Pretentious Crap
- Thread starter josef k.
- Start date
nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
I've always enjoyed Agent's posts. Unlike some people, he reads source texts, can actually engage with the material in them and thinks through it instead of looking at Wikipedia and expecting that to be good enough.
this is a big problem: people are incapable of thinking outside of the seriously flawed and brain numbingly stupid dichotomy of "rationality" vs. "superstition", "progressive" vs. "conservative", "science" vs. "religion".
by the way, within this retarded dichotomy, i am of COURSE on the side of science. for the hundredth time, i am not AGAINST science, no did i ever say it is EVIL. that would be stupid and absurd -- and you people need to stop polarizing my position for easy dismissal.
my agenda here is to question the massive, massive conceit of our age, just like every age which came before:
this has everything to do with the "faith" in science that Josef mentioned.
in the last few years there have been a wave of interest in mostly seriously misguided and misinterpreted versions of Darwinian theories - such as the Bell Curve, such as the biological determinism which runs rampant in the academies. and all of this, i, and others, are loosely calling "neo-Darwinism". whether this usage is sound, i suppose time will tell.
there is a big flaw in your logic:
someone does not have to have a replacement solution in order to criticize the status quo. i do not have to solve humanity's problems in order to study or analyze or form an opinion about those problems.
HAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahhahahahahahahahahaahh , who are you fking people?
are u made out of internet-ether just to get laffs, or are you srius?
"psychoanalytic interpretation is no more unreliable than a linguistic analysis"? too good, too good !
psychoanalytic interpretation: person inteprets other person,
linguistic analysis, person interprets smthg written or spoken or recorded but
still it is language and can be analysed according to the categories of the language it is uttered in (unless the language is gibberish, in wihc case it's just teh jibberz) ; lnguistic analysis maybe something like subject nominative, direct object accusative dative and participles ergativity or agglutinating or 'here is the syntax operative in the particualr language' and so on . about a million tings one can do when makin a linguistic analysis, not all of which are interesting lol .
but still , my god, u analyze a 'language' and u r analysizing by definition a system of SOMETHIGN that has some repetitive structure that allows it to make sense in the first plac e . the possibility of 'reliability' is about a 1000 timez more than wen u interpret someone psychoanalytically (this is not a 'for' or 'against' either 'linguistics' or 'psychoanalysis', it is a 'let's be honest about what we are doing here' statement about method , )
Tentative Andy
I'm in the Meal Deal
There is a troll under our bridge.
swears
preppy-kei
I don't think these dichotomies are all that seriously flawed though. I'll take rationality over superstition any day, the former has its limits but the latter is just fucked. I, for one, would love to see an end to religion, superstition and conservatism! Wouldn't you? I thought you were all radical 'n stuff?
This is some strawman horseshit and anybody who thinks like this is an idiot. If you think natural selection results in "the best" you don't understand natural selection. If serial killers were better adapted to surviving the next million years and they took over the world, that would not mean they were the "best" people, just that they were more successful in passing on their genes.
Again, strawman horseshit, if you don't think we understand that there are limits to our knowledge, then you don't understand much.
The whole point of science is that we don't take "faith" in it, we ask for results. If a scientist's ideas are proven wrong, they're toast. If some preacher says the world is going to end next week and it doesn't happen, then he'll just come up with more bullshit to explain why. That's "faith".
The bell curve has been disproven and discredited by scientists and academics. To claim that it is accepted in mainsream academia means you are either being disingenuous or you don't have a clue about its status anyway. Which one is it, zhao? Social and racial darwinism were popular ideas 50-100 years ago. Usually driven by mystical racial beliefs rather that scientific enquiry.
Yeah, but it's just that your criticisms are usually smug, half-arsed and ill-explained.
well i do think it is seriously flawed. but i have already said what my choice would be within the silly frame work of this dichotomy.
there is no doubt most people consciously or subconsciously think like this. these misinterpreted versions of Darwinian theories are nothing less than ubiquitous in the world we live in. they are all pervasive. just turn on the telly: the idea that "we are much more advanced than people who came before" permeates society, and overshadows any admission of the limits of our knowledge.
again, you fail to, and do not want to, see the bigger picture that i am talking about. Science is not nearly as objective as we'd like to think, as a simple analysis of the distribution of funding in any research department demonstrates. and our "Faith" in science and technology, for instance to potentially solve all of our problems, despite the obvious fact that technological development has caused most of our problems in the past century, is absurd. (and no i'm not a ludite and think we should revert to pre-industrial lifestyles. i am saying that our trust in the objectivity of science and technology to deliver us into a bright future is seriously ludicrous. the solution might be to do science in a more responsible way in the future, instead of using it to justify our selfish, greedy whims)
you yourself said anything can be used to justify anything. that is the gist of my point: science is no different from religion in this regard.
and yet it was on the best seller list for a very long time, and remains hugely popular. ideas like this are still spreading like wildfire. it is part of this wave of "neo-darwinism", whether you like to face that fact or not.
i do my best. sorry if it's not good enough for you. here's an idea: why don't you come up with some ideas of your own, instead of trying to be mean to those of others, half arsed or not?
i am not a scientist, nor theorist, nor am i nearly as well read as others, but this does not mean what i have to say is not valid or important. and i'm still working a lot of this stuff out, learning as i go, but that doesn't mean my main points can be so easily dismissed as "horse shit".
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an internet misspelling of "owned". meaning, roughly, defeated by, put in his/her place, humbled, pissed on, etc.
vimothy
yurp
Zhao: I noticed something interesting: in many ways the neo-Darwinism/bio-logical determinism 'narrative' (obviously I am being a bit glib here) has a similar status to the narrative you yourself are advancing with regards to our ancestors -- in that it's controversial, attacked as pseudo science, etc, no?
swears
preppy-kei
Millions of people don't even believe in Darwins theories, ffs. And if people misinterpret them, then that is not the fault of science itself.
I do think we are more "advanced" in a lot of ways than the people who came before, even my parents generation had a lot of dodgy reactionary views that are not accepted today. For instance, 100 years ago, a lot of people believed in social darwinism, imagine that!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've said all this before and it's all pretty boring and obvious stuff. Except "the obvious fact that technological development has caused most of our problems in the past century" that's bollocks, there are a number of factors that have caused "most of our problems"... I'd say certain ideologies are the villians of the piece here: fascism, stalinism, neo-conservatism, but, you know, "problems" eh? What a downer they are!
Science and reason are way different from religion in that regard. Religion doesn't need any reason... "god sez so, so do it!" If people actually exercised their reason, a lot less evil would be "justified".
Most people who understand Darwin's theories and the scientific method wouldn't wipe their arse with The Bell Curve. If people have racist political reasons for swallowing this stuff, then they'll swallow anything.
I found it pretty easy.
Yeah, but it's a bridge made of trolls.
I think someone should put this thread out of its misery. It nearly got Godwinned to death a while back, by that crypto-nazi Zhao, but then Nomad facistically refused to "take" the Godwinning and the argument continued unabated. Everybody else carried on being blatantly racist and imperialist, and nobody detected the huge logical fallacy at the heart of every argument on all sides of the discussion, which is too obvious for me to point out.
I hereby award Vimothy the Undetected Sarcasm prize of the week, although I will claim it for myself if either Zhao or Nomad responds angrily to this post demanding to know why I called them a Nazi. Unless they're just being sarcastic and I haven't detected it, in which case they can have it.
It strikes me that the biopolitical dimension of this question has to be considered paramount, at least on a syntagmatic level. I also think that in light of the gap - or what Lacan called the spaltung - separating genuine pretentious crap from its mere simulacrum (see above) there is also a necessity here for a structuralist-hermeneutic account to supplement the basic biopolitical accounting which - of course - has to be the first port of call in any genuinely revolutionary attempt to rethink proletarian subjectivity in terms of its objectal destinations, against the reigning neo-liberal hegemony, in which the subject is treated as a mere phallic appendage to the libidinal excesses of the Big Other. In this effort, of course, the resources provided by higher mathematics will play an important part.
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