When I went to college I sought out creative writers that would help me with writing.
Obama said on the other hand that he sought out "Marxist professors," on p. 101 of Dreams from my Father. I still find that that phrase defines the man. You are what you seek.
As a blogger I know I should try to find more contemporary business. I should go after issues that burn and blaze. Whenever I mention gay marriage, for instance, I get two hundred comments. Many tomahawks are thrown.
But I want to open debates, not wars.
My problem with Marxism and with Democrats remains that they are not enough about the country and too much about certain factions of the country. Marxism divides the population into good and bad. Good is defined by oppression. Bad is defined by success.
Then they set about redistributing from the successful to the losers. They want the votes of the losers to help them win.
They've been very successful with this strategy.
But I don't think the country itself can succeed if that's the national strategy. We are likely to become a failure as a country, since failure on an individual level is what's rewarded by those in power.
Imagine a classroom in which the F's got A's and the A's got F's. Everyone would try to get an F, so they could get an A.
What if you went to college to major in failure? What if whole countries were set up in order to inculcate failure, in order to attract aid from the IMF?
One wonders about the algorhythms of success and failure. One problem is that those who are smart and successful often keep doing better and better, while the losers get further and further behind.
Sports seems to accentuate that separation between the gifted and the crummy.
At any rate, I think what we sought out in college is what we tried to become, and by now, many of us have more or less become it. Has Obama succeeded?
His wife is proud of him. He's the king of the losers.
52 comments:
I sought out great teachers with big personalities.
I didn't care what they were teaching--I wanted to hear them teach.
I swam on an intramural team that raised funds for a Marxist sociology professor to appeal denial of his tenure. Our coach was the daughter of the swim coach and the team consisted of swimmers who had tried out for the swim team and either gave up or missed the cut. We swept every event in intramurals against swimmers entered by fraternities and sororities. The daughter of the swim coach got elected to the student senate.
The sociology professor taught classes that were always full after the first few hours of registration, which was conducted alphabetically, so I never took his class. But I did attend a party at his house. I told him I liked Oswald Spengler. He suggested that I read Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium and a book by Anatole France called Penguin Island. He lost his tenure battle because he looked too much like Ken Kesey.
Students are human and thus make decisions based on what they consider to be their best self-interests do they not.
For most WASPs, marxism is not in their best interest--Romneyism probably izz. For poor students from the barrios or working class marxist-ideas might be in their best interests (as Islam might be). That said, the older, labor-oriented marxists were quite a different bird than the multicultural sort--sort of the difference between Dreiser and Angela Davis. However fugly the history of applied Marxism seems, KM himself was usually addressing the workers of Germany and England (the International, only in theory)--.
In a sense the postmodernists, at least the semi-rational ones (say Rorty) were correct: after Stalin and Hitler (and that doesn't mean communists are nazis), Truth itself has become dubious.
Truth is dubious but we can't do without the concept. We have to grant that someone is right or at least that one thing is better than another objectively. Objectively capitalism is better than communism insofar as it allows for more freedoms for more people, not just intellectual freedom but the ability to choose what to eat. North Koreans don't have either freedom to think or write, or to eat. South Koreans have both.
Kim Jong-Il (may his soul rest in peace) is socialism with a human face. He had a human face, as did Pol Pot. And he wanted it worshipped.
What happened to Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country?
I know that self-interest might make the poor think that communism is better because in the short term they get to eat better, and have better clothes but within a few years when the economy stagnates, they will starve. So you have to think a few years down the road to the best algorhythm.
Fast goes fast and slow goes slow, do that low yo yo stuff.
All you gotta do is move your pretty feet, and do that low yo yo stuff.
How's that going to work out when the diseases kick in?
It may be in someone's immediate interest to date a hooker, but how's it going to go ten years down the road when you're in a hospital on a drip from doing the low yo yo stuff like any other feller?
Is it possible for the poor to think abstractly and to think of the good of all? To think of the good of their country? I say that each person has an infinite mind made in the image of God, and that they therefore can understand not just the nation but the universe.
They can suffer for the good of the country, and put their shoulder to the wheel. They can understand that Locke and Smith will keep the country safe while Marx makes us all marks.
Avoid becoming marks.
I think Christ in talking to the poor thought they were worthy of understanding his message. They could understand as well if not better than the millionaires with their illuminations. The poor can understand the parable of the talents. Christ is the leaven in the lumpenproletariat.
This video is actually called Truth. It's from a young North Korean woman who is also Christian:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPoBEabr-0Y&feature=related
Truth in a political sense, at least. Im not suggesting the PoMo denial of logic and science was correct.
Locke was not the gung-ho capitalist you think he was, KO. Marx himself quotes Locke, usually favorably. While favoring some property rights Locke opposed the massive Tory estates, and royalist power--the whigs were not...Teabuggers, exactly. (tho' Locke was a hypocrite on slavery as was his bastard Jefferson). Locke's 2nd TOCG is a liberal document, not Ayn Rand.
Now, I agree democracy is preferable to....Kim-ocracy (or Maoism). Didn't Marx once say he was not a marxist? Unfettered capitalism is another matter. (re....dripdrip, why Providence provided Latex. Serio I understand what you are saying but yr hero Locke said much the same re people acting in their best interests--not in accord with the "Romanish monarchy").
You'd have to cite the Locke portion of your testimony carefully, and drop the Ayn Rand bit, before I bit. Locke is quite controversial and obviously the Marxists have looked hard for ways to discredit him. That he owned stock in an American company that did trade with slaveowners is part of their schtick. But Jeremy Walsh among others has a different look at Locke altogether and posits that his central inspiration was Baptist and that he was against slavery. Very difficult to get all this straight without citations.
I don't support Ayn Rand, as she wasn't a Christian. I'm not a pure capitalist in that sense that she was. She wanted pure egotism to rule.
I find her grotesque.
I do like her hits at Marxism. I think she hits hard and well. but she didn't build anything I'd want to be part of.
For one, Locke opposed the monarchy and divine right of Kings. He cared not for magistrates. Sounds trivial perhaps--but many conservatives and religious people (whether chr.jew, or muslim) still uphold monarchistic ideals, explicitly or not. And lest we forget Locke's political writing influenced both French and Amer. revolutionaries (e.g., Rousseau, and Jefferson). Lockean ideals may have resulted in secularist errors in a sense (and the Terror) but in principle he was a champion of freedom (including freedom from baronial/aristocratic power).
Kirby,
I sought out mathematics classes. If I recall correctly, I had 108 quarter hours in Math out of 180 required for my BA. The Honors College was good to me :-). Like you (and GM), I made it a point to seek out well-taught classes, and to take multiple classes from instructors that I thought were especially excellent.
I think you have Obama figured completely wrong. Obama was seeking social justice. When Obama went to college, the poly sci profs he had who were most likely to be interested in social justice were the Marxist ones. The issue here isn't that Obama is or was Marxist, it's that the capitalist econ-oriented poly sci types tend to be your kind of people, sycophants to the rich and powerful, not his. Later in life, he came to understand the social justice imperative of Christianity, and came to see it as a superior foundation to Marxism for his social justice concerns, and this, as well as constitutional law and personal preference for community building and consensus seeking, is where he's coming from now.
Has Obama succeeded?
His wife is proud of him. He's the king of the losers.
Loser? He won the last Presidential election by 365 to 173 electoral votes. If he's the king of losers, what does that make McCain? The joker?
And it seems ironic that you posted this note on the very day that the last US combat troops pulled out of Iraq, marking the final end to the Iraq war, and arguably earning that Peace prize from a few years back. For my part, I'll take losers who can end illegal, immoral wars over losers who start them.
It takes damn little courage to fan the flames of patriotism, and seek self-justification by sending other people off to kill and die so that you can bee a "war president." It takes more courage to stand up to the jingoist idiots who are determined to find fault with everything you do, and to do the right thing anyway.
Later in life, he came to understand the social justice imperative of Christianity.
Which one? Romans 13, as in obey the king/emperor at all times, or some koom-ba-yah passage in Matthew--ie, the rightist-Bachmann types insist they are following the Gospel, as do Obamaites. Not exactly consistent (given we were discussing Locke (not Cantorian dreams), Locke himself objected to Romans 13).
What about the thousands of armed "advisors"? What about the drones? What about the other illegal immoral war in Afghanistan? Libya? Syria? The one he wants to start in Iran? A murderer of children can never earn a peace prize.
GM,
What about the thousands of armed "advisors"?
AFAIK, the only folks the US is paying who are armed are embassy guards. It is very likely that there are other armed US citizens, but they're being paid for by other folks.
What about the drones?
AFAIK, any drones still operating in Iraq are operating with the permission of the Iraqi government, and are unarmed. If they are there (and I don't know), they'd be limited to providing intelligence to other units (presumably Iraqi).
What about the other illegal immoral war in Afghanistan?
The war in Afghanistan is not illegal -- the Taliban were providing protection to al-Qaeda. The 9/11 attacks, together the the Taliban's decision to continue to provide bases for al-Qaeda were a legitimate casus belli. Whether the continued war in Afghanistan is immoral is a more difficult question. I think an honest answer would be, "in some ways yes, and in some ways no." Likewise, I think it's reasonable to ask whether or not our strategy in Afghanistan has served our national interests. I think the same answer applies.
Libya?
Libya is an interesting question. IMO, Obama was legally obligated to seek an AUMF, but let's be honest here, he wouldn't have gotten one, simply because the Republican party is determined to obstruct him in every way possible, whether or not it serves the national interest.
I'd put Libya in a different category. Libya was not an invasion, so much as it was an intervention into a civil war, and moreover a civil war whose balance arguably depended whether and how the international community chose to intervene. I think a final judgment on the Libyan intervention will have to wait, and to a certain extent, this is true of Iraq as well. To paraphrase Franklin: they can have a republic, if they choose to keep it. Odds are they won't, but time will tell.
Syria?
AFAIK, we're not involved in Syria.
The one he wants to start in Iran?
You need to check your sources. There are folks who want to start a war in Iran, but so far as I can tell, they're all Republicans.
A murderer of children can never earn a peace prize.
This is clearly wishful thinking. After all, Kissenger won the Peace prize.
J,
Which one? Romans 13, as in obey the king/emperor at all times, or some koom-ba-yah passage in Matthew
Paul was naïve about Roman power, in a way the Jesus never was. Paul thought that his Roman citizenship would provide him protection as a missionary, and he had the comfortable (if deeply misguided) belief that only law-breakers had reason to fear governmental authority. This error was causal in his own death.
No, I'm referring to the social justice component of Jesus's ministry, as well as the social justice component (well attested in the prophetic writings, especially Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zecharia, and Amos) of Judaism. Call it koom-ba-yah if you like -- in my experience, social justice often calls for personal sacrifice.
And yes, both Bachmann and Obama base their worldview on their Christian faith, and both are right, so long as their Christian faith is properly understood as distinguished from the Christian faith, as taught by Jesus, and as witnessed too (with acknowledged failings) by the Christian church over its 2000 year history. Of course, my opinion in this is that Obama's faith is a good deal closer to Jesus's than Bachmann's is. It's given that Kirby feels otherwise.
I totally recognize where Bachmann is coming from. I have no idea where Obama is coming from, but it feels like Outer Space with a touch of Kim Jong-Il's flared pants.
Stu, I loved all your careful points in these responses.
I like that J has finally simmered down enough that we can have an actual conversation.
GM considers even Lincoln to be a war criminal. His denomination has completely ruled out any violence (except psychological warfare, which can get very intense in pacifist circles).
I'm completely against what is called social justice because it gives too much power to the government. I am not against churches helping the poor, nor am I against individuals or even groups helping the poor. I am against the government helping them, because it allows the government to seize the holdings of the rich.
I see the 1% as the geese that lay the golden eggs. People should just get off of them. The 1% -- people like buffett and Gates, and many less well-known figures, are financial geniuses. The government thinks it only has to seize their holdings, and then they can redistribute the benefits. But when they seize the stuff, it's as if it vanishes into thin air as by a magic trick.
There is some magic in the work of financial geniuses for which no government can account.
It would be as if governments thought they could write poetry, or publish novels.
Wrong. Only individuals can do this, and they have to be inspired individuals for the work to be any good, and they have to respond entirely to their own genius.
Being a financial wizard is even harder, even more rare, and at least as necessary as poetry and novels.
It's not fair that some people get all the talent. Tell me about it. God isn't fair.
Communists, in wanting everything to be fair, just murder the way things really are.
The government should realize that it has the duty to keep the four central rights: life, health, liberty, and property, and that they have to balance the duty to keep all four (they can't seize property in order to help us with health if it means they have to kill our liberties).
Otherwise, they should stay out of our lives. I'm a bit wary of big government types.
Obama is no Christian. He's a crypto-communist. Jesus never said that government should be Big Brother. He did imply that individuals and churches should help the poor. And yes, they should.
Flip them a quarter as you pray for them to get their wherewithal back, or bring them home to your house and mother them to death. But don't pass the buck to Uncle Sam.
Kirby,
I'm completely against what is called social justice because it gives too much power to the government. I am not against churches helping the poor, nor am I against individuals or even groups helping the poor. I am against the government helping them, because it allows the government to seize the holdings of the rich.
It seems to me that you're completely blind to the ways in which under the status quo, the government actively aids the rich is seizing the property of the poor.
What's being proposed these days is that the slant in favor of the rich be reduced, not reversed.
Stu, you sometimes seem to be the lost voice of Pravda. I wonder how this has happened to you.
South Korea has western levels of prosperity. North Korea has slave camps, famines, and zero freedoms. And yet because there is no income disparity many on the left prefer it to the other Korea.
It's very weird. Madeleine Albright praising Kim Jong Il and saying he was sane. Yes, in Democratic communist terms, he was following a certain logic.
There is an incredible discrepancy between the two Americas. One is all about income equality guaranteed by the government. The other wants free enterprise.
One side wants sexuality regulated so that the laws governing consent at least are still there. The other wants a free for all with diseases treated by the state.
There was footage of Rick Perry coming across a 14 year old BISEXUAL, she's 14, mind you. She takes PErry to task for being against gay marriage. She's 14. She's bisexual. There are 5 or 6 kinds of hepatitus alone. And yet she's a bisexual. She swings both ways. And she thinks Rick Perry has problems that we all need to deal with.
Things are getting loopier by the minute.
We have a 3000-page document that violates the Commerce Clause any which way it can, and one side is all over it, saying yes we can! The other side is saying, wait, just a minute, the Constitution... regulates... NO IT DOESN'T, I mean yes we can! The other side screams.
It's the weirdest set of flash points I've ever seen, and just keeps getting weirder.
Madeleine Albright all over Kim Jong Il.
The war with Al Qaeda is not about Islamic terrorism.
IF Obamacare is repealed, and the economy begins to move again as a result, I see the media lining up in huge blocks like we see on TV from Pyongyang, weeping uncontrollably that their dear leader's unconstitutional and unreadable law was not passed.
The poor don't even pay taxes in the country, but they want to take more from the wealthy and have the government redistribute it. So we can be more like North Korea!
Stu's correct insofar that Obama's political views are closer to Christian teachings (social justice, etc) than the likes of a Bachmann, Romney, or Gingrich--in theory at least (though keeping in mind the drones, etc). Christ was not a republican sunday schooler in love with the NRA, KO. But that's part of the problemo_ ain't it: conservative bozos like the Bachmanns use JC for their ends. Leftists see JC as Che Guevara. So it goes, without a social contract and civil law
Luther said it was permissable to defend oneself. Even Augustine allowed that. You can't turn the other cheek to Hannibal Lector.
Well, you CAN. Yes, you CAN.
But it won't have much of an effect on someone without a conscience. Ask Jeffrey Dahmer!
Mostly the NRA likes to shoot deer. I approve of this since deer house Lyme ticks. The NRA should be given government subsidies to wipe out all the deer and the government should let them use helicopter gunships. They should do this on a white Christmas when they are easier to spot.
I confess I rather like Bachmann. She makes very good sense to me. I like that she stands with Israel (Ron Paul doesn't see any difference between Israel and Iran, they're both just foreign countries to him -- he has no way of ranking countries according to how well they accord with Lockean criteria -- Bachmann on the other hand does).
Bachmann's hair is better than all the other candidates' except possibly Romney's. People say: what's that got to do with being a president? We have to see these people all the time on TV. We don't really want one with shaking hands, or a whiny nasally voice (Paul) or one who does the preacher sing-sing and slows down for emphasis at the end of every sentence like Obama, or a big fat wretch like Gingrich (let him get his gut under control and then we cna talk about the economy).
I liked your hit on the Koom-ba-Yah left. Nice hit. There are passages like that in the Bible. I nearly always throw up when I read them.
I prefer what Bachmann tends to find in the Bible.
One of the hugest flaps now is the gay rights situation: gay marriage (allt he Republicans are against it), while Obama on the other side has tagged gay rights as the stipulation for receiving foreign aid.
He wants to increase sexually transmitted diseases worldwide.
He can't wait to do this.
The other side is about regulating sexuality. First in oneself (Gingrich fails, as did Cain), and then in the society at large. When you watch "gay pride" marches, it just seems that they have no shame at all.
There are a lot more people like that.
Shameless in every sphere. Give me a handout. (Unashamed.) Watch me wiggle my butt. (Unashamed.) I read Marx. (Unashamed.)
I like Bachmann because she still believes in shame. Did Jesus believe in shame? He did let the lady caught in adultery go. But wasn't he using shame against the entire Roman empire? They killed God.
Once a country gives in to licentious shamelessness as the Romans under Nero and Tiberius did, they were done.
Obama is completely shameless. He just openly lies. He has no concern about this. He told McCain he would only take public monies not private, and then ended up with eight times as much loot to run his campaign. He expects us to believe one word he says after that?
He's as shameless as Kim Jong-Il. Maybe not as shameless as Bill Clinton (he rapes people and can still show his face in public as if he's a moral being).
Very weird.
Bachmann at least still has some sense of shame, I think.
I'm for her. Plus, her hair is fantastic.
Kirby,
Stu, you sometimes seem to be the lost voice of Pravda. I wonder how this has happened to you.
The problem here is that you're not actually reading what I'm writing. You're reacting to what you believe that people like me believe. Can it be any more obvious? You haven't engaged a single one of my points, but instead bring in extraneous crap like this:
South Korea has western levels of prosperity. North Korea has slave camps, famines, and zero freedoms. And yet because there is no income disparity many on the left prefer it to the other Korea.
You've never heard praise of North Korea from me. I would greatly appreciate it if you'd react to what I say, rather than trying to cram other people's words down my mouth and then respond as if I'd said them.
One side wants sexuality regulated so that the laws governing consent at least are still there. The other wants a free for all with diseases treated by the state.
This is a gross and offensive misrepresentation. Your side wants to regulate sexuality, not based on consent, but instead based on traditional gender roles (heterosexuality only) and traditional relationships (only within marriage, and forget about divorce). Claiming this is about consent has the implication that my side is ok with rape, which is a damn lie, and you should be ashamed of it.
My side argues for lesser constraints, under the general notion that what consenting adults do in private is their business, not the states. My side also argues that we should make available both the knowledge and the means to practice safe sex. Your side is trying systematically to deny both, because your side is offended that this knowledge and these means might prevent what your side believes to be the just consequences of such activity.
I find it curious the way this whole argument has shaken out. Conservatives generally claim they want a small government, but this isn't really so. They want a large police force (to prosecute the kinds of crimes that they believe other folks tend to commit), a small SEC, EEOC, OSHA, EPA and IRS (so that their crimes will be unpunished), and a large military (to kill Iraqis). But they also really want a large secret police force which will be charged with imposing their morality on their fellow citizens. Controlling, condescending, but unaccountable: modern conservatism in a nutshell.
Since there are only two parties, we tend to think of the entire horde of the other side as one, since they vote as one. But there is a lot of difference within the horde. It's just that they vote as one. Foucault said over and over that there should be no separate sexual crimes. If you beat someone up to rape them then you should get prosecuted for beating them up. I tend to see the whole left as Foucauldian. Foucauld is the most frequently cited author in the humanities. I tend to see him as the girding holding together the entire Democratic party.
There are however outliers such as yourself and Brett, who claim to not have been directly influenced by Michel Foucault.
I've never heard of a police force that the right wants to put forward such as the religious police in Saudia Arabia.
this seems like a paranoid fantasy.
I think right and left each have these paranoid fantasies about the other. And we see one another as through a glass darkly, each side seeing the other as Judas.
(J put through a bizarre comment that Bachmann was a reminder of the Manson girls, which I excised, as it seemed to slip off the narrow precipice I accord to logic into an abyss of chaos.)
You always sexualize the political discussion, KO. Was FDR Foucaultian?? No. Nor was say JFK and many others. The democrats did not start with the Clintons, Obama, Pelosi, Frank, etc. One notes your tactic--"presentism" if you will-- on right-wing sites such as Althouse, and in Limbaugh-speak. It's Orwellian--ie, suggest anyone who supports social security sides with Hillary, etc.
Kirby,
Since there are only two parties, we tend to think of the entire horde of the other side as one, since they vote as one. But there is a lot of difference within the horde. It's just that they vote as one.
Republicans generally vote as one. Democrats do sometimes, but not as consistently. Democrats are more accustomed to being a majority party (and so they haven't tended to need unanimity to acheive their ends), whereas the Republicans are more accustomed to being a minority party (and so, without rigid party discipline, they would have very little political leverage).
Foucault said over and over that there should be no separate sexual crimes.
I know very little of Foucault, but if this is what he said, then he's an idiot on the subject, and by no means representative of mainstream Democratic thought. The general theoretical framework of the left vz. rape is that it is the ultimate invasion of privacy. [At the risk of being a bit too glib here, it often seems to me that the theoretical framework of the right is that rape is a crime against property, which is to say, in the common case of male on female rape, it's a crime against the husband/father/controlling male, and not so much a crime against the woman per se.]
I've certainly heard the theory that rape is not a crime of sexuality, but instead a crime of violence. I think the exclusionary aspect is naïve, although certainly a part of rape is imposing one's will on another. And I can see some Foucaultian echos in this theory, but it is not ultimately Foucaultian, because it characterizes rape intrisically as violence, and not as separate from it.
I tend to see him as the girding holding together the entire Democratic party.
Then you're as much an idiot as he is.
I've never heard of a police force that the right wants to put forward such as the religious police in Saudia Arabia.
Perhaps not. But the right has consistently tried to use civil law as a way of controlling and shaping morality. I'd argue that this is a misuse of civil law, and it has tended to reduce respect for civil law. In the meantime, I'm sure you'll argue that while DOMA is great, the miscegenation laws were clearly wrong. To me, they come from the same place, and are headed to the same place.
You're a bit out of touch over there in the computer science building. The humanities rules the creation of values, and this is why the population is getting increasingly crazy: 80% of the population has studied under a Foucaultian.
(About 80% of Americans attend college, and chances are good to perfect that they've encountered at least one Foucaultian. Foucaultians tend to be quite rigid and demanding that you either serve their values or flunk the class. Most kids serve their values. A few stand up to them, but are bullied into silence rather shortly.)
DOMA is just another law that Obama has tossed out along with any law that defends our borders.
He doesn't believe in America. He believes in an international proletariat of the "oppressed."
I get my values via the Bible's values. I see nothing in there about miscegenation. There's plenty, and quite clearly written, with regard to fornication and sodomy in particular. The last bit in Revelation is parsed by Metzgar as not being about dogs, but about sodomy.
"The list of those who are excluded [from the New Jerusalem] resembles in some respects the earlier list of those consigned to the lake of fire (21:8), but here the first category is 'the dogs' -- a reference to sodomites" (105-106).
It's not clear to me how you can erase all the references and instead make them into pastors and keep a straight face.
I guess the whole idea of excluding ANYBODY for ANY reason seems abhorrent to the left. Unless, of course, it is straight white Christian males who have conservative views.
They should go into the lake of fire for refusal to go along with the new Foucaultian ideals.
I do think we need to understand and obey the law as it is written. "For there is no power but of God."
I sometimes think that because he won the popular vote (he cheated by getting McCain to work with a handicap in terms of his phynancing), Obama believes that he IS God.
13 is clearly against the lusts of the flesh "make not provision for rthe flesh" because he's at pains to note all over the place that the flesh cannot know God. Only the spirit can know God.
The flesh is ignorant.
It's difficult to get the communists to see this kind of thing.
Among other commandments that are located in 13:9, he also says things like 12:11, that we should not be "slothful in business."
Poor businessmen are wicked people.
If nothing else, we could say that Obama is a very lousy businessman who has brought America to the brink of ruin. Does he care? No, he is proud of himself. Because he has no brains. If he had a brain, he would leave the office. Instead, he's running for a second term. He hasn't done enough damage yet.
Kirby,
You're making up statistics. According to Wiki: Educational attainment in the United States, only 56% of the population over age 25 has "some college," 9% max out with an Associates degree, and only 30% have a Bachelor's or more. And the National Center for Education Statistics breaks this out by various majors. There you'll see a large majority of students take majors which require little or no exposure to the Humanities: Biological Sciences, Buisness, Computer and Information Science, Education, Engineering, Heath professionals, Psychology. The Humanities themselves represent such a tiny portion of the majors that they're not even listed as such.
While I don't doubt for a moment that Humanities faculty understand themselves as playing a central role in shaping the values of their students, I very much doubt they do. Oh, yeah, those doe-eyed coeds pay an appropriately flattering amount of attention, but once they have their grades, they move on, otherwise unaffected. The question of who's played who seems appropriate, and my money is on the 20 year olds. After all, they're not the ones pretending that eloquence and a transitory power obviate age in determining sexual desireability.
Outside of a few ivory tower citadels (including the one in which I work), liberal education in the classical sense is all but dead. For the most part, students go to college in search of the main chance -- they take communications if they're pretty, business if they're not, and engineering if they like math more than grovelling (most folks would rather grovel, it turns out). They'll take (and resent) freshman English, but it won't change their values any more than it improves their writing ability.
Foucault as a strawman is convenient for you because you can argue against him, and he can't argue against you. But don't confuse this with participation in the American conversation.
Vocabulary test: chambering?
Chambering
Meaning: Sexual immorality; wantonness; fornication; lewdness.
This old English word is used only once in the King James Version, see: Rom. 13:13.
Maybe check your cliffsnotes to Dante's Inferno KO (iddn't every poetical supposed to have that, at least in Anglish?): there are creatures deeper--much deeper-- in the Malebolge than mere sodomites and whores (tho' , they're in there). Caiaphas, for one: the lying judge-bureaucrat (he could work for both GOP and Dems, would one imagine--Kissinger-like)
is there music to go along with chambering
: ;
>
~
Kirby,
We can go around and around on sexual morality.
I draw a sharp distinction between sexual immorality (which I see as being ultimately about unfaithfulness, and sexuality as objectification) vs. orientation. You're doing your best to conflate them, and to thereby condemn me for opinions which I don't have.
What I see in our society is a tremendous amount of sexual marketing, and a strong correlation between sexual marketing and promiscuity. This is no less true of the heterosexual commmunity than it is of the homosexual community. And certainly, promiscuity is inconsistent with faithfulness. In this, the characteristic sin of the heterosexual community is not only no less than that of the homosexual community, it isn't even different.
Where you and I disagree is on the question of whether or not faithful homosexual relationships between consenting adults are intrinsically sinful. I believe that the category of faithful homosexual relationships between consenting adults is a category that was unknown to Paul: he'd have known of homosexual relationships only in the context of pederasty or prostitution. And with Paul, and you, I have no problem condemning either, as both are exploitive, degrading, and damaging. But for me and you, unlike Paul, there are other categories.
The question then becomes that of what principles do we use in making moral judgments about these new categories. You look to scripture, and pull out Paul's analysis, even though it involves equating very different social relationships. I look to the principles upon which scripture is based. Can such arrangements be life-giving? Obviously not in the narrow sense of procreation (and you'd have a point there if you wanted to argue that way, although it would put you on the no side of the contraception debate, and you might find this inconvenient); but also obviously, in the yes sense, that such relationships can be mutually supportive in very much the same way that traditional marriages are.
So which is greater? The letter of the law, which we are to obey without understanding, and to apply to contexts that the authors could not have imagined? Or the principles of the law, which we can understand, and we can apply to new situations?
I disagree very much with Stu's minimalizing of the humanities. First off: think now of the Iowa numbers with 30 second commercials ruining the chances of Gingrich.
Now imagine begin stuck in a course fo ran entire semester with a Foucaultian and the long term damage that could be wreaked on an impressionable teen.
they don't even have to listen to their parents this much!
A teacher who was really trying to poison a mind (and probably 90% of them are) could do tremendous damage in one semester. Let alone two or three.
(P.S. Hurrah! JH is back!)
Stu, you really have to be willing to drink the Kool-aid if you think the rates are cmoparable. I've known gay men like Ginsberg and burroughs, and their rates were astronomical. Even less famous gay men that I knew would boast of doing 100 men in a day. Wikipedia says the high end of the gay community shows that there are many gay men doing at least 100 men. I would guess that aside from Mick Jagger, we're tallking about 1% of the heterosexual community approaching that. Here's a study from the U. of chicago published in Conservapedia (it's a conservative version of wikipedia):
"A new study by a group of University of Chicago researchers reveals a high level of promiscuity and unhealthy behavior among that city's homosexual male population.
According to the researchers, 42.9 percent of homosexual men in Chicago's Shoreland area have had more than 60 sexual partners, while an additional 18.4 percent have had between 31 and 60 partners. All total, 61.3 percent of the area's homosexual men have had more than 30 partners, and 87.8 percent have had more than 15, the research found.
As a result, 55.1 percent of homosexual males in Shoreland -- known as Chicago's "gay center" -- have at least one sexually transmitted disease, researchers said.
The three-year study on the sexual habits of Chicago's citizens will appear in the upcoming book, "The Sexual Organization of The City" (University of Chicago Press), due out this spring."
This is fairly devastating and strikes me as obviously true based on my minimal experience with gay men. There are some gay men who have very small experience, or just one or two partners. But the heterosexual community has that as the norm.
This is another huge bone of contention between left and right of course. Gays want to claim that their gay shamelessness parades are not what they are really doing in real life. Conservatives want to say, yes, this is what they are doing.
And funding is on the line, as is the whole reality of gay marriage.
Probably the objective truth is very difficult to get at in this climate since all truth in this area is so highly politicized now.
Still, from what I saw int he 70s and 80s, this was a wild scene. There were gay bars in which men just went around without pants.
No heterosexual community since ancient rome has been like that, at least to my knowledge (which is admittedly limited).
Maybe with Kim Jung-Il or someone like that who could do whatever he liked with anyone, you might have levels like this. But the women weren't consenting.
The men, it seems, were.
If there was a lot more restraint on the part of the gay community, I think they would be more likely to be accepted into the ranks of the married. As it is, it just seems absurd. This is who you want to pastor you?
It's like you want a tiger to talk to the lambs.
At any rate, I don't know anything about the orientation issue.
Even among gays, that's hotly debated. Some say they realized late they were gay. Others knew when they were three, and hold the Johnnie come Latelies as fraudulent.
What do I know?
suffice it to say I have been in the arts community a long time, and have known a lot of gay men over the years. Most of them were completely wild, and many of them are now dead. foucault wasone of the first to go from AIDS. He died in about 1982. He was a complete wild man from all accounts.
And where rest Ulysses and Diomedes?? U., sort of a John McCain figure..and D. one of Bush's generals, if you will. Not such a copacetic place (the Prophet nearby...beneath 'em, corrupt clergy of the ages).
Kirby,
I disagree very much with Stu's minimalizing of the humanities
Of course you do. You're a Humanities prof. Look, I didn't say that the Humanities should be unimportant. Only that they are.
Arguing as you do that they're somehow the fully realized linchpin of modern society's value system is delusional. That sort of argument might work at an English Department faculty meeting, as a way of rallying the troops in the face of the latest round of budget cuts, and it might even get a polite hearing in UC's faculty Senate. But it's important to be able to recognize a distinction between your discipline's aspirations and its present reality. The reality is that the Humanities are marginally more important than physical education, and marginally less important than the quality of dorm food in defining the typical collegiate experience.
And arguing that a French philosopher/social theorist who died almost thirty years ago is somehow at the center of today's conversation about society is not helping your discipline's cause; especially when you do so as an excuse to avoid addressing the arguments that are actually being made.
First off: think now of the Iowa numbers with 30 second commercials ruining the chances of Gingrich.
You do know who's running those commercials, don't you? The Republican establishment. FOX. They realize that while Gingrich might be the not-Romney of the moment, he'd get creamed in the general election. There is that thing about the three wives, which isn't going to win him much enthusiasm from the evangelicals; and then there's the fact that he draw essentially no support from independents or Democrats. Trust me. If you guys run Gingrich, Obama will be competitive in South Carolina.
My point was that a 30-second commercial can change a mind. Imagine an entire semester. Where do you think OWS got the idea (held by a majority) that socialism is a good thing?
Obama is himself a product of the university system.
Remember, he sought out Marxist professors. How hard did he have to search?
While we're talking lakes of fire let's bring up an old saw that J used to badger me with back in '04.
If God creates lakes of fire they are usually most easily discovered on tectonic fault lines. Life it seems comes up out of those faults. Fresh building material. Also, tsunamis.
Why do you suppose the tectonic fault lines are so fertile, but also cause such enormous destruction? why did God build the world on these fault lines?
why, also, are our conversations also around massive fault lines between portions of the electorate?
It seems to me they get people hot, like lakes of fire, but also bring life to the conversation.
Isn't it weird?
Kirby,
Stu, you really have to be willing to drink the Kool-aid if you think the rates are cmoparable. I've known gay men like Ginsberg and burroughs, and their rates were astronomical. Even less famous gay men that I knew would boast of doing 100 men in a day. Wikipedia says the high end of the gay community shows that there are many gay men doing at least 100 men. I would guess that aside from Mick Jagger, we're tallking about 1% of the heterosexual community approaching that.
You do realize that you're talking about outliers here? 1% is 1%, not 99%. Having 100 sexual partners in a lifetime is plausible whether your homosexual or heterosexual. That's less than four a year.
"Doing 100 men in a day?" That's one every 14.4 minutes, if you're going at it for 24 hours. Or more realistically, one every six minutes for ten hours. This is borderline possible, but clearly, this is work, not sex.
As for the notion that the Shoreland is somehow the city's gay center... Someone is pulling your leg. The Shoreland is a former hotel, which served as a UC dormatory for many years. It's current in the hand of a developer who wants to convert it to condos or apartments, but AFAIK is presently unoccupied. I suppose that 55.1% of the empty set of male residents of the Shoreland do have a sexual disease, but this is literally a vacuous statistic. They gay center of Chicago is Boystown, which you can easily find via wiki. All things being equal, I'd assume that the conservapedia article is a plant designed to make conservatives look foolish when they quote it. YMMV, of course, but in the meantime, excuse me for pointing and laughing.
Still, from what I saw int he 70s and 80s, this was a wild scene. There were gay bars in which men just went around without pants.
No heterosexual community since ancient rome has been like that, at least to my knowledge (which is admittedly limited).
Don't get out much, do you? Not that I do either, but seriously?! Are you blind? Did Woodstock just pass you by? And even today, so called "gentleman's" clubs and their advertising constitute a blight. The old LTV plant about five miles from my house has been taken over by "Club 390," which advertises, "all of the liquor and none of the clothes." And it's not nude men that they're selling.
If there was a lot more restraint on the part of the gay community, I think they would be more likely to be accepted into the ranks of the married.
Actually, you're making the same mistake here that you do in criticizing the Democrats, and that is in see a the in the face of a plurality. Faithful folks (no matter how they're wired) don't flaunt it. Promiscuous folks do. If you were to judge the promiscuity of heterosexuals based on the same evidence you admit for homosexuals, you'd be in deep despair.
Kirby,
My point was that a 30-second commercial can change a mind. Imagine an entire semester.
There's a huge difference between the gullibility and impressionability of Tea Party member and a typical 19 year old. And the gap does not favor the Tea Party. Nineteen year olds are conditioned by evolution and experience to work around the opinions of their elders without internalizing them. Tea Party members are accustomed to being lead like sheep, from one supposed outrage to the next.
Next.
Vesuvius blew in 79 AD, which Metzgar says means John of Patmos was probably think ing of it when he wrote about the lake of fire.
Stu, you make some amusing points here about teens vis a vis their elders, but I think you're wrong. Teens are also looking for substitute parents at that time. They are easily prey to cult figures at that time. They need authority.
The churches used to do that for them.
Too often now it's the Foucaultians. I wish we could quantify this. Think of Henry V and his looking to Falstaff.
Not all return to their families as the source of authority.
I'd like to quantify this. Besides, many kids have no parents. Or parents that aren't educated, and can't be trusted to bring them into the realm of culture.
Teachers are crucial in these areas.
Not all students are susceptible. But many are. I wish I could quantify this.
I didn't understand what you meant by work. Gay men can be passive recipients. This isn't work.
Straight men do have to work or at least move to get pleasure.
I think gay men can just lie perfectly still. It's still sex, and that's probably the most deadly kind.
I don't know if heterosexual women are doing this too in big numbers. If they are, I'm sure they get killed in the process. I don't think anyone can survive the mix of blood and feces.
I wish I could quantify this.
Stu,
I love you as a brother and excellent thinker but this:
There's a huge difference between the gullibility and impressionability of Tea Party member and a typical 19 year old. And the gap does not favor the Tea Party. Nineteen year olds are conditioned by evolution and experience to work around the opinions of their elders without internalizing them. Tea Party members are accustomed to being lead like sheep, from one supposed outrage to the next.
Is about the most ignorant thing you've written here. Perhaps you're exposed to students who don't listen to you and your colleagues. Perhaps the math department at UChi is only filled with Harry Potter-Evans-Verres level rationalist skeptics, but your experience with young adults doesn't even begin to match mine. Students, in my experience, parrot what their teachers say, especially teachers they respect. It's sort of cute, but to assume that the average 19 year old is wiser than the average tea partier is absurd. You're again seeing oneness in the face of plurality, as you say. There are tea party folks who love Ron Paul and those who love Romney; it's a diverse group as well. I wouldn't say either group has an edge on resistance to continual messages.
Dante's hellish chambers are not vulcanism ala Vesuvius (tho perhaps that is an earthly analogue). The rings of the inferno are something like....the neo-platonic sets that Doc Stu thinks of, but not merely..numerical, but normative if you will (isnt a murderer or Hitler worse than a petty thief??). The rings--it. "giros", or gyres per Eire right -- are in inverse relationship to the...Forms of ...los cielos. OR so the poet claimed.
Kirby,
I didn't understand what you meant by work. Gay men can be passive recipients. This isn't work.
The passive guy is "done," not the "doer." You're the English prof, figure it out. To get the math (to say nothing of the physiology and grammar) to work, this is oral, not anal. And I don't care if you're mainlining viagra, no man is going to stay aroused for 10 straight hours of sexual contact, which is the lower end of plausibility for 100 partners. So the guy's a pro, and this is work. And arguably a challenge, so as to establish a certain notoriety and market value.
I don't know if heterosexual women are doing this too in big numbers. If they are, I'm sure they get killed in the process. I don't think anyone can survive the mix of blood and feces.
Just pros, under the same general constraints as above. A mouth's a mouth, and a tongue's a tongue, after all. Sorry to be graphic, but you're the one whose raised the linguistic ante without thinking about what they're saying.
No matter how you cut it, pros represent outliers, at least in this culture. And for pros, servicing clients is work, not sex. And bragging isn't just bragging, it's advertising, with all that implies.
No women are doing that kind of thing for fun. I would say none. If they are doing it it's under compulsion probably as an aspect of human trafficking and is to be deplored. Even in the clubs as you put it the women are maybe visible but not touchable. That's a fairly strict rule. In the Sopranos bar if you touched one of the women you'd end up battered in a back alley. Perhaps somewhere in Thailand that wouldn't be the case but in Thailand at least half of the women for sale have AIDS. You'd be a fool to touch them.
I'm not sure that orientation is enough to justify something.
Many for instance feel oriented to shoving chocolate in their face, or slamming ice cream by the bucket, or eating Twinkies. But they shouldn't do this.
OF course people feel drawn to do things all the time. I have a weird thing on circular staircases where I'd love to jump down. It's almost a compulsion. But obviously I do not fall for this disorienting orientation.
It's hard to sort these things out. Consenting adults and all can do things like ask each other to get the old tourniquet around the neck scene going. It kills some.
Should it be illegal?
I don't know.
Would I want soldiers in the army who were addicted to this activity?
Trying to understand the truth on any of these issues is so complex because the political people don't care about the truth. And they're willing to lie about everything, and switch statistics, and do anything to justify what they want.
Their enablers will do anything to be liked.
The matadors of love are mostly bull-.
I guess you could say that one of the things we did all seek out in college was love experiences. Some with lots more success than others.
There was one heterosexual guy at my college who slept with probably every woman on the campus. Isn't that gross?
GM,
Students, in my experience, parrot what their teachers say, especially teachers they respect.
I don't think you followed my argument. Students are very good at feeding teachers what they think their teachers want. So we agree on "parrot." My argument is that they're also very good at mocking these very same teachers out of hearing. Perhaps you've forgotten how wise you were when you were nineteen? Or how easy it was to figure out what your teachers want, and to feed it back to them. The mocking, too, amounts to little more than feeding back to their friends what they want to hear.
Do young adults seek authority figures? Of course they do. But the authority figures are more likely to be sophomores or juniors than faculty. We live in a culture in which our primary relationships outside of the family fall in an ever narrower demographic range, a consequence of the pervasive sexualization of society. The generation gap isn't fixed between 1960 and 1970, it's fixed between 15 and 30, and this is no less true today than it was back the days of rage.
Do students occasionally fall under the spell of particular teachers? Of course. But not in numbers sufficient to make Kirby's case. He'd have us believe that the tiny Humanities faculties at most Universities are able to hold sway over the values of an undergraduate body that outnumbers them 400 to 1. Even if I concede that they can hold sway over an average of two each, that's still a drop of moral authority in an ocean of hormones.
Yes, I would say that pastors and teachers have a giant influence. Like a 98% influence. Kids may pretend they're not listening, but kids do listen. Kids may even think they're not listening, but they're listening, and absorbing. I can't understand Stu's viewpoint at all. Unless you're dealing with an incredibly stupid person (an aquacephalic, perhaps) they are listening. We are a social species, and influence is guaranteed when people listen to each other. I suppose this is just a difference of opinion, but it's certainly a major one. Stu says the kids outnumber the humanities faculty by 400 to one. Sure, but the kids have to take humanities classes, and if you have eighty of them in a class you get 60 hours to talk to them. If they don't listen and absorb your viewpoint, they fail.
I had a student attempt to take the Intro to Bible class without attending class. He just took the online tests. He failed. He didn't know what was being said in class, and couldn't follow the questions.
It's possible to take in ideas and spit them out, but when you're nineteen, and especially if you're not attending a church, you are hot wax and the teacher can make you into a little version of themselves.
This is fine if the teacher is a normal human being. If they are a Foucauldian, the kid is in a lot of trouble.
Do you have any data which would prove your claim that high numbers of professors in the humanities identify as Foucaultians, KO?? I have my doubts--even in the PoMo hierarchy Foucault-ism probably lags behind the marxists, and Lacanian-freudian phreaks. I attended one class with a somewhat Foucaultian feminist (and survived). They are not all rabid leftists either, but often quasi-Nietzschean, somewhat nihilist. The Reds don't care for them. It's a regional thang as well--around NY, or the ivy league perhaps. When Biff and Bunny learn about the litur-rar-ee classix in the Midwest, it's probably taught by a biblethumper, or a Miss Marple type--worshipers of TS Eliot, Woolfe,et al. There's occasionally one salty realist around teaching Dreiser, et al, or a bit of Marx-- until his liver gives out.
There was an article that appeared a while back that said that Foucault was the most widely cited author in the Humanities. This appeared in 2007, and was quoted in the chronicle of Higher Education, among other places.
Where I want to school at Evergreen State in the late 70s it was Jung and Jungians whom everyone was quoting. Ten years later when I went to grad school it was Foucault. One prof had a prominent photo of Foucault over his dinner table where most normal people put a portrait of Jesus or the Last Supper.
I never got a taste for Foucault as I did for Lacan, Derrida, Klossowski, Levinas, or Lyotard, or later learned to like the neo-Kantians such as Bruckner, Ferry, Finkelkraut, and what came to be called The New Philosophers (they furiously blasted the philosophers of 68 and finally drove them out in France but no one has done this job in America as many of our profs remain besotted with Foucault, Foucault, Foucault).
I never liked him because he seemed to entirely lack a sense of humor. This is almost a crime in my book.
Lacan and the others were generally speaking rather playful even to the point of being idiotic at times. I love that spirit.
I love Charles Fourier for that. Even Marx had a pretty good sense of humor at times, although I am told he added his jokes after he got done with being turgid about his soap opera mentality with regard to the two classes only one of which was fallen and disgraceful.
I really don't know how much Foucault is still considered an icon in the Ivies. I'm somewhat like one of the Japanese soldiers left behind on an island in 1945 and didn't know the war was over until 1962.
I rely on articles that appear in the Chronicle.
I'm in a rather small department and we're mostly engaged in teaching composition and such to golf course management, culinary, plumbing and heating, along with those who intend to transfer and go on to a large state school (where they will certainly encounter shrill Foucaultians, each more humorless than the last).
I'm also told than in history Foucault is enormously influential.
I find his bald pate and overly staring eyes and his ludicrous leather outfits to be just plain absurd. He's like something from a bad Wodehouse novel except in Wodehouse there are no deaths. Foucault is practically the grim reaper in my book, and even though he knew he had AIDS, he apparently continued to have sex with his acolytes.
But one of the things you find among Foucaultians is that no matter what he did, it was just delightful. And when he died they stood around in blocks and wept as if he was Kim Jong Il and American quads were little versions of Pyongyang.
Lacan was amusing at least, though much closer to yr dreaded commie foes--possible ties to stalinists-- than Foucault, the Uncle Fester of Filosophia. Doc Lacan would see 70-80 patients a day, abuse many of them, have sex with them (tho' appears to be all hetero), and reportedly, their children at times, then would make up some quasi-freudian flim flam and peddle it as psychology. Heh heh.
Avital Ronell has a new book coming out in January called Loser Son. Have been a fan of hers since reading The Telephone Book the year I was excommunicated from grad school. Her parents were Israeli diplomats so she was born in Prague and grew up fluent in both German and French as well as English. She studied with Helene Cixous who introduced her to both Derrida (Ronell translated much of Derrida's work into English) and Lacan. Apparently quite a close friend to the late Kathy Acker.
Stu:
I'm talking about student parroting to each other in heated debates information that other teachers have given them.
As in, blowing off work in my class during the required "workshop time" they get into interesting historical and philosophical arguments, using arguments wholly lifted from their classes. They're not doing this for my benefit or in hopes that I'll report it back to their teachers.
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