Pages: 1 … 584 585 586 587 588 … 695

 

2020-06-21 06:39:18
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
I haven't said universities should spit out job ready graduates and of course universities teach basic building blocks.

However the govt has decided to stop subsidising courses which don't produce people who are useful for the economy and in which there are already too many graduates, and yes a physicist is going to be better prepared for a technical job than someone who studied poetry or art.
We have far too many lawyers and its not as if they do anything actually productive to begin with.

If people still want to they're free to study whatever they like.

Really university should be a whole lot cheaper and this would all matter a lot less, but Uzique's beloved and noble academics and administrators have all jacked up their incomes and there you go.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-06-21 06:44:59)

Fuck Israel
2020-06-21 06:44:58
uziq
Member
+497|3711
but humanities graduates have better employment rates than many STEM subjects, such as computer science? how are they 'less useful for the economy' if they're indeed finding graduate work? seems there are positions open and graduates are filling them. isn't that the definition of 'useful'?

seems australia is having some sort of political insecurity about a newly assertive china on its doorstep. it's as if you're angling towards a new deal-era american approach to education: let's raise a generation of scientists and engineers to build up the country! unfortunately shooting your humanities departments in the foot and discouraging people from reading history is not going to change the balance of power.

too bad for australia. it doesn't diagnose some essential 'fault' with humanities. all your talk about 'needing to adapt' is the usual blague.

i've also never expressed approval, let alone admiration, of university administrations. academics certainly haven't 'jacked up prices': they are the most precarious and unsupported workforce in the modern university. you literally don't know what you're talking about and it's boring.

Last edited by uziq (2020-06-21 06:45:50)

2020-06-21 06:46:52
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
Will encouraging people to study poetry and art history change the balance of power?
Is it something the govt should be funding when the country has to import engineers to run the economy?
Fuck Israel
2020-06-21 06:50:10
uziq
Member
+497|3711
who cares if people want to study poetry? good for them. you live in a rich and advanced society and can afford it. the uselessness of learning should be encouraged. universities are there to create a civic culture as well as to train the technicians of tomorrow.

australia is generating vast amounts of wealth, at the cost of all our tomorrows, through fossil fuels and heavy exports of minerals and resources. and you're complaining about the annual cost to the taxpayer of poetry? lol. get a grip. yes, it's really the humanities' fault that australia has sub-standard (?) engineers. all those potential engineers who were snatched away by the lure of studying Tennyson and heroic couplets!
2020-06-21 06:51:59
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX
Australian engineers are fine, we just don't have enough of them apparently.

Like I said, people are still free to study what they want, they just don't get a subsidy.
Fuck Israel
2020-06-21 06:58:25
uziq
Member
+497|3711
sure, it's a stupid solution all the same and nothing surprising, governments are full of harebrained ideas about funding higher education, often times balancing the philistine prejudices of people such as yourself and those less-educated in the electorate.

you'll note that all the anger and invective only ever flows one way in these 'debates'. it's always the non-lettered bearing some grudge about the harmless and docile humanities student. this desire to punish them or mark them out as 'snobs'; really, the vast majority of university graduates i know could not care less about johnny scaffolder. but people such as yourself are determined to point out that 'humanities must go' or 'poetry readers must get their comeuppance' at every possible opportunity. it's sad and pathetic, really.

when's the last time humanities graduates kvetched about the tax breaks given to tradesmen, or the subsidies and incentives thrown at small-business owners? could you imagine something comparable, like me dragging around for years and years the bitterness you evidently have for 'the huge manatees' about, say, tech workers? or people in ex-coal-mining towns? LOL. it just doesn't happen.

if you were capable of having an honest conversation with yourself on this matter, you'd admit that the humanities are a trivial cost in the national budget, and certainly are not enfeebling the nation or holding you back from becoming the great engineering master-race. and as someone who was wholly subsidised and benefitted from a free education, and indeed a generation with generous dole and unemployment benefits after university, and thus freedom to choose and loaf to their heart's content, you should be a little more fucking self-aware about the benefits of ringfencing the 'freedom of education' as an ideal worth upholding.

in matters like this you really resemble jay, keen to reap benefits and freebies for your own gain, and then desiring and delighting in it being taken away for others. a very essentially mealy-mouthed and fatuous trait.

Last edited by uziq (2020-06-21 07:29:26)

2020-06-21 07:44:23
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3978

Uzique wrote:

you'll note that all the anger and invective only ever flows one way in these 'debates'.
I had to unfollow an old friend from high school on Facebook because of this. My friend kept posting about how people who went to college wasted their lives and didn't learn anything. He went into the military and then came back and became an airplane mechanic. He got radicalized while in the military I guess. I checked his Facebook just now and it was a lot of complaining about BLM.

I think it is interesting how people are more often radicalized by the military than by college. Frat guys in college aren't coming out of school Social Justice Warriors. Same Frat people would come out of the military MAGA men.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
2020-06-21 12:32:33
Larssen
Member
+99|2146
I think the aversion stems from the fact that quite a number of former humanities students roll into corporate management positions and the technical people reporting to them don't understand why or how this happens
2020-06-21 12:49:09
uziq
Member
+497|3711
yes, STEM people who spend their 20s bragging about their great graduate salaries, lording it over the 'humanities coffee shop workers', don't like it when the humanities lot catch up later in their own career arc. this is generally what happens. after the first decade in a career ladder, the average earnings even out between the two 'sides', and really then you're down to individual initiative and graft anyway.
2020-06-21 14:27:29
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5617|London, England

Larssen wrote:

I think the aversion stems from the fact that quite a number of former humanities students roll into corporate management positions and the technical people reporting to them don't understand why or how this happens
Because they don't understand that the writing and social skills they eschewed in college mean more than their ability to calculate differential equations. Can you run a meeting? Can you talk intelligently? Can you write without spelling or grammatical errors? Congratulations, you will run circles around your aspbergery brethren that can't interface with clients.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
2020-06-21 19:35:32
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|7030|PNW

Not to nitpick but years of office-y correspondence with business people tell me that few actually care about the spelling and grammar so much as the meat of an issue. They'd rather have it five minutes ago than finely polished.

Not really related: few weeks ago with a client in Seattle, topics wandered during a walk from one site to the other. Turns out he used to play on a Minecraft server years ago I'd been on years ago. It's quite possible one of us trolled the other there.

Small world / good times.
2020-06-22 03:10:20
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

sure, it's a stupid solution all the same and nothing surprising, governments are full of harebrained ideas about funding higher education, often times balancing the philistine prejudices of people such as yourself and those less-educated in the electorate.

you'll note that all the anger and invective only ever flows one way in these 'debates'. it's always the non-lettered bearing some grudge about the harmless and docile humanities student. this desire to punish them or mark them out as 'snobs'; really, the vast majority of university graduates i know could not care less about johnny scaffolder. but people such as yourself are determined to point out that 'humanities must go' or 'poetry readers must get their comeuppance' at every possible opportunity. it's sad and pathetic, really.

when's the last time humanities graduates kvetched about the tax breaks given to tradesmen, or the subsidies and incentives thrown at small-business owners? could you imagine something comparable, like me dragging around for years and years the bitterness you evidently have for 'the huge manatees' about, say, tech workers? or people in ex-coal-mining towns? LOL. it just doesn't happen. .
Erm, wasn't it you who was whining about how much bricklayers got paid and how many tax breaks they got?

Anyway, the govt isn't instructing universities on how to run courses, they're just not subsidising the ones they don't think deserve subsidising for various reasons, one of which is oversupply of graduates. So medical yes, law no.

As for the rest of it I don't care, except I would note that the one person who has spent his time being snide, sneery, superior, gloating, and offensive - and been banned multiple times for it - always seems to be um you.

Oh and I have plenty of letters - CEng MSc AIMMM ACGI and a few others probably.
Fuck Israel
2020-06-22 03:27:14
uziq
Member
+497|3711
no, i was using their example to mention that they have very strange complaints about polish migrants, considering they are very materially affluent and seemingly not affected by freedom of movement at all. i don't care how much money they make. humanities graduates do not spend their time bitching and moaning about tradespeople.
2020-06-26 06:25:47
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
+2,053|7030|PNW

US Senators Introduce 'Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act' — With Backdoor Mandate

Fun stuff.

Of course "Lindsey Graham" is one of the names on it.
2020-06-26 06:49:01
RTHKI
mmmf mmmf mmmf
+1,741|6996|Cinncinatti
One of many reasons why Congress needs a purge.
https://i.imgur.com/tMvdWFG.png
2020-06-28 16:53:57
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3978
We must ban fireworks.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
2020-06-29 02:43:20
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,815|6364|eXtreme to the maX

RTHKI wrote:

One of many reasons why Congress needs a purge.
A purge or The Purge ?
Fuck Israel
2020-07-07 10:32:32
Larssen
Member
+99|2146
So in the wake of this whole BLM thing it's more apparent than ever that the postmodernist wave in philosophy is leaving quite a legacy. Foucault and derrida have never been more relevant and I think my preference for rortyan pragmatism or marxian analysis is especially pertinent. I guess uziq totally missed the mark here by lambasting all that stuff as jejune and old/irrelevant.
2020-07-07 10:42:34
uziq
Member
+497|3711
foucault isn't postmodern. he flatly rejected any such terms and considered himself a nietzschean and latterly a structuralist after de saussure. as such, he is associated with structuralism as much as the later post-structuralism. he also never went away. he is the most-cited scholar in the social sciences.

what you're trying to do is rope in 'french theory' to a culture war, when i am telling you that, french theory qua academic subjects, are out of fashion. which they are. they haven't been popular in an academic context for decades. the high-point of 'french theory' in the academe was literally the 1970s. it is about as relevant to philosophical thought in academia as paul de man and the yale school, i.e. not very fucking much.

so for you to talk about them 'leaving a legacy' in 2020 is like, erm, okay? you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to the actual intellectual history and the movements/fashions/fads in thought. you simply don't have a clear grasp of what you are talking about.

are BLM seriously affiliated with derridean deconstruction? are antifas really talking about hauntology? this stuff has been a niche concern on the marxist left in the 90s/00s, with writers like mark fisher, but that 'destructive', deconstructionist, 'postmodern' tendency also equally swung to the far-right, from warwick's CCRU and into stuff like nick land's accelerationism, transhumanism/posthumanism, cybernetics, object-oriented philosophy, etc. to say nothing of continental thinkers like sloterdijk ... not exactly 'revolutionary protest' deconstructionism there.

there's a lot to unpack in your statement and essentially boiling down the BLM struggles of 2020 to a fucking SERIOUSLY hackneyed trope about 'anglo-saxon pragmatism versus french theory' is illiterate. these debates between sober pragmatists and the american school of analytic philosophers and 'french theory' took place FIFTY years ago. and any social revolt taking place today, whilst using some of the hot terms from postmodern discourse, also use plenty other concepts that are not postmodern but, rather, structuralist, marxist, and modernist, e.g. critique of ideology, interpellation, intersectionality, etc. none of these concepts are 'postmodernist'. post-colonial struggles and civil rights is NOT postmodernist.

it's really tiring having to explain to you first principles. i sincerely recommend you to read a book instead of wading into topics with smart-sounding bullshit like 'rortyan pragmatism or marxian analysis over foucault and derrida'. i don't even know what that means tbqhwy. foucault and derrida PARTOOK of marxian analysis. ffs.

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-07 10:56:18)

2020-07-07 10:47:45
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+643|3978

Larssen wrote:

So in the wake of this whole BLM thing it's more apparent than ever that the postmodernist wave in philosophy is leaving quite a legacy. Foucault and derrida have never been more relevant and I think my preference for rortyan pragmatism or marxian analysis is especially pertinent. I guess uziq totally missed the mark here by lambasting all that stuff as jejune and old/irrelevant.
The angry blacks in the street aren't reading philosophy. No one needs to read Marx to know what poverty is or that police are racist.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
2020-07-07 10:50:02
uziq
Member
+497|3711
larssen is just as lost and without any real orientation in this subject as jay. god knows what shit he reads online or which blog-level polemic he is recycling.

derrida and french theory have been stuff for tumblr bloggers to name-drop. they are not pressing concerns for research in universities today. they are simply out of fashion by about 30 years. the idea that they have some vatic power over protestors in the street today is really tendentious culture war bollocks.
2020-07-07 11:00:19
Larssen
Member
+99|2146
I don't think there's any postmodern philosopher who accepts the term 'postmodernist' as the definition became so stretched and all encompassing it described almost anyone involved in philosophy in the 70s if they were even slightly contrarian. Nonetheless they're still referred to in this way and most anyone will understand the gist of what we're getting at.

You're forgetting to mention that these two pretty much provided the intellectual base that spawned whole new fields. It's one of the foremost reasons foucault is so widely cited; his thought and derrida's deconstruction were fundamental to many analyses on power and discourse that strongly influenced the trajectory of many racial or sexual identity based equality driven movements, it's definitely traceable.

Core ideas on identity, discourse and power structures have now well and truly entrenched themselves among the public at large, which is a process that naturally takes quite a lot of time. The adoption and real effect of new scientific or philosophical insights can take decades. BLM doesn't need to have read their magnum opi to have been influenced by their contents.

Last edited by Larssen (2020-07-07 11:00:56)

2020-07-07 11:04:46
Larssen
Member
+99|2146
It's also funny you make light of these works as 'stuff for tumblr bloggers' while they're notoriously hideously complicated reading. One of the main critiques is the convoluted way in which foucault writes, it takes weeks or months of serious study in a professional setting to untangle it. Not quite the easily digestible tumblr blogger philosophy
2020-07-07 11:07:30
uziq
Member
+497|3711
okay, thank you for your vague post that goes nowhere and answers nothing. so it's their fault for deconstructing power structures? you do realise foucault wasn't the first philosopher to critique power structures, right? not even close? critiques of power go back way, way before any sort of social scientific turn in academia.

lol 'it takes several decades for ideas to become absorbed'. 'BLM doesn't need to have read it, it's still their legacy'.

my guy, BLM is clearly and consciously quoting the civil rights struggle. which PRE-DATES FOUCAULT AND DERRIDA. you don't need fancy french theory and complex post-structuralist philosophy to 'deconstruct' the imbalances of economics and justice in US life. it's all there in MLK. or malcolm X, even. neither of those two were embroiled in 'postmodernism' or whatever the fuck you are prattling on about. these are all part of broad reformist or revolutionary movements that go way, way back before some efflorescence of hipster french theorists post-may '68.

the other funny thing is you keep clinging to rorty and his pragmatism, because i guess you had a really engaging seminar on that once, as if it's still the dominant strain of philosophy and philosophic culture in american academia today. it isn't! james, dewey, rorty ... it's all as dated as talking about foucault, derrida, lacan, etc! you are literally rehashing a culture war that took place in the 1970s as if it's the most pressing and only interpretation for events in 2020. really confusing stuff my guy. american philosophy departments and continental philosophy have moved on. and, yes, as i said, deconstruction and the legacy of postmodernism just as clearly lead to strains of far-right nastiness, if not outright nihilism and abnegation (e.g. cioran). you could just as easily argue that derrida's deconstructionist legacy has led to nihilistic far-right 4chan trolls, rather than earnest BLM protestors.

what even is your motivating in invoking this passé 'culture war' anyway? i literally don't get it. it's like the only point of your post was to say 'well, ackshually', and then to demonstrate you have NO clue what you're talking about. NONE.
2020-07-07 11:11:10
uziq
Member
+497|3711

Larssen wrote:

It's also funny you make light of these works as 'stuff for tumblr bloggers' while they're notoriously hideously complicated reading. One of the main critiques is the convoluted way in which foucault writes, it takes weeks or months of serious study in a professional setting to untangle it. Not quite the easily digestible tumblr blogger philosophy
they're not that complicated in philosophy, really. they're not as hard as kant or leibniz. they're not as hard as heidegger or husserl. there's an entire german idealist tradition (from which they draw), as well as early 20th century phenomenology, viennese logical-positivism, french existentialism ... all this stuff is hard! it's complex!

you're just recycling tropes. 'wow foucault and derrida are hard!' they're not even regarded as the most difficult post-structuralists. check out deleuze and guattari! it's like your entire view of 20th century philosophy has been ... gained from photocopied sheets in a seminar ... wow, make u think.

foucault is easy to understand if you've read nietzsche. the analysis of power structures, master-slave relations (itself from hegel), on values and norms, etc. is all there. a long tradition in german philosophy. similarly, derrida and foucault's linguistic stuff is easy to understand if you're familiar with structuralism, e.g. de saussure. which, trust me, EVERYONE was for the first half of the 20th century. it was the main influence both on viennese logicians, leading to wittgenstein, and on french cafe thinkers, leading to merleau-ponty etc. EVERYONE was conversant with these ideas, the sign/signifier/signified, etc. and what have you.

hey larssen. READ A FUCKING BOOK!

 

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