If Mort Divine ruled the world

Actually, plenty of academics in history, philosophy, English, political science, the natural sciences, etc. etc. lean left. But their leftism isn't sexy.

Leftist philosophy isn't sexy? Judith Butler's tiddies disagree! If the natural sciences can be politicized, it's not natural science*.
 
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Leftist philosophy isn't sexy? Judith Butler's tiddies disagree! If the natural sciences can be politicized, it's not natural history.

Chomsky's variety isn't. My variety of systems-theory leftism isn't. Post-Butlerian leftism is.

My point is that there are many different kinds leftism, and not all of them are equal.
 
Chomsky's variety isn't. My variety of systems-theory leftism isn't. Post-Butlerian leftism is.

My point is that there are many different kinds leftism, and not all of them are equal.

But you've quoted Butler so much. Leftist system's theory seems to always ignore micro-economics, which seems an immediate disqualifier and typical of communist/socialist apologetics..
 
I like Butler. I don't always care for her disciples.

There isn't really a leftist systems theory. That's just how I describe myself. And I think macro-economics are more important than micro. I'm not apologizing for communism though, since communism and systems theory are at almost direct odds.
 
I like Butler. I don't always care for her disciples.

What separates "people who like Butler" from "her disciples"?

There isn't really a leftist systems theory. That's just how I describe myself. And I think macro-economics are more important than micro.

A. I don't think macro-economics is very applicable to anything other than "higher level" B. The "higher level" doesn't actually help any particular person.

I'm not apologizing for communism though, since communism and systems theory are at almost direct odds.

But both are, most likely, leading to suffering when used prescriptively.
 
Another element of corporatism (or so I always thought) was a union of the government and the biggest corporations collaborating to rig the market against smaller businesses. Regulations that smaller businesses are broken by, but that big businesses can survive or work around.

That, on top of corporations influencing policies, is what I thought corporatism basically was.
 
What separates "people who like Butler" from "her disciples"?

Butler eschews the metaphysics of identity politics.

A. I don't think macro-economics is very applicable to anything other than "higher level" B. The "higher level" doesn't actually help any particular person.

It isn't applicable to anything other than the higher levels. I guess that's why they call it macro.

The highers levels do help individuals, just not in ways that are directly observable or immediately beneficial.

But both are, most likely, leading to suffering when used prescriptively.

Everything leads to suffering when used prescriptively.

As HBB said, there's no way to know whether corporatist policies were absolutely necessary in the development of modern technologies and systems; but, descriptively speaking, they played a major role.
 
It isn't applicable to anything other than the higher levels. I guess that's why they call it macro.

The highers levels do help individuals, just not in ways that are directly observable or immediately beneficial.

I put higher levels in scarequotes because I'm still skeptical that it's applicable. I think the credit/savings issue is a good example. It accelerates national/global spending to push credit over/without savings....until the meltdown.


Everything leads to suffering when used prescriptively.

As HBB said, there's no way to know whether corporatist policies were absolutely necessary in the development of modern technologies and systems; but, descriptively speaking, they played a major role.

Caroll Quigley argues that intense accumulation of capital is necessary for major civilization. However, such accumulations seem to set up said civilization for the fall in ways that may be orthogonal to wealth and technology development. Maybe just because of regression to the mean, or maybe because of human needs beyond the basics.
 
Meltdown, "the fall," etc. are apocalyptic notions closely tied to individualistic views of the world. Structural functionalism, systems theory, and other kinds of complexity theory complicate whether falls are really falls, and reject the idea of meltdown altogether. As far as systems are concerned, what we perceive as meltdown is restructuring. At this point in social development, even if we did experience an economic meltdown, social complexity has ingrained itself so deeply in our cultural consciousness that it would be nigh impossible to regress to some kind of mean, as you say, or base Crusoean state. We don't need all the fancy banking systems and conglomerates in order to be a complex society. Fantasies of the end never quite manage to capture the all the valences of social transformation.

In other news, this was cute:

https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-racists-got-the-blues/

Setting aside the politics of the post for a moment, the translation content alone is quite funny.
 
I understand you set to set aside the politics but that article is so stupid.

Nothing about it was racist and the Blue Lives Matter stupidity didn't just start as an opposition to Black Lives Matter but specifically started as a reaction to the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter which calls for dead cops, shooting pigs, frying bacon and so on.

That whole article could have just been man accidentally supports Black Lives Matter in an attempt to support Blue Lives Matter by pretending to understand Gaelic.
 
Meltdown, "the fall," etc. are apocalyptic notions closely tied to individualistic views of the world. Structural functionalism, systems theory, and other kinds of complexity theory complicate whether falls are really falls, and reject the idea of meltdown altogether. As far as systems are concerned, what we perceive as meltdown is restructuring. At this point in social development, even if we did experience an economic meltdown, social complexity has ingrained itself so deeply in our cultural consciousness that it would be nigh impossible to regress to some kind of mean, as you say, or base Crusoean state. We don't need all the fancy banking systems and conglomerates in order to be a complex society. Fantasies of the end never quite manage to capture the all the valences of social transformation.

The "Great Recession" unfortunately was not what I would call a meltdown (and little was restructured), so it's still hard to know what meltdown exactly would look like. I do agree that restructurings are a necessity of hubristic overgrowth in any particular area of society, but it is possible to have catastrophes in which real information and/or capital is lost, rather than simply shifted.


In other news, this was cute:

https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-racists-got-the-blues/

Setting aside the politics of the post for a moment, the translation content alone is quite funny.

One of the main lessons from my German classes was "don't trust online translators." Was always funny when someone got caught doing that.
 
The "Great Recession" unfortunately was not what I would call a meltdown (and little was restructured), so it's still hard to know what meltdown exactly would look like. I do agree that restructurings are a necessity of hubristic overgrowth in any particular area of society, but it is possible to have catastrophes in which real information and/or capital is lost, rather than simply shifted.

I wouldn't deny that, but it's really difficult to imagine what kind of catastrophe that would be. As Jameson said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

I understand you set to set aside the politics but that article is so stupid.

Nothing about it was racist and the Blue Lives Matter stupidity didn't just start as an opposition to Black Lives Matter but specifically started as a reaction to the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter which calls for dead cops, shooting pigs, frying bacon and so on.

That whole article could have just been man accidentally supports Black Lives Matter in an attempt to support Blue Lives Matter by pretending to understand Gaelic.

I found all the little bits of information as to why the translation was incorrect pretty interesting; but I suppose it could have been reduced to that simple line. It strikes me that that's what clickbait articles do, though. I prefer substance.
 
I wouldn't deny that, but it's really difficult to imagine what kind of catastrophe that would be. As Jameson said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

If the root of capitalism is private property and interpersonal property exchange, I'd argue capitalism only ends with humanity. I don't make personal/private property distinctions of course.
 
I found all the little bits of information as to why the translation was incorrect pretty interesting; but I suppose it could have been reduced to that simple line. It strikes me that that's what clickbait articles do, though. I prefer substance.

For what it's worth I actually speak Gaelic myself and I lol'd at his stupid fucking shirt slogan faux-pas before I even read anything.
 
https://www.theatlantic.com/educati...ind-campus-response-to-sexual-assault/539211/

A moment of sanity from the Atlantic:

As of 2014, Harvard Law’s Title IX training for its disciplinary board included Campbell’s PowerPoint slides. Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote of the intended effect of the training on recipients: “It is 100% aimed to convince them to believe complainants, precisely when they seem unreliable and incoherent.”
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Campbell’s claim that a sexual-assault victim’s memory consists of completely accurate but disorganized fragments contradicts fundamental scientific knowledge of the nature of memory, McNally told me. “The brain is not a videotape machine,” he said. “All of our memories are re-constructed. All of our memories are incomplete in that sense.”
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Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and social behavior at UC Irvine, has done pathbreaking work on memory manipulation. When I described to her what’s now being taught to administrators and students, she said it sounded disturbingly like a return of “recovered memory” theory, with some neurobiology thrown in “to give luster” to the argument.

During the recovered-memory scare of the 1980s and ’90s, thousands of people were convinced by their therapist—and by best-selling books on the subject—that their problems were caused by repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, often at the hands of their father. The theory was that the mind buried what had happened because it was so awful, but that the “forgotten” events nonetheless caused a lifetime of pain. Guided by therapists, victims were able to recover the memory and begin healing.


As it turned out, though, many therapists were implanting false memories in vulnerable people, resulting in baseless accusations that tore families apart. The frenzy eventually burned out when researchers, including McNally, discredited the underlying assumptions. “The notion that the mind protects itself by repressing or dissociating memories of trauma,” he writes in Remembering Trauma, “is a piece of psychiatric folklore devoid of convincing empirical support.”
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The result is not only a system in which some men are wrongly accused and wrongly punished. It is a system vulnerable to substantial backlash. University professors and administrators should understand this. And they, of all people, should identify and call out junk science.
 
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https://theoutline.com/post/2202/climate-change-denial-should-be-a-crime

Now climate alarmists are using the "look out the window" argument. My how things change. That's fine. Just wait for winter.

Winter is coming...

But yeah, looking out the window isn't a good argument.

While for some it may be enough to know that climate change makes hurricanes more frequent and more intense, the process of attributing individual events to climate change is tough. It will actually be easier to do for Harvey than for Irma. Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central, said that the first scientific estimates assessing climate change’s impact on Harvey will likely be available within the next month—which is fast for science. He attributed this to the fact that Harvey was a massive precipitation event, and scientists have a clearer understanding of how climate change affects that sort of storm. Furthermore, Harvey included coastal flooding, which is more clearly influenced by higher sea levels, a known consequence of climate change. Proving causation for Irma, mostly exceptional in strength as opposed to precipitation, will be trickier, and Strauss estimated that would take at least a year.

Strauss stressed that while drawing the connections between a storm and climate change is a useful scientific endeavor, most laypeople don’t need to see the exact causation to fit the narrative to their own personal beliefs. If you think climate change is a problem, you know that one of the consequences is increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes, and it doesn’t much matter if there was the direct causation here. Harvey and Irma are what climate change looks like, and if we want to minimize that, we had better tackle climate change.

Connecting hurricanes to climate change requires thinking at a certain level of abstraction. (Or as Strauss put it: Thinking about the causation “gets a little bit metaphysical.”) Many people have too many other concerns right in front of them—pressing needs that make global systems and our impact on them feel very far away from their daily lives. And so if you don’t think climate change is a massive pressing issue, you’re likely to see a large hurricane as just a large hurricane.

But that’s where having storms back-to-back might actually help change the general public’s understanding of how climate change plays into hurricane season, says Arthur Lupia, a political science professor at the University of Michigan who studies how people make decisions. Harvey was a visceral event that brought with it an onslaught of stories of the people affected. All the sudden something that felt abstract was tangible—people started to realize “this could happen to my family” or “this could happen to my home.” And now Irma, a second event of catastrophic proportions in a second location, re-emphasizes that conclusion. It makes it much harder to write it off as a fluke, even if it was a fluke, which again, we won’t scientifically know for quite a while.

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...te_change_has_to_do_with_irma_and_harvey.html