cars posted:

he works to help force an extremely racist society to acknowledge people living within it as human beings, which is, i claim, possibly nearly as worthwhile as people attacking books they haven’t read and don’t understand because a French name is attached to them, on a World Wide Web forum called tHE r H i z z o n E

and also i wasnt attacking the quotes based on the french name attatched to them but making fun of the way they read to me, im sorry this was misconstrued as an attack on badiou for being french, rather than on his writing style as presented in the post (sorry)

Belphegor posted:

If you need to hate on a French intellectual for sipping champagne and saying platitudes, there are better targets than Badiou, like Alain de Botton. Let's all just hate on Bottom instead

alain de botton is english though, as one cd probably have inferred by the dreadful smell. do better imo

cars posted:

i just get this Sokal vibe from this place sometimes lately when it comes to lumping continental writers together as hypocrites or gibberish through crass readings of excerpts out of context, which weirds me out because I’m old and remember this place from 5 years ago which was the tail end of the old guard that identified more closely with the site’s name

the crypto-fash part to me is how that outlook serves to denigrate theory and undersell the continuity that exists or should exist between its readers and its writers. it’s sweeping vulgar characterizations pitting “theorists” against “workers” where i think it’s more useful to define which writer you’re talking about and the character of their work, because theory is not itself, and does not belong to, a social or economic class, and if even if you think caring about classes that much is not useful, that example is just a particularly crude and dangerous way of caring about class

but what i’d add, and no matter what other people believe about this distinction It’s Still Real To Me Dammit, is that i wasn’t calling anyone stupid or fash. i was saying certain things people say or do strike me as stupid or fash, which is certainly my opinion of certain things i have done or said in the past, including on this same topic, and will almost certainly be my opinion at some point of at least a few things i say or do in the future. i am a big believer in criticizing behavior instead of gluing it permanently to people, because I think the latter doesn’t do a ton to get people to change how they think, speak or act

and yet i struggle to see how my personal frustration with the styles of communication used by communists across the board from badiou to rga and across a much wider body of scientific literature, in this case demostrated by mocking the style of the quotes parenti posted, especially when they are presented devoid of context as they were in this case, is any reason to call me or what i am doing "crypto-fash", or to jump all over me because of it. at no point did i "lump continental writers together as hypocrites", something you are nowprojecting onto me, as if a frustration with certain writing styles and with there being too many words and too little time to read them all is somehow "crypto-fash" or the same as dismissing the content as gibberish.

The nadir of Western media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Syria has been the reporting of the siege of East Aleppo, which began in earnest in July and ended in December, when Syrian government forces took control of the last rebel-held areas and more than 100,000 civilians were evacuated. During the bombardment, TV networks and many newspapers appeared to lose interest in whether any given report was true or false and instead competed with one another to publicise the most eye-catching atrocity story even when there was little evidence that it had taken place. NBC news reported that more than forty civilians had been burned alive by government troops, vaguely sourcing the story to ‘the Arab media’. Another widely publicised story – it made headlines everywhere from the Daily Express to the New York Times – was that twenty women had committed suicide on the same morning to avoid being raped by the arriving soldiers, the source in this case being a well-known insurgent, Abdullah Othman, in a one-sentence quote given to the Daily Beast.

Petrol posted:

cant spell Badiou without Bad. also IOU but that isnt really funny, in this context,

A BadIOU is a bounced check
e: Karel Kosík is a lound czech

Edited by swampman (June 7, 2018 01:55:16)

After the events of May ’68, Paris-VIII, also known as Vincennes, was created to be a refuge for radical students. A committee of 20 peoples that included Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes set out to model Vincennes after MIT. Michel Foucault was named the head of the philosophy department. While Deleuze could not initially work at Vincennes, he later joined a staff that was comprised of Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Judith Miller.
In a department filled with radicals and communists, students tore open ceilings to see “if the police had bugged the rooms” and matters of administration were often seen as fascist coups. Department members invited friends to teach classes, many of whom would not even show up for class.
When Ranciere and Badiou decided that “not showing up” was pretty good grounds to fire these teachers, the victims immediately declared it “a Bolshevik coup and alerted Deleuze and Lyotard, who saw it as the start of a witch hunt. ‘They organized a sort of hunger strike in Deleuze’s seminar.'”
Judith Miller openly declared “certain collective have decided not to grade students on the basis of written workers, others have decided to give a diploma to anyone who thinks they deserve one.” The French government swiftly declared that the Vincennes philosophy department could no longer award national diplomas.

Badiou declared Deleuze an “enemy of the people” and penned several anti-Deleuze articles. At the height of the conflict, Badiou's “men” would prevent Deleuze from finishing his seminar, he would put his hat back on to his head to indicate surrender. Badiou himself would occasionally turn up at Deleuze’s seminar to interrupt him, as he admits in the book he wrote on Deleuze in 1997.
Badiou created brigades to “monitor the political content of other classes in the philosophy department.” Deleuze responded to most interventions calmly, and would avoid conflict even when “groups of up to a dozen people bent on picking a fight would show up.”
Sometimes these brigades would show up with copies of Nietzsche to ask trick questions in an effort to embarrass Deleuze. And when that didn’t work:

Often the “brigade” would end up imposing the “Peoples Rule,” commanding the student to quit Deleuze’s classroom on the pretext of a meeting in Lecture Hall 1 or a rally in support of a workers’ struggle. Deleuze reacted calmly, pretending to agree with them and retaliating with irony.

And when that also didn’t work:

Only once did get angry, when he found on his desk a tract by a “death squad” advocating suicide.”

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

I used to read TV show reviews on the av club but I found myself drawn to them less and less. Eventually I came to the realization that these things shouldn't even exist. It's somebody recapping what happened on a tv episode, then saying if they thought it was good. (Spoiler: it was apparently at least pretty good; no tv show with less than a B average is consistently reviewed, and shows that decline in quality are quietly removed from review.) Why am I reading this? Who is it for? A movie review or game review has some merit at least in theory in that it tells you if a work is worth your money. But generally speaking a specific TV show is functionally free, and either I watch the TV show, in which case I don't need to read someone else describe it and give their opinion on it; or I don't watch it, in which case I don't feel like reading someone summarize it either due to spoilers or a lack of interest. But this parleys into Bullshit Jobs: there is so much content on the internet that exists like Facebook, Twitter, Buzzfeed quizzes, tv reviews, facile editorials that confirm their biases, where the point isn't that this writing is necessary, useful or even good: the point is just to fill time for office drones to sit and read quietly instead of going nuts from boredom.

this is why grantland folded, im pretty sure thats all they had. maybe there was something about sports too?