Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Einherjar86]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZZMXV_PRXk

No religion is a religion of peace; even Christ said he did not bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34).

I don't like this subordination of non-Western religions/cultures to the West itself, as though somehow emulating Western societies salvages one from the third-world dustbin. The inconvenient truth is that the West thrives on the third world, and it's actually a structural component and result of twentieth-century global corporate capitalism.

Nick Land makes a very radical but compelling remark when he says: "If fascism is evaded in metropolitan societies it is only because a chronic passive genocide trails in the wake of capital and commodity markets as they displace themselves around the Third World, 'disciplining' the labour market, and ensuring that basic commodity prices are not high enough to distribute capital back into primary producer societies."

Also, I'm not sure I agree that Islam is "backward," even in its fundamentalist state (unless we want to argue that all religion is "backward," which I wouldn't agree with). Slavoj Žižek contests that Muslim fundamentalists are, in fact, actively engaged modernists: "the Muslim fundamentalists are not true fundamentalists, they are already 'modernists', a product and a phenomenon of modern global capitalism - they stand for the way the Arab world strives to accommodate itself to global capitalism. We should therefore also reject the standard liberal [i.e. Western] wisdom according to which Islam still needs to accomplish the Protestant revolution which would open it up to modernity: this Protestant revolution was already accomplished more than two centuries ago, in the guise of the Wahhabi movement which emerged in (what is today) Saudi Arabia. Its basic tenet, the exercise of ijtihad (the right to interpret Islam on the basis of changing conditions), is the precise counterpart to Luther's reading of the Bible."

Zero Hedge: meet-man-charge-americas-secret-cyber-army-which-bonesaw-makes-mockery-prism

Must Read.

Very illuminating. Although, what does Mr. Durden mean when he says that what is happening today would have once "sparked mass protests and toppled presidents"? Is he suggesting that a certain return to origins is in order? That we need to salvage some form of purer Americanism?

I think it's important to consider the possibility that the concept of "privacy" is changing, and, along with it, acceptances of what might be interpreted as infringements on our privacy. Durden's opening paragraphs come off as reactionary and lamenting cultural and technological development.

What Ein likes to talk about:

http://reason.com/archives/2013/06/20/overselling-psychiatry

Indeed. Thanks Foucault.

Actually, that reminds me: you should seek out Foucault's Madness and Civilization. I think it's something you would appreciate. It's an abridged (but sufficient) version of his History of Madness, which was actually his doctoral dissertation (or the equivalent thereof).

 

[Dak]

Very illuminating. Although, what does Mr. Durden mean when he says that what is happening today would have once "sparked mass protests and toppled presidents"? Is he suggesting that a certain return to origins is in order? That we need to salvage some form of purer Americanism?

I think it's important to consider the possibility that the concept of "privacy" is changing, and, along with it, acceptances of what might be interpreted as infringements on our privacy. Durden's opening paragraphs come off as reactionary and lamenting cultural and technological development.

Durden is just the pseudonym for all "inhouse" Zero hedge contributors btw. I don't think it necessarily has to be a call for a "return" to some former situation when one points out that what would be a big deal yesterday is not a big deal today, or whether it should be.

That said, a lot of stuff on ZH has similar lamenting about the "Fallen State of America". I'm so used to it I don't even see it anymore.

Indeed. Thanks Foucault.

Actually, that reminds me: you should seek out Foucault's Madness and Civilization. I think it's something you would appreciate. It's an abridged (but sufficient) version of his History of Madness, which was actually his doctoral dissertation (or the equivalent thereof).

Will add it to my ever growing backlog.

 

[Einherjar86]

A sadly accurate account:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/o...-of-the-english-major.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Studying the humanities should be like standing among colleagues and students on the open deck of a ship moving along the endless coastline of human experience. Instead, now it feels as though people have retreated to tiny cabins in the bowels of the ship, from which they peep out on a small fragment of what may be a coastline or a fog bank or the back of a spouting whale.

There is a certain literal-mindedness in the recent shift away from the humanities. It suggests a number of things. One, the rush to make education pay off presupposes that only the most immediately applicable skills are worth acquiring (though that doesn’t explain the current popularity of political science). Two, the humanities often do a bad job of explaining why the humanities matter. And three, the humanities often do a bad job of teaching the humanities. You don’t have to choose only one of these explanations. All three apply.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

 

[Einherjar86]

Coincidentally, Dak was explaining some of this to me a few days ago.

I just want to say something about my position on intentionality and what in literary studies is called the "intentional fallacy," and how it applies to race and gender issues currently occupying the news. The intentional fallacy is basically the contention that an author's purported original message can't dictate the worth or value of a literary text. As Wimsatt and Beardsley put it: "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."

Now, how does this apply to race and gender? On Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow explained that the general thrust to define marriage as between a man and woman demeans the efforts of gays and lesbians who try to marry. One of the conservatives on the show said that he couldn't "let that comment go," and took offense that Maddow was calling him a bigot. Maddow then countered that she wasn't calling anyone a bigot.

I feel that this is a common misunderstanding among conservatives and, more simply, non-academic persons: that general opinions, positions, or even statements can be demeaning even if the individual doesn't intend them that way. Conservatives are often so driven to extend racism or intolerance to individual actors, thus taking it personally when someone says that the effort to define marriage as between a man and a woman demeans gay marriage.

That isn't at all what Maddow was saying or what any intellectual is saying. They're identifying systematic racism, or systematic intolerance, not bigotry that can be traced back to individual actors. I know Dak has often made the argument that these systems are comprised of individuals, but I don't think that matters here. People often say things without intending them to be intolerant, but that doesn't mean the statements themselves aren't intolerant or racist. We need to understand that language operates at a level beyond the visceral utterance of the individual, and that a comment can be systematically racist or demeaning without being intended as such. In this way, if we follow the intentional fallacy, the value of a statement cannot be reduced to what its speaker intended.

We also, I have to concede, cannot call specific people bigots for iterating a statement of systematic intolerance; but we should acknowledge that a bigoted attitude still prevails throughout our cultural unconscious.

 

[Dak]

The video was pretty funny and sadly more accurate than like 95% of what passes for economic punditry on US news networks.

 

[Einherjar86]

I realize this may only be interesting to literary students, but anyway...

The idea of graphing and mapping texts isn’t new. In 1946, when computers were enormous and the internet wasn’t even an idea, a young Italian Jesuit priest, Father Busa, started work on software that could perform text searches within the vast corpus of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher-saint. Three years later he persuaded Thomas J Watson, the founder of IBM, to sponsor his research. Index Thomisticus, a machine-generated concordance, was completed in the late 1970s.

[...]

The big breakthrough came in 2004, when Google developed an electronic scanner capable of digitising books. No longer did researchers interested in tracking cultural and linguistic trends have to endure the laborious process of inspecting volumes one by one. Soon after Google’s digital archive went online, five of the largest libraries in the world signed on as partners. And, more or less just like that, literature had the potential to become data on an unprecedented scale.

“There are hundreds of digital projects in the humanities taking place,” Andrew Prescott, head of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, tells me. The emerging field is, he says, “best understood as an umbrella term covering a wide range of activities, from online preservation and digital mapping to data mining.”

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fb67c556-d36e-11e2-b3ff-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2XjQAXs9P

 

[Dak]

Well it's interesting to me as an extension of a larger process: The digitization of life.

Some conspiracy sites suggest that there were civilizations in the far past that reached the same level of technological development (or higher), and that we have little record of them (and what record we have is hidden, hence the conspiracy angle) because everything was digitized, and harddrives just aren't going to last as long as stone structures or cuneiform or whatever other archaic methods you can think of.

So when some civilization crushing incident happens, all record of the last 300 years is erased. Some castles might be left standing or something.

 

[Einherjar86]

I met with some other grad fellows in the program today and discussed the topic. It's really interesting, and one of the fellows (he's a fourth-year) has actually experimented with some of the software. There are copyright issues for contemporary literatures, but hopefully in the future we'll find ways around that.

It raises plenty of pertinent issues, for instance: how does the quantitative approach alter what we consider "reading"? how does it affect authorial intention? how does it assess information, and what exactly is information? how does it disrupt generic conventions and categories? and how does it impact the field of literary analysis in general? Lots of things worth considering.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

I'd like to do this to all Hegel.

 

[Einherjar86]

My friend has actually run Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations through the program, and it turned back some interesting results. You would think the word "word" would be prominent throughout the PI, but it actually fluctuates indirectly with the word "sense."

Matthew Jockers, a literary scholar, has (if I recall correctly) run Moby-Dick through the program multiple times, using something specific called "topic modelling." As it turns out (according to the software), Moby-Dick is only something like 10% about whaling, 50% about seafaring, 35% about homo-eroticism, and 5% about monomania. Of course, all by itself this information doesn't tell us anything useful about the novel, but it can provide us with very helpful information if we then go and actually read the novel.

The program doesn't read the book; it takes the book as a "bag of words" (a phrase we were using yesterday) and sifts through its contents, taking word counts, word proximity, etc. From there, it generates topics based on clusters of words. So, for instance, if in a Hemingway novel you get the words "battle," "fight," and "gun" turning up within close proximity to one another, the program simulates a topic for "war" and categorizes the words accordingly.

Such a process can't stand in for reading though (yet). Moby-Dick might only be 5% monomania by word count; but as readers of the novel know, Ahab's monomania is what drives the narrative. There would be no seafaring at all if it weren't for Ahab's obsession. So the software isn't designed to take the place of reading, but rather to help us sift through the vast collection of texts and better direct our reading.

 

[Einherjar86]

Just stumbled across this:

http://symposium-magazine.com/why-write-the-history-of-capitalism-louis-hyman/

 

[Dak]

Mises.org: State Splendor and Public Poverty

 

[SentinelSlain]

some blonde car garage receptionist I dated in Bradford told me that even though she accepted her freedoms as a western white girl and believed in them to be right, if she had a relationship with one of the guys she met in the African country she'd volunteered in, she would go along with their customs due to cultural relativism (and her romanticising it and being quite a simple person). She even said she would allow her (theoretical) daughter to undergo FGM / clitoris removal.

I'm sorry but this is the point where your wish for a life free of political and ideological conflict and yes *NO RACISM* just leaves you an utter simpleton. Women like her are basically like driftwood with a sprinkling of pretence on the top. She's a racist bitch for saying that her child should get its genitals mutilated, partially, ultimately, because it's black.

Women wont like this post, but whatever. People who try and embarrass you out of talking about this stuff through reference to male insecurity or whatever (because FGM and Koro are clearly totally unrelated to male insecurity) but you should just stand up to all of that rubbish and say the truth.


White women are nearly always a little bit like this. Like this was the extreme version of these dumb views. The only reason for her extreme cultural relativism is the socialization of "being white" in the decades she has lived (all two of them) and the location she was at. Basically, white women are oversexed, hypocrites, incapable of defending the freedoms that allow them to live their lives in the manner which they choose and are overly romantic about other cultures.

 

[Einherjar86]

Mises.org: State Splendor and Public Poverty

What a horrible context in which to discuss his purportedly humanitarian ideal of providing goods/services for the one going without. I wonder if he even knows what the Colosseum was for...

some blonde car garage receptionist I dated in Bradford told me that even though she accepted her freedoms as a western white girl and believed in them to be right, if she had a relationship with one of the guys she met in the African country she'd volunteered in, she would go along with their customs due to cultural relativism (and her romanticising it and being quite a simple person). She even said she would allow her (theoretical) daughter to undergo FGM / clitoris removal.

I'm sorry but this is the point where your wish for a life free of political and ideological conflict and yes *NO RACISM* just leaves you an utter simpleton. Women like her are basically like driftwood with a sprinkling of pretence on the top. She's a racist bitch for saying that her child should get its genitals mutilated, partially, ultimately, because it's black.

Women wont like this post, but whatever. People who try and embarrass you out of talking about this stuff through reference to male insecurity or whatever (because FGM and Koro are clearly totally unrelated to male insecurity) but you should just stand up to all of that rubbish and say the truth.

White women are nearly always a little bit like this. Like this was the extreme version of these dumb views. The only reason for her extreme cultural relativism is the socialization of "being white" in the decades she has lived (all two of them) and the location she was at. Basically, white women are oversexed, hypocrites, incapable of defending the freedoms that allow them to live their lives in the manner which they choose and are overly romantic about other cultures.

Female circumcision should be abandoned not because it's a "savage, culturally backwards idea," but because research has shown that it poses a measurable health threat to those who must suffer it. Your ex seems to be making an effort to acknowledge cultural value. While her belief in female circumcision may be misplaced, her intention seems to be that other cultures are not qualitatively better or worse. You, on the other hand, seem to genuinely think that we can evaluate different cultures, eventually ranking them in terms of "best" to "worst." This is untrue.

Cultural relativism shouldn't be an excuse for blindly participating in cultural practices; but these practices aren't to be condemned or abandoned specifically due to their cultural worth, nor should we extend the scientific research on certain practices to evaluative judgments on whether or not a culture is "good" or "bad." Cultural relativism means refraining from qualifying another culture as definitively worse than our own. Good, bad, better, worse, etc. are terms that can only be weighed from within a cultural framework. Female circumcision might be a scientifically unhealthy practice, but this doesn't mean that a culture that practices it is definitively worse for someone born into that culture than, say, Western liberal democracy would be.

 

[Einherjar86]

Mises.org: State Splendor and Public Poverty

What a horrible context in which to discuss his purportedly humanitarian ideal of providing goods/services for the one going without. I wonder if he even knows what the Colosseum was for...

some blonde car garage receptionist I dated in Bradford told me that even though she accepted her freedoms as a western white girl and believed in them to be right, if she had a relationship with one of the guys she met in the African country she'd volunteered in, she would go along with their customs due to cultural relativism (and her romanticising it and being quite a simple person). She even said she would allow her (theoretical) daughter to undergo FGM / clitoris removal.

I'm sorry but this is the point where your wish for a life free of political and ideological conflict and yes *NO RACISM* just leaves you an utter simpleton. Women like her are basically like driftwood with a sprinkling of pretence on the top. She's a racist bitch for saying that her child should get its genitals mutilated, partially, ultimately, because it's black.

Women wont like this post, but whatever. People who try and embarrass you out of talking about this stuff through reference to male insecurity or whatever (because FGM and Koro are clearly totally unrelated to male insecurity) but you should just stand up to all of that rubbish and say the truth.

White women are nearly always a little bit like this. Like this was the extreme version of these dumb views. The only reason for her extreme cultural relativism is the socialization of "being white" in the decades she has lived (all two of them) and the location she was at. Basically, white women are oversexed, hypocrites, incapable of defending the freedoms that allow them to live their lives in the manner which they choose and are overly romantic about other cultures.

Female circumcision should be abandoned not because it's a "savage, culturally backwards idea," but because research has shown that it poses a measurable health threat to those who must suffer it. Your ex seems to be making an effort to acknowledge cultural value. While her belief in female circumcision may be misplaced, her intention seems to be that other cultures are not qualitatively better or worse. You, on the other hand, seem to genuinely think that we can evaluate different cultures, eventually ranking them in terms of "best" to "worst." This is untrue.

Cultural relativism shouldn't be an excuse for blindly participating in cultural practices; but these practices aren't to be condemned or abandoned specifically due to their cultural worth, nor should we extend the scientific research on certain practices to evaluative judgments on whether or not a culture is "good" or "bad." Cultural relativism means refraining from qualifying another culture as definitively worse than our own. Good, bad, better, worse, etc. are terms that can only be weighed from within a cultural framework. Female circumcision might be a scientifically unhealthy practice, but this doesn't mean that a culture that practices it is definitively worse for someone born into that culture than, say, Western liberal democracy would be.

 

[Dak]

What a horrible context in which to discuss his purportedly humanitarian ideal of providing goods/services for the one going without. I wonder if he even knows what the Colosseum was for...

It's a question of opportunity cost. I think the point is well made.

 

[Cythraul]

Female circumcision should be abandoned not because it's a "savage, culturally backwards idea," but because research has shown that it poses a measurable health threat to those who must suffer it.

So does the claim "Female circumcision should be abandoned because it poses a measurable health threat to those who undergo it" hold true across all cultures or only some cultures and not others?

Good, bad, better, worse, etc. are terms that can only be weighed from within a cultural framework.

Why's that?

Female circumcision might be a scientifically unhealthy practice, but this doesn't mean that a culture that practices it is definitively worse for someone born into that culture than, say, Western liberal democracy would be.

So is it bad to engage in unhealthy practices or not? If it is, then why can't somebody say that one culture is worse than another insofar as the one engages in unhealthy practices that the other doesn't engage in?

 

[Dak]

I love Cyth's drivebys

 

[Einherjar86]

So does the claim "Female circumcision should be abandoned because it poses a measurable health threat to those who undergo it" hold true across all cultures or only some cultures and not others?

I would say certainly; but I'm speaking from my perspective. I think it should be abandoned. I do not claim to possess the cross-cultural tools to be able to convince a member of a different culture that I'm right. Claiming that a specific practice is harmful does not translate into the corresponding claim that a culture practicing it is thereby less valuable, or not as good.

Why's that?

Words like "good" and "bad" don't trace back to objective qualities. When I say "This beer is good," it means something entirely different than "He's a good man." "Good" can only be appreciated within the bounds of cultural (and syntactic) relativity. That's just the nature of the word. Show me what is always, without exception, good, and I'll show you an ideologue.

So is it bad to engage in unhealthy practices or not? If it is, then why can't somebody say that one culture is worse than another insofar as the one engages in unhealthy practices that the other doesn't engage in?

What does "bad" mean? It might be "bad" in a bodily sense; but who are we to presume that a culture practicing female circumcision places any worth or value whatsoever on the body? Perhaps we believe we do a "good" deed by extracting a young woman from such a barbaric culture, only to find that she kills herself days later out of shame or hopelessness, because her system of knowing the world has been irreparably shattered. When we presume that we can measure cultural worth based on purportedly Western, scientific views of good and bad, we establish a dangerous precedent whereby we view ourselves as qualitatively superior. I can't stand that.

Put more succinctly: we cannot definitively say that a specific culture is better or worse in any general sense. We can only say that specific cultures are better or worse for me/him/her/etc.