The News Thread

[Dak]

Everybody thinks they have it worse than everybody else.

Precisely. People are dumb.

 

[CiG]

 

[tagradh]

People who obsess over which gender has it easier are pathetic. I used to do it myself so I should know.

Most men who work brutal hours in gritty jobs wouldn't trade it for having to deal with a menstrual cycle, pregnancy and being physically vulnerable and most women who deal with sexism wouldn't trade that for 10 hours a day on an oil rig and so on. Everybody thinks they have it worse than everybody else.

I think this just goes back to the retarded, binary view that the majority of people seem to have on most things.

But then as a terrible centrist I would see things that way.

 

[CiG]

Two dudes run a train on some bitch, she falsely accuses them of raping her because she thinks a third guy who she wants to date won't date her if he finds out she's the type of bitch to get trains run on. I know this is basically a feminist talking point but being promiscuous needs to carry less stigma than it currently does, especially in the age of abortions, effective contraception and medical advancements dealing with STIs.

That said, false rape accusers deserve to rot.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

More on Ronell, from NYU department chair who hired her

So, a few things that struck me from this article.
1) Holy shit, this is why properly run departments rotate chairs democratically. I found the remark of the German department focused on English translations of French theory to be particularly stinging, and the fact that the faculty had to block her from dropping high-proficiency in German to be unforgivable. It is the German Department after all.

2) It seems apparent that there had long been a pattern of sexual misconduct by Ronell. If more stand up and come forward, of which the referenced student/Stockholm syndromite who lost her funding at Ronell's hands would likely not be included, then her dismissal should be a serious topic of discussion, regardless of tenure.

3) I'm glad that Hüppauf posed the question of how exactly it is that we can consider an academic whose largest influences are Heidegger and (less so, but nonetheless aptly noted) Derrida to be left-wing scholars. Heidegger was a Nazi for god's sake, and once one grows out/gets over the glow of his writing's profundity, the reek of radical conservatism and cultural/identitarian monism cannot go unnoticed. I recall being abhorred at something similar during a talk hosted by the Rosa-Luxembourg-Stiftung (so, as left as it gets) featuring a department chair from a university in upper-state New York. This professor, claiming to be a communist, referenced Carl Schmitt, far-right conservative political theorist of the Weimar era who later became a jurist and darling of the Nazi party, on numerous occasions in a way that made it apparent he was central to world-view upon which this presentation was constructed. I was so surprised at the reference that the gravity of it didn't hit me until after question time, but I did ask one question which I think revealed the source of intellectual poverty. The talk was focused on the notion of the comrade as the model for generating a successful revolution. Asking her if perhaps the employment of ideal-types was partly responsible for the failure of left-wing intellectuals to realize a communist state in the West, she denied that her talk had anything to do with ideal types. It's not deliberate, but it is an intellectual blind spot, blinded by the aura of profundity and consequent assumed simplicity.

 

[Einherjar86]

Thanks for sharing.

I'm glad that Hüppauf posed the question of how exactly it is that we can consider an academic whose largest influences are Heidegger and (less so, but nonetheless aptly noted) Derrida to be left-wing scholars. Heidegger was a Nazi for god's sake, and once one grows out/gets over the glow of his writing's profundity, the reek of radical conservatism and cultural/identitarian monism cannot go unnoticed.

Yeah, this is a sticking point for me too. I think it's possible for scholars to hold different political positions than their intellectual influences, but in the case of Heidegger so much of what he wrote is closely bound to a right-wing political ideology. And Derrida's treatment of Heidegger doesn't absolve it of this; Derrida regularly claimed that deconstruction wasn't a political philosophy (whether we believe this or not, it is true that deconstruction is not the friend of identity politics, regardless of Judith Butler's legacy).

 

[The Ozzman]

Why would anyone NOT want to live in the EU after these articles passed?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17849868/eu-internet-copyright-reform-article-11-13-approved

 

[CiG]

Win!

 

[HamburgerBoy]

The EU has been gouging American tech companies for decades now. The sooner we cut ties with Europe and build a stronger alliance with East Asia, the better. And lol @ all the chucklefucks in that article's comments section because "muh Russia". I pray every day for Brussels to become an Islamic caliphate, can't possibly be any worse than the neoliberal retardation in control.

 

[CiG]

 

[viewerfromnihil]

Print and broadcast media have thus far fared better during the rise of the internet than their American counterparts have, and this is just another step to ensure that remains the case. Not necessarily a bad thing as far as I'm concerned, though I wouldn't mind seeing a larger pirate party contingent in parliament's across Europe.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Print and broadcast media have thus far fared better during the rise of the internet than their American counterparts have

?

 

[viewerfromnihil]

?

My perspective is a bit a narrow, since I haven't quite had the chance yet to live long term in more than one EU country, so my comment is more true for, say, Germany than it is for Poland, but here's some statistics on print media consumption in the EU:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/422820/europe-daily-usage-of-print-media-by-country/

And the US:
http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/ I want to acknowledge here that the print percentage is perhaps a little skewed. I, for example, subscribe to NYT and WP, but read them on my phone and computer. If asked in the poll, however, I would have said print and not online, as would, I'm sure, many others who pay for the news they read.

Magazine subscription rates are informative here too. I'm going to stick to Germany here because it's what I know. Der Spiegel, comparable to Time Magazine in that it's weekly circulated, but with a journalistic quality closer to The Atlantic, has a weekly circulation of 750,000.
https://de.statista.com/themen/2050/der-spiegel/

Time, on the other hand, is about a tenth of that, or "just over 79,000 copies per week."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(magazine)

The Trump Bump is helping publications like The Atlantic and New Yorker, but in the case of The Atlantic, it's about 45,000 per issue, and that's monthly.
https://www.foliomag.com/citing-a-s...e-atlantic-prints-second-run-of-janfeb-issue/

For what it's worth, there is fear and has been for a while about what will become of print here, but it hasn't quite had the same doom-and-gloom I've seen back home. It's in some ways been seen as an opportunity to evolve (Süddeutsche Zeitung is like their NYT), as this piece references:
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/printmedien-die-zeitung-ist-tot-es-lebe-die-zeitung-1.579970

And, in fact, it's not exactly taboo here to discuss ways of involving even state funding to protect journalistic institutions, such as how broadcast is funded, though most of the journalists on this panel were understandably skeptical. Not, however, of whether or not it was possible, rather of the potential risks doing so may pose to journalistic independence. In any case, they do refer to the "Newspaper Crisis," so it's not like it's not a problem here. I just think it's less a problem than it is in the US, particularly when considering the problems facing small newspapers
http://www.fr.de/kultur/netz-tv-kri...tmedien-die-zeitung-als-luxusprodukt-a-462367

Which, as was just mentioned in passing, brings me to broadcasting. Every household here has to pay broadcast and radio fees, or Rundfunkbeitrag (17.50 per month). In the US, however, it's all private, and hence the takeover of small broadcasters and news organizations by partisan conglomerates. The closest we've got is NPR, and they've got to beg us for money numerous times a year and have in the past been so concerned with the potential of federal funding falling through that they were willing to bring on the Muslim Brotherhood on as a major contributor.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Thanks, I knew all media in the US had fallen in response to the internet's spread but didn't know that it held up in parts of Europe so well.

 

[viewerfromnihil]

Meanwhile in America

Blanks to be fired during active shooter drill at local school

 

[Dak]

Which, as was just mentioned in passing, brings me to broadcasting. Every household here has to pay broadcast and radio fees, or Rundfunkbeitrag (17.50 per month). In the US, however, it's all private, and hence the takeover of small broadcasters and news organizations by partisan conglomerates. The closest we've got is NPR, and they've got to beg us for money numerous times a year and have in the past been so concerned with the potential of federal funding falling through that they were willing to bring on the Muslim Brotherhood on as a major contributor.

You believe NPR to be nonpartisan?

 

[viewerfromnihil]

You believe NPR to be nonpartisan?

I didn't say that, though I do find it to be fair. The problem is that to some extent they have to cater to their audience since their audience literally gives them the money they need to keep buzzing vibrations through the air.

 

[Dak]

I didn't say that, though I do find it to be fair. The problem is that to some extent they have to cater to their audience since their audience literally gives them the money they need to keep buzzing vibrations through the air.

I don't listen to NPR because they don't talk much about things I find interesting or important, and on the occasion that they do, they have a typical liberal take I can get from any dozen of their listeners around me. They aren't HuffPo bad, but it's so Lib SWPL it hurts. The webpage may as well be CNN in terms of political coverage.

 

[Dak]

https://www.theatlantic.com/educati...t-have-to-speak-in-front-of-the-class/570061/

For many middle- and high-school students, giving an in-class presentation was a rite of passage. Teachers would call up students, one by one, to present their work in front of the class and, though it was often nerve-racking, many people claim it helped turn them into more confident public speakers.

“Coming from somebody with severe anxiety, having somebody force me to do a public presentation was the best idea to happen in my life,” one woman recently tweeted. According to a recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, oral communication is one of the most sought-after skills in the workplace, with over 90 percent of hiring managers saying it’s important. Some educators also credit in-class presentations with building essential leadership skills and increasing students’ confidence and understanding of material.

But in the past few years, students have started calling out in-class presentations as discriminatory to those with anxiety, demanding that teachers offer alternative options. This week, a tweet posted by a 15-year-old high-school student declaring “Stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to” garnered more than 130,000 retweets and nearly half a million likes. A similar sentiment tweeted in January also racked up thousands of likes and retweets. And teachers are listening.

This. Stupid. Shit. Needs. To. Stop.

 

[Dak]

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-small-note-on-terror-of-uncertainty.html

China still has concentration camps.