, what do you think of all those announcements? Well, some, I think, are a little bit more meat and potatoes than others. If you can connect people in an easier way to vote a registration, if you can highlight voting deadlines, then I think that's smart and good. I would have a little, maybe a second thought about, OK, well, giving more data of exactly where I am and whether or not I am an active political participant is yet more data that these companies have about you that is relevant in several ways to their core business. However, at least it's useful. You're getting something out of it. You will be notified on places that you spend a lot of time that the time to either register or vote is drawing near. Where we can again start to wave our jazz hands to worry about an upcoming storm is undermining civic integrity on Twitter, which sounds a little hashtag heliportal, hashtag portal to hell to me, mostly because there is a line between. Election day has been moved to November 13th instead of November 3rd. OK, you can label that as but not a real thing versus the kind of political conversation that surrounds elections that very often bipartisan sources can be read as voter misinformation, whether or not it is in the letter of Twitter's law. We will have to find out. Right. If I go on Twitter and say none of you should vote, is that a yes, that on the line over the line? Exactly. Yeah, you just start calling more than balls and strikes at that point. And that's where I think we get into we get into trouble. Let's calm things down, though, and talk about the largest tech companies in the world meeting with the government. That won't get anyone upset. Members of the following big tech companies Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, aka Yahoo, in this case, Pinterest, LinkedIn separate from Microsoft sent their own representative and Wikimedia. All of those had representatives that met with members of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force, the Department of Justice's National Security Division and the officer of the Director of National Intelligence. They were discussing scenario planning, handling, election misinformation and the group intends to meet regularly into November. Some of the scenarios mentioned as being discussed, including leaks of stolen materials, manipulated videos, stuff like that. Scenarios were supposedly candidate agnostic. Oh, baby, this is an interesting one, mostly because beyond whatever we saw in 2016, the idea of surreptitiously leaked materials is a part of politics and has been for a very, very, very long time. The idea that this could come from foreign actors is something that we are paying a lot of attention to, although considering the forces that have leaked stuff like this in the past, I don't know if state actors are ever going to be our largest problem considering how easy it is to leak kinds of materials. And so if somebody who is a partisan finds material that is damaging to one of our presidential candidates or a major Senate candidate or a gubernatorial candidate and leaks it, but they are an American citizen and they just are here to affect the outcome of the election, is that fine? But if it crosses a server in Moscow, it's not. That is interesting. Manipulative. It's why I think it's interesting Wikimedia is on this foundation because Wikimedia is the one that can handle that question very well in ways that the other companies I don't think can. No, I mean, they can know where it was uploaded from. But then again, but they're very, they're very experienced in handling people saying, no, this is important. Yes, it is. No, it's not that sort of that sort of moderation. They have a perspective on there where Twitter and Facebook, they're all worried about their, you know, the how it's going to affect the relationships with lobbying and stuff. And Wikimedia lives and breathes that kind of controversy every day, whether this should be included or not. They are more well-versed on it. But I don't know if this is something that will ever be something that everybody can agree on. Oh, no, I wasn't trying to apply that. Oh, OK, I think it's interesting that they're on there because that's a voice that needs to be part of that. I totally agree. It's just, you know, what is the line between a bartender recording Mitt Romney saying that 47 percent of Americans are never going to vote for a Republican versus a Russian hacker finding. Right, let's back off that real quick, because I think we're giving short shrift to the positive that this meeting can give, which is you do want these companies thinking about very obvious things that we don't want to happen ahead of time rather than getting caught with their parents down like they did in 2016. Yes, although I would say temper your expectations because I don't know if there are answers. Again, again, I'm not saying that they will be perfect. In fact, they probably won't. But it's better to have them thinking about it than not. Yeah. And if anybody wants to know, like, why would you ever allow leaked materials out anyway? Go watch the movie, The Post. Thank you. Some of these stories end up on our subreddit. You could submit stories that you think are worthy of the show and your peers. You can also vote on other ones that you see at Daily Tech News Show dot reddit.com. Let's check out the mailbag. We got some good stuff. Daniel and Cincinnati said, I'm going to I'm going to read his PS first. He said, I like Microsoft. OK, then he says, why does Microsoft think that after paying tens of billions of dollars for TikTok, that history wouldn't repeat itself like when Zynga bought draw something seems to me that with all of the concessions that Microsoft will have to make to keep Taka in the States, people being finicky, governmental rules prone to change, a competitor could just come in and make an enticing clone where people just lose interest because the big lame Microsoft now runs it. Daniel, you're not wrong. And I like that you included a smiley face.  I'm not sure that's the right parallel here. You know, draw something didn't have quite the presence. And I think that's the key. Microsoft doesn't really care if they buy TikTok and it fails. What they care is having it long enough to show that Azure can run a service like that and handle a challenge like that. I really do think that's their main point here. Yeah, I would just like to add here that social networks have proven to be a lot more durable than I think we think they are as we remember watching my space fade into the distance and friends are fading to the distance.  There's no reason to think that TikTok won as well. And there's no reason to think Microsoft wouldn't spin off management to somebody else and just want to run the back end on Azure. That's a possibility too. Samuel has a perspective different than Lamar's on Instagram Reels. He says while the dancers of TikTok are well served by the features of Reels, the fact that they don't have any sounds other than music and the missing features of not being able to duet someone means that my use of TikTok as someone that makes original content in cosplay with friends, sometimes not even in the same country as I am, is completely missing from it thus far. It feels like Instagram thinks that TikTok is still musically instead of what it has evolved into a place where many creators make original content together and couldn't care less about dancing. Just another perspective and keep up the awesome work. Thank you, Samuel. That was a good perspective on that. It could also be Instagram saying, let's not put too much development into Reels just yet. Let's put a toe in, see if people like it, and then we make the TikTok clone. I'm sure Instagram understands that it's missing some features like the duet, for example. For sure. For sure. Hey, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Daniel Dorado, Jeff Wilkes and Scott Hepburn. Also, thanks to Justin Robert Young, the politics man himself. What's been going on this week? We have a lot going on this week, Sarah, and I thank you for asking. First, we have our back to school special tomorrow.  Experts, parents. We've had parents and teachers be writing in for the last week, and we're going to have a lot of different perspectives on the real challenges that are facing the country right now, as parents wonder whether or not they are going to send their kids back to school and what that exactly looks like. And next week, we begin two full weeks of convention coverage. Twitch.tv slash Justin are young is where you're going to have to go to get it eight to 10 each night, Monday through Thursday is when I will be on next week and the week after first for the Democrats, then for the Republicans and friends. You've never seen conventions like this before because they've never just been YouTube or Zoom or whatever they're going to look like, but there's no one else. You want to watch the most bizarre conventions in history with then your boy, Justin Robert Young. So twitch.tv slash Justin are young. The fun begins next Monday.  We want to hear from you about it. We can put some pics of you up on our Instagram feed and we can read some quotes here on the show. For instance, Biocau said, I wouldn't mind a hoodie would come in handy in the Seattle weather. If you would like me to read your quote about DTNS merch, email us feedback at daily tech news show dot com. And if you're like, but I don't have any DTNS merch, we'll go fix that daily tech news show dot com slash store. I want a hoodie too. Let's all get hoodies. Let's all get hoodies. Our email address is feedback, not in the summer, though, feedback at daily tech news show dot com. We are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. 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Welcome to another episode of Marxist Voice, podcast of the Communists in Britain. This episode will be listening to another talk from 2023's Revolution Festival, this time with Ben Curry discussing and defending the Enlightenment. In the age of the Enlightenment, the young, ascendant, capitalist class began to stretch its wings against the spiritual dictatorship of the Church and the feudal monarchies that they propped up. Breaking the chains of obscurantist medieval dogma, bold thinkers and pioneers like Locke, Newton, Diderot and Rousseau fought for rationality and science, and in so doing, theoretically cleared the ground for the great bourgeois revolutions. Today, however, capitalism is decrepit and dying, and the ruling class has turned away from the reason of its youth. In fact, the irrational capitalist system threatens to drag human society back to a new dark age. Therefore, as Ben will explain, despite its limits, we as Marxists lay claim to the bold materialism and clarity of thought which characterised the Enlightenment as theoretical armaments in our own struggle against our rotten ruling class. Without further ado, this episode of Marxist Voice, brought to you by the revolutionary communists in Britain. Well, Alan on Friday explains that we as communists, we're not just fighting for a world in which everyone has what they materially need. We are fighting for a world in which people can really begin to spiritually develop themselves, in which the doors of culture are flung open to the masses so that they have access to art, science, philosophy, all of these things that are excluded to them under capitalism. But today, capitalism threatens humanity with a huge throwback of culture. It's threatening to drag art, science and literature into the abyss with them. And really, there's an excellent symptoms of the complete dead ends, the impasse of capitalism in the halls of universities because it has become now all the rage in academia to denigrate, to slander and to reject what they call the Enlightenment project. That is the capitalist class and its thinkers in the ivory towers of universities increasingly tend towards rejecting the great heritage and achievements of the capitalist class itself and its thinkers in its youth, basically. This has become, as I'll come onto, I'll name a few of the examples of these academics of the modern day. But let us start by looking at the context in which the Enlightenment arose. Now, as Marx and Engels explain in the Communist Manifesto, capitalism played the most revolutionary role in history and its youth. It completely revolutionised industry and commerce and trade. It broke up feudal relations on the land and it dragged huge populations out of rural isolation. And it also revolutionised human thinking. Science received an unprecedented impetus from the developments of industry and trade and philosophy in all areas of human culture also developed alongside that. And these revolutionary changes that capitalism brought about completely through the feudal system that had dominated Europe from millennium completely out of balance and did the feudal lords and the old monarchies of Europe have the good sense to go into the dust-benefit history quietly? Of course not, just like the capitalist class of today. They fought against every threat to their rule and privilege. The old feudal ruling class, they instigated reigns of terror, they instigated inquisitions, religious wars, drowned Europe in blood. Parts of Germany were nearly depopulated, 50% collapsing population in some parts of central Europe. And the church didn't just silence religious heresies, but they silenced every form of opposition. 80,000 witches were burned at the stake and scientists were also persecuted by the church. Galileo, of course, was forced to recant his views. Giordano Bruno, the most modern thinker, would be incredible just to give a lead off on just what he stood for. He refused to recant his views and he was burned at the stake by the Catholic church. And alongside this, the church also put together a long list of banned books, the Papal Index. And the more irrational their system became basically, the more rationality, reason and science themselves became the enemy from the point of view of this old ruling class. And their system wasn't just becoming irrational, it was becoming downright surreal. The closer, the more feudalism had exhausted itself, the more deserving it was of being overthrown, the more the old monarchies that dominated Europe for centuries concentrated power in their hands. Just like the capitalist state is concentrating power in its hands, the more it is in conflict with the needs of society. You had the rise of autocracies. Louis XIV in France demanded that his subjects refer to him as the sun king, the literal centre of the universe. So that's how irrational and surreal this system was becoming. And so it was a time in all respects like our own, in the sense that the old order, the ancien régime, was choking the paws of society and it was threatening to bring civilization down into the abyss with it. And it was a time of course in which earth-shattering revolutionary events were being prepared and the crowning of all of that was of course the Great French Revolution of 1789 to 1793. But revolutions don't spring from the grounds ready made, the ground is prepared for them and the minds of men are prepared for those revolutions. And you had that in this period, revolutionary thinkers emerged who subjected the old society to merciless criticism. They developed programs of action. You had pamphleteers that were agitating amongst the masses for these revolutionary ideas. Just as we're meeting here today, you had across ancien régime France, you had salons and clubs meeting and discussing these bold revolutionary ideas. And to begin with, these ideas were the property of an advanced guard. They were isolated from the masses. Their ideas, they seemed shocking and extreme to the people of those days. But at the decisive moment, because these ideas answered the needs of the historical moment, it was these ideas that gripped the masses. It was under the banner of reason, liberty, equality, the rights of man that the French Revolution of course was fought. And these thinkers provided that thinking conscious element which is vital to all revolutionary movements. And of course, I'm referring to the boldest, most revolutionary thinkers that formed the vanguard of that great intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment in opposition to faith, to superstition and to the irrational remnants of feudalism, they raised on their banner reason. That was their rallying cry, reason effectively. And they believed that there were many thinkers, they were more moderate and they were more radical thinkers and they had a diversity of views. But fundamentally what linked them was the belief that human beings are naturally endowed with reason. That reason can be used to understand nature and society. And that placed at the feet of humanity, this understanding can liberate human beings. We can develop a rational morality, a rational law and social system. At a time when the existing social system depended upon the justification of the divine rights of monarchies to rule. This was a revolutionary challenge to say that we need a rational system based upon reason. And of course we know that in actual fact they were blazing a trail for the rule of capital. They were blazing a trail for the rise of capitalism. But they didn't necessarily understand that their fight in those terms, they were fighting sincerely for human liberation. They were not actuated, they were not inspired by the desire for money and acquisition and petty things that we associate with capitalist motivation. They were inspired by the most noble, high spirited motivations that any revolutionary thinkers have ever been inspired by. And I will give the word over now to a great thinker from the Enlightenment. Emmanuel Kant, who was writing at the high point of this period, who in 1784 wrote a short article titled What is Enlightenment? And I think he sums up the spirit of the Enlightenment brilliantly. He says, on all sides I hear, do not argue. The officer says, do not argue, drill. The taxman says, do not argue, pay. The pastor says, do not argue, believe. So the ruling class were demanding ignorance and passive obedience from the masses. And in opposition to this Kant raises what he calls the slogan of the Enlightenment, Sapare Aude, which is Latin for dare to know. That was the spirit of this period, dare to know. It was a daring, scientific, defiant revolutionary spirit that had the most fertilizing effect on a galaxy of the most brilliant thinkers imaginable. From the 17th through to the end of the 18th century, I'll just list some of the speakers that belong to this short period. There's no period in human history that has produced such a galaxy of thinkers. Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Isaac Newton, Dallembert, Levocier, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Holback, Helvetius, Diderot. And this is just some of the more brilliant amongst them. And there were others just as brilliant whose names completely slipped my mind. So this was the spirit of the Enlightenment, right? And these were the brilliant thinkers that it produced. And it was a spirit that was appropriate to a period in which the capitalist class felt that it represented the future of civilization. It was an optimistic spirit when great revolutionary tasks were posed before that class. But of course, things moved on. The French Revolution came and went. It was followed by the Thermidorian reaction, the Napoleonic Wars, the Bourbon Restoration, the hell of the suffering of the working class and the industrial revolutions. And by the middle of the 19th century, the mood had changed amongst the capitalist class. By the time you have the 1848 Revolution sweeping Europe, the capitalist class was more scared of the rising working class than they were interested, shall we say, in burying the remnants of feudalism that still scattered about Europe. And in fact, they proved in that revolutionary wave that they were capable of coming to an understanding with the counter-revolution. They played a counter-revolutionary role against the working class. And in the same way that they did that on the political plane, they increasingly were showing that they were capable of coming to a philosophical pact with the remnants of medievalism, with clericalism and reaction. And it's from this period, the middle of the 19th century, that you start to see the emergence in bourgeois philosophy of a strong anti-enlightenment trend. You have thinkers like Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, who reject the idea that there is a world out there to be known by reason. People like Schopenhauer reviving the idea that all we have is appearances, representation, as he referred to it. We cannot know the world outside of our representation. We have our five senses, but we can't know the world itself. Its subjective idealism is being revived in philosophy. Kierkegaard is saying that reason cannot let us know the world. All we can really resort to is faith. This idea is once more revived. These reactionary, inward-looking philosophies are being revived. A fun fact about Schopenhauer. In 1848, he was living in Frankfurt, which was one of the centres of the German Revolution in that year. He actually allowed Prussian troops to use his balcony to shoot revolutionaries. I raised this point just to point out that he was a man rooted in his times. His ideas were reflected of the mood of his class, of the bourgeoisie basically. It's a pessimistic mood. It's an inward-looking mood. It's a subjectivist outlook in which you're surrounded by this hostile world that is out there. It bases itself on extreme individualism, which of course, by the end of the 19th century, now capitalism is really sputtering out its last progressive mission. You have the rise of monopolies, the rise of colonialism and imperialism. You have the militarism across Europe preparing the ground for what would become the First World War. In that context, you have the extreme pessimistic individualistic philosophy of Nietzsche expressing really the mood of the age, shall we say. For Nietzsche, he was an atheist. He rejected God, but he also rejected science. He rejected both as forms of faith and extreme individualistic philosophy and questioning even of the benefits of pursuing scientific investigation by Nietzsche. I'll bring some quotes in by him in a second. In the 20th century, of course, now the real disaster is upon capitalism. We have school after school that rejects enlightenment, that rejects reason. The Frankfurt School, for the first time, so-called left-wingers, so-called Marxists, rejecting the Enlightenment. They reflected the mood of the ruling class by this time, seeped in pessimism and that pessimism seeping down into the petty bourgeois intelligentsia. And the Frankfurt School thinkers like Adorno and Hawkeimer, they wrote a famous book called The Dialectic of Enlightenment and fundamentally they were saying, look around you. What has enlightenment and scientific thought brought you? It's brought you the Holocaust, it's brought you the Attenbaum and at least in the case of Adorno, it's brought you jazz music, which he placed for some reason on a similar sort of pedestal. But yeah, I mean the fundamental idea that they were saying is that science was supposed to be about liberating men, but actually it was about controlling nature, yes, but also controlling men and controlling the minds of men. And therefore the end result of enlightenment is totalitarianism. It's the Gulag of Stalin, the death camp of Hitler and American consumerism which is controlling the minds of the masses through things like jazz music. And then of course by the second half of the 20th century you have the rise of post-modernism, which down to the present day and its offshoots, post-modernism and its offshoots, are dominant still on university campuses and particularly philosophy departments and they were inspired by people like Nietzsche and the Frankfurt School. And the rejection of the Enlightenment has become the mainstream philosophical position of bourgeois academia. Now, it would not be educational to you nor pleasurable for me to go into all of the differences of these different schools, these thinkers and so forth that all have their own diverse theories and little nuances, but in one way or another they all have the same fundamental thing about them which is they all revive idealism and specifically subjective idealism, this inward retreat, and in all cases it opens the door for mysticism. In place of the Enlightenment view which is that there is an objective world out there, it exists independently of our minds and it can be understood by reason and the senses and science. You have this inward retreat. There's only me, I have my senses, I can see things, hear things and so forth but do I know that they tell me anything about the world? Do I even know that they tell me there is a world out there? That is a question mark that is placed above science by these thinkers, these subjective idealists. Instead of that I only have my own subjective truth. I know what I think, I know what I feel but I cannot know if there is an objective truth out there. This is how Nietzsche put it. Now Nietzsche has the advantage, the virtue should we say over most modern academic thinkers that he at least tried to put a bit of poetry into his pessimistic nonsense and he says the following, even the Sphinx has eyes and as a result there are various truths and as a result there is no truth. So that's it, there is no truth. There are only many subjective viewpoints. Now if you're familiar with postmodernism this will sound very familiar to you and that's not a coincidence because people like Foucault and Deleuze and these people that are the touchstone of postmodern thinking directly attribute and credit Nietzsche as an important inspiration. They only change fundamentally the wording which is rather than many eyes and all of this sort of stuff they talk about we all have our own narrative I have my narrative in my head you have your narrative in your head stories basically and we cannot privilege one narrative above another because to do so is anti-democratic it's totalitarian and authoritarian and we can't say that one story is better than another which is precisely what enlightenment thinking and science says is the rational explanation and other explanations based upon superstition are false and incorrect that's a meta-narrative and that is something that they reject they reject therefore the idea of objective truth independent of the individual Now we can understand the reasons for this we can understand the reasons that these theories have gripped academia and university campuses in particular it's a reflection of the fact that the capitalist system has become irrational just like the feudal system was irrational it has become irrational and their mood therefore has turned to pessimism the deepest despair and pessimism and it has seeped down into the petty bourgeois layers who turn their back on rationality and reason and they develop all of these irrationalist philosophies but all of these different philosophical schools they don't just come out and say that they want to justify their point of view and they do so by pointing to what they claim are the failures of the so called enlightenment project and of science now Foucault in particular takes up this pointing out should we say the failures of science and makes an entire career out of it and in particular pointing out where science has been wrong before hasn't science been false in the past haven't we had dead ends we ended up at downright reactionary positions which were the scientific consensus in the past particularly he puts psychiatry and the history of sexuality and these sort of things where downright reactionary views have been regarded as the scientific consensus in the past and he puts them and there's an implication which Foucault is a very slippery fish he never quite spells out his views entirely categorically as I will come onto but there's an implication there that all scientific categories that we impose are more or less imposed by our ideas on nature and they're all more or less arbitrary and can be disposed of and another set of views inserted in their place and that really what they reflect is power relations and he has this abstract notion of power relations not the notion of state power or of class power but power as an abstract thing coming from the minds coming from our discourse and so on again Nietzsche put it much clearer than Foucault or any of the rest of them ever did when he said the following things are subject to interpretation and whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth that's the view now yes of course science has been abused by the capitalist class we can just point to the fact that in the 19th century it was scientific consensus that there's a hierarchy of races which was used to justify slavery, colonialism and all the rest of it but instead of blaming the ruling class instead of blaming capitalism for straight jacketing science what you end up with is the very notion stemming from the enlightenment that science can attain truth that is regarded as false and rejected and they point to the fact yes there were things that were regarded as scientific fact yesterday that have today been proven to be totally false can we not thereby say that there will be scientific theories today which are regarded as true that in the future will be regarded as false and of course we will have to say we will have to admit yes that is true so how can we trust anything that's the fundamental line of argument basically it's a line of argument that rests on the basis of an undialectical view of scientific progress in the sense that it looks at each individual snapshot of science each theory is necessarily only an approximation to the description of the world it can only ever achieve that right we never arrive at a complete state of science science is an infinite progression of closer and closer approximation and therefore it also always necessarily contains a partial falsehood it also has a relative element to it as well now does this mean that there is no such thing as absolute truth and we as dialectical materialists would deny that we would say that actually that is not in the snapshot of science that we see the whole truth but it's in the progress of science by an infinite number of generations or should I say an indefinite number of generations of scientists arriving at a closer and closer approximation that we have the absolute truth which has its basis in the material objectivity of the world that's what gives its absolute character is our materialist position and there's another sense in which I think that the postmodernists become confused and these anti-enlightenment thinkers become confused and that is that they don't understand the way that science progresses science doesn't actually progress in a straight line I think this is central to the whole point here or the way that science progresses is it progresses through a process of negation in the sense that you have an old theory right it stands the test of time for a period and then a new theory comes about a revolutionary theory that overthrows the old theory and takes its place and they take this to mean that you have one set of categories which are imposed upon nature and then they are basically overthrown completely and a new set of categories take their place they see it as a complete negation of the old in a very formalistic sense but that's not it's a dialectical negation is the way that science progresses and I'll try to explain what I mean by that and this is where the difference between a formalistic and a dialectical understanding of negation is very important and I want to use the example of modern chemistry which was born really in the century of the Enlightenment in the 18th century now at the start of that century alchemy was the dominant view within chemistry you know the philosopher's stone turning lead into gold and all of that sort of thing it was very infused with mystical ideas by the end of the 18th century you had what is recognizably very much like modern chemistry had emerged but bridging the gap of the 18th century you had a theory which rose early in the century and collapsed towards the end of the century known as the theory of Phlegisthen and this is based upon a very simple observation right when something burns it seems to emit something it emits a flame you know red or yellow or whatever coloured flame and this theory was that that is a substance called Phlegisthen everything possesses it and when it burns it is emitted it loses this Phlegisthen right now this was a theory that was eventually overturned but was the theory of Phlegisthen therefore completely and utterly worthless well no actually on the contrary it was an enormous step forward first of all in the sense that even on the basis of a wrong theory you can do a lot of good science at the start of the 18th century thousands of years of scientific investigation had discovered 15 chemical elements by the end of that century we had 41 chemical elements had been discovered so that in itself proved something I think but more than that in a more profound sense the theory of Phlegisthen actually lives on in modern chemistry in the sense that if you take Phlegisthen and turn it upside down so here you have a substance that is emitted and was calculated to have a negative mass if you think of a substance that is absorbed and has a positive mass with all of the same attributes you have oxygen which was precisely what was discovered by Levolsier at the end of the 18th century and in that sense even a false idea can have a rational kernel and the process of negation in science is not simply one of disposing of all old ideas in favour of a completely arbitrary new set of categories it is a process of negation but at the same time of preservation of what is rational and separation of that rational kernel from the accidental and irrational husk that it is contained with him that contains it and it's precisely this inability to see the progress of science as a process and a contradictory process through the negation of the negation that leads to the idea of a lack of progress and the idea that one set of it's just an arbitrary set of categories replaced with any other arbitrary set of categories and actually this dialectical concept of negation of the negation is precisely vital to understanding the essence of what I'm trying to get across in this whole talk because that dialectical negation is precisely vital to understanding our whole approach to the enlightenment and to all of bourgeois culture basically because the socialist revolution is not just about throwing out everything that capitalism has created after all under capitalism isn't it the case that machinery and industry are used to enslave the worker that's very much of course true but we don't thereby reject the whole of industry we fight for the expropriation of the capitalist class by the working class which will allow industry and technology to become a force for human liberation for freeing us from jodgery and everything else and so in that sense capitalism has created the basis for communism by creating the basis for super abundance and in the same way all bourgeois culture and above all enlightenment thinking must be conquered preserved and at the same time freed of its class character by the proletariat as the preparation for a socialist culture, a higher culture which which will base itself not just on the rational kernel of enlightenment and scientific thinking but the enormous cultural and scientific inheritance that has to be separated from that irrational kernel and that's the difference between us and those who blindly reject the enlightenment and think that they can negate it in a purely formalistic sense by rejecting it by rejecting it in that way because they point to all of the bad things that capitalist culture has about it they embrace barbarism which incidentally is precisely the direction that the capitalist class are taking us in anyway fundamentally now Foucault I'll give him this much he was intelligent enough to understand that by rejecting the idea of scientific progress that leads you into a patently reactionary and absurd idea that medieval superstition is just as good at telling us about the world there's modern astrophysics and theoretical physics and biochemistry and everything else and he was too cowardly should we say to actually openly embrace that point of view and instead he actually explained his point of view in an essay called titled what is enlightenment in direct response to cancer what is enlightenment where he says he refuses to say whether he accepts the enlightenment or not he says the problem with the enlightenment is it says that you're either on the side of reason and rationality or you're irrational and superstitious and he says he rejects what he calls the blackmail of the enlightenment which is the most cowardly, mealy mouthed way of saying that he embraces superstition basically now other of his followers are a little less cowardly and are prepared to precisely openly reject the enlightenment and scientific progress whatsoever and I'll just take one example an academic who says she is a follower of Foucault and disgracefully calls herself a Marxist feminist and that is Sylvia Federici in her book which I had the pleasure of reading Caliban and the Witch she says the following well she directly questions what she calls the belief in the socially progressive character of the scientific revolution and she rejects enlightenment thinking because she blames it for the subjugation of the workers the subjugation of women and colonial peoples under capitalism but what does she end up doing by rejecting this enlightenment thinking in particular she disgracefully treats Descartes and Hobbes in particular in this kind of way in fact they're the only enlightenment thinkers she cares the cherry pick from well she ends up first of all glorifying the position of women and peasants under feudalism first of all embracing feudalism over capitalism in the first instance and in place of science she embraces magic and witchcraft and this is what she says about magic and particularly whether we can say that magic is real she calls herself a Marxist by the way so listen to this it would not be fruitful to investigate whether these powers were real or imaginary it can be said that all pre-capitalist societies have believed in them and in recent times we've witnessed a revaluation of practices that at the time we refer to would have been condemned as witchcraft let us mention the growing interests in parapsychology and biofeedback that are increasingly applied even by mainstream medicine so she's arguing in favor of alternative medicine against science and she won't say whether she believes that witchcraft is actually real whether magic is real that's the logical conclusion of Foucault's ideas to be honest it's incredible and what she accuses enlightenment thinkers of doing particularly Descartes is of imposing a new vision of the body on society they invent this new vision of the body and they do this precisely in order to prepare the body for capitalist exploitation because before you can exploit the body you have to start thinking about it the mechanical extension of the machine as the factory worker or as a baby making machine as women become under capitalism and this vision she then says was first of all developed by these thinkers and then enforced by state violence and where does Federici identify the state violence which is backing up enlightenment thought in the witch trials in the burning of 80,000 witches in Europe was supposedly the imposition it was all about basically driving out the idea that the body has anything spiritual or magical about it in order to to create raw material for exploitation so you have this situation where she says that those fighting for reason and science and rationality and the religious fanatics burning witches were one reactionary block which is the biggest slander and the most absurd slander that you can throw at these enlightenment thinkers and what is more it is a completely idealist notion of how capitalism arose it presents the struggle of ideas as the locomotive of history and bad ideas were responsible for the rise of capitalism which is completely and utterly turning things on its head now Foucault doesn't in fact draw things quite to this logical conclusion in fact again this slippery fish says that he actually stands in the enlightenment in the tradition of the enlightenment in what sense in this same article that I referred to he says that he maintains the same skeptical approach enlightenment thought was all about skepticism didn't they after all adopt a skeptical approach to the received wisdom of their days and he just does the same well let's look at a particular enlightenment thinker who is well known one of the fathers of the enlightenment Descartes who is treated so disgracefully by Federici he's well known for his skeptical approach to the thinking of the day he regarded it as his duty to doubt everything and he declared that nine-tenths of the received wisdom that had come down from the medieval ages was trash based upon dogma, faith and superstition and he declared that he was going to sweep all of this away and rebuild human knowledge on the basis of reason starting from what he described as a few simple self-evident truths that he would be left with and of course we know what those simple self-evident truths they included the famous dictum I think therefore I am doesn't that sound a bit like the post monist I think therefore I am it's very inward looking it's very subjectivist notion well maybe superficially but here's the difference fundamentally Foucault says that he is also a skeptic he also takes a skeptical attitude towards and cast doubt on the received wisdom of his day but he is casting doubt on the possibility of science and of knowing the world whereas Descartes cast doubt on faith and superstition from the optimistic point of view that he could on the basis of reason come to understand the world now of course it's very easy to point to the limits of Descartes and his philosophy but it's completely and utterly they are the inverse they are the completely opposite of each other and I will also say this in answer to Federici Foucault was able to espouse his skeptical views towards science and reason from the comfy position of a university chair Descartes had to do so from self-imposed exile in France because his views were regarded as too dangerous in his day far from the state being the ones that carried out his views into practice his views were fundamental he earns the undying hatred of the church and of the established powers by elevating faith sorry reason over faith they completely despise these views and the church attempted to stamp them out for 60 years after his death it was forbidden to teach Descartes views not just in France but also in the Netherlands where he had a relatively free atmosphere relatively in those days and others amongst Descartes followers were even more were even bolder in their point of view these are the real continuators of the Enlightenment people like Spinoza now Descartes he famously believed of course that the world is separated in two he had a dualistic view he saw the material world as being very mechanical following the mechanical laws of motion but there's also another realm of spirit of thoughts basically and there was a separation between the two but his followers Spinoza completely abolished that separation and he believed there was only one substance in this world and yes it has the qualities that are describable by mechanical motion of speed, penetrability, extension and so on but it also has infinite other qualities including the possibility, the potential for thought and sensation and he called this one substance God or nature it was a kind of pantheism but it was a pantheism in form only because if you say that God is everything you're basically saying that God is nothing and this was dangerous stuff in those days if you just change in fact the word God or nature to matter you have a fully consistent worked out materialist point of view a materialist doctrine that was a consciously revolutionary in Spinoza's case a consciously revolutionary challenge to the religious authorities of his day particularly because as I say religion provided the justification of all of the regimes that dominated Europe and so it was a challenge to the state to hold an idea like this and let's listen to how Spinoza, these real brave revolutionary thinkers put things forward as it may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it to keep man deceived and to disguise the fear that sways them with the specious name of religion so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their own deliverance and will not think it's humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for the glorification of a single man now consider the context this was extremely revolutionary stuff and he was persecuted like all of these thinkers they were not the ones doing the persecuting they were not the totalitarian authoritarian thinkers these were fighters for human liberty prepared to pay the ultimate sacrifice and long after his death if you were denounced as a Spinozist in the 18th century that was tantamount to being called an atheist a materialist a republican democrat and a revolutionary a subversive an enemy of the state basically that was what it was to be a follower of Spinoza and the materialist spirit of men like Spinoza that was the spirit of the age it was a spirit that drew upon the great scientific advances of people like Galileo Kepler Newton and so forth it produced other materialist schools this age of enlightenment you had the English philosophers like Bacon Hobbes and Locke they were far from radicals Bacon in particular was he developed the philosophical basis for the scientific method but when these ideas were transferred to France where the Ancien regime had become so rotten the existing material conditions were demanding a criticism under enlightenment thought under the basis of reason and a materialist method it provided the source of tremendous revolutionary inspiration this materialist doctrine from Spinoza and from the English empiricists had an electrifying effect on the boldest thinkers in pre-revolutionary France and these thinkers you had among them men like Diderot they explained that there was no need for God to give us morality it's our material needs and our senses that explain our morality and it's the social well-being of society that creates the moral sense of what is right and wrong and Diderot used the example if you are blind the idea of indecent nudity is meaningless to you so clearly the senses have a lot to do with our morality there's nothing God given that makes it immoral to go around with no clothes on it's our material conditions our material reality and what conclusions did they come to people like Diderot on the basis of a materialist approach he didn't conclude that we need to turn workers into mechanisms for exploitation and so forth he concluded that slavery is immoral homosexuality is not immoral this in the middle of the 18th century incredible views for which he was sent to prison in 1749 and even after his release from prison he continued his work as did many of these revolutionary thinkers all working on this project called the Encyclopedia the aim of which was to gather all of the scientific knowledge across Europe and to use it like a giant torch to clear the fog of superstition they brought these ideas together there's incredible wits as well about these people how far they stand from these academics who are completely and utterly impenetrable they don't want to be read and they don't want to be understood Nietzsche in particular said I don't want to be understood they wrote it in black and white the modern academics don't want to be understood because they want to keep these ideas from the masses it's their academic preserve the plastics against whom the Enlightenment thinkers were fighting these people that were defenders of faith and superstition in the middle ages on the contrary these works are full of wit and verve there's so much life in these works of these great revolutionary thinkers of the French Enlightenment in fact in 1920 Lenin said we should republish the French materialist writings and redistribute them amongst the Russian workers and peasants because they are better atheists propaganda than nine-tenths of what we're capable of producing incredible stuff if you read two books at the end of this you should read the history of philosophy here and you should read Dallenbert's Dream by Diderot which is one of the most beautiful and astonishing expositions of materialism and very close to dialectics Diderot in particular came very close to a dialectical outlook far from being a totalitarian philosophy it was about human beings liberating themselves it was about dispelling superstition through works like the Encyclopedia they fervently hated aristocracy they hated inequality and injustice even when the capitalist class were guilty of it people like Holbach the great German materialist who lived in France he was of the same group he hated England okay not because he had any bitterness towards English people but because the rise of trade and industry had brought about tremendous inequality so they were bourgeois thinkers yes but they did not have bourgeois limitations these were extremely humanistic thinkers and revolutionaries and in fact it is directly towards French materialism that we can trace modern communism so it's in the enlightenment that we find the roots of our own tradition and after all the materialists were arguing it's not nature that makes men evil it's evil institutions and evil conditions that mould us that condition us and therefore if you want to create a heaven on earth you need to overthrow evil conditions and evil institutions it was a revolutionary philosophy is fundamentally what I'm saying and you even had some amongst them who believing they were applying pure reason to the material conditions arrived at the conclusion that there was no in the middle of the 18th century I'm not talking about the utopian socialist I'm talking about people like Abbey de Marbley okay who argued that there is nothing reason cannot erect an argument against redistributing property and introducing communism this was in the 18th century this is far advanced they were looking beyond the bourgeois revolution they were groping beyond that now it is of course it is of course of course we do have our criticisms of enlightenment thought the main limitation of enlightenment thinking was that it was metaphysical rather than dialectical by and large people like Diderot and certain writings why people like Rousseau they did contain elements of dialectics but the main limitation was precisely that as I said previously what was the main unifying theme of the enlightenment human beings are naturally endowed with reason but reason is not something that maybe we are all naturally endowed with the potential for reason but reason is something that has developed mankind gaining greater and greater control over nature and understanding over nature so it is a historically arrived that place it is not as if and this is the conclusion you could draw if you believe that human beings are endowed with reason all that would have been necessary would have been for some great thinkers to come along 300 years before and we could have had the enlightenment in the 14th century instead of the 18th century no they didn't understand things as a process of development they didn't see history historical development in particular was something that was a bit beyond their horizon because after all such was the development of science that even the earth itself was not regarded as having a history that people like Newton advocated that the earth had been spinning around the sun for all eternity and geology was in its infancy the idea that the earth has a history biology was even more in its infancy they were still collecting all of the data all of specifying the different species and genera and so forth in fact read that book by Diderot I highly recommend it he anticipates evolution they're groping beyond even the limits of their day he talks about the idea that species perhaps did have a history but they were limited by their day and in particular they were limited by the fact that the tasks posed before humanity were those of the bourgeois revolution and they could not go beyond the limits of their day they were materialistically analyzing man in the abstract right they were talking about man in the abstract the rights of man and so forth but in actual fact we were talking about specific men in a specific epoch in the bourgeois epoch and their ideas could only find realization of course in the bourgeois republic and in a new form of exploitation they couldn't have gone beyond that because there was no other force in society upon which they could base themselves so it had a certain abstract anti-dilectical character and in that sense the anti-enlightenment thinkers have all of the vices and none of the virtues of the Enlightenment because they lack dialectics even more so there aren't the brilliant elements of dialectics that you see in Diderot or Rousseau in these thinkers they are as I mentioned previously they don't understand the Enlightenment precisely because they don't have dialectics and they start from a subjective idealist point of view and it was precisely in the in the Enlightenment thinking that we find the roots of our own tradition of Marxism it's from French materialism that you have the birth of communism the great utopian socialists were directly inspired and based themselves on the philosophy of French materialism instead of feudalism being irrational they regarded capitalism as irrational and they critiqued it from that point of view that was a key source and inspiration of Marxism the great political economists Smith and Ricardo were men of the Enlightenment who for the first time subjected capitalism to a scientific analysis Marx just took that to its conclusion and of course the rediscovery of dialectics in the modern era can trace its roots through Kant into the German idealist tradition which is also fruit of the Enlightenment of the greatest thinkers that the bourgeois class has produced so we owe a direct debt of gratitude to Enlightenment philosophy and we defend it against those people that say forward to barbarism or they would do if they had any ounce of sincerity and honesty about them and yes I'll leave the last words now to Trotsky because I've gone to 45 minutes but I didn't go to 50 minutes and this is from his 1924 pamphlet literature and revolution and in it he's arguing against those communists in Russia who precisely wanted to discard all bourgeois culture in the name of a some sort of supposed proletarian culture that would start from zero which as I mentioned is precisely it's not how culture develops it's through negation of the negation and he explained the following and I think it's a very striking summary of what I'm trying to get across much better than I could express it he says if there had been no working class with its strikes, struggles, sufferings and revolts there would of course have been no scientific communism because there would have been no historical necessity for it but its theory was formed entirely on the basis of bourgeois culture both scientific and political though it declared a fight to the finish upon that culture under the pressure of capitalistic contradictions the universalizing thought of the bourgeois democracy of its boldest, most honest and most farsighted representatives rises to the height of a marvellous renunciation armed with all the critical weapons of bourgeois science such is the origin of Marxism that's all for this week's Marxist voice but before we go a few announcements if this talk piqued your interest then you should get a copy of Reason in Revolt from Wellread Books which shows how the advances in modern science like chaos theory, the human 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