aerdil posted:

just googled my alias and apparently i'm a character in skyrim fanfiction

"There are rumours your area has become sanctuary to criminals Aerdil."

Ah, Aerdil. The woman stood tall for her age, straight, rigid and proud in the face of the threat. Rumours circled that she had been quite a catch in her youth, fuelled by adrenaline and a hunger for lust. Now the creases in her skin only served to add weight to her presence, what she had lost in youth she had gained in wisdom and outright demanded in respect. Thick grey tendrils had been tamed into a plait that hung low past her waist and as the crisp clear voice of Aerdil rang out into the trees, Tai could not help but grin. Now THAT was a woman who could hold her own. Sneaking a glance to her right she noticed the same pride written over Saylens lips.

lol

stegosaurus posted:

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Militants-Pocket-Communism-Badiou/dp/1844679861/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_z?

that's.. coming out on my birthday. Heello fbi

getfiscal posted:

you know what's sort of funny (to me). reading about psychoanalysis has probably done a lot of the work in making me handle my anxiety and such better. like not much of the physical symptoms have changed but how i handle it has become significantly better in part because of lacanese junk. and i know it's probably half-understood junk but who cares.

for example, i often used to have panic attacks while talking to people because there are constant errors, slips, challenges and misunderstandings. and my brain would sort of slow down and try to work through each one. and once i realized that basically there was no way to avoid that chaotic stream of half-failures in communication i was able to communicate much more easily. and also the idea that people were engaged in a sort of critical dance to challenge me and assess me became much less frightening and then it became less troubling to play along.

beyond that i used to spend a lot of time thinking about meaning in life and such. and the only "solution" i had encountered was the existentialist idea that tends towards thinking that a stable self confronts an absurd world but that constructed meaning can be drawn from it. but the reality seems almost the opposite to me now. that is, the world makes complete sense, it has laws that it follows, but the self is basically an onion, you peel it away and there isn't anything left but the component parts. so the world isn't really absurd, it's more that we are, or rather all the things we desire sort of are insane. but like.... not really even that? like, they can be explained too... from a god's eye view you can know that you fell in love with someone because of some bizarre combination of psychological elements involved, but like, that doesn't really matter, who cares, just live your life!

getfiscal posted:

i read a bit by chantal mouffe yesterday and i think i finally am starting to get what my intuition about planning is (and related issues about althusser and her). basically its connected to rationalism. like planning is this idea that you can bring unity to society by rationally connecting production with consumption, but that's always going to be problematic because it requires a perfect unity between private and public purposes. and that's fine for most marxists because they imagine this total citizen which is wholly committed to planning acting in a sort of harmony and without alienation. but if you strip that away then you need to come up with much better arguments for planning which are rooted in very precise economic arguments and not just this intuition that planning is a natural extension of rationalist humanism. by all this i mean that the ideological intuition involved in most popular marxist arguments rests on this sort of belief in a well-ordered society, making it essentially a mirror image of rawlsian liberalism and such. and so althusser is better in that he focuses on the end of particular oppressions through class liberation, rather than a sort of perfect democratic order.

These two posts are completely contradictory. If consciousness is nothing more than an onion, composed of various hegemonic influences and neuroses, how could a man under communist society be anything but a "total citizen"? You're the only one projecting a humanistic impulse of man to resist totalization or coercion or whatever term you like.

swampman posted:

http://gayutopia.blogspot.com/2007/12/noah-berlatsky-fecund-horror_12.htmlThis

this is still good if anyone skipped it when it was originally posted. that's what i read today. and like two other bad books

getfiscal get a goodreads if you don't have one please i want to stalk your to-read & have-read and add a bunch of it to my to-read tia. everyone else too. i have finally bought into goodreads completely to manage bookreadings

drwhat posted:

i will assume that's you, thanks. thought that might be but i'm not cool enough to know everyone's non-posting names

that is indeed me.