#201
has anyone here read "Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain" by Butch Lee? it looks interesting as fuck, i need to hunt down a copy
#202

loyellthecat22 posted:

germanjoey posted:
guys, you're all gonna be really jealous. at the library sale this past saturday, i bought, besides a bunch of books about THINGS by AUTHORS (including extraordinary popular delusions & the madness of crowds for a dollar ftw), I bought a book called "Working Cats" for a dollar 50. Working Cats is a book filled with pictures of cats "working" at various blue collar jobs... "Woopsie and Doopsie," at the factory, hard at work sitting on the assembly line. "Rascal," at the grocery store, hard at work sitting on the checkout conveyor belt. "Munchkin," hard at work on the lawn....

that's cool edit: please make ctrl+s submit a post instead of of doing strikthru tags even tho those are also really cool



how have you gotten by for so many years without tab-space

#203

germanjoey posted:
how have you gotten by for so many years without tab-space

it's too much work

#204
I promised to read that Debt book that came out recently, but secretly I plan to ignore that promise for the time being, and re read the QingZhong chapters of the GuanZi to refresh my economics knowledge
#205
yes, yes, good plan, you were dangerously close to contemporary relevance there for a moment
#206
i can't think of anything more poisonous than contemporary relevance
#207
the only thing more disgusting than the present is the past.
#208

mistersix posted:
yes, yes, good plan, you were dangerously close to contemporary relevance there for a moment



Made me smile, but unless you've read it and have some specific criticism, you shouldn't dismiss the qingzhong chapters as irrelevant, out dated, or wrong. I'll read debt, but there's a lot of valuable ideas in the guanzi, too, and it's the sort of text that you keep coming back to over the years for new ideas, guidance, and inspiration

#209
smash the past. it is a millstone around our necks, a foetid bog in which we wade, the clutter of twenty centuries, a pervasive throng of lecherous skeletons leering with empty eye-sockets. humanity is something to be overcome. marxism is transhumanism
#210
twenty centuries, is that as far back as the history books go at your uni?
#211
i neither know nor care. how old is the world really. what if it were like, two seconds old, and got created with all your memories??????? mad shit bro.
#212
also my current uni is ucla, ranked as the 13th best academic institution in the world so, like, go crazy w/ that
#213
is UCLA really ranked that high? boss shit bruv
#214
How many spots did ucla fall after you enrolled?


My posting is ranked best in the world
#215

blinkandwheeze posted:
has anyone here read "Night-Vision: Illuminating War and Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain" by Butch Lee? it looks interesting as fuck, i need to hunt down a copy



its very MSH-y

its on library.nu btw

#216
im reim glad lyg is reading chinese stuff
#217

babyfinland posted:
im reim glad lyg is reading chinese stuff


he always has

#218
I've always read chinese stuff; in terms of reading ancient texts, I started with chinese and then took up greek later. For the last couple of years I've thought the greek texts to be superior in a lot of ways, but the chinese texts have their own strengths and are sometimes better.

For economics, there's really a dearth of quality ancient works, that's why I'm revisiting qingzhong. The greeks have a good one from xenophon, and the one by aristotle can make you smile, but overall dedicated economic discussions are few and far between.

Totalitarianism is the best example of something that the greeks didn't talk about in too much detail, but the chinese literally built a whole philosophical school on the notion.

Edited by Lykourgos ()

#219
if you want a good econ text check out "principles of economics" by greg mankiw
#220
it has ancient wisdom of the rulers
#221
here's a good excerpt:

"Qin Zhangli, from the province of Hunan, was confronted with a dilemma of the type of money and price. Then he remembered that the world has largely accepted Milton Friedman's theory that inflation accelerates in the presence of low unemployment, and peace reigned for eighty eight months."
#222

Impper posted:
is UCLA really ranked that high? boss shit bruv



ya but mostly for health sciences + engineering + shit. fackin south campus.....

#223

Lykourgos posted:
I've always read chinese stuff; in terms of reading ancient texts, I started with chinese and then took up greek later. For the last couple of years I've thought the greek texts to be superior in a lot of ways, but the chinese texts have their own strengths and are sometimes better.

For economics, there's really a dearth of quality ancient works, that's why I'm revisiting qingzhong. The greeks have a good one from xenophon, and the one by aristotle can make you smile, but overall dedicated economic discussions are few and far between.

Totalitarianism is the best example of something that the greeks didn't talk about in too much detail, but the chinese literally built a whole philosophical school on the notion.


cool. respeck.

#224
medicine and engineering are the only disciplines that exist. liberal arts serve as cash cows to bilk all the useless buffoons that are out there
#225

Impper posted:
medicine and engineering are the only disciplines that exist. liberal arts serve as cash cows to bilk all the useless buffoons that are out there



yeah peeps like me

#226
"that's like, your opinion man" -a perfectly valid thing to say in class when ur a lib arts student
#227
zoinks, we shoulda listened to our dads!
#228

Impper posted:
medicine and engineering are the only disciplines that exist. liberal arts serve as cash cows to bilk all the useless buffoons that are out there



engineering and medicine too, except in reverse hahahaha

#229
i ollied over infinite jest's spot on my bookshelf to read Faulkner and i think im being sponsored[ by bam margera now
#230
Infinite Jest is a good book
#231
infinite jest is a book of really really good & worthwhile moments interspersed within a wasteland of tennis
#232
the tennis parts are great
#233
yah when theyre actually playing tennis
#234
I can sort of appreciate Infinite Jest but like Pynchon's books they just don't really do anything for me. I should set them on fire though, I should burn the books I really should. I am going to burn them.
#235
i just read alex callinicos's book "althusser's marxism" which was great. very clear explanation of the problems involved in althusser's thought. but not in a jerk way, he praises a lot of what althusser does. it's cool because it works through some critiques of lukacs and gramsci as well. and the best part is that he concludes in a way that fully anticipates laclau and mouffe (some years before they came out with their book) and says that overemphasis on ideology over repression will lead to reformism.
#236

getfiscal posted:
i just read alex callinicos's book "althusser's marxism" which was great. very clear explanation of the problems involved in althusser's thought. but not in a jerk way, he praises a lot of what althusser does. it's cool because it works through some critiques of lukacs and gramsci as well. and the best part is that he concludes in a way that fully anticipates laclau and mouffe (some years before they came out with their book) and says that overemphasis on ideology over repression will lead to reformism.



does he say anything on althusser's stance on marxist humanism? e.g. this: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1964/marxism-humanism.htm
i've tried to read this like three times in the past and could never ever make heads or tails of it. does it make any sense to you?

#237
i'm sort of a beginner on such things so i probably won't describe it well and will step into various errors.

basically marxist humanism focuses on humanity as being realized (the liberation of their species-being) in the process of history and sees alienation as the key to marxism. althusser suggests that this relies on an early marx who has not rejected hegel's dialectic yet. althusser argues that marx's dialectic is qualitatively different from hegel's, that it isn't just an adopted hegelianism. marx had to "break" with hegel in order to understand history in a scientific way. and so mostly after this "break" he doesn't really talk much about alienation (except again in private journals).

hegelian marxists like lukacs had said, for example, that the proletariat was the subject-object of history. that means that human history was essentially groping towards its own liberation in the form of a proletariat that could see itself as liberator of all and therefore see society as it actually is rather than mediated through class relations. but this objectivity was questioned by althusser, who ended up saying something radically different: marxism was the first theory that didn't see itself as objective and representing all of humanity. so it is theoretically anti-humanist.

for example, bourgeois philosophy almost always implies universalism about itself, it always say that it has come to conclusions about what is natural and timeless about itself. so it might come up with things like "humans are rational self-seekers that self-organize in markets naturally" as axioms that can't really be argued against effectively. marxist humanists played a similar game by implying that classless society was the natural state of humanity and that history was essentially restoring a natural balance but with advanced technology. althusser says, on the other hand, that marxism doesn't make claims about timeless features of humanity, and it doesn't appeal to see society as it really is in absence of distorting features, it rather is a partisan theory of theoretical practice that draws on the class position of the proletariat as the first theory in history that admits it is biased and contingent. in other words, marxism is a theory in service to the proletariat, rather than pretending to be a theory of humanity (as in bourgeois philosophy).
#238
#239

getfiscal posted:
i'm sort of a beginner on such things so i probably won't describe it well and will step into various errors.

basically marxist humanism focuses on humanity as being realized (the liberation of their species-being) in the process of history and sees alienation as the key to marxism. althusser suggests that this relies on an early marx who has not rejected hegel's dialectic yet. althusser argues that marx's dialectic is qualitatively different from hegel's, that it isn't just an adopted hegelianism. marx had to "break" with hegel in order to understand history in a scientific way. and so mostly after this "break" he doesn't really talk much about alienation (except again in private journals).

hegelian marxists like lukacs had said, for example, that the proletariat was the subject-object of history. that means that human history was essentially groping towards its own liberation in the form of a proletariat that could see itself as liberator of all and therefore see society as it actually is rather than mediated through class relations. but this objectivity was questioned by althusser, who ended up saying something radically different: marxism was the first theory that didn't see itself as objective and representing all of humanity. so it is theoretically anti-humanist.

for example, bourgeois philosophy almost always implies universalism about itself, it always say that it has come to conclusions about what is natural and timeless about itself. so it might come up with things like "humans are rational self-seekers that self-organize in markets naturally" as axioms that can't really be argued against effectively. marxist humanists played a similar game by implying that classless society was the natural state of humanity and that history was essentially restoring a natural balance but with advanced technology. althusser says, on the other hand, that marxism doesn't make claims about timeless features of humanity, and it doesn't appeal to see society as it really is in absence of distorting features, it rather is a partisan theory of theoretical practice that draws on the class position of the proletariat as the first theory in history that admits it is biased and contingent. in other words, marxism is a theory in service to the proletariat, rather than pretending to be a theory of humanity (as in bourgeois philosophy).

Good.

#240
i made the mistake of glancing at d&d yesterday, saw a thread that looked interesting trying to get people reading critical theory, so I jump to the last page and people are of course just engaged in a pedantic argument about whether lacan (and by extension psychoanalysis in general) is complete bullshit. it's basically people who have a little knowledge of zizek/lacan but like them talking past people with no knowledge of the field and like cogsci or positivism. too bad I'm banned or I'd wow then with my moderate to little knowledge of lacan