#16081
Post rating: ~
it doesn't really seem surprising to me that international relations would have a lot of stuff like that in it, especially at an undergrad level. like aren't half the damn think tanks in washington dc about international relations?
#16082
[account deactivated]
#16083
Post rating: +
This is why I decided against international affairs in college. You’re also right about Arabic, most of my classmates in Arab 101 were wanting to work in the foreign service or were ROTC (even our classroom was in the ROTC building with little sandbox tables for small unit tactic lessons).
#16084
Dont Mess With Sucess
Post rating: +
Dracula
#16085
[account deactivated]
#16086
Post rating: ~
Linguistics
#16087
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
The good thing about those intro courses is that they tend to expect very little out of you for the finals and such. Like you just need to show you understand some of the basic terms. If you know that Woodrow Wilson apparently thought every nation should have a state or whatever then you'll get a fine mark.
#16088
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
IR class is one of the things that made my politics what they are, because it revealed to me that every "liberal" IR person turns into a Bush-era Charles Krauthammer hyper-"realist" if it's in any way suggested that the United States would not have complete veto power over every substantial decision made by any future global governing body
#16089
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

swampman posted:

Dracula



it's nuts how contemporary-seeming that book is, right down to the casual anthropological criminology

#16090
[account deactivated]
#16091
[account deactivated]
#16092
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

toyotathon posted:

i'm an idiot but how is IR realism theoretically different from wartime nationalism, that nations are in a state of constant conflict to seek advantage at others' expense



it's not, and imo it's even closer than that, in the sense that it's a naked vehicle for the specific, intellectualized nationalisms of the war-loving elites of a tiny subset of nations whose members are pretty easy to puzzle out

#16093
[account deactivated]
#16094
Post rating: +
naming my new and 100% original ideology 'goodism' so that people will know that it is good, and that all other ideas are not good, because they are not goodist
#16095
[account deactivated]
#16096
Post rating: ~

Caesura109 posted:

west coast canadian university proffering Vox-style defense of multinationals isnt what i expected.


just ace it, how hard can it be to outwit an idiot at their own game?

#16097
[account deactivated]
#16098
lies half the time
Post rating: ~

quite solicitous of their welfare

#16099
Post rating: ~

toyotathon posted:

reading The American West and the Nazi East. nazi propaganda, 30 years after the car was invented, featured covered wagons w/ hitler's face on the side, manifesting the lebensraum destiny, captioned "Go East, Young Man!". is it hard to grasp the meaning? hitler constantly saying shit about how slavs and jews would be their redskins. himmler in Der Untermensch going on about how the black earth of the east would be 'the california of europe'. it's not hard to grasp, or the vice versa, why hitler is so prominent in the white amerikan consciousness today.



i have read similar shit some years ago and back then the holocaust literature seemed to turn towards interpreting the holocaust as a colonial project. i mean when hitler took power there was like 500k jews inside the borders of germany and the vast majority of jews they genocided were from the territories they invaded. this makes more sense than the classical "nazis needed scapegoats and picked the jews" angle coz it s like a much more simplistic version of "false consciousness" and doesnt mean much aside from exculpating german masses from settler-bent chauvinism

#16100
Post rating: ~
timothy snyder, despite being shit, synthesizes a lot of the internal colonization theory of hitler in a good way in "black earth"
#16101
[account deactivated]
#16102
Post rating: +
IR realism, or "how i learned to love the bomb"
#16103
[account deactivated]
#16104
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Okay, so let’s be specific. What is the sequence of events by which you suspect the Vietnam-era anti-war movement in the U.S. was made into, or constructed as, a tool of the finance sector? What causes led to what effects, in what order? Who was behind each stage of it? What were their motives? What were the means by which they achieved their motives?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, or that you’re right, but indicting the entire New Left and beyond as tools of bourgeois monetary policy would require the exact specificity you suggest, not just vague and ominous hinting at it.
#16105
[account deactivated]
#16106
Post rating: ~
Good luck to finding a new major
#16107
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
ganbatte
#16108
Post rating: ~
The air force the branch for those who have dedicated their lives to achieving new moral lows, and new heights of chickenshittedness.
#16109
[account deactivated]
#16110
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

Caesura109 posted:

Despite being from the U.S, he was using Peterson's accent and even adopted his sort of high-pitch voice



lol

#16111
Post rating: +
Colleges in the US only have small pocket (if any) of real scholarship and you don't have to go to grad school to figure it out if you're a marxist. Even in programs like linguistics; I took a language acquisition course that at first seemed interesting, the professor mentioned critical linguistic studies, imperialism and immigration with regard to learning language etc. but then ended up suggesting to the whole class one day to look into the State Dept for jobs. i put a marx quote in my final essay for revenge. My german courses taught the "culture" but probably dedicated less than 5 pages to the intellectual history of Germany and then spent whole chapters just shitting on East Germany and the Wall. Fellow students in class are no different, a bunch of students were doing some really sketchy stuff in the CS program about making satellites for the government, i knew this one guy who lied about going to an NSA career fair to get out of class but was really just getting an abortion with his girlfriend.

college is weird
#16112
[account deactivated]
#16113
[account deactivated]
#16114
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
that professor sounds exceptionally incompetent and self-loathing for IR. most of them are "social liberals" who live in eternal hope of influencing someone who influences someone who influences someone in the White House who opens the bomb bay doors. your guy must have lost all will to live to be aping a Canadian psych prof YouTube man and doing "news article day" as his first lecture, an IR professor with balls leads with Q&A on the first chapter of the text to demonstrate how no one in the class read it even though they were supposed to according to the class site. Chair Force will do that to you, he was probably hung over as shit.
#16115
lies half the time
Post rating: +
my ir professor was a self professed communist who recommended a bunch of decnt lit to me and liked to regal the class w stories about militant antipolice actions from back in his day growing up in coldwar copenhagen, def gave me a distorted impression of the field in general
#16116
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
regardless Caesura109 you probably did the right thing imo by not choosing an IR/IA major, if for your future job prospects if nothing else. it's an over-stuffed academic field full of future do-something-else-ers whose main self-qualification is that they read the op-ed page of a news site every day, and from what little you've said of your background you would likely have had to pitch yourself as the ultimate whore of Babylon to get institutional support. It's one of those areas where it still pays to be a ruddy Scandinavian wearing orthopedic shoes
#16117
[account deactivated]
#16118
Post rating: ~
I've been reading 'Reading Capital' by althusser in my spare time. Althusser wrote a great chapter on "The Epistemological Propositions of Capital" which is more of a long Engels quote in one of the prefaces to Capital Vol II, where he illuminates a Marxist theory of science and scientific epistemological breaks, for example Lavoisier and the phlogiston theory of his predecessors, wherein oxygen was actually discovered by Priestly and Scheele but because of the existing categories of knowledge regarding their object of study, they were incapable of grasping the revolutionary implications that it had for chemistry, and it took Lavoisier's critique by way of "changing the problematic", where he saw the "fire-air" of Seele as a solution to a hitherto unknown problem. In the same way, political economy had already discovered the kernel of capitalist accumulation in surplus-value, but confused its terminology constantly, blinding it to its revolutionary implications. As the process and production of knowledge changes, so does its object of knowledge and modern chemistry and Marxist science were born.
#16119
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +

dimashq posted:

I've been reading 'Reading Capital' by althusser in my spare time. Althusser wrote a great chapter on "The Epistemological Propositions of Capital" which is more of a long Engels quote in one of the prefaces to Capital Vol II, where he illuminates a Marxist theory of science and scientific epistemological breaks, for example Lavoisier and the phlogiston theory of his predecessors, wherein oxygen was actually discovered by Priestly and Scheele but because of the existing categories of knowledge regarding their object of study, they were incapable of grasping the revolutionary implications that it had for chemistry, and it took Lavoisier's critique by way of "changing the problematic", where he saw the "fire-air" of Seele as a solution to a hitherto unknown problem. In the same way, political economy had already discovered the kernel of capitalist accumulation in surplus-value, but confused its terminology constantly, blinding it to its revolutionary implications. As the process and production of knowledge changes, so does its object of knowledge and modern chemistry and Marxist science were born.



*sonic boom as bhpn reenters forum stratosphere at mach 2*

#16120
Post rating: +
I framed my MA thesis around that quote so yeah, you got me. Anyway, I've been reading "The Long 20th Century", it's ok. The whole purpose of the book is to hype Japan as the new hegemon which didn't age well but the historical information is good and the framework is solid since he orients it around rates of profit. In fact, the framework is so solid that when you read the intro it's obvious he's accidentally describing China today, which makes the nonsensical "Adam Smith in Beijing" even weirder, like he forgot his own book.

Western communists need to read more sweeping longee duree works of Marxism and far less "people's history" since we're already conditioned by petty-bourgeois ideology to look for humanism and spontaneity through willpower. If existentialism was an attempt to come to terms with the entrance of the mass of humanity into history and therefore represents a moment when first world humanism and third world scientific socialism coexisted in contradiction and the new form of imperialism that resolved it had not yet come into being, we've basically gone backwards and today's Marxist humanism is far more racist and imperialistic than Sartre, let alone the Thorez era PCF. Scientific works of this kind were the main target of the postmodernist counter-revolution and are now forbidden so Anderson, Arigghi, Wallenstein and co. are still the only option.

E: it's inferior to Anderson's two works of historical materialism but since he never wrote a history of capitalism and Hobsbawm's work is not very interesting, it's the best I know of.