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You beat me to posting that one.
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I’m migrating data today - staring at my computer…
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I love that comic so much. Randy is awesome!
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I like posting comics! Is this the place for it now? None of these have so much to do with Marxism, except under the definition where it includes everything. But at the moment there are so many other threads that made me think of them, it was impossible to decide on one.
Edited to add:
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Has this been posted somewhere here?
Perhaps this is what is meant by the right when they accuse us of Cultural Marxism
Thesis-- the existence of a comfortable culture
Antithesis-- the critique of that culture’s structural inequalities
Synthesis-- the rise of a new, somewhat strange and unfamiliar culture to supplant what has come before.
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Ethics in Book Reviewing:
I’ve got a mathematical problem. Birth of a Theorem is by
one of the great geniuses of today, a cosmopolitan, liberal-minded man
who helps his wife look after their children, likes big-hearted folk
songs, welcomes diversity and wears the same jewellery as I do. But as a
contribution to the genre of popular maths, the book stinks.
To give the problem extra calculus, my favourite maths writer is a
sour-faced white supremacist with a mouth the shape of staple, who
thinks women in America should be deprived of the vote and apparently
calls himself ‘Derb’. An honest reviewer should obey his prejudices, so
I’ve tried to find a way to cover up my dislike of Cédric Villani’s
book, just as I tried to find a way I could slag off John Derbyshire’s
excellent Prime Obsession (about the Riemann Hypothesis) when it came out. It’s not possible. There’s hardly a chapter in Birth of a Theorem that I could enjoy. But I’ve had a breakthrough. I have realised that I’ve had been looking at Villani’s Theorem in the wrong light.
How could anyone enjoy Cédric Villani’s ‘Birth of a Theorem’? I think I’ve worked it out
Seriously, it sounds as if Prime Obsession would tickle my intellect in just the right way, but…
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David Gelernter, lost his hand to one of Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s devices in 1993. Which is somewhat ironic, given that Gelernter is the author of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats) , and the co-author of the parallel-computing language Linda - named after (porn) actress Linda Lovelace.
Since Mr. K. was targeting people who worked with technology, Gelernter was a good pick; but otherwise the two might share some viewpoints on modern society.
The US is the greatest threat to world peace? What a pinko-facist.
I felt like reading that I had it confirmed to me that “skepticism” is indeed quite different than many of the things that it ends up opposing. Sounds like he encountered a substantially lower ratio of reactionaries to people who react to criticism with, “Hey, you might have a point there” than you would expect in an average group of people. It suggests that a movement built on trying to be reasonable and rational actually does better at those things than a movement not dedicated to those principles.
Of course it’s telling that the MC decided to act as a reactionary, filling time that was supposed to be dedicated to the crowd. No matter how reasonable your cause, it’s a pretty safe bet that the people with positions of power got those positions by political purity.
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They can’t explain them because they aren’t aware of them as such. For you, schema are embedded and available, but for many people, they represent externally hardcoded restrictions on what can be perceived, manipulated and fruitfully discussed. If you start counting at one, meeting someone who starts counting at zero can easily lead to anger and mutual incomprehensibility; the flexibility of understanding literally nothing is an offense to the straitened mind.
I respectfully disagree! And personally, I require a global paradigm; a container for top-level schema; it seems to be built into my wiring to need that. But luckily it’s not impossible to figure out how the universe works; every sufficiently evolved religion or philosophy ends up in the same realizations, which are typically called “mysticism” by those who are mystified by such things, and “common sense” by those who aren’t.
[quote]But this isn’t the place to discuss that, this is the place for mocking the people who call anything that doesn’t fit their infantile model of the world “Marxism,” and related.
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Good point. I apologize! I will go drink some tea.
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Improper tea, I would hope.
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It wasn’t generalized advice, really, but focused on a particular person with a particular problem.
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