Posts by Kracklite
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... and if I must define myself with a neat, tidy cryptotheological/epistemological/ideological label, perhaps it's as an Epicurean who half-heartedly thinks that he should be a Nihilist if he were honest, but also honestly can't be fagged with it and will settle for Absurdism as a stop-gap (see Camus for that one). Hic!
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Bleagh... grammatical mess that turned out to be. To much of Scotland's best-known exports again...
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I/S just said it better than I could.
I/S did indeed put it better than I could while I was off downloading some nice iPod apps (lightsaber effects, anyone?)
Marxism is certainly inherently authoritarian, in the same way that the catchphrase of all schoolyard bullies are authoritarians when they say "Don't piss me off or my Big Brother will beat you up."
Bullies will deny that they are bullies and claim that they are allied with some transcendent "good" - and they'll even believe it, which will only indicate that they've identified themselves completely with what they perceive as the toughest gang around. People will honestly believe that; it's called cognitive dissonance.
Orwell's devastatingly ironic point is that Big Brother need not exist in a corporeal sense at all - all the Party needs is the idea of Big Brother to personify "historical inevitability" (called by Robespierre and the like, "Providence" and by others "necessity" and Thatcherites, TINA - "There Is No Alternative". Alasdair Gray makes a nice play with it in his novella, "Five Letters From an Eastern Empire" where the Emperor is literally a puppet, treated by everyone as if he were a real man made immortal.
I've always found so-called libertarians of both the Left and the Right either disingenuous or self-deluding for the reasons above. Marxism's God may be an abstract, nonpersonal one, but it brings with it its Apocalypse (revolution) and it's New Jerusalem (the dictatorship of the proletariat) just like any other cult. I'll stick "market forces" and whatever gibberish the Scientologists use in the same category as "historical inevitability" too.
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Less Cosa Nostra than Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea, surely? ("Don't call me Shirley")
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"The Romantic Sublime and The Silence of the Lambs" may seem like a too-accurate parody of pretentious postmodernism, but actually I have found that I could talk to students about the Byronic anti-hero and get blank looks and then get appreciative nods when I brought up Hannibal Lecter and related him to Dracula as an example of the charismatic nominal villain whom one wants to see get away with their crimes. So, yeah... just have to mix the language and examples I guess.
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sounds attached as labels to various phenomena without any actual comprehension of the concepts and signification.
Or in pub talk, people talking shit.
...yes, maybe I do need subtitles to translate the academese.
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More seriously, David (does the P in hD stand for Pol)...
As a very old academic joke has it, PhD stands for "Piled Higher and Deeper" (as in books, notes, pizza boxes and unwashed dishes).
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Hypothesis, and as such, hypothetical: Perigo+undiagnosesd stroke=Phineas Gage?
Danielle:
I can, boringly, list several US historians who were all Marxists in the sixties and seventies and now faff on about the wonders of authoritarian militarism and manifest destiny.
Truebelievers: they have a lot to answer for.While I disagree with some points of John Gray's Black Mass, I do agree with his point that that Marxism is just like any authoritarian cult. While Marxism is nominally distinct from right-wing authoritarianism or neoconservatism or libertarianism, they are essentially authoritarian social darwinism and there is no essential shift from the authoritarian, deterministic pattern or mindset of Marxism to those ideologies. If a certain kind of mind that is incapable of dealing with ambiguities and uncertainties or compromise become disenchanted with the contradictions of one authoritarian deterministic system and adopt anothe that is equally so with far more ease than they would one that is vague, ambiguous, compromising according to their basic way of thinking.
Yes, I do regard libertarianism as an authoritarian system because it is (to me at least) a mythology based on "might is right... and lucky me, I happen to be mighty."
"Survival of the fittest", by the way, was not invented by Darwin. As one Darwinist biologist of my acquaintance put it, Darwinism could more accurately be put as "survival of the least inadequate."
Kyle:
Meh, historians, they don't count.
"Even God could not change the past, and so He created historians." - Voltaire
(pretentious quote serving as observation, no more)
Craig:
I've been reading it for years, Idiot, and you can go sit in the naughty corner with Perigo and stop being such a precious little toddler.
OFGS, chill out! There's "balance" and there's the search for equivalence which can sometimes get absurd. As far as I'm concerned, Perigo and his hysterical friends are not to be placed on some neat, orderly spectrum - I think even the right can reject his coprolalia (coprographia?) as symptomatic of a severe personality disorder without having to feel that ground has been conceded to the left.
David:
The same meaningless phrases over-and-over: "political correctness", "nanny state", etc. with almost no attempt at analysis or reference to fact.
Dunno if this is relevant, or if I can quite articulate my meaning, but the language that David refers too is something that is actually less language in the sense that something is comprehended and communication is established in order to further comprehension in others than simply the attachment of labels. I mean, one of the criticisms of Irene Pepperberg's work with Alex the parrot was that in fact Alex was in some cases at least, using sounds attached as labels to various phenomena without any actual comprehension of the concepts and signification. Scatological language os not by its nature logical or consistent or refering to anything specifically or directly, but serves the purpose of engendering shock and disgust at the base level, therefore it does not need to be meaningful or logical in any other way. Ie., as you say, it is duckspeak, of a particular kind.
Wossname:
Frankly, the research was pissweak -- but that's all that's needed at universities these days.
Cheap shot - which is all someone with a poverty of intellect can afford. Try succeeding at a university, see how hard it really is and maybe I'll take you seriously. Yes, academics use obscure language. So do musicians and dentists (chromaticism, impaction?), because what they say has to be precise within its context. I'll take the piss myself, but philistine know-nothingism with a gloss of "Eh, in my day..." rhetoric from the Four Yorkshiremen sketch is indeed a thoroughly hollow pose.
For the record, teaching someone all the words to The Red Flag by making her skull every time she made a mistake is NOT the most effective teaching technique
Maybe not, Emma, but it sounds a lot more fun than Migram's (in)famous experiment.
And I wonder if Tom Scott would ever follow the lead of Gerald Scarfe... etc
Craig, please! The language these people use is simply pathological. The search for some sort of equivalence is absurd under the circumstances. "Question, worth 40% of total test score: Was Stalin was as bad as/worse than Hitler?" Really, at certain levels, nit-picking which act of vileness scores more decimal increments on the mephistometer is meaningless.
Sorry about the apparent Godwining, but my defence, M'lud, is that I haven't in fact Godwined the discussion, but rather reinforced Godwin's principle by asserting, as he did, that hyperbole is pointless.
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... or, irrelevantly, the truly eldritch but inevitable Hello Cthulhu. Sadly, not updated for a while.
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* MR does become rather repetitive, if you listen to it for more than 20 minutes
Actually, that's deliberate, I think. One, it allows follow-up and two - the main one, the one that is two, that is, I mean my second point but the more important one, even though it's not numerically one - it's aimed at people getting up, showering, eating breakfast, commuting who will only get 20-minute bites - but different bites, like a radio CNN.
As for much of the rest said, I'll have to utter a sturdy "Baaaa" and join the flock. Tend to agree/disagree over this and that as a pathetic attempt to convince myself that I'm an individual.
What is it with aging males? Is advanced testosterone poisoning what I have to look forward to? That high gallery window at the Boullee exhibition opening is looking awfully tempting.
Cthulhu
Hey, it's election year - why choose a lesser evil? Neil Gaiman's take is here.
Personally, I'm tempted to vote for the Great Race of Yith; they appreciate the importance of forward planning. Pity about them being Australian, though...