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i bet it's real, and it's probably going to be fairly effective, too
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Mar 2, 2015 20:16
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Well, you would, but life is full of disappointments. Like, I still meet people going "Challenge accepted" unironically
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Mar 2, 2015 20:24
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PiCroft posted:Given a choice of Doge and "Long term economic plan", I think the choice is obvious. the only economic plans worth mentioning are plans for the next half decade i like to call them five-year plans
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Mar 2, 2015 22:17
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Also, Mao was personally a very impressive individual in a lot of ways dude was really sharp, also strong-willed, devious and charismatic
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Mar 3, 2015 14:25
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Prince John posted:I was watching a documentary about your namesake last night, and apparently he whizzed through a three year law degree in a single year. Smart cookie. Oh yeah, Lenin was one of those people you can read and just *feel* the intelligence of. I very rarely feel completely out of my depth reading even very clever people, but reading Lenin is a very humbling experience. I think it's because he's not a really super cryptic (like Wittgenstein or many continentals) or especially dense in his prose (Hegel, looking at you), so he just lays his analysis open in a way that makes it look completely obvious without obscuring his work. He was very much a product of his time, but I think he might be my favourite prose writer from a reader's perspective - he just hits that sweet spot of sophistication, erudition and straightforwardness for me. More so than even guys like Sartre or Russel, for whatever reason.
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Mar 3, 2015 14:39
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Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder is very good, it's maybe the single most valuable document for assessing the theoretical justifications for the early development of the Soviet Union. I very much enjoy Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which is probably Lenin's most original philosophical work. Other than that, What Is To Be Done and State and Revolution are, being the biggest "classics", also good for understanding Lenin's thinking. I understand he's got a textbook on the materialist dialectic, but I can't comment on that as I haven't read it. Beyond that, he's got a lot of essays (some terribly dated) and various commentary on contemporary political issues. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is also a really good summary of the "orthodox" Marxist view on the relation between, well, imperialism and capitalism as such, and a major theoretical contribution. Lenin's most important works are fairly esoteric, and he is really fond of Engels, but they can be read on their own. I particularly like his sick beatdowns on people - he writes some absolutely savage polemics. Find anything about Bernstein, or Kautsky after the outbreak of the Great War - his writing just drips of venom. e. oh hey, look how beaten i got
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Mar 3, 2015 15:25
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StoneOfShame posted:I would move away from the Marxists and read something like Bourdieu's Distinction for a more nuanced understanding of class structure than the Marxist one or perhaps some Foucault for a philosophical framework that offers a great place to critique the framework of Marxism that relies heavily on metanarratives. die pomo scum
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Mar 3, 2015 17:26
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For real, though, Foucault is great, but I do think it's good to have an understanding of the subject of a critique prior to the critique itself, and Lenin is both entertaining and lucid as a writer. Also Foucault really loved him some Marxism, so eh
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Mar 3, 2015 17:28
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I could never get the hang of Lukacs. Everyone says he's great, but all I can see is that duck cartoon that says "Liberals" over and over again, only saying "realism"
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Mar 3, 2015 17:34
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Disinterested posted:Ya well Luxemburg and Gramschi then. These do indeed own, I embarrassingly only really "got" the state of being of the capitalist (i.e. that it's a social function, not necessarily a specific dude) after reading Luxemburg's Reform or Revolution, and Gramsci is just magical. StoneOfShame posted:Oh totally, I was assuming some familiarity with Marxism already as Zizek was mentioned so I was just dropping what I would consider the best alternative view. Foucault is odd in the sense that he did love Marxism but his work often seemed to disagree with the core philosophy of it and you almost get the feeling that he didn't always want to agree with what his work showed him. He also often spoke of things different to what he spoke much more in an activist role than a strictly academic one, the guy owned. Bourdieu is also something that no one should overlook his analysis of social order and the role of language and culture constructing power arrangements as well as economic capital doing so is fascinating, just good luck with the 200 word sentences! Confession time: I have only ever read secondary sources re: Bourdieu. I keep telling myself that I'll get on him some day and just not doing it. I think the complicated relationship of Foucault and Marxism is similar to his relationship with modernity in general - on one hand, I have always seen him as the last of the great modernists, on the other he's clearly at least a precursor to what we call post-modernism in his methods. It is very confusing. I'd tend to see him as a heterodox Marxist and his critique as a basically internal one rather than as a fundamental rebuttal of the whole Marxian project, but ymmv. I am also not an expert on Foucault, so take it with a grain of salt.
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Mar 3, 2015 17:44
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Disinterested posted:Foucault's aspirations are a bit different to Marx's though, obviously; Foucault's dominant categories are power, knowledge, and discourse. He's much more invested in how people think than Marx is, really. He definitely doesn't have the scientism of the orthodox Marxist. Oh, yeah, I don't think this is even contestable. The question is whether Foucault's methods or project contradict the underlying Marxian programme, and I don't think it does.
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Mar 3, 2015 17:52
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If you say so, I guess. I suppose I tend to think the whole "metanarrative" point is one that tends to be overstated, both for how destructive the critique is and for how fundamental it really is to the central premises of marxism, but I really am a little exposed when discussing Foucault, so I won't argue the point.
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Mar 3, 2015 18:07
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OK, so how do you use that as a critique of e.g. the historical-materialist approach as such? Do you outright reject the notion of historical "progress"? That doesn't seem reasonable, IMO. Like, I get that Foucault does different things than simply restating or elaborating on an original Marxian basis. I don't get how it contradicts that basis, in the sense that one cannot coherently use both modes of analysis simultaneously. Of course Foucault will be used to interrogate Marxian narratives as much as other ones, but my point is that interrogation does not necessarily mean a fundamental rejection of the premises. To put it in dialectical terms, a critique may negate the original thesis without fundamentally being alien to that thesis - certainly I can accept that a lot of the relatively high-level stuff in Marx's view of history, escathology etc., must be rejected by a consistent Foucauldian, but I don't see a basic rejection of the Marxist/Marxian programme as such is necessary, if that makes sense.
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Mar 3, 2015 18:22
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Eh, keeping this whole debate thing alive isn't the dumbest thing Milliband has done. He might possibly be more elegant about it, but Cameron's whinging on this is probably the easiest attack in existence. It's an opportunity to establish Cameron as weak, and a very rare opportunity for Milliband to appear strong. He really wants this to have legs.
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Mar 8, 2015 13:05
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yo why is lily allen a monster? i enjoy her music, want to know why she is actually terrible
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Mar 9, 2015 16:18
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ok i won't i dunno, you lot are uk-ers and i've read stuff indicating that people think she's a poo poo in previous iterations of the thread, i'm just curious as to why that would be
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Mar 9, 2015 16:20
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Pesmerga posted:In this thread, that could be anything from drowning puppies through to the wrong flavour of monster munch. I'm not sure in her case though. yeah i know, but often this thread actually knows things that i don't, so 
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Mar 9, 2015 16:25
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Coohoolin posted:I like Lily Allen (she did a "gently caress you coalition" song last year) but she got some flak for a music video that was a bit poo poo about black women's body images, having a go at them for having "big booty" or whatever it was. oh come on that song literally spelled out that it was sarcastic in the lyrics
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Mar 9, 2015 16:33
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Coohoolin posted:Hey, I didn't say I agreed, just that it happened. It's the only negative thing I can remember associated with Lily Allen so if you wanna jump around to Smile on your way to work feel free man. i would do this anyway, i'm just curious and this seemed like the place to ask like, if i only listened to pop made by Correct artists i'd hardly listen to anything
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Mar 9, 2015 16:51
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you know spangly a i am starting to suspect you might be a bit of a misanthrope
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Mar 9, 2015 17:28
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Pissflaps posted:I think you have some weird pro Lily Allen agenda. i have been found out! curses
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Mar 9, 2015 17:30
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the jury stuff is bullshit, though, romania deserved to win in 2013
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Mar 9, 2015 22:11
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Geokinesis posted:Links to various article I remember seeing about it. they aren't very charitable in their readings, are they
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Mar 9, 2015 23:50
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tooterfish posted:Here you go! tony benn tried to warn you, but you did not heed him! you did not deserve tony benn
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Mar 12, 2015 11:28
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LemonDrizzle posted:it's not like atlas shrugged is on school reading lists or read by anybody other than libertarian turbonerds who think wearing bow ties makes them look sophisticated, i don't really think it's doing a whole lot of damage to the world also the finance minister of norway has it as her favourite book so y'know
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Mar 12, 2015 23:26
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you can read the first two or three pages of atlas shrugged and get a feel for it - apart from galt's absurd speech, it's basically the same all the way, with no pacing or anything to speak of. i don't mind rand's prose, tbh, it works for what she wants it to even if she sounds evil and incredibly angry all the time. it is a mediocre novel apart from That Speech, which makes it bad. it's better than, like, fifty shades of grey, which is so shoddily written sentence-wise that i had to force myself to finish even the tiny bit i decided to read
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Mar 13, 2015 00:01
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Darth Walrus posted:If you're looking for definitions of race and ethnicity that weren't pseudoscientific messes cooked up by racists to further their agendas, I've got some bad news for you. some definitions were made by people who wanted to figure out if it was actually a Thing, though turns out it mostly isn't
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Mar 13, 2015 16:41
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Pissflaps posted:Is this based on the idea that somebody would vote for Labour in the hope that they'd form a formal coalition with the SNP? How does that work? it's more, i think, that labour is further alienating the SNP and thus anyone who sympathises in any way with them (which is probably most scots) will have less reason to vote labour basically, scots have had a nagging feeling that they're a very long way from westminster already, and this just reinforces that feeling. is the theory.
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Mar 16, 2015 14:54
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no, alienating scots by saying they don't want anything to do with the party perceived as the Scottish Party the alternative would've been "we're up for it if the snp goes along with [apparently reasonable demands that the snp isn't going to go for]", which would've signalled that yes, they take scotland and the representatives of scotland seriously and it's scotland rejecting those premises rather than westminster looking down on scotland that the snp already ruled out cooperation only gave labour a safe opportunity to pain themselves as the reasonable party, which they chose not to take, either because they're incompetent or because they reckoned that it would make them look weak in some other way that would more than balance out any goodwill gained in scotland it's not about the substance, it's about the message
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Mar 16, 2015 15:04
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Pissflaps posted:I suspect that a Scot who identifies with the SNP as being 'the Scottish Party' is likely to be voting for them already. you're being obtuse, and i don't know if that's deliberate or because you genuinely don't see the power dynamics going on here the snp is a regionalist party, and even people who don't support them for policy reasons will tend to identify them with the region, and thus with disrespect towards that party as disrespect for the region - this has little to do the snp in particular, and more to do with regionalist parties as such - people who didn't support the IRA were horrified at the treatment of Bobby Sands as a symbol of ireland. basically, if you have a feeling that you're marginalised for [reason], the marginalisation of people who specifically represent [the reason] is going to make you uneasy even if you don't support that party. so, communists might get uneasy about the larger communist party in a country being banned, even if they belonged to a different communist sect or whatever
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Mar 16, 2015 15:12
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Jose posted:You're blowing this massively out of proportion no, i'm not saying that it's a huge thing, i'm explaining the mechanisms by which it is a thing at all, however minor, because pissflaps appeared not to understand what i was getting at i don't think this is, by itself, going to make any significant difference, but it's part of an ongoing theme
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Mar 16, 2015 15:24
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francis urquhart set him up
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Mar 23, 2015 13:08
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tbf i'd really appreciate it if people would stop bloody applauding at political conferences all the time, it is really tiresome jazz hands seems like a good way to make "spontaneous" applause too awkward to engage in
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Mar 25, 2015 12:47
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for real, though, there's a tendency towards people wanting acceptance and accommodation for weakness rather than trying to overcome it in general, and i don't know how i feel about that like, i'm all about fixing structural issues so people have a fair shake, but getting upset about completely innocuous, everyday phenomena is seriously your own problem. i'm terrified of heights, but this doesn't mean i get to demand that any conference i take part in be on the ground floor or w/e
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Mar 25, 2015 13:02
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re: race and gender: gender is a high-level ideological concept based off of sex, which is a Real Biological Thing - both "man" and "woman" are unquestionably valid categories (they may or may not be the only valid sexual categories, but they are valid) so, gender roles are built on objective realities. some people genuinely don't see themselves as belonging to the gender corresponding to their sex, and so should probably be met with measures helping this out. there's a lot of biological weirdness around transgenderism, but there are at least some neurological indications that some people literally have central nervous systems with gender-dimorphic features belonging to the opposite sex to which they are born. race is pure identity. it's something we make up and then construct our definitions to justify after the fact. it is a rubbish concept. so when someone claims to be another race, it's purely grabbing another identity this is also why it's totally ok to make fun of super-weird paraphilias and otherkin etc and not, like, gay people
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Mar 25, 2015 16:13
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African AIDS cum posted:Sickle cell anemia is a social construct see, this is what i'm talking about by constructing the definition of race after the fact
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Mar 25, 2015 16:21
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racial realism itt what would you say is the general biological definition of "race", forums poster african aids cum
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Mar 25, 2015 16:25
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like, is "black" a race? is "caribbean black" a race? are sephardic jews and arabs racially different? what about slavs, are they a distinct race from roumanians
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Mar 25, 2015 16:27
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African AIDS cum posted:Yes, no, yes, yes so ethiopians and xhosa people are the same race, i assume my point is it's very difficult to construct a biological definition of "race" that is consistent with your answers here which is not explicitly made up in order to conform with the basically arbitrary racial categories we're already operating with (type phrenology, skin colour whatever)
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Mar 25, 2015 16:28
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Pissflaps posted:As a white male I'd find it problematic to dismiss race as a construct because in doing so i'm also dismissing racism. much like ur posting
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Mar 25, 2015 16:31
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