#8681
Post rating: +
i studied history at state and asked my vietnam professor after class if we would address Chomsky's (and I'm sure other's) concept that vietnam posed the "threat of a good example" and i had to explain to him what that was as he looked at me like im from outer space

i guess school isnt the place for ideas like that
#8682
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +++++
my professor for a senior seminar on terrorism wrote her first monograph about a russian socialist who shot and injured a brutal governor. in an interview she was asked if she sympathized with the socialist and she was like "uhh, no, of course not, she shot someone".

my military history professor was a retired lieutenant colonel and he did this thing during the first class where people gave their opinion by a show of hands about various military policy questions (2002 i think) and i was one of the only people who opposed the afghan war and i was a member of the conservative party. he was smart and critical but like... a liberal military officer.

another professor i had for french history wrote a book that argued that the solution to france's problems was to liberalize the economy much more but also somewhat increase funding for certain social programs. he was featured in the economist.

one politics professor i had commented that students protesting the rise in tuition should probably just get in line at the unemployment office.

every economics professor i had was a liberal who would add asides about why socialism failed and then go back to teaching purestrain neoclassical econ. my last economics professor was a catholic priest who opened his class by disproving marx using the diamond-water paradox.

i had a few professors that were socialists but they were all on the extreme liberal side of things. so i don't really trust academics at some level.
#8683
Post rating: +
Lmao. I learned the is-lm model from minqi Li. Most of my history professors, especially the self proclaimed orthodox Marxist who a few classes later said that one good thing bush had done was repeal the capital gains tax, were liberals though.
#8684
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
i had a neo-gramscian international political economy professor who basically blew my tiny mind with marxist ideas that took years to work their way through the gears up there. he claimed to be in correspondence with fred durst of limp bizkit, who he said was very interested in radical social theory.
#8685
Post rating: +
the fred durst center for humanities and the arts is one of the most important buildings in austin texas
#8686
Post rating: +
i had an economics prof who was a card carrying davos man establishment neoliberal (harvard phd, worked at the imf, world bank, major financial institutions) and he insisted on teaching marx. when some of the business students sort of guffawed at having to do marx he was like "marx could be right. how do you know that he's wrong? i don't. and marxism isn't dead, people. my buddy leo panitch up at york has still got a giant lenin portrait in his office."
#8687
Poronto
Post rating: +
none of my professors expressed any opinions on politics or economics whatsoever in class. seems like you guys fell in with some really inappropriate ideologues
#8688
Poronto
Post rating: ~
look communism is either right or it isn't. either way trying to think or talk about it seems at best irrelevant and useless and more than likely counterproductive
#8689
Post rating: +

djbk posted:

I listen to Richard wolff regularly, you guys have any other 'theory' or 'decline of merica' podcasts?


#8690
Post rating: +++++
I also went to school and was smarter than everyone there even the professors cool how we all ended up on the same website.
#8691
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +

tentativelurkeraccount posted:

djbk posted:

I listen to Richard wolff regularly, you guys have any other 'theory' or 'decline of merica' podcasts?

imagine... you could be looking at this

#8692
Post rating: ~

littlegreenpills posted:

look capitalism is either right or it isn't. either way trying to think or talk about it seems at best irrelevant and useless and more than likely counterproductive


ftfy

"purestrain neoclassical" can i have my username changed to this

#8693
Post rating: ~

Keven posted:

I also went to school and was smarter than everyone there even the professors cool how we all ended up on the same website.


Agreed.

#8694
Post rating: +
my profs to date have each and every one been ardent stalinists, which is why i post on the rhizzone, a forum for stalinists
#8695
Post rating: ~
i never really knew what my professors' politics were in undergrad, just what they thought about a bunch of dead gay writers and their works

also i was stoned all the time, even when i went to class
#8696
Post rating: ~
I didn't ask his politics, I just wondered if we were going to spend all semester on figuring out very basic stuff you'd be able to put together by having any decent understanding of colonial history. (The answer was yes, this class is basically a Vietnamese literature and culture class, despite being about the Vietnam war)

*Vietnam viewed Ho Chi Minh as a national hero and they had a long history of being conquered*

My problem is more about removing things critical to the established order from fields of study that should be precisely about that. Removing "class" or "imperialism/empire" as something you can study in a history class.

Fuck me, I don't care if a professor ascribes to my political beliefs, but it sucks that they are entirely unfamiliar with anything associated with a critical belief structure. American Power and The New Mandarins isn't exactly a new text, or a very complicated one.


Edited by Themselves ()

#8697
Post rating: +
i had a professor who was a maoist organizer in sao paulo and had worked extensively with the panthers in LA and the landless movement in Brazil.

i had another professor who was an ex- la raza activist and another who was an engineer for the sandinistas.

but then again I went to unviersity of texas, a Good School, not the gay school yall went to
#8698
Kurdt
Post rating: +
i had a fellowship at the ilich ramirez sanchez institute of patrice lumumba university
#8699
Post rating: ~

Themselves posted:

Fuck me, I don't care if a professor ascribes to my political beliefs, but it sucks that they are entirely unfamiliar with anything associated with a critical belief structure. American Power and The New Mandarins isn't exactly a new text, or a very complicated one.


It's also not really an important or influential text in the study of the history of the Vietnam War and really the only reason it's popular is because it's Chomsky (and even then I don't think anyone read it until it got republished after 9/11).

#8700
Post rating: ~

Lessons posted:

Themselves posted:

Fuck me, I don't care if a professor ascribes to my political beliefs, but it sucks that they are entirely unfamiliar with anything associated with a critical belief structure. American Power and The New Mandarins isn't exactly a new text, or a very complicated one.

It's also not really an important or influential text in the study of the history of the Vietnam War and really the only reason it's popular is because it's Chomsky (and even then I don't think anyone read it until it got republished after 9/11).



I have no idea what this means or how it relates to what Themselves said

#8701
Post rating: ~

Lessons posted:

Themselves posted:

Fuck me, I don't care if a professor ascribes to my political beliefs, but it sucks that they are entirely unfamiliar with anything associated with a critical belief structure. American Power and The New Mandarins isn't exactly a new text, or a very complicated one.

It's also not really an important or influential text in the study of the history of the Vietnam War and really the only reason it's popular is because it's Chomsky (and even then I don't think anyone read it until it got republished after 9/11).



Fredric Jameson talks about us being alienated from our pasts, but isn't talking about the Vietnam war as an ideological mechanism for capitalism to justify/reify itself a re-examining of this crucial aspect?

Is this not one of the critically important dynamics of the war that would seem to make sense the fact that we really "got wrong" the history of the area and how much support the Viet Cong would have?

#8702
Post rating: ~

Themselves posted:

Lessons posted:

Themselves posted:

Fuck me, I don't care if a professor ascribes to my political beliefs, but it sucks that they are entirely unfamiliar with anything associated with a critical belief structure. American Power and The New Mandarins isn't exactly a new text, or a very complicated one.

It's also not really an important or influential text in the study of the history of the Vietnam War and really the only reason it's popular is because it's Chomsky (and even then I don't think anyone read it until it got republished after 9/11).

Fredric Jameson talks about us being alienated from our pasts, but isn't talking about the Vietnam war as an ideological mechanism for capitalism to justify/reify itself a re-examining of this crucial aspect?

Is this not one of the critically important dynamics of the war that would seem to make sense the fact that we really "got wrong" the history of the area and how much support the Viet Cong would have?


That's all perfectly true but I'm still not sure why you're completely shocked that your history teacher hasn't read Chomsky's view on Vietnam? Most historians today are critical of US involvement in Vietnam for various reasons, including the ones like those you're stating here, but basically none of them are basing that off of Chomsky because he a) isn't a historian and b) doesn't even focus on the Vietnam War that much and c) American Power actually gets a lot of stuff wrong. Way better writers from the same period would be like, Bernard Fall or Gabriel Kolko. A linguistic professor or a media studies lecturer should be able to respond to Chomsky, a Vietnamese history teacher doesn't really have that responsibility.

#8703
Post rating: +

Lessons posted:

Themselves posted:

Lessons posted:

Themselves posted:

Fuck me, I don't care if a professor ascribes to my political beliefs, but it sucks that they are entirely unfamiliar with anything associated with a critical belief structure. American Power and The New Mandarins isn't exactly a new text, or a very complicated one.

It's also not really an important or influential text in the study of the history of the Vietnam War and really the only reason it's popular is because it's Chomsky (and even then I don't think anyone read it until it got republished after 9/11).

Fredric Jameson talks about us being alienated from our pasts, but isn't talking about the Vietnam war as an ideological mechanism for capitalism to justify/reify itself a re-examining of this crucial aspect?

Is this not one of the critically important dynamics of the war that would seem to make sense the fact that we really "got wrong" the history of the area and how much support the Viet Cong would have?

That's all perfectly true but I'm still not sure why you're completely shocked that your history teacher hasn't read Chomsky's view on Vietnam? Most historians today are critical of US involvement in Vietnam for various reasons, including the ones like those you're stating here, but basically none of them are basing that off of Chomsky because he a) isn't a historian and b) doesn't even focus on the Vietnam War that much and c) American Power actually gets a lot of stuff wrong. Way better writers from the same period would be like, Bernard Fall or Gabriel Kolko. A linguistic professor or a media studies lecturer should be able to respond to Chomsky, a Vietnamese history teacher doesn't really have that responsibility.



It sortof sounds like you're saying his (Chomsky's) ideas aren't good because he doesn't get paid to give those ideas? Is there a shittier ad-hominem that exists?

#8704
Post rating: +
No, I'm saying Chomsky doesn't really know anything about Vietnam and is just a political pundit so he isn't any more relevant to a history class than Bill O'Reilly or Malcolm Gladwell. His ideas aren't good either though, American Power is all about how the NLF is this massive popular organization and the US can never defeat them, but by the time he was writing that the NLF had been all but destroyed as an effective fighting force and the remainder of the war would be driven primarily by PAVN actions, not the NLF.
#8705
Post rating: ~
That said I actually liked parts of American Power, the intro is really poignant and his analysis of US intelligentsia is good, I just don't think he does a very good job analyzing either US strategy in Vietnam or Vietnam itself.
#8706
Post rating: ~
"His fundamental point on the New Mandarins is that we should not uncritically accept the claim that technocratic approaches are neutral and beneficial" You've misread the book brother.

In fact, limiting one's scope to the study of "history" can be the same trap that trying to be "objective" lends one to. Fall and Kolko seem to fail to question what function our ignorance of the Vietnamese culture serves for the war machine.

Chomsky asserts that it is the crucial element - that we never did care about the specifics, only the optics and how they would domino into other countries.

He then goes further to claim that the ideological function of thinking we are ignorant is simply a way to transpose benevolence on the part of the US. In fact, policy makers had good reason to think that Vietnam was undergoing a sort of cultural rebirth, and this alternative model of development, something protectionist and non-capitalist, had to be stopped.

Dealing with the Vietnam war on this level allows us to understand the function of imperialism as it was expressed in the late 20th century. Do these forces persist? Our impulse to deny the existence, both rhetorically and literally, of these alternative structures of development?
#8707
Post rating: ~
There's a lot of things in American Power, I think it's actually a collection of essays, but chapter 6 "The Logic of Withdrawal" is the part that deals most directly with Vietnam and it gets it wrong in more or less the way I just said. I pulled out the book just now to check and sure enough, here he is asserting in 1969 that the NLF is unchecked despite their Tet losses and the pacification campaign despite the fact we now know, unequivocally, that this wasn't true.

The point about the US being ignorant and not caring isn't specific to Chomsky and it's actually the centerpiece of Bernard Fall's work and is basically really mainstream stuff, and yeah like I said I enjoyed some of his analysis of US intellectuals.
#8708
Post rating: ~

Lessons posted:

The point about the US being ignorant and not caring isn't specific to Chomsky and it's actually the centerpiece of Bernard Fall's work and is basically really mainstream stuff, and yeah like I said I enjoyed some of his analysis of US intellectuals.



I was going to ask if there's somebody you know of that deals with this stuff: "The point is, the United States will not tolerate any constructive development in its own domain, any developments that will harm the interests of the elites who run this place, and hence we are going to destroy them if they happen anywhere else.'

I don't think Chomsky would characterize American Power as "non caring", instead he would say they care about their power, and the optics of power. This, of course isn't specific to Chomsky, but I haven't seen the "threat of a good example" used by anybody else, and its not Chomsky's wording, it comes from a '89 Oxfam report on Nicaragua http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/nicaragua-the-threat-of-a-good-example-121188

What kind of perspective does Fall offer? I fear his role as a war correspondent would lend him to almost an 'embedded' analysis.

#8709
Post rating: ~
Fall was definitely a war correspondent type but his analysis is good and well-respected by basically all sides because he actually understood Vietnam and the contemporary situation. If you was a good radical history though what you really want to read is Kolko, Anatomy of a War is a great general retrospective.
#8710
Post rating: ~

Lessons posted:

Fall was definitely a war correspondent type but his analysis is good and well-respected by basically all sides because he actually understood Vietnam and the contemporary situation. If you was a good radical history though what you really want to read is Kolko, Anatomy of a War is a great general retrospective.



Cool. I'm obsessed with big picture stuff but maybe this will have some of that, who knows?

#8711
Post rating: ~
I do still think that the idea that these fields are all disparate is nonsense. For example if i asked a "media studies" professor about Chomsky, are they going to be able to discuss radical economics?

Chomsky's views are too wide-ranging to say that he should have to be understood as "this type or that type" of thinker. Let the thinking stand on its own.

If you're teaching a class on war, be prepared to talk about and deal with the contemporary anti-war arguments. Chomsky isn't that unheard of, and his radical ideas aren't super complex: its pretty much a marxian analysis (from my readings) until his alternative.
#8712
Post rating: ~
Chomsky is a "wide-ranging thinker" in the sense he can talk intelligently about a wide number of topics because he's well-read, but I don't think even he would put himself forward as a notable historian of the Vietnam war or expect any given history professor to know what his views are on that subject. The reason that wouldn't be true for linguistics or media studies is because he's actually published substantial and influential works on those subjects and people in those fields should probably be aware of it. And yeah, historians of war should be aware of anti-war movements, but I'm also not going to fault them for being ignorant of the specific views of any particular pundit.
#8713
Post rating: ~
Also I'm not saying like, we have to have sharply divided disciplines or whatever, I'm talking about what you can reasonably expect people working in academia to know for reasons of sheer logistics.
#8714
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
Yeah, he can't be pigeonholed as "just a linguist" or "just a liberal." he is more in the class of experts that include Malcolm Gladwell, Ira Glass, and Joe Rogan.
#8715
Post rating: +
Two weird blowhards that I hate to listen to, and the UFC's Joe Rogan.
#8716
objekt-a.tumblr.com
Post rating: +
and next we have on stage



Edited by jeffery ()

#8717
Post rating: ~

swampman posted:

Yeah, he can't be pigeonholed as "just a linguist" or "just a liberal." he is more in the class of experts that include Malcolm Gladwell, Ira Glass, and Joe Rogan.



i loled but the thing is gladwell, glass, and rogan just erase class - chomsky doesn't

a google search for "joe rogan class consciousness" comes up with Joe Rogan Speaks About Expanding Consciousness With Natural Psychedelics

conflation boo

#8718
[account deactivated]
#8719
Post rating: ~
caliban and the witch talks about them a little bit but in depth study would be cool. new cults for new communism!
#8720
Post rating: ~
i stopped reading lessons posts but i assume its the same trot garbage