c_man posted:

ive been reading wallerstein's The Modern World-System I, and it's really fun to read. he's pretty liberal in his orientation but his methodology and a large part of his interpretation is materialist and Good In My IMO. his discussion of the development the nation-state alongside international economic forces and the evolution of the relationship between these two due to these contradictions is really interesting. on the other hand he's mostly covered internal european history so far and hasn't spent much time on the non-european periphery. there's a chapter later on that seems like it should be about this but i'm still a little surprised and dismayed at how little there has been so far

Well, you have to scavenge the good bits and leave the bad bits when you are engaging with a work like that. At least you're getting something from it and can supplement it with other knowledge, yknow?

The last book I read was Red Dwarf. This is only the second fiction book I have read in a good many years. My friend showed me most seasons of the show on rabb.it and I was really into it. Then she recommended me the novel. It was even better than I could have guessed! I don't want to spoil the whole thing, but let me say a few things that I like about it. Number one has to be its very unique take on sci fi. In contrast to so many works that look to the skies for saviors, Red Dwarf features a universe completely barren of any alien life. Everything that occurs outside the forces of nature itself is a consequence of our actions. The end of all life itself comes as a consequence of a society that never abandons class stratification or corporate domination. All of the other life forms, all of the robots, all of the spaceships and populated planets, all of the hellish escapist mindtraps, all of these come directly from the consequences of our actions. The writing is very funny and the pacing is marvelously brisk. It made me laugh, it made me cry, and... it made me think. Thank you for reading my book report.

@sam_kriss let's leave the Assadism, political oppression, starvation & economic collapse aside yeah? That's some real "progress" over here

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) July 29, 2016

babyhueypnewton posted:

Zizek may be a liberal but he's a great troll.

Just finished reading his latest, amazing, super pro level troll, that I guess everyone on the internet who cares has already seen, but I hadn't, and everyone on twitter is MAD. Big success:

http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-sexual-is-political/

So what is “transgenderism”?

Consequently, there is only one solution to this deadlock, the one we find in another field of disposing waste, that of trash bins. Public trash bins are more and more differentiated today. There are special bins for paper, glass, metal cans, cardboard package, plastic, etc. Here already, things sometimes get complicated. If I have to dispose of a paper bag or a notebook with a tiny plastic band, where does it belong? To paper or to plastic? No wonder that we often get detailed instruction on the bins, right beneath the general designation: PAPER–books, newspapers, etc., but NOT hardcover books or books with plasticized covers, etc. In such cases, proper waste disposal would have taken up to half an hour or more of detailed reading and tough decisions. To make things easier, we then get a supplementary trash bin for GENERAL WASTE where we throw everything that did not meet the specific criteria of other bins, as if, once again, apart from paper trash, plastic trash, and so on, there is trash as such, universal trash.

Should we not do the same with toilets?

it doesn't matter how many times i read it, i laugh my fucking head off every time. twitter is a wildfire

aerdil posted:

i read all of parallax view and i dont recommend it

maybe read it again now that you're older and see if you can appreciate it from a different angle? :tongue: