freecounterpoint: The Sky is Clearer Already

Saturday, March 10, 2007

The Sky is Clearer Already

17 comments:

Tecumseh said...: Here is a quote from this archetypal Frenchie:

This is not a clash of civilisations or religions, and it reaches far beyond Islam and America, on which efforts are being made to focus the conflict in order to create the delusion of a visible confrontation and a solution based upon force. There is indeed a fundamental antagonism here, but one that points past the spectre of America (which is perhaps the epicentre, but in no sense the sole embodiment, of globalisation) and the spectre of Islam (which is not the embodiment of terrorism either) to triumphant globalisation battling against itself.

Straight out of Planet Pepe.; 3/10/2007 8:12 PM
Mr roT said...: Not sure if it's out of Planet Pepe's inner core, though. Pepe's prose I understand enugh to disagree with. This retarded buffoon makes no sense in English. I assume this was well-translated.; 3/10/2007 8:15 PM
Mr roT said...: Strangely on-topic.; 3/10/2007 8:35 PM
Tecumseh said...: Well, OK -- Pepe is more understandable, at least he speaks plain English, I agree. (Living in the good ole U. S. of A. has its unintended consequences.) But the central theme -- Amerikkka is bad, anything else is good -- is unmistakably from the same planet.; 3/10/2007 11:00 PM
Mr roT said...: You got "Amerikkka is bad" out of Baudrillard? I got "I'm confused" out of him. OK, I admit there's some weird academic anti-Americanism sensible in there, but as Massimo d'Alema would say,"He's no more anti-American than CNN."; 3/10/2007 11:47 PM
Tecumseh said...: OK, I'll buy that. Speaking of confused, here's what Alan Sokal has to say about this quintessentially bloviating Frenchy:

Baudrillard is not disputing the trivial issue that reason remains operative in some actions, that if I want to arrive at the next block, for example, I can assume a Newtonian universe (common sense), plan a course of action (to walk straight for X meters, carry out the action, and finally fulfil my goal by arriving at the point in question). What is in doubt is that this sort of thinking enables a historically informed grasp of the present in general. According to Baudrillard, it does not. The concurrent spread of the hyperreal through the media and the collapse of liberal and Marxist politics as the master narratives, deprives the rational subject of its privileged access to truth. In an important sense individuals are no longer citizens, eager to maximise their civil rights, nor proletarians, anticipating the onset of communism. They are rather consumers, and hence the prey of objects as defined by the code.

Can you decode this for me, in plain English?; 3/11/2007 12:22 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...: I didn't see Jean Baudrillard, nor did I even know such a man existed. Ergo, Baudrillard was merely a figment of my imagination... he neither lived nor died.

This French post-modernism bullshit is easy!; 3/11/2007 12:28 AM
Mr roT said...: Yeah. Sokal's drunk the Kool-Aid grande tiempo. I liked his making fools of the lefty intelligentsia but he was always in the business of clearing the lefty intelligentsia of its impure elements to make way for the pure old Harvard Sq Marxists. You made no big deal of this post of mine a while back. And speaking of links, where'd you get that quote of Sokal's from?

As to what he means, I imagine him drunk on some early paper of Einstein, the Greenwich Village bar he's drunk in is spinning 'round about his head and he's taking that to be some great revelation of relativity. Without some Newtonian Absolute Narrator, anything can be anything else at all, blablabla, ooh, that undergrad ought to be a model...Hey, baby, how about a brewsky?...Why yes, I am a social critic and leftist. And thou?

MFT, yes, it's damned easy to baffle with bullshit. That's why academia is so full of morons in the, uh, Humanities. AI, makes the case here that at least one Physics Department at at least one excellent university in New York City is in a similar boat of shit.; 3/11/2007 3:45 AM
Tecumseh said...: JJ: The Sokal quote is from wiki -- just go back up to the top of the page, look at the word "quote" with a blue link under it, and ckick on it. Mirabile dictu!; 3/11/2007 4:01 PM
Pepe le Pew said...: Here's an interesting article on baudrillard; 3/11/2007 9:33 PM
Pepe le Pew said...: And here's a translation of his essay; 3/11/2007 9:49 PM
Pepe le Pew said...: We no longer have a clue what a symbolic calculation is, the sort of calculation common in poker or potlatch: minimum stakes, maximum results. 'This is exactly what the terrorists achieved in the attack on Manhattan, which provides a good illustration of -chaos theory: an initial shock provoking unforeseeable consequences. Gigantic deployments of Americans, on the other hand, achieve nothing but derisory effects-a hurricane, as it were, resulting in the flapping of a butterfly's wings.
Now that is just brilliant.; 3/11/2007 10:01 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: Pepe's confused.; 3/12/2007 1:21 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...: MFT " Can you decode this for me, in plain English?"

What Sokal was saying is "Ha Ha!"; 3/12/2007 3:06 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Pepe invoking Baudrillard is akin to David Duke invoking Mein Kampf; 3/12/2007 3:08 PM
Pepe le Pew said...: david duke - isn't he one of you republicans?; 3/12/2007 9:36 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: david duke - isn't he one of you republicans?

Pepe, don't encourage one of us use the Vichy analogy again. You're pitchin us softballs here.; 3/13/2007 8:16 PM

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