In this connection, it has recently come to my attention that the white woman is the issue here, so I decided I better find out what one is. This creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother, and not economically exploited. She doesn’t work. She is either the white man’s image of her--effete, pampered, privileged, protected, flighty, and self-indulgent--or the Black man’s image of her--all that, plus the "pretty white girl" (meaning ugly as sin but regarded as the ultimate in beauty because she is white). She is Miss Anne of the kitchen, she puts Frederick Douglass to the lash, she cries rape when Emmet Till looks at her sideways, she manipulates white men’s very real power with the lifting of her very well-manicured little finger. She makes an appearance in Baraka’s "rape the white girl,"(14) as Cleaver’s real thing after target practice on Black women (15), as Helmut Newton’s glossy upscale hard-edged, distanced vamp (1976), and as the Central Park Jogger, the classy white madonna who got herself raped and beaten nearly to death. She flings her hair, feels beautiful all the time, complains about the colored help, tips badly, can’t do anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t know anything, and alternates fantasizing about fucking Black men with accusing them of raping her. As Ntozake Shange points out, all Western civilization depends on her (1981, p. 48). On top of all this, out of impudence, imitativeness, pique, and a simple lack of anything meaningful to do, she thinks she needs to be liberated. Her feminist incarnation is all of the above, and guilty about every single bit of it, having by dint of repetition refined saying "I’m sorry" to a high form of art. She can’t even make up her own songs.

There is, of course, much to much of this, this "woman, modified," this woman discounted by white, meaning she would be oppressed but for her privilege. But this image seldom comes face to face with the rest of her reality: the fact that the majority of the poor are white women and their children (at least half of whom are female); that white women are systematically battered in their homes, murdered by intimates and serial killers alike, molested as children, actually raped (mostly by white men), and that even Black men, on average, make more than they do. (16)

kinda shocked tbh

roseweird posted:

ugh do i actualy have to read the article

modernleftism.txt

getfiscal posted:

i started reading a "guide to financial markets" by someone who's probably khamsek's former boss. i bought it in 2003 and it's funny with hindsight because it's like... most regulators agree that individual investors need more regulation, but that institutional investors need very little. now let's talk about how derivatives are a revolution in risk-management.

black-scholes-Merton makes it a priori impossible to lose money anymore

drwhat posted:

i find the realities of how large-scale investment works almost endlessly fascinating as i learn more and more about it at my job, it's so much effort to do nothing and just get 0.0001% more money than the other guys, and this generates billions and billions and billions of dollars of profit. it's incredible and horrifying, it's just nothingness, the value of a dollar becomes zero and small software bugs cause thousands to disappear every day for no reason. practically no one has any idea what they are really doing. i think i've had a conversation with 2 or 3 people total in the past year who actually understand anything about the trades they work on. the colossal scale of the whole thing seems to encourage profound tunnel vision. or maybe it's just one of the psychological disturbances you require to deal with these things

i wanna learn all about this

discipline posted:

what are you talking about?

it sounded like you were talking about high frequency trading. were you talking about something else?

A revolutionary in the fullest sense of the word - a man or woman who lets the imperative to be human take its deepest hold on his or her being, who becomes wholeheartedly committed to the service of people and a world of justice, who live as he or she would call others to live - is nothing other than a saint. All of the others - Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the Weathermen - are impostors. They may have hated Capitalism, but they themselves were beholden to its logic, variants on its theme of dominance and submission. Francis of Assisi, Loyola, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Barbara Ward, and EF Schumacher are the real revolutionaries. The move people's lives as Christ Himself did; they have no time to shift musty furniture. They alone challenge and change the structures of oppression - because they call forth change in the human heart.

A qualitative revolution takes place in the monk who feels with his whole being the total claim that dying to oneself makes upon one's whole life; it drives him to deeper identification with all humanity, to the service of prayer and simplicity, to the purification of the intolerances within his heart.

...

True change is not brought about by the weekend radical, the seasonal rebel, or the five year plan. It is brought about by those activists whose long-haul commitment radiates with a love and respect for all persons. True revolution only occurs when one aspires with the full reach of one's hope to be disengaged from the deadly wheel of the idolized Thing and the violent injustice it necessitates.

discipline posted:

I got a masters in what amounts to economic geography and it's useless because I actually know how this shit works and it sucks the magic out of it. I'm a giant fuck up with no job pushing 30, my life is like one big suicidal ideation

babyhueypnewton posted:

why? many fields of scholarship are actual religion, including but not limited to finance, international relations, neo-classical economics, analytic philosophy, while many others such as psychology, biology, and critical studies have seriously flawed epidemiological foundations. this may sound extreme but as someone being forced to study IR the entire thing is a fraud, far worse than I thought.

what the fuck? "why would you want to know what motivates people in influential positions?" why indeed would someone want to know anything about the internal culture of the groups that control the huge fluxes of capital that affect our daily lives?