Thanks for the Koeppen review
My reading list just got longer - again
Pervert's Guide man's new book, an urban myths tome and Youth, an underrated gem
El Reg bookworm Mark Diston trawls through at publishing's top notch texts. Bad boy philosopher Slavoj Žižek puts Russell Brand in the shade with his latest cultural critique, while urban mythmeister Jan Harold Brunvand has revised his entertaining and enduring tome that's a goldmine for comedians and sketch writers alike. And …
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Saturday 22nd November 2014 17:50 GMT WatAWorld
It doesn't require much genius to know it is far easier to provide criticism when
Žižek has been quoted as saying that his work is to engage in critique, rather than to answer questions or provide theories.
It doesn't require much genius to know it is far easier to provide criticism when it isn't constructive criticism.
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Monday 24th November 2014 12:42 GMT The Indomitable Gall
Re: It doesn't require much genius to know it is far easier to provide criticism when
Spoken like a politician. Politicians love criticism to be accompanied by a counter-proposal, because then they can attack the counter-proposal rather than having to defend the flaws in the current system (and no system is wihout flaws). This leaves us with a "disposable politic society" where we throw away all our policies and start from scratch on new policies, instead of mending only the broken parts. Nowhere is this clearer than in education, where every 30-ish years we swing between strict grammar-spelling-and-times-tables "basic skills" teaching, and let-them-be-free-to-create "holistic" teaching, instead of integrating the two (NB lots of individual teachers do go work resolving the two ideologies into a coherent whole,but it's never institutionally codified).
So it's good to go into some depth about the problems without confusing the debate by introducing one of an infintite variety of possible solutions.
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Monday 24th November 2014 12:50 GMT The Indomitable Gall
Re: Some BS
Indeed. No historical society has institutionalised individualism and thrived in the long term. Modern society is a corruption of earlier family-like tribal structures. Individuals have used positions of trust (head of the household) and slowly mutated them into positions of "authority". Domination etymologically meant little more than running a household, patriarchy was just doing as your father said. But now these words have been corrupted by office-bearers to mean something more controlling and sinister.
This sort if self-interested individualism killed Rome. It was the increasing servitude of feudalism that triggered the French Revolution and the birth of modern democracy. Industrial capitalists' lack of altruism led to trade unionism and communism, but they only stalled the march of the current individualist wave which is set to bring our society tumbling down.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
