kinch posted:The Black Forest comprises primary forest of the Second Hemisphere. The exact dimensions and makeup of The Black Forest are unknown. The Black Forest is estimated to encompass 144,000 hectares of width and 144,000 hectares of length although the exact boundaries of this forest remain undiscovered. Each hectare contains 30 wolves. Every fifth hectare contains a village. Every ninth hectare contains a Ruin. Every twentieth hectare contains an entrance to the grotto. Every twenty-fifth hectare contains a Ziggurat forming focal point for all wolf distribution in surrounding sector. The thick sludge of the forest floor is highly prized by peasants and ascetics. The trees of the Black Forest emit a toxic gas when chopped or burnt, making them unusable for any task. This is all currently established information about The Black Forest.
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationdhip of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing. They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away. Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
You feel a benign presence enter your brain... "I can see you still have a lot of questions about the pyramid! Ha ha ha... The impetuousness of Youth... But this old man will do his best to explain. What is Crystal Pyramid? The length of each side in Crystal Pyramid is Infinite. The total height to Crystal Pyramid is Infinite. The absolute area encompassed by Crystal Pyramid is Infinite. There are Infinite corners to the pyramid although a maximum of four can be seen at any moment. Now do you understand? The positions occupied by Crystal Pyramid consist of All Positions. The Crystal Pyramid is hollow and the walls are Infinitely thin. The concept of externality is alien to Crystal Pyramid. The age of Crystal Pyramid is Infinite Age and the place it comes from is Infinite Place. All skeletons represent a side of Crystal Pyramid. There are Infinite sides. The aim of skeletons is to produce Infinite skeletons in order to attain the grace of the Pyramid. Well, I hope this answers all your questions." The voice recedes...
Whos this
The pitiful man, who works in development and design at the Seattle-based software company Woot, told reporters he takes time out of every day to “promote and further brand” and to extend his “social and online presence.”
“I am my own product,” the little worm said while staring at a laptop and depressingly shuffling between his Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Tumblr accounts, which he claimed are “essential tools for growing personal brand” on a daily basis. “I think of myself as the creator, developer, and marketer of Brand Phillip Cathin. And the ideas I come up with are products produced by that brand.”
“It’s sort of like I’m the CEO of the company called ‘Me,’” continued the sad excuse for a man, briefly pausing to check for any comments on his latest Tumblr post about the future of social media. “And right now, I’m defining my company’s story, style, and strengths so that people can see what I’m about and what I have to offer.”
Cathin, who sees his worthless daily blog posts, endless Facebook status updates, and aggravating Foursquare check-ins as “extensions of his brand name,” confirmed that he spends the majority of his miserable days attempting to leverage his 627 Twitter followers into a larger web network of “brand consumers.”
The unbelievably tragic man also stated that everything he does, from social interactions to visits with his family, essentially serves to continue building his brand.
“It’s all about getting people to hear my voice, and having them recognize that voice as a valuable commodity,” said Cathin, heartbreakingly noting that his work experience, family background, and education made his perspective “unique.” “Ultimately, I think I can get people talking about me and seeing the many elements of who I am. That’s the only way my product can be seen by everyone.”
“The way I see it, your personal brand is an investment,” the hopeless man added. “And I’m definitely planning on making the most out of that investment.”
The poor soul then began talking about “the innumerable challenges of keeping brand fresh” as helpless reporters could take no more and walked away.
animedad posted:baudrillard is such bullshit. he's like an annoying pothead
mods namechange me to foucaults pendulum, baudrillards skrillex
cleanhands posted:i spent a week in puglia walking round crusader castles and churches etc and would like to know a good book about the knights templar, from a schizoanalytic perspective if poss, tia
here are some good books on various crusades:
http://www.amazon.com/Northern-Crusades-Second-Eric-Christiansen/dp/0140266534/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354220215&sr=1-1&keywords=the+northern+crusades
http://www.amazon.com/The-Occitan-War-Political-Albigensian/dp/0521123658/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354220179&sr=8-1&keywords=Occitan+war
http://www.amazon.com/Byzantium-Decline-John-Julius-Norwich/dp/0679416501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354220430&sr=8-1&keywords=Byzantium+%28III%29%3A+The+Decline+and+Fall
http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Chronicle-Conquest-Constantinople-ebook/dp/B008484K74/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354220503&sr=1-1&keywords=Memoirs+or+Chronicle+of+the+Fourth+Crusade+and+the+Conquest+of+Constantinople
http://www.amazon.com/History-Crusades-Vol-Foundations-Jerusalem/dp/052134770X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354220598&sr=1-1&keywords=A+History+of+the+Crusades%2C+Vol.+I%3A+The+First+Crusade+and+the+Foundations+of+the+Kingdom+of+Jerusalem
All you need to know about the first crusade is Bohemond. Bohemond was straight up gangsta
These two are good too for Medieval Sicilian history:
http://www.amazon.com/Kingdom-1130%C2%961194-John-Julius-Norwich/dp/0571260446/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354220676&sr=1-1&keywords=the+kingdom+in+the+sun
http://www.amazon.com/Norman-Conquest-Southern-Italy-Sicily/dp/0786414723/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354220750&sr=8-1&keywords=conquest+of+sicily
Bablu posted:i've got like science examsin ten days but instead in a week i finished a frolic of his own, the coming insurrection, a brief history of neoliberalism, the age of revolution, and i'm thinking of starting more books
im also reading the age of revolution. i got the whole hobsbawm series lined up
swirlsofhistory posted:Is a brief history of neoliberalism any good? I was supposed to read it for a course but didn't bother, and it's still sitting on my shelf. Looks pretty thin so that's a plus.
it's a book about economics by a geographer so yeah it's probably really well versed in the material
getfiscal posted:maybe study for science exams
ten days is like a month away dude
swirlsofhistory posted:Is a brief history of neoliberalism any good? I was supposed to read it for a course but didn't bother, and it's still sitting on my shelf. Looks pretty thin so that's a plus.
its good, read it!
getfiscal posted:swirlsofhistory posted:Is a brief history of neoliberalism any good? I was supposed to read it for a course but didn't bother, and it's still sitting on my shelf. Looks pretty thin so that's a plus.
it's a book about economics by a geographer so yeah it's probably really well versed in the material
jeez, i wonder what the hell geography may have to do with the economy, oh well, guess we'll never know
Crow posted:jeez, i wonder what the hell geography may have to do with the economy, oh well, guess we'll never know
For some really eye-opening info about how geography was really important to the development of peoples, I recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Bablu posted:i've got like science examsin ten days but instead in a week i finished a frolic of his own, the coming insurrection, a brief history of neoliberalism, the age of revolution, and i'm thinking of starting more books
The Coming Insurrection lmao
HenryKrinkle posted:http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/14/professor-defends-stalin-socialism-at-student-organized-debate/
I love how the response from the "libertarian" (Furr is the "liberal" in the debate) is a misattributed quote. Wish I was a conservative academic or talk show personality, seems so easy.
aerdil posted:just got done talking about lacan, marx, etc. w/ some fellow students at a little get together. it's a shame theyre all too normal to post here.
you can make accounts for your headmates, its fine
babyhueypnewton posted:Bablu posted:i've got like science examsin ten days but instead in a week i finished a frolic of his own, the coming insurrection, a brief history of neoliberalism, the age of revolution, and i'm thinking of starting more books
The Coming Insurrection lmao
yes, agreed, lmao
My wife teaches French to tenth-grade students at a private school here in Mumbai. During one recent class, she asked these mostly upper-middle-class kids to complete the sentence “J'admire …” with the name of the historical figure they most admired.
To say she was disturbed by the results would be to understate her reaction. Of 25 students in the class, 9 picked Adolf Hitler, making him easily the highest vote-getter in this particular exercise; a certain Mohandas Gandhi was the choice of precisely one student. Discussing the idea of courage with other students once, my wife was startled by the contempt they had for Gandhi. “He was a coward!” they said. And as far back as 2002, the Times of India reported a survey that found that 17 percent of students in elite Indian colleges “favored Adolf Hitler as the kind of leader India ought to have.”
In a place where Gandhi becomes a coward, perhaps Hitler becomes a hero.
Still, why Hitler? “He was a fantastic orator,” said the 10th-grade kids. “He loved his country; he was a great patriot. He gave back to Germany a sense of pride they had lost after the Treaty of Versailles,” they said.
"And what about the millions he murdered?” asked my wife. “Oh, yes, that was bad,” said the kids. “But you know what, some of them were traitors.”
Admiring Hitler for his oratorical skills? Surreal enough. Add to that the easy condemnation of his millions of victims as traitors. Add to that the characterization of this man as a patriot. I mean, in a short dozen years, Hitler led Germany through a scarcely believable orgy of blood to utter shame and wholesale destruction. Even the mere thought of calling such a man a patriot profoundly corrupts—is violently antithetical to—the idea of patriotism.
But these are kids, you think, and kids say the darndest things. Except this is no easily written-off experience. The evidence is that Hitler has plenty of admirers in India, plenty of whom are by no means kids.
Consider Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. Reviled it might be in the much of the world, but Indians buy thousands of copies of it every month. As a recent paper in the journal EPW tells us (PDF), there are over a dozen Indian publishers who have editions of the book on the market. Jaico, for example, printed its 55th edition in 2010, claiming to have sold 100,000 copies in the previous seven years. (Contrast this to the 3,000 copies my own 2009 book, Roadrunner, has sold). In a country where 10,000 copies sold makes a book a bestseller, these are significant numbers.
And the approval goes beyond just sales. Mein Kampf is available for sale on flipkart.com, India’s Amazon. As I write this, 51 customers have rated the book; 35 of those gave it a five-star rating. What’s more, there’s a steady trickle of reports that say it has become a must-read for business-school students; a management guide much like Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese or Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking. If this undistinguished artist could take an entire country with him, I imagine the reasoning goes, surely his book has some lessons for future captains of industry?
Much of Hitler’s Indian afterlife is the legacy of Bal Thackeray, chief of the Shiv Sena party who died on Nov. 17.
Thackeray freely, openly, and often admitted his admiration for Hitler, his book, the Nazis, and their methods. In 1993, for example, he gave an interview to Time magazine. “There is nothing wrong,” he said then, “if Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany.”
This interview came only months after the December 1992 and January 1993 riots in Mumbai, which left about a thousand Indians slaughtered, the majority of them Muslim. Thackeray was active right through those weeks, writing editorial after editorial in his party mouthpiece, “Saamna” (“Confrontation”) about how to “treat” Muslims.
On Dec. 9, 1992, for example, his editorial contained these lines: “Pakistan need not cross the borders and attack India. 250 million Muslims in India will stage an armed insurrection. They form one of Pakistan’s seven atomic bombs.”
A month later, on Jan. 8, 1993, there was this: “Muslims of Bhendi Bazar, Null Bazar, Dongri and Pydhonie, the areas we call Mini Pakistan … must be shot on the spot.”
There was plenty more too: much of it inspired by the failed artist who became Germany’s führer. After all, only weeks before the riots erupted, Thackeray said this about the führer’s famous autobiography: “If you take Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in.”
With rhetoric like that, it’s no wonder the streets of my city saw the slaughter of 1992-93. It’s no wonder kids come to admire a mass-murderer, to rationalize away his massacres. It’s no wonder they cling to almost comically superficial ideas of courage and patriotism, in which a megalomaniac’s every ghastly crime is forgotten so long as we can pretend that he “loved” his country.
In his acclaimed 1997 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen writes: “Hitler, in possession of great oratorical skills, was the Party’s most forceful public speaker. Like Hitler, the party from its earliest days was devoted to the destruction of … democracy most especially and relentlessly, anti-Semitism. … The Nazi Party became Hitler’s Party, obsessively anti-Semitic and apocalyptic in its rhetoric about its enemies.”
Do some substitutions in those sentences along the lines Thackeray wanted to do with Mein Kampf. Indeed, what you get is a more than adequate description of … no surprise, Thackeray himself.
Yes, it’s no wonder. Thackeray too was revered as an orator. Cremated, on Nov. 18, as a patriot.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/30/hitler-s-strange-afterlife-in-india.html?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_campaign=cheatsheet_morning&cid=newsletter%3Bemail%3Bcheatsheet_morning&utm_term=Cheat%20Sheet