/lit/ - Literature

It's depends on your political views. The farther left you lean, the more comfortable you'd feel there.

They're right in the sense that racial/gender theory and absolutely retarded interpretations of thinkers and classics are being shoved down my throat 24/7 in my humanities classes. As an example, my professor once showed an image of JLo in an ass-sticking-out pose very similar to pic related and said that her pose was a blatant remnant of Jim Crow imagery, continuing the colonial trend of "othering" "black and brown female bodies"

They're wrong in the sense that I'm still managing to have a meaningful time at school and am enjoying myself. I read and research plenty in my own time and put my all into whatever assignments I get.

It's definitely just as politicized as they say. I slogged through my fair share of humanities classes as electives and while some of them were better than others, the assumption that leftist talking points are true forms the backdrop and conventional wisdom of pretty much every discussion.
I took one class which was actually pretty good, about using science fiction to think about modern science and technology trends. There's an emerging genre of "science realism" fiction where authors writing about technology that already exists in the real world leads to effects that read like science fiction from decades ago.
But one of the teachers in this class was a turbo-lefty, but also a Christian.
We'd butt heads all the time because I was a fedora and she kept trying to push relativism but I wasn't having it. I'd trigger her and this other dude all the time by pointing out ways they were wrong during the group discussions. Nobody quite had a trigglypuff meltdown but it got close.
Still gave me an A though so it worked out.

>>11578036

>go to university
>take literature class
>get put into groups based on a Which Harry Potter House do you Belong to quiz
>professor spends the first few lectures making sure we've all been caught up on Game of Thrones
>reading list includes The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, The Fault in our Stars, The Hunger Games, and a few tumblr blogs
>classmate accidentally mentions Shakespeare and gets beaten up and dragged away by campus police
>for the next month the class goes into triggered mode and we all color in coloring books and play with playdoh while disney movies play on the projector
>get an A+ on all my essays because I just repeat that as a straight white male I'm too privileged to discuss the issues discussed
>fail the overall class anyway for being a straight white male
>campus gets shot up and I get shot and spend the next few months in the hospital
>tfw bills from tuition and hospital bills are over 80 billion dollars

Are there any universities that haven't yet been drowned in leftism?

>>11578171
If there are, I haven't seen 'em

>>11578092
crased and bledpilled

>>11578092
t. yuropoor

This is why I was trying to get someone to start a general Academia thread. Wanted some discussion about degrees and etc.

>>11578052

It depends. I’m left-wing oriented (if I had to say what I am I would say a social-democrat), and yet I still think that many of our humanities departments are mediocre at best. I was expecting Nabokov-style classes, where we would read the works and focus on their literary techniques, where we would vivisect the books and learn how the authors did what they did.

I wanted to learn how Tolstoy used micro-details to bring scenes and characters to life. I wanted to know from what source Emily Dickinson got her vast vocabulary and where did she find her main inspirations for metaphors. I wanted to analyze, as under a microscope, the language of Shakespeare’s greatest dramatic works. I wanted to learn the dialogue techniques of Raymond Chandler and his use of simile. I wanted to understand how Oscar Wilde composed his epigram am-like style of dialogue.

Instead, all we got were texts about literary theory and language theories from French sleep-inducers like Derrida, Foucault, Saussure, Barthes, Bakhtin and Roman Jakobson, people who were neither skill in any art or any science.

Humanities departments should stop concerning themselves about the meaning of language, or the meaning of an authors personal philosophies, about the social aspects and influences of such and such book and instead focus mostly on the techniques that were used to create those works. We needed to create better readers, better writers, people who could tell their students about all the wonderful things that are happening in every page of a masterpiece of fiction.

Also, I don’t mind that we analyze more books of minorities and socially excluded groups, so long as we never take out the space of those works that are considered to be the greatest achievements of our civilization.

>>11578333
>social democrat

How dull

yes

>>11578036
No, it's much worse; worse than any brainwashed brainlet can conceive.

>>11578352

It says a lot about you that you did not considered almost all of my post and focused only on my political orientation.

Anyway, most countries in the world with the highest Human Development Indexes have some form of strong Welfare-State, in the molds of Social Democracy. It doesn’t matter if is cool or dull, it’s a matter of what works best.

>>11578085
Your Christian teaching assistant was pushing moral relativism?

>>11578333
>goes to college
>still ignorant enough to think we Whites have a culture, let alone a civilization
You can take the racist out of the cornfield, but you can't take the cornfield out of the racist.

>>11578036
Nothing's as bad as internet memers say

>>11578389
Academia is the exception
To be fair, I'm attending what might be one of the worst examples in the country

>>11578385

When I said our civilization I meant the human civilization. Let me give one example: if we took Plato and put him under the sun he would get tanned. He had probably a very dark hair and beard, as well as dark eyes, as most Greeks. If we presented that figure to conservatives they would say that that man wasn’t white and did not belong to the western civilization, when in fact he is one of the main names of it.

I wanted to say that its important to take a look on books by marginalized groups, other points of view, etc. But we should never stop giving space to the books that are considered the best (it doesn’t matter the sex, race, culture, religion and political beliefs of the person that create them).

I also don’t think we should divide civilization in West X East. Some poems by Rumi are among what’s best in universal poetry. There are great collections of folk songs in Japanese literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude (by an author that would be considered by many as non-white) is, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of literature of the XXth century, and of all times.

>>11578036

Non-anglo here. The answer to your question in my part of the world, OP, is no. It is impossible to get a degree in gender studies where I live, because our universities still uphold a proud European scholarly tradition, and have not been reduced to for-profit daycare centers for the rich and trade schools for the poor. I am almost entirely certain that everyone who has responded that yes, it is as bad as the memers say ITT are anglos.

>>11578036
>Went to grad school in midwest
>Everyone was a commie
>EVERYONE
>one professor identified as a bird
>when I asked if I would be able to do literary work outside of critical theory, I was told "there's all KINDS of critical theory you could do, I'm sure you'll find something in it you'll love!"
>nobody read anything
>in Shakespeare class we literally discussed manspreading and other such things for the first two weeks
>had to take library studies course where we spent weeks going over a "bigoted" blogpost made by a current professor of the university
>guy had the audacity to call a woman by her first name in his casual blog, rather than "Professor Lastname"
>he said he always calls people by their first name, it's a blog
>"mansplaining"
>ask class: "if he singled her out as 'Professor Lastname', wouldn't he be playing with her with kiddy gloves? makes it seem like there was no option that wasn't sexist here"
>for some reason, assume they'll come to a logical conclusion
>"you're right anon, sometimes men just need to know when not to engage"
>oh okay
>in one philosophy class there's only two white males, everyone else females
>one of the white males asks at the end of class: "I hear white men's voices can be overpowering to diverse voices. How should I approach this to make sure I don't oppress anyone?"
>clearly being facetious
>everyone takes him seriously
>class comes to an agreement
>"As long as you remember what you are, you shall be fine to speak"
>oh okay

I could go on and on and on and on oh my god what has happened academia is dead kill me

>>11578431
What cunt?

>>11578377
Your whole post was dull and it's only getting duller.

>>11578439
Where is this university in the world rankings?

>>11578439
Sounds fucking hilarious

finishing my phd in a humanities field at a university in the US here. I'm at a particularly conservative university, so it's a very different ethos. I would say that for someone going through undergrad right now, it probably seems pretty dire, but if you look at the field from a larger perspective, the sort of vapid pomo deconstruction stuff that dominates a lot of liberal campuses of today is a fad that came and went. It really peaked in the 90's with derrida-mania. Now you literally have no one doing that shit anymore. But since universities move slowly, a lot of the departments are still sort of stuck in that era. So it's on its way out.

On the left the onus has shifted towards post-colonial theory, which is still a form of mostly useless critical theory that people employ so they don't have to read books or actually know anything, but I would say Edward Said is a step up from Foucault.

Everyone in academia knows we're at a 'turn' moment right now. pomo was in large part the denoumont of the literary turn of the mid 70's. Now you have the ontological turn in anthropology, you have the spatial turn in geography and architecture, and the participatory turn in the study of religion. A lot of new scholarship is actually coming out of divinity schools as english and lit departments sit desiccated from decades of deconstruction. We'll just have to wait for all the post-1991 commies without a cause to fade away because tenure is a bitch

>>11578333
Not on the same side of the political spectrum as you (not completely against redistribution/some form of wellfare, but I'm probably as close to the center as you are, just to the right), but it seems like you were looking for an actual education. You don't get that in most humanities departments these days. What you get is armchair political science, identity politics and how these influenced your reading list. And no one can be wrong. You should've looked into the curriculum and gotten into a Uni that still had a modicum of respect for literature and whose faculty wasn't replaced by "critical theory" fanatics.

And no, your post wasn't boring. All the things you were hoping to get from your degree show a healthy understanding of the cogs that make good literature. The fact that people find that boring is telling of the world we live in. On second thought, they've always found it boring, the novelty is that they now have influence over the fucking curricula.

>>11578439
Not too far off from my experiences. Here are some doozies:
>J-Lo Jim Crow thing mentioned here >>11578067
>all nametags and self-introductions have to include pronouns
>poured my heart and soul into my final creative writing project, hands down the most proud I've been of anything I've ever written, only for my professor to evaluate it as "very male-centric" and "lacking in more marginalized perspectives"
>tried to have class seminar on Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, but every time it was a woman's turn to speak she would waste a good eight fucking minutes making disclaimers about how disgusting, heteronormative, trans-exclusionary, and patriarchal his ideas were
>every student reading their work out loud uses that god-awful slam poetry tonality
>most creative writing from other students were sub-fanfiction tier
>professor gives list of 20th century artistic/social movements and asks us to break into groups to read the manifesto of each, I raise my hand and choose futurism from the list and suddenly everyone treats me like a fascist
>one professor took 45 minutes to read her "erasure poetry" based on Phenomenology of Spirit to the class which was unbearable, insipid nonsense the entire way through
>students (nearly always female) will constantly say the most retarded shit like "I didn't like it when _____ happened in the story" as if it's a bad thing for something sad or upsetting to happen
>"i don't really get the point of philosophy" (continues to rattle off philosophical propositions as if they're facts and gets offended or uses twitter-tier arguments when alternative positions are pointed out)
>"dead white men"
>"brown bodies" "trans bodies" "black bodies" "female bodies" "latinx bodies" "differently-abled bodies" bodies bodies bodies bodies bodies bodies
>one professor ACTUALLY FACTUALLY asked that we not use ANY PRONOUNS AT ALL when referring to him. not "they," not "xir," NO pronouns. (I dropped the class after the first day and took ecology instead)

>>11578478
When I was there it was the US university that published the most books out of their English department. It is one of the most well-funded English departments in the country, and therefore the world I'd assume. It's supposed to be an amazing program. That's why I went there. Plus it's in one of the nicest cities I've ever lived in.

AND YET

THE ABSOLUTE STATE

>>11578532
Fucking hell. Tell me you're kidding. Please. It can't have gotten this cartoonish

>>11578393
what country?

>>11578516
>finishing my phd
Literally stopped reading right there.

>>11578575
I genuinely wish I were. After posting I remembered that the professor in question wrote a glowing review of my creative writing piece in my final evaluation, though. It seemed more like she just didn't actually take the time to read it at first and defaulted to one of her easiest types of criticism when it was time to give me feedback.
Still pretty bad but at least it didn't stay that way
Everything else is just as bad as it sounds

>>11578516
Sounds comfy. Which university?

>>11578352
>thinks political ideologies have to be exciting to be good
This is why /pol/ is growing

>>11578532
We need a /lit/ university or something. We can't save these places. It's over. Knowledge will die in the academy. We must go somewhere else.

Also, this just reminded me of one of the fucking worst things that happened while I was at grad school, among all the other stupid shit.

>be literal POC transwomyn
>have evil cis white male bf
>in shakespeare class, we're discussing Taming of the Shrew
>it's a comedy, right?
>wrong
>it's a fucking misogynistic story of ABUSE and RAPE
>the female mc gets dragged around and is CLEARLY unhappy and gets gaslit and brainwashed by the evil oppressor male
>try to interject: "This is a comedy -- these characters are supposed to be feisty lovers. It's like wrestling kayfabe, they're not being serious. In fact, I at times have a very similar dynamic with my boyfriend."
>after class, huwhite girl comes up to me
>TELLS me I'm being abused
>asks if my boyfriend is white
>"you shouldn't let him colonize your body"
>literally no way to respond to this
>leave

These people are ROBOTS. They literally do not understand human emotion, subtext, comedy. They can't even read -- every class was filled with "I liked the part where..." or "I thought [...] was a little [sexist/racist/whatever]". It made me want to gouge my eyes out.

Best of all, only my professors knew I was trans, so my fucking holier-than-thou classmates would make jokes about the crossdressing in Shakespeare and laugh it up together. And in nearly the same breath one of them would go on long rants about the TRANS COMMUNITY.

>>11578036

It's bad, but this place is much, much worse.

>>11578052
The humanities and social sciences today exist as leftist think-tanks and nothing more.

Hi friends! (heheheh)
I've never been to college, but what's it like there? (Time to expose these liberal pedophiles for what they really are, intellectual frauds heh)
Is it really as bad as they (I) say? (Stormfront taught me when it's Jews it's okay to poison wells and watersupplies and basically any other tactic heh.. Hail...victory. GOP uber alles!)

>>11578660
I do not like this post

>>11578620
>They can't even read -- every class was filled with "I liked the part where..." or "I thought [...] was a little [sexist/racist/whatever]".
F U C K I N G T H I S
If I have to hear one more braindead unexamined life stand in front of the class and start a sentence with "I liked the part where" I'm going to hold lit fireworks against my throat.

>shouldn't let him colonize your body
Once again I find myself simultaneously horrified and unsurprised.

>>11578660
>I've never been to college, but what's it like there?
In many other conversations this may rightfully exclude people, but it doesn't in this one. Academia has such a major influence over all elements of our culture that every single person is affected by it, and if members of the general public feel that academia has failed them, they are entitled to complain.

>>11578660
Please explain your motivation to write and submit this post

>>11578660
u mad

>>11578660
I genuinely can't tell how many layers of irony half of the posts on this board gave ascended to
This could be somebody that's retarded trying to bash /pol/ or just as easily an actual /pol/ack trying to make the people critical of his dumbshit ideology look like the true retards for being unsubtle and unfunny
What the fuck is happening anymore

>>11578676
>>11578713
>>11578724
>>11578728
>>11578729

I didn't have it as bad as several posters there, but there was an omnipresent feel of anti-intellectualism going on, and I don't really mean stupidity per se, more as in actively opposed against established intellectuals and their works.

>Aristotle was introduced with his quote about how women are unequal to men, and we only used his ideas to talk about the Nobel Committe scandal.
> Teacher never made references to classic lit. Most of the references were to bloggers, some of really modern (always female) authors, and I mean in the last few years or so.
> No one had read classics.
> Everyone was opposed to the canon and the overall idea of it.

>>11578729
I just can't keep up.

>>11578732
Wait... hold on...
You're telling me...
Alright so you're telling me...
Hold on, I've almost got this...
You...
Ahh sorry I'm just trying to force this into perspective...
Trying to hold all the moving parts in my head at once...
You're basically trying to say...
So you're basically saying...
That post was BAIT??
WHAT?????

>>11578385
When did he say anything like that you paranoid motherfucker

>>11578732
This post is even worse

>>11578620
While I do appreciate the great lengths you went to prove your point. Tits(even if fake) or gtfo

>>11578532
>bodies bodies bodies bodies bodies bodies
can someone explain to me why pseuds in the humanities do this? I took one "diversity" class to fulfill a requirement and hearing this every day made me want to kill myself

>>11578092
Kek

>>11578749

ITT a bunch of salty kids who are made their professors didnt recognize that they were le world classe geniuses and so they go to the hipsterist corner of the internet to jerk eachother off with fanfic about being cucked out of an education by neomarxists

>>11578757
They're also obsessed with "spaces"

This thread is further proof that literally all Americans should be banned from posting on /lit/

>>11578757
It's just materialism. But for some reason they don't understand that the use is insanely dehumanizing. They use it as though it's just the new PC lingo.

"Bodies" and "spaces" can have pretty profound meaning in philosophical works that utilize a material lens towards a greater purpose. But morons just use it because it's trendy. That's all.

>>11578794
We are humble refugees with nowhere else to turn to, please accept us.

>>11578794
UK humanities departments are the same.

>bodies
>latinx
>unpack
>find a dialogue
>x space
>otherness
>I feel like
>privilege
>academic consensus

>>11578620
I remember a post on red dit (yeah fuck off) where someone called Taming of the Shrew an actual horrible play because of the sexist themes and the one guy telling the OP that he/she didn't know what they were talking about got downvoted into negativity.
I tried explaining it was a comedy as well but gave up.

>>11578794
but then what would you have to bitch about in between crying that you can't understand moby dick and that henry james is too hard for you

>>11578835
>Henry James
>American

I'm in a PhD program at a top 5 or top 10 or something like that

It's just as bad at the highest echelons. I can't explain it, but even Harvard and Cambridge PhD students I've met were just "tidier," more "efficient" in being empty-headed bullshit artists obsessed with trendy SJW garbage. They weren't smarter, they didn't transcend it. I have not met one truly genius person while I've been here. Everyone is terrible. It is indistinguishable from undergrad. Hell, some of the undergrads I've taught were smarter than any of the PhD students, because at least a few of them had real passions that didn't fit into the academic mold.

>humanities academia is shit
In other news water usually makes shit wet

>>11578844
>muh piece of paper
The bongbrain cries out when you tell him that Eliot and James aren't British and that his literature died a long time ago

Here in France it's really school-dependent. "Normal" universities have become contaminated though to a much lesser degree than in America. Unfortunately they are catching up. Top-schools such as Ecole normale supérieure are mostly free of that shit.

>>11578859
He’ll probably claim Conrad next lel

>>11578757
Lucky you, I've actually done quite a bit of thinking on this.
Before attending university, I tended to consider this brand of leftism/critical theory we're all referring to (let's call it Slam-Leftism for now) as a simple political ideology that was highly popular at the moment. I saw it as belonging to the same set of all other standard political alignments. I didn't agree with it and really didn't like it, but I respected it as a coherent body of ideas.
Within my first week of college I started to suspect that simply wasn't the case.
It's a given that multiple people who both subscribe to the same ideology will probably make similar arguments and bring up similar points in any kind of relevant discussion. Nothing out of the ordinary there. What I started noticing about Slam-Leftism, however, was that its proponents actually speak in near-identical sentences and phrases, and when asked for elaboration on any given claim, will all take you down an identical series of sentences and terms to explain their reasoning.
I don't just mean that they have a set of specialized terminologies to describe concepts there was no good term for beforehand. I mean even ideas that you'd expect to be rephrased or reasoned in any number of ways are always arrived at with the exact same set of memes.
The specific terms used are always highly emotive and I assume were derived from slam poetry over time. "bodies" instead of "people" is a major example. "Spaces" is another. These are words that get you claps from the audience when you say them on stage, and my working theory is that oral performances played a crucial part in sculpting Slam-Leftism. Emotive terms that the audience responded well to became more frequently used as a consequence, creating a positive feedback that crystallized key phrases, sentences, and terms and eventually spilled out into a general world-view. Slam-Leftism is not an ideology, it is a memetic oral ritual born out of capitalistic optimization to get the most retweets, most reblogs, most applause in the fewest words. Slam-Leftists do not actually think deeply about the ideas they espouse, they are just ritualistically communicating a preset of signage.

tl;dr university leftist is a memetic virus born out of the incentivization of powerful language on social media and within poetry circles

>>11578905
Meh, you're partly right (you did skip a few lines of reason with the whole "capitalistic optimisation" machine, but fine, whatevs).

It's all social costs and rewards and the whole social media and subculture aspects you've mentioned are the playing-field more than ever before. The interesting part is how these people and/or their ideology have become the guardians of educational curricula. I think the whole democratisation of education process, whereby the government and Western cultures decided that higher-ed is for every retard is one factor. Couple that with the fact that if higher-ed is for everyone, not every retard can study rocket science, Kant and classics, so you need Mickey Mouse degrees. Then you have the government subsidising Mickey Mouse degrees (this is more true for Europe than it is for the US) so we can be happy and delude ourselves we have a more educated population, while the schools are happy they're getting money, students are happy they've got diplomas to hang on walls, etc. And the education industry complex lives on.

The fact that the former guardians of curricula opened the flood gates on critical theory fanatics was also probably a result of making education more palatable to the masses. Just like the Liberals let the identity-politics types in to gain track with the retarded majority youth and much like the Reps let in the retarded pulpit huckstering tent Evangelists in a while ago (and now they've taken over the party).

>>11578532

>every student reading their work out loud uses that god-awful slam poetry tonality

>>11578961
Can someone give me an example of what this tonality is?
Does it only exist in the American accent?

>>11578036
I went to a small great books program that was largely fine while I was there, but there was a noticeable uptick in SJW students in the underclasses. Since I've graduated, it's become much the norm; it's gotten to the point where you can expect that the student body in large part comes in thinking our reading list (important authors of Western philosophy, history, literature, math, and science) is problematic at best or irredeemably racist, sexist, etc., at worst.

Hilariously, all of the super "Marxist" students were loudly disappointed when they finally got to read Marx and he was different than what Twitter led them to expect.

>>11578997
literally google it.
real example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OadZpUJv8Eg
parody (but it capture its spirit better than 1000 real examples): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kwyihYaIp4

>>11578958
>(you did skip a few lines of reason with the whole "capitalistic optimisation" machine, but fine, whatevs)
The term probably comes with too much baggage to be effective there, so I'll restate that
The set of terminologies and phrases went under a literal process of evolution. All the prerequisites were met:
- Propagation (terminologies can be repeated by one person multiple times, or repeated by others)
- Heritability (repeated terminologies will obviously be similar to the previous causal instance)
- Variation (every person will use or implement the terminologies in slightly different ways)
- Differential rates of propagation based of said variation (more desirable/powerful/efficient/eye-catching terminologies are more likely to be repeated, and with increased frequency)

If these qualities are simultaneously found anywhere, you can bet your ass evolution is already occurring. The terminologies optimized themselves and became more and more complete. They even managed to develop a series of literal defense mechanisms, given that any set of beliefs/terminologies that can be easily countered will be less likely to propagate. That is why Slam-Leftism contains so many caveats that defend itself from criticism, like the idea that privilege it at odds with someone's ability to join this conversation, and that even the marginalized that disagree with Slam-Leftism are actually just acting as Uncle Tom vessels for the corrupting privilege.

>>11578997
it's like when nogs rap with no music like they're relating something deep from the heart yo

it's very declarative and sassy, like you're really TELLING OFF the person who called you 'ma'am' in a starbucks when you're clearly a transqueer gendermischling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YzIGoonIrE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0HZZgxrmOU#t=10s

>>11578997

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5GxVJTqCNs

This is the first thing that popped up on my search for slam poetry, and it's there. It's always there. It's shrill, it gets louder as the sentence goes on, sort of tones up - I'm not really that great at linguistic terms in english, but it's an unmistakable uniformity that you will recognize once you've heard a few, and the exact same kind of intonation is prevalent in the slam poetry of my native country.

>>11578052
Self-fulfilling prophecy

>>11579022
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kwyihYaIp4
gold

>>11578997

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNgqpkZMjiw

>>11578036

>>11578997
Here's what I'm talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6CCePrJlaU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLSnNSqs_CQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxYimeaoea0 (skip to Michael Dyson's parts. Pure poetry, emotion, and form in place of content. It's even scarier seeing this stuff coming out of someone who's clearly intelligent)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4_QwmaNoQ

>>11578532
>I raise my hand and choose futurism from the list and suddenly everyone treats me like a fascist
notevenwrong.jpeg

>>11579032
>>11579027
>>11579022

>>11578036
I live in east Europe and, here at least, I'd say no. But that's because we're a pretty backward and conservative country. Many people say that the uni I go to is filled with leftists and communists and shit, but having spent a year studying there I have to say that this is bizarrely off the mark. (Btw, the focus of the education seems to be quite different from that in the US unis, with much stronger formalist influence and more remains of positivism, and numerous rigorous philological courses. Feminist critique and such stuff is in reality just starting to catch on in younger academic generations.)
The criticism mostly comes from conservatives (often with a disgustingly utilitarian rhetoric), yet they posses and used to possess many cultural institutions which, under their rule, often slide(d) into irrelevance and corruption, so I really cannot take them too seriously.

US unis and culture are a different matter, though, obviously. It seems to me that there's way more humanities unis per capita there than necessary, which dilutes the knowledge, forces the unis to employ subpar professors and so lowers the standards.

>>11578333
Well, I get what you're going for, but I find that these theorists can offer really interesting and meaningful general frameworks that you can then apply to specific texts. But, yeah, there definitely should be enough space given to formal analysis. (Though if you're interested you'll surely find the analyses of Shakespeare that you want on the internet or in the libraries if you're interested.)

>>11578620
>We need a /lit/ university or something.
>spend four years starting with le Greeks, learning ancient Greek to read Homer, tragedies, Plato and Aristotle in the original language and overanalyze them to death and back
>realize that you were studying literature but only know the Greeks, spend the last year quickly studying Shakespeare, Tolstoyevsky and the meme trilogy trying to fill out the gaps
Sounds great

>>11578782
>>11578757
Blame Foucault and Lefebvre. Since the end of WWII France has been noting but a blight on the earth.

>>11579235
No blame Americans. Americans took what the French said and twisted it and proliferated their brainlet versions like the unthinking pseuds Americans are.

>>11578905
>>11579023
this makes a weird amount of sense

>>11579238
You'd have a point if the French took an issue with it at the time. Foucault and Derrida were actively involved with these American academics, and now the French like to pretend it didn't happen cause they can sand the results of their hallowed thinkers.

>>11579259
It's not reeeel pomo bro

>>11579265
Imagine complaining about postmodernism while posting on 4chan, one of the most postmodern places on the internet.

>>11579282
hahaha, yeah XD

>>11579289
))0)0))

Wow after this thread I'm never Enrolling to university #not4me

>>11578439
Minnesota is fucked.

>>11579363
Yeah, it's just so easy to cut the gatekeepers to meaningful employment out of your life.

>>11579363
Same. Glad I dropped out, now I have time to get real education and read Evola.

>>11578905
>>11579023
I've had made similar observations as yours, but didn't know what conclusions to draw from it. What books did you read to come to this line of thinking?
>>11578958
This too. Can you recommend books that critique systemized education and literacy, or ones that support old school liberal arts education?

>>11579600
Didn't come to me from any books—it just sort of became pretty obvious seeming when I was around that kind of person so much—but it seems like the entire area of memetics is pretty related. Not sure what kind of reputation memetics has, though

It all reminds me of that movie Pontypool

>>11578036
>high school
>professor (woman)
>say one hundred years of solitude is machist
>i say is not more machist that whatever novel before 1960
>she said if you describe a machist world, your novel is machist. simple like that. you dont forget the machism because historic context.
>i say that is like saying hamlet is pro-monarchy
>she starts rambling about my ignorance of elizabethan theatre and his labels and how they have differente names to his separated visions of royalty.
>i say that doesnt make any sense
>she starts to derrail to all class about the necessity of see misoginy even in masterpieces of the literature. (while she winks at me...)


i know is hich school and not strictly academy, but that teacher was a visionary. (it was like ten years ago)

>>11579662
The Shape of Jizz to Come

Wew lad thank god I didnt fall for the state university meme and just realized I was to stupid for college. Goddamn. I mean I'm still a tradie retard but wew.

you are asking those memers..what do you expect as an answer?

go try for yourself.

>>11579740
I promise you I'm no memer. The humanities being in healthier shape would be beneficial to me. I want smart, honest people coming in. I wish it were an environmental that still attracted people like that. But my description of the experience was perfectly honest

>>11578171
Al-Azhar

Keep in mind that most professional academics have never worked a legitimate job and have spent basically decades removed from society living in a bubble where ideology matters more than reality

>>11578385

Absolutely awful post lad

no

>>11578603
>doesn't support ideologies based on aesthetics
brainlet tier 'activist'

>>11578092

>>11578757

It's a word trick. The idea is to point out that white male culture/civilization/people treat non-whites and non-males as less than human. It's a throwback to the language of slavery where slaves weren't people, but bodies that could be exploited, abused, flogged, raped and so on.

Basically it's an oblique way of saying that non-whites are still slaves in some sense

>>11578794

This cancer started in Europe you absolute mong

>>11579835
>>11578905
who do i believe

Delete my post again and see what happens

>>11579854
What did you post?

>>11579861
An opinion fascist moderation doesn't like
>>11578660

>>11579867
>fascist moderation

>>11579877
That's what it's called when you disappear posts that you don't like shithead

>>11579867
That post number was made later than you made the post complaining about it being deleted...

>>11579881
Nice counting skills idiot

>>11579885
Yeah. I goofed it. I screwed up. I made a bad call. Butterfingers but eyes, not fingers. Here's the thing, though. At least your shitty post isn't in this otherwise great thread anymore

>>11579879
Okay retard lmao

>>11579896
>>11579902
Alright, enjoy the silence when it comes for you

>>11578516
>Edward Said is a step up from Foucault

>>11578905
uh, so this was what Land was right about

>>11578829
Incorrect use of fresco.

Hi friends! (heheheh)
I've never been to college, but what's it like there? (Time to expose these liberal pedophiles for what they really are, intellectual frauds heh)
Is it really as bad as they (I) say? (Stormfront taught me when it's Jews it's okay to poison wells and watersupplies and basically any other tactic heh.. Hail...victory. GOP uber alles!)

>>11578958

This happened before in Germany universities circa the 18th-19th century, when institutions started admitting more general population trash. Bullshit courses proliferated.

The pinnacle were Hegel's lectures, which were largely attended by future civil servants, clerks, veterinarians and so on.

I love being a christian palestinian because I can say whatever I want in class and automatically win the oppression hierarchy. I was recently discussing the 'myth' perpetuated in modern times as Hitler being a mad man declaring war in the world when in actuality he was forced into war in many circumstances regardless of ones moral judgement on his actions. Everybody in class was too scared to accuse me of whatever the buzzword of the month was. I belong to an impenetrable group that cannot be questioned. Other minorities don't take advantage of this and just parrot the same milquetoast opinions of everybody else but I'm going to milk this for as long as I can. I go to a university in the Bay Area too

>>11579061
>hi, i'm a slut

>>11579411

Garbage meme. There's plenty of meaningful work to be had without a useless college diploma. Stop shilling

Since this might as well be a college thread:

Has anyone here gone to the Ivies for liberal arts? Are there really more black and latinos as as result of different admission policies? Not a /pol/ster, just asking out of curiosity.

>>11579978
That one's a personal favorite of mine

>>11578092
I know you think you're being hyperbolic but based in my experience in uni I can actually believe all this.

>>11579990
Im a non-legacy white male currently majoring in History at Harvard. My class is split almost exactly 50/50 white/others. The minorities who get in are as smart as everybody else who does. What people don't get is that there are tens of thousands of students with perfect scores and perfect grades. That's not what they're looking for, you need something beyond that that sets you apart from everybody else. Everyone has either started a business, program at their school, or something similar. This triggers the asians, cause all they do is schoolwork, but the whole "discriminating against asians" is pants on head retarded

>>11578381
Matthew 7:21-23
>21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’

>>11580033
>students with perfect scores and perfect grades. That's not what they're looking for

Yeah, they're looking for enough brown people to fill their diversity quota since colleges are ranked on inclusivity now

>>11580033
To use of language I'm not fond of, would you say that the minorities come from privileged backgrounds? I can't see how underprivileged people are managing to start business in high school if they live in the ghetto.

>>11578333
In denmark we have a state-funded "writer school" where 5 people come in each year and that seems more up your alley.

>>11578905
incredible post. in all seriousness this could be worthy of a full book if you did some careful research without being clouded by resentment (which you don't seem to be)

the situation you describe is strangely analogous to the idea of "Homeric culture" raised by Eric Havelock in Preface to Plato. his argument is that in the centuries preceding Plato, the main mode of cultural transmission was recitation of poetry, which was built up from arrangements of epithets. though most people didn't memorize the entire poems, everyone knew the epithets and used them to add persuasive elements to their language. even though they had a written language for some of that period, in plato's time poetry was still the primary method of storing information since most of the population was illiterate. though everyone is literate now, to extend the analogy to modern leftists, they are functionally "illiterate" in the sense that poetry and tweets form the primary vehicles of ideological dissemination.

to answer this >>11578757, my best guess is that the "bodies" obsession largely stems from a garbled conception of Foucault's biopolitics. literature departments imported french philosophy in the 70s and 80s without really having enough of a philosophical background to interpret it well, so people heard that derrida and foucault were "against hegemony" or whatever and they got taken up by the emerging school of postcolonialism (and all the related racial ressentiment). one of these people was ta-nahesi coates's professor at howard and then he starting hammering the "black bodies" thing in between the world and me, and that's the point it got really out of control

>>11578450
powerful arguement

>>11578422
You don't understand what conservatives think. No one thinks Meds aren't white. No one thinks non-whites can't or haven't contributed to western culture or civilization. Conservatives are just against mass uncontrolled demographic replacement immigration because that is simply replacing Western culture with colonies from other cultures. /pol/ isn't conservative. They're libertarian or neo-Nazi, which are radical, the opposite of conservative. And it's just a classic troll there to say that Meds aren't white.

>>11579980
Such as?

>>11578439
There's only one solution

>>11580050
No, you obviously can't read. All the minorities have perfect grades and scores too.
>>11580056
Yeah, most of them do come from privileged backgrounds. Not all though. Lots of them did the things I described in the ghetto, and that's admirable if you ask me.

>>11578905
>>11579023
this is fucking horrifying

>>11578036

College and university is nothing but an over glorified trade school now. Everyone goes to get jobs instead of for the love of learning, which you cannot do because all but the elite (and their offspring) have been priced out of. Hence, trade school. People that go to university for linguistics and literature are no better than the half literate American southerner who bumbles his way through a course on commercial plumbing. Both have the same goal.

It's pretty pathetic. When I realised that I just dropped out of school.

>>11580165
Isn't it?
>>11580081
Really glad people are liking those posts, I was worried I'd come off as a complete psycho
I'm very interested in giving this theory some serious thought and fleshing it out as much as I can, even if I'm the only person who reads it in the end. Any recommendations on books to read (I'm sure memetics is related but I know very little about the field), research I could reasonably accomplish on my own, similar/identical theories already present elsewhere would be really helpful

>>11579918
Tell me more. I'm a hair away from ordering Fanged Noumena. I know next to nothing about him or his theories

>>11580190
And what have you been doing?

>>11580213

Dreaming.

>>11580214
Sounds better than school frankly.

>>11580219

It is. It has its up and downs, though.

>>11580098

Any number of trade jobs, for starters. A person who builds houses is doing much more meaningful work than some paper pushing piece of shit in Washington or your local university English department.

>>11580103
Hell no. (Classical) Liberalism is what opened the door for all of this shit in the first place.

>>11580157

Yeah because brownies are graded on a curve retard

If all the scores really are identical, then there's no reason you can't have all Asian or all white enrollment. But that's not allowed because muh diversity

>>11580157
>grade inflation only happens in college
>top 5% is indistinguishable from top 0.5% in casual observation, so there must be no way it matters that a bunch of top 0.5% didn't get in because of diversity.

>>11580211

Don't read Land, he's borderline incoherent.

Unironically read Nietzsche, specifically his academic writings and maybe Daybreak and Gay Science. There are lots of passages about how language/grammar determines how and why we are able to think at all.

Basically words precede thoughts. We don't have a thought and then find the words for it. We have certain words available to us at any given moment and construct our thoughts out of these words.

>>11580254
Where do the top 0.5% go if they give up on college?

>>11580251
The scores aren't identical. Blacks in the overall population 95th percentile get in, Asians in the top 1% don't.
(As if Asians only concentrate on school and not also a bunch of extracurricular their parents also force them to take. Who is employing the whole of the county's violin teachers, Mexicans? )

>>11580295

Blacks at MIT score in the top 10% of Americans in math. They score in the bottom 10% at MIT

>>11580295
To be fair, many of the Asians don't really deserve it at all and their success is often more indicative of continual forced toil rather than anything approaching actual talent. I'd rather let some blacks and hispanics in.

>>11580307
Source?

>>11580288
Their back up school. And they will do fine there generally. But is there someone on the supreme court who hasn't gone to Harvard? No. Asians also suffer from a variety of stereotypes about how they are weak, bad leaders. And so Asians will remain locked out of the very pinnacles of elite power. Almost as if they were being discriminated against.

>>11580307
I don't see how that changes what I was saying.

>>11580314
>our society shouldn't reward hard work. Give it to those other people for being the right shade of brown instead.

>>11580245
>Robespierre was a liberal

>>11580314

Yes they're largely just automatons without a shred of creativity. The drudge of tomorrow. Sweatshop workers of the intellect

>>11580347
>we should reward work
No, we should reward results
I don't care about your "it's only fair" fantasyland.
Hard work is irrelevant.
Consequences are relevant.

>>11580320

https://youtu.be/53TgxsB1_Lo

0:40

>>11580347
>our society shouldn't reward hard work. Give it to those other people for being the right shade of brown instead.
Nothing about their work is particularly hard. It is, however, constant and often ruthlessly cynical. Rote memorization does not entitle a FOB to the birthright of black Americans who have been here for centuries.

>>11580358
What does that even mean? What are saying? Hard work does get results. The only other thing that fits is luck. Fine let's draw names out of a hat.

>>11580355
Yeah, no negative stereotypes of Asians ever existed.

>>11578036

Depends on what country you're in. America is a fucking shit show. Studying cultural sciences in Germany was a great experience and it did not feel as politicised as ppl pretend it is. In fact, many of the proggresivist narratives were challenged and critically examined, the way it should be. PC culture was nowhere to be seen. Our prof (female) made racist jokes on a daily basis. The students did not mind, no one got yelled at or shot.

>>11580383
Okay this poster is an asian

>>11578333

You're dumb.

>>11578092
Is Shakespeare actually looked down upon yet? Ive only seen people joke about here, is it just suspected that he is next on the white-man hit-list?

>>11580410
You can complete an English degree at most Canadian Universities without ever encountering Shakespeare

>>11580387

Don't you have to accept responsibility for the Holocaust and write a 50 page letter of apology to the jews before they even let you in to university in Germany?

>>11580211
I've been wondering the same things myself so I don't really know yet if there are books on how verbal repetition shapes culture. Don't really know anything about the more scientific aspects of "self-replication" and the like, but I've done a fair bit of reading in 20th century leftist philosophy

French Theory by Francois Cusset covers what I was talking about w/r/t french philosophers being imported to america in the 70s and 80s. that will provide you some historical context to how the ideological foundations of slam-leftism (absolutely LOVE your term) came to be.

Mark Fisher wrote really well as a leftwing critic of SJWism. "Exiting the Vampire Castle" is a masterpiece that sums up the movement well: https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle

Ethics by Alain Badiou is worth checking out as a purely intellectual BTFOing of SJW ethics. It sounds like your work is more historically/sociologically focused, but you'd probably appreciate how well Badiou dismantles their ethical claims on a strictly theoretical basis.

>I'm very interested in giving this theory some serious thought and fleshing it out as much as I can, even if I'm the only person who reads it in the end
as far as i'm concerned, readership isn't an issue to fret over. this might be a bit of intellectual idealism on my part, but i think it's important to construct a cogent critique of SJWism that isn't poisoned by muh Western civilization sentimentalism, just to say that it IS possible to argue against SJWism without being a reactionary. right now, the far right has a monopoly on criticizing SJWs while most leftist writers toe the line even if they inwardly disagree, so I can't help but feel a lot of the nazi resurgence comes from the fact that kids are disgusted by SJWs and then think the only way to combat them is going full nazi. these people are literally so disgusting that kids would rather be nazis than care about progressive issues.

>>11580427

Neither Jews nor the holocaust ever came up, surprisingly. Not really on anyone's mind. The picture you have of Germany is a meme. We're much less apologetic than you'd believe. Just look at Germanys role in the EU currently.

>>11578052
This is not correct. I am an actual campaigning member of a moderate-sized socialist organisation with some representatives at local government level(and not some tiny little Trot cult group). A good friend of mine is about to finish his PhD in Hegel, and he is absolutely disgusted, as are all of his peers I have been introduced to. Academia does not have a left-wing bias; it has a strong liberal-capitalist bias. Ideas to the left of Hillary-style Democrats, social or economic, aren't really tolerated. Even the "Marxian" economists out there are expected to use Marx to applaud capitalism. Even Bernie style Social-Democracy will absolutely not get you a "comfortable" existence in academia.

>>11580437
>Badiou

>>11580463
say what you will about Badiou being a Maoist, but Ethics is a great book that has nothing to do with that. it's a polemical work that completely dismantles the ethics behind SJWism. a nazi could read it and find it valuable, regardless of Badiou's other works

>>11580462
>PhD in Hegel

He deserves whatever he's getting

>>11580391
I'm a legacy WASP. Asians probably don't refer to themselves as "they".

>>11580437
SJW or natsoc, are certainly the loudest options. antifa/pol/ is radicalizing [some of] the kids these days.

>>11580472
how could you be a maoist and not like SJWs?

>>11580477
>Asians probably don't refer to themselves as "they".
But if you're pretending you're not asian of course you'd do that?

>>11580488
any honest communist should see SJWism as the bourgeois takeover and commodification of the academy and progressive ideologies. though i'm sure you have a comparison between the red guard and SJWs lined up, besides both groups being young and politically inflammatory, their end goals are pretty divergent.

badiou himself doesn't comment much directly on SJWism (as this is an american problem the french care little about). the gist of his theoretical critique is that it's all built on an idea of the "ethics of the Other" and that this idea, introduced by Levinas, is insupportable without the idea of an Altogether-Other (i.e. God) that grounds one subject's ability to recognize another subject as Other. Otherwise, there is a contradiction in terms since you can't re-cognize an Other given that the "Other" is something that is outside of you. Badiou heads off Derrida and Spivak at the pass with their "ethics of the Other" which in turn critiques SJW ideology given that it's all rehashed Derrida

>>11578036
In literature, it's not intolerably bad but you can certainly see its influence, especially if the lecture is being given by a younger professor. The list of books taught will invariably be adjusted to include more female or nonwhite authors, even if the overall quality suffers as a result as relatively obscure authors of little value are selected.

The main problem in my view is the students. They come in knowing pretty much nothing except ideology, and are always happy to jump on the slightest hint of a feminist or race-related critique, while completely missing obvious classical references and being totally ignorant of the slightest bit of relevant historical knowledge. Even if the professors were absolutely brilliant and balanced, the amount of teaching you can do when the raw material is so bad is obviously limited.

>>11580033
Hey nice, same major and school, agree with your post. What year by chance?
>>11580314
>success is often more indicative of continual forced toil
Not sure about that, but I'll share some of my thoughts.

At least where I am from (SF Bay Area), a majority of Asian applicants have the same background, in that they all live in rich (gated) ethnosuburbs, they have engineer parents, etc etc. I don't want to imply that the environment in which one grows up in is 100% deterministic for college admissions, but most of my friends in hs were pretty homogenous in terms of career interests and hobbies. It's sort of hard to stand out in that sort of environment when there's a lot of others with that background applying. Not even because they are part of the same race but everything else aforementioned doesn't lead to many 'novel' life experiences and reflections, which is important when writing personal statements. This is crucial because essays carry a lot of weight when there are so many talented applicants applying and it becomes a differentiating factor.

For sure, they had great GPAs and test scores. Without a doubt they'd succeed at any highly selective uni. But some were banking on the fact that a 36/2400 would be their golden ticket and blew off their essays, which require a good amount of introspection.

fwiw i'm chink as well

>>11580583
>'novel' life experiences and reflections
That's because their parents aren't spending money in the right places. A lot of white upper-middle class professionals hire consultants whose fees go up into the tens of thousands in order to try to craft a good application. They recommend things like summer international humanitarian aid work, all of which of course has to be paid for by the parents. If they ever figure out that system they'll flood it, just like everything else.

>>11580641
>A lot of white upper-middle class professionals hire consultants whose fees go up into the tens of thousands in order to try to craft a good application
Yeah a lot of people do that here too, with varying results. Certainly doesn't detract from an application though.

To some extent these extracurriculars have already been found out. Going to Africa for a feel-good trip isn't as effective as it used to be. But I do agree -- the rich, regardless of race/gender/whatever, have the biggest upper hand in the game. I highly doubt that will change in the near future, and affirmative action without taking income into account will only do so much.

>>11578439
Why would you lie on an anonymous online forum?

>>11580718
The only unrealistic part of that post was the professor identifying as a bird. Everything else is absolutely possible at a good number of colleges

>>11580277
>his academic writings
Which are?

>>11580526
Man, those Asians are wily!

>>11580716
Not until grandpa decides he'd rather just give me a board seat than buy a building.

>>11578036
desu just access as much literature and content (regardless the form) available to you while in college. they give you so much access to material not available to laymen unless through purchasing or ripped versions. regardless of your political belief, go and study. your professors will give their opinions on subject matters, sometimes with arrogance and sometimes with earnest passion. but in the end of it all, you are allowed access to so much content that you can dive deep into possibly any branch of the historical/literature record. the humanities are still important. if anything, they will illuminate the world just a little bit more.

university is for you and your development as a free individual thinker in the western world. fuck the haters and fuck the demagogues at the universities. i never deny they are there, but ignore them and keep gaining exp!

>>11580795
>just grind that game yo
College is the most expensive mmorpg ever! Can't you think of any better use of your money?

>>11580404
I'm sorry you felt threatened by me, brainlet. Sit down. I won't hurt you.
Good boy.

>>11578052
I'm left leaning and that's BS. If anything watching episodes of black mirror for college assignments made me hate my own party.
Not that I'm going to the right all that strongly though.

>>11578809
Dont beg for the euros acceptance like a cuck, we all know they, "hate us cuz they aint us"
But in all seriousness, yes, this is our only place of refuge.

>>11578439
The academic liberal arts is dead, long live NOTHING, because it's all your fucking fault we're in this position now. Burn.

>>11578905
Dude, this is some great fucking insight. Well done senpai!

>>11578905
So, it literally became a religion, in which the recitation of its dogma became sacrosanct ritual?
Wonderful, this'll develop in a very healthy way into the 21st century, clearly.

>>11578333
This pretty much describes my encounter with the humanities. I switched to STEM after a year. The biggest joke was a Sociology class I took. My favourite classes were the ones that had some flexibility in what you did your essays about, so I could more-or-less read about what I wanted (philosophy). Everything else was turbo-autistic "What did X think about Y", "Analyse X from a Y perspective".

>>11580865
lol yes indeed

>>11578381
>sola scriptura

>>11579913
It isn't fascist if those are, and have always been the rules of the board.

Did any of you guys find classes that you liked? Didja sign up for the classes of professors whose literature you enjoyed? Were you disappointed?

>>11580979
How infiltrated is STEM?

>>11581043
There was a lot of "women in STEM"-type stuff in the last few years I was there, but it was run by students and was much more positive and low-key than the radical feminist politics in the humanities, with people helping each other, giving talks, etc. A net good. A degree of the more sinister stuff exists, but I'd say it's mostly confined to liberal tech start-ups.

That was in computer science, by the way. Mathematics is full unwashed manchild autism, especially at the postgrad level.

>>11581043
>Physics
>Math
Don't give a shit at all, save for some second-hand embarrassment. Seen as fools.
>Engineers
The ardent, extreme lefties are often the subject of ridicule. Many engies are openly caustic towards them, especially in Electrical Engineering.
>Computer Science
See above, except for a few decently large outcroppings of "Women Who Code" and other groups to that effect. Generally seen as dead weight.

I don't have experience with Chem or the more biological fields, but they tend to be much more left-leaning.

>>11581071
>That was in computer science, by the way. Mathematics is full unwashed manchild autism, especially at the postgrad level.
Good thing I'll be double majoring in both, also I'm going in as a "mature student" (23).

>>11581075
>but they tend to be much more left-leaning.
How much more? As much as the liberal arts?

>>11580295
The fact that you think playing the violin is what these schools want shows how misguided (and probably asian) you are.

>>11578333
>Humanities departments should stop concerning themselves about the meaning of language
This. Most """"""""debates""""""""" in the modern day humanities are literally debates over semantics. It's fucking awful. No intellectual rigor whatsoever.

>>11581087
>t. violist
Lol, nice wannabe violin you have there.

>>11581092
How do you get 5 violists to play in tune?

shoot 4 of them

>>11581096
How do you transcribe a violin piece for viola?

Divide the metronome marking by 2.

>>11581100
You are in a town you've never visited before and are lost. You see two people: a mail man and a viola player. Who do you ask for directions?

The viola player doesn't exist.

>>11581158
Surely this has to be 'a talented viola player' or something.

I can't talk, I'm a drummer

>>11581158
>>11581165
Why did the violist marry the accordionist?

Upward mobility.

>>11581087
It's just an classic trope anon. Similarly, I doubt my grandpa would've actually had to buy a name on a building to get me in if I was such a screw up that the SAT was hard.

>>11581187
How do you get a violist to play tremolo?

Write "solo" above the passage

>>11581278
Why is the viola so common on /lit/?

>>11581293
A violist came home and found his house burned to the ground. When he asked what happened, the police told him "Well, apparently the conductor came to your house, and..."

The violist's eyes lit up and he interrupted excitedly, "The conductor? Came to *my* house?"

>>11578092
>absolute true diary of a part time Indian

God I hate this book with a burning passion. Can’t believe this was the one text we spent most of our time on in English I.

>>11580865

If you don't realize that there's always some grinding needed to learn anything significant, then maybe college isn't for you.

>>11578036
Just read any of their work. It's a horrible state of affairs.

>>11580765

Anti-Education, The Pre Platonic Philosophers, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, and arguably Birth of Tragedy

>>11580347
>But is there someone on the supreme court who hasn't gone to Harvard? No.
It's a bigger problem that such an institution has essentially managed to monopolize a branch of the government. It should be treated like a corporate monopoly.

>>11580351
Classical liberals can get pretty revolutiony

>>11578517
Just a heads up but welfare will be unavoidable in the decades to come.

>>11581437
Literally what happened to the United States of America when they broke away from the British Empire.

From my experience, they don't seem to establish a difference between the way things ARE with how things OUGHT TO BE. They explain how things work according to their own argumentation and framework, and implicitly enforce that that is how things should be. You're not really ever given any opportunity to argue against it either. Even if you do, you're already wrong and/or a bigot.

>>11579094
i like certain things that are associated with other things that people find easy to hate, so i keep my mouth shut or i know they're someone who knows liking one thing does not mean you approve of something related to it

>>11581369
>some grinding.
For most people college is 4+ years of wading through useless shit.
Shoot, most people would be better off if they could drop out in 8th grade. Not like they will learn anything they need for their job. Only thing they do learn is high culture it's not for them. As a member of high culture, I have to say, that's kind of a mean way to keep the exclusivity.

>>11581383
Harvard is a billion dollar hedge fund with a small school attached.

>>11581353
I read that in elementary shcool

>>11580410
an sjw can love shakesspear, it's just that they view the classics through an intersectional lens. Much more damaging if you think about it

>>11578439
Where did you go?

>>11581642
SJWs are incapable of loving anyone or anything, including themselves. They hate and seek to destroy everything, including themselves. They only feign "love" as a means of more efficiently and effectively destroying. They're pure evil.

>>11581675
sjws are just maladapted children, you would have to be extremely sheltered to view them as pure evil. evil is immensely frighteining to people with normal hearts

>>11581688
>sjws are just maladapted children
Children of Satan. They're radical totalitarian political ideologues who want to wage literal total war against ordinary people and overthrow God. They only want universal chaos, suffering, and death. The spirit in them is the same spirit that was in Cain. Read that chapter of Genesis.

>you would have to be extremely sheltered to view them as pure evil.
You'd have to be extremely sheltered to be completely ignorant of history from the Munster Rebellion to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

>evil is immensely frighteining to people with normal hearts
Here's a hint for dealing with humans. What people present themselves as is not always what they actually are.

>>11581719
>from the Munster Rebellion to the fall of the Berlin Wall.
if that's your idea of evil you've never seen somebody murder a person in cold blood for no reason but personal gain

you're talking about abstracted evil, which has ideological reasoning behind it

sjws are not children of Satan, satan is immeasurably bad, and omnipresent, and his actual children are horrfic. the fac that he is in us all and everything doesnt make us his childrne

>>11578036
no. i am an english major and all of the green texts here is larping.

>>11581724
>if that's your idea of evil you've never seen somebody murder a person in cold blood for no reason but personal gain
And you have? Oh, you think you're hard, ese? I've seen some shit. *puffs up chest and steps to you* I'm from the hood, ese. *leans into your face and flexes neck muscles* I'm hard. You got something more to say, bitch boy? *leans back and smiles in response to your cowering panic* Didn't think so, ese.

>you're talking about abstracted evil, which has ideological reasoning behind it
Reasoning has nothing to do with it. There's nothing abstract about the persecutions carried out by totalitarian states.

>sjws are not children of Satan, satan is immeasurably bad, and omnipresent,
No demon is omnipresent, and neither are demons taken collectively, as demonstrated by Scripture. Only God is omnipresent. You're ascribing powers to Satan that are God's. There are two theories that a demon has either the power of single presence or the power of limited multipresence, but no demon or demons are everywhere at once.

>and his actual children are horrfic. the fac that he is in us all and everything doesnt make us his childrne
Read your Gospels. Wheat and tares. SJWs and similar types are playing dress rehearsal for the kingdom of the Antichrist and have been since the days of Cain. I've known many SJWs over the years, and horrific and frightening are two words that I definitely would use to describe them, even if they didn't start out that way. I can link you to some news articles about them if you want, too. I won't ask for a link about the murder you claim to have witnessed, though, because you were no doubt named when you gave testimony.

>>11580874
Getting some ERP vibes here.

>>11578036
Not terrible, but also not as studious or encouraging of actual ideas to develop like you're expect in the times of Scholastic Europe.

>>11578647
>>11578052
Also this. If you aren't part of the left leaning circlejerk, there's no point to pursue a further academic career

>>11581675
>>11581719
So you're capable of loving everyone and everything, including yourself? You love and seek to create everything, including yourself? You only feign "hate" as a way to more efficiently and effectively create?

HAH! Give me a break, friend!

>>11581675
Replace SJWs with anons and this sentence would still work, maybe even beter kek

>>11581792
ur literally dividing identity politics as good vs evil. Angles vs. demons. You are merely viewing them the same way they view their enemies. It is easy to demonize one side as you have literally done so. But to really understand, you must have respect for their ideology, and humanize their motives rather than literally demonize intentions (I say that twice because it's funny how you literally have demonized them, but I wont deny the wisdom of the holy book, be it not taken literally, he he)

>>11581792
Would you ever kill an SJW?

>>11581858
>>11581862
I'm not perfect, but I also don't want to overthrow democracy and establish a totalitarian state and take away everyone's rights and sleep soundly as my political opponents are tortured to death in the basements of secret police stations, so at least I have that going for me I guess.

>>11581869
>ur literally dividing identity politics as good vs evil.
No, not identity politics. I don't give a damn about that. SJW is a new name for a very old phenomenon. Identity politics is just the current mask it wears, an excuse. Anyway, I didn't draw the battle lines. God did.

>Angles vs. demons.
SJWs are the servants of demons, not actually demons themselves. The struggle of a Christian is not against flesh, but is a spiritual battle against demonic forces, as St Paul wrote. SJWs are not our ultimate enemy and can be won over and turned.

>You are merely viewing them the same way they view their enemies.
No, I don't view them as prey. You see, I recognize that they're pure evil, but I still respect their God-given rights.

>It is easy to demonize one side as you have literally done so.
Once again, they are the servants of Satan, as all unsaved, unrepentant sinners are, but they are not actual demons. You're refusing to recognize that distinction. SJWs are not beyond redemption like demons are, but they are of a reprobate mind as described in Romans 1. There are souls among them that will turn from sin in the course of their lives and enter Heaven. Still, Christ wasn't wrong when He stated the woes of the Pharisees. Leftists are a den of vipers.

>But to really understand, you must have respect for their ideology
To understand leftism it is impossible to still have any respect for it.

>and humanize their motives rather than literally demonize intentions
Their motives are not what they say they are. Their motives are clear from their actions which are well documented in history and the news. Judge a tree by its fruit.

>(I say that twice because it's funny how you literally have demonized them, but I wont deny the wisdom of the holy book, be it not taken literally, he he)
Oh you devilish little rascal you, you sure got one up on everyone there, didn't you? So clever.

>>11581877
No. I'd never commit murder and no one ever should. I wouldn't even sign up to lawfully kill other soldiers in a just war between legal state actors, much less in an ideological civil war (which I don't want to ever happen). I'm not a soldier. I doubt I'd even be able to kill anyone in self-defense if they tried a terrorist attack or something and I happened to be there. I'm not a pacifist, but I tend to just get confused when stuff goes down and don't even figure out what happened until it's already over. The way to fight SJWs is not physical, but spiritual. To do that you first have to recognize what power they serve, and that isn't God.

>>11578352
>>11578377
>>11578450
You know your ideology is true when it filters out brainlets who prefer cool slogans to boring number crunching

t. neoliberal

>>11578439
based

science says YES 9999 citations edition
https://heterodoxacademy.org/resources/library/

>>11582004
>He thinks adhering to a robotic ideology of rootless de-cultured global capitalism is "true".

>Believing anything internet memers have to say.

>>11582572
>but what about culture????

>>11581542
>Harvard is a billion dollar hedge fund with a small school attached.
That doesn't even begin to describe it. Their endowment last year was over 37 billion. It's a disgusting institution. The school itself should be nationalize, and its alumni should be taxed into poverty.

>>11582572
>>11582601
forgot pic

>>11582633
>Dude let us privatize your shit, you will like the slums.
>Also transfer democratic control over your economy to transnational corporate lawyers
Fuck off worm, the centralization, connectedness, and homogenity of privatized markets is causing worldwide ecological collapse. Anyone can look at the facts in Brazil, India, Nigeria, Mexico, the USA and see right through these scams pushed by the IFI's you shill for. You are retarded. The only way you could be doing worse is China style, which isn't very different from neoliberalism.

>>11582633
>source: the world bank
>they went above $700 per year mark they have truly made it
nice calculations bugman

>>11582633
>>11582601
>The only way to lift people out of poverty is my specific brand of predatory international capitalism and not just adhering to more moderate notions of free trade with Adam Smith's notion of a home bias!

>>11582633
>haha we'll just raise everyone's standard of living to amerifat levels while encouraging population growth (it's the only way to grow!)
Nice global tragedy of the commons, fartsniffer.

>>11582633
>poverty / wealth is the axis of morality

>>11582729
>Capitalism
>Tragedy of the commons
What? The "Tragedy of the commons" is a lie, used as propaganda to support privatization and liberalism (now neoliberalism) in general.
We wouldn't have these kinds of problems with common ownership (unless trade fucks things up)
Look into the origins of private property in 18th century British common law.
The real Tragedy of the Commons is the Commons being systematically privatized.

>>11578333
I wish that more people were like you.

>>11578036
Not in Canada, generally: class material is still largely the same as it was 30 years ago. Of course literature studies are left-leaning: in the real world right-wingers are busy trying to defund, destroy, and discredit the entire concept of education, and anti-learning doesn't work well as a starting point for education. There will always be clueless students ranting about shit they never thought about before last week: that's part of the tradition, and just because you find the current trends more annoying than those of past decades doesn't make them any worse.

>>11578333
Excellent post. And a good prof in a good grad seminar will still teach these things, if you can find one.

>>11582768
No, tragedy of the commons is when people share a pool of resources and each individual takes more than they need to get ahead of others. Globalization makes this a macro issue, have fun when pajeet mining companies are bidding to drill in the grand canyon and the Chinese own all of Australia.

>>11582898
No you idiot, privately owned corporations bidding to privatize state property is not the tragedy of the commons, there are no commons involved in that scenario.

I'm thinking of going to uni to do a humanities degree at 25. Convince me i'm making a mistake

>>11583055
Why so old? :(

>>11583075
I couldn't go when i was 18 because my mum is disabled and i had to care for her. But my brother is old enough and willing to do it now if i go to uni.

>>11580081
Yo, quick question about Havelock: my library has Preface to Plato but also a couple of his collected essays and lectures. What work of his should I read to get the big picture of his thought?

>>11583105
You're a good soul. I wish you luck at school anon.

>>11578774
That projection yikes

>>11582898
>Uses the antithesis of the tragedy of the commons as an argument for the existence of the tragedy of the commons
Oh no, it's another, "anglophone can't understand the difference between common ownership and property, and can't understand the world outside of the terms set by private property and state sovereignty" episode.
Congrats, you just disproved the existence of the tragedy of the commons, or at least proved the existence of the even worse tragedy of property. Restoring common ownership and other traditional systems of social possession is the only way to counter the scourge of capitalism.

>>11581792
Nigga, not even that anon, but all he was pointing out is that your are clearly overreacting and using hyperbole to describe SJW's, as bad as they already are.

>>11583055
I did that because I dropped out at 21 and got readmitted at 25 (went back for a creative writing degree though). Here's the pros/cons of doing this.

Pros:
>You'll be a much better writer than your peers
>You'll probably have some life experience to draw upon when writing
>You'll be mature enough to take advantage of all the resources available to you (additional workshops, talking to resident authors, going to office hours, etc)

Cons:
>Dating will be harder
>Everyone around you will be a retarded zoomer
>It's a fucking humanities degree so have a plan for when you get out and don't acquire too much debt

I did a masters in Roman history at Oxford university, and my expereince was not at all like people say on here, but I dont know if it's just that amerifats are retarded and obsessed with identity, or because the classics are pretty conservative, or because Oxford is its own bubble. There were many things about experience I thought were just dumb pedantry, but in a completely different way.

>>11579973
>which were largely attended by future civil servants, clerks, veterinarians and so on.

Where do I find information on this?

>>11583231
You studied Roman history at fucking Oxford you dumb nigger. It is self-evident that the degree self-selects for people who don't engage in woke twitter ID politics. Roman history would be considered a racist patriarchal subject at most Mickey Mouse Unis in your country.

>>11582963
>what is the negative environmental imapcts of pollution
>what is overfishing
>>11583128
>retard thinks less regulation will be good for the environment

>>11583055
Do a concrete subject in the humanities, like Economics or Polisci, based on whatever is best ranked at your university, is what I'll recommend, anon. I suspect that these days, success in a certain field coupled with the resulting more leisure time is the best way to actually enjoy the humanities.

>>11583231
>because the classics are pretty conservative
It's this mostly. In fact, sjws are now claiming medieval studies is the last bastion of reactionary thought or whatever.

When they take Latin away, the knives come out.

>>11578036
the humanities themselves, no. the people who make up most of the field, yes

>>11578036
In Germany, it's avoidable but identity politics form certainly a prominent current within humanities.

>>11583287
>What is overfishing
A product of state sovereignty, and private business. Overfishing is not the tragedy of the commons you dink, just because you read the end of the line once doesn't mean you know dick about how the law of the sea, transnational fisheries and the markets trading fish. All the problems of overfishing are private enterprise/ state corruption.
>Less regulation
Actually I don't think corporations and private business should be allowed to exist, the problem is fisheries are capitalizied. Artisan fisheries exercising true common ownership are very good at managing there fisheries, global super trawlers, long liners and purse seiners are the problem, that is private business capitalizing what should be common, not the so called "tragedy of the commons"
Not only do you not understand the difference between private and common ownership, a guarantee I understand marine biology and ecology far better than you do, as I have studied that as a life long passion.

>>11583315
I do think the rigour needed to be competent at advanced latin might have helped.

>>11583277
I'm a communist who studies Classics at uni. My tutor is a basedboy who shits on democracy for voting in Trump.

Even Lenin and Marx constantly alluded to Athenian democracy and mythology. The latter even read Ancient Greek plays in the original every year to keep his mind sharp.

>>11579022
The first video is a perfect example of the 'beat' and general vibe of slam poetry.

>>11579027
I honestly don't understand why you're using the first poem here an demonstration. It's really lacks most of the qualities of the stereotypical slam poem and if anything is genuinely more heartfelt and poetically expressive, as opposed to the ranting to people to gain sympathy for your poetics that dominates slam. If more slam was like this I'd be far more sympathetic to it.

>>11579032
This, conversely, is pure slam.

>>11583353
Do you know what a common is? Genuinely asking because you seem to think the second a private ship enters the ocean (if you could tell me who owns the ocean that would be great), the problem is somehow totally not, "a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action."
>autodidact
Hmm yes that explains everything. Read up on the great ecological benefits the removal of private ownership has done btw.

>>11583277
>Classics
>Not Mickey Mouse
>'Mickey Mouse degree' was coined by Margaret Hodge, a Labour Education Minister
>By her observation that "the degree itself may not have huge relevance in the labour market", Hodge appeared to be reflecting particularly on those reading the Literae Humaniores (Classics) otherwise known as "Greats" at Oxford University.

Kek. How did you literally say Classics at Oxford wasn't Mickey Mouse, when that's what the term was describing?

>>11583220
What do you do now assuming you have finished your degree?

>>11583522
Imagine being dumb enough to respect Lenin while looking down on le masses who voted trump

>>11583587
Imagine being dumb enough to think proper democracy has ever existed.

>>11583231
>bongbreath
>piss poor rambling prose
Every time

>>11583565
I used it to describe Unis mate. It's all the Unis that took advantage of the democratisation of higher-ed, whereby the government and society decided that higher-ed is for every retard, and shifted their business model as to accommodate retards. Hence subaquatic vaginal studie, cultural studies, women's studies, media studies, etc.

Roman History predates that practice and while it might not have direct transferable skills into today's market, it's not a symptom of the same money-grabbing model.

Also, relax nigger.

>>11583592
No one said it did. But such a person would still be to the average leninoid what Goethe is to Rudyard Kipling

>>11583607
>Hasn't read Lenin
Why do you think you know what he even believed?

Also, what's wrong with Kipling? Goethe is great though.

>>11583522
I don't understand how you think that's an argument. The fact that some communists read Classics at Uni is not indicative of the most common political orientation of your average Roman History/Classics student. The fact that Lenin and Marx "alluded" to Athenian democracy and mythology has even less to do with it. Finally, the fact that communists enrol in classics/ROman History courses has very little to to with the twitter-slam-leftist critical theory fanatics that have hijacked other humanities departments.

>>11583620
>property confiscation is a good idea
Hahahaha

>>11583601
Gender studies legiterally came out of psychoanalysis, goober. It was a global phenomenon that even happened in Texas 3-4 decades before your supposed democratisation of higher-ed. You really think feminist and postcolonial studies are recent?

>>11583631
I was merely riling him up for thinking that Classics students are all meathead fascists. I wish the fascists and right identitarians (even normal neocons) would read more classics and history. It'd make them less full of shit.

>>11583633
'Property' (i.e. factories) should be owned by its workers. Keep up.

>>11583640
>that even happened in Texas 3-4 decades before your supposed democratisation of higher-ed.
That supposed democratization occurred immediately after WWII. That it is descended from Psychoanalysis only further indicates that it's worthless.

>>11583640
>confiscating gentry lands and getting rid of your best blood
>letting peasants administer factories
Lmai

>>11583660
>peasants are factory workers
Are you even trying? Peasants come from FEUDALISM, which CAPITALISM liberated us from.

>>11583640
> for thinking that Classics students are all meathead fascists
Where exactly was that implied?
>global phenomenon that even happened in Texas 3-4 decades before your supposed democratisation of higher-ed
I'm not sure when you think the "higher-ed is for everyone" revolution began, but regardless of what you think, my point was about Uni's taking advantage of this policy to get more asses in seats and subsidies for made up degrees. Vaginal/gender studies was just one example.

Not sure if you're retarded, or deliberately obtuse/disingenuous.

>>11583667
>Russia wasn’t still pseudo feudalist
This is your mind on slipshod fialectic

>>11578036
>tfw I was a freshman in college and wanted to get a PhD
>fast forward 4 years later, am senior
>realize collegiate life and academia is a marxist propaganda machine
>say fuck getting PhD and become a wagecuck

I wish it didn’t have to be so.

>>11583544
The second a privately owned business removes the fish from the ocean to take to the market, those fish become private property, a price tag. The states(coastal waters and EEZ's are owned by states according to UNCLOS, so calling the ocean "the global commons" is a misnomer and pointless buzzword.
The problem is the state leases out the 'commons' to private business, effectively privatizing the ocean. Artisan fishers only take what they need for consumption, and are aware of, immersed in, and dependent on the sustainability of their fisheries, this holds true from thiland to West Africa to America's Pacific Northwest, so I would say that common fisheries have an excellent track record spanning 10,000 years. If you are referring to what happened in inner monglia or Soviet Russia as the tragedy of the commons you are retarded. State property is still property, completely different from the commons.
>Autodidact
I am properly educated and obviously more informed than you are.

>>11583679
Yeah they were, but there was a proletariat in the cities lmao! I agree that Russia needed to complete capitalism, which was what the NEP was for, but if you look at all the major cities, they had workers who carried out lots of the early protests, joined bolsheviks, etc.

Are you going to deny there were factories in Russia with a working class? How would anyone be able to dispossess the so-called "gentry"?

>>11583676
>I'm not sure when you think the "higher-ed is for everyone" revolution

When did it begin? I was merely talking about the Mickey Mouse phrase which was coined in 2010.

My Anthropology department was pretty reasonable. There was one guy who would always talk about how chimps are superior to people but other than that nothing too wacky.

>>11583708
>letting proles administer factories

>>11583734
>that tfw when Mondragon did so well that even Franco wanted those co-ops to bring Spain's economy back

>>11583700
Ok so you just don't like the word common because it pokes holes in your idea that private business=bad. The ocean is a continuous body of water that comprises most of the Earth's surface. There is no country that owns the entire ocean, only the shoreline. A good example of this is how killing sharks im California disrupts ecosystems on the other side of the ocean. The ocean is connected, and it is not owned. Private companies overexploit it, making this situation a tragedy of the commons. Please refrain from using your big "properly educated" neoliberal brain from trying to address highschool level examples of commons.

Is it ok if I take the autodidact approach for humanities as a stemweenie? Will lit bully me?

>>11583774
lit is close to illiterate and very few people read here. Do it if you have the discipline and some guidance from someone who's actually competent

>>11583750
Also small scale fisheries have lasted 10,000 years because there actual welfare factors on human population growth. You can't out the genie back in the bottle though so good luck with your impossible to implement idea of destroying all private ownership.

>>11582615
The expression is probably from a while ago when it was more accurate. In any case, the line doesn't need literal exactness.
As to your last point, let's slow your roll on that soak the rich.

>>11583750
The "tragedy of the commons" is a neoliberal argument for privatization, you neoliberal.
>You don't like the word commons.
I actually know what it means, unlike you
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land
At also seems that you have no idea what private property is. This is why I told you to look into the orgins of property in British common law, and the orgins of, "the tragedy of the commons" in social-contract theory, it has it's roots in propaganda for the enclosure and privatization of the commons and there subsequent destruction.
You are using Hardins definition of the tragedy of the commons which is ahistorical, unscientific, and counterfactual.
If you can invest in a corporation running fishing charters, you aren't investing in the commons, you are investing in the private ownership and extraction of the commons, which is the enclosure and destruction of the commons.
This could have been resolved quickly but you got the insane idea that you understand what you are talking about and tried to agrue with me. I used to make the same argument as you when I was 16 btw.

>>11583790
>Impossible to implement
All you have to do is change a few laws and corporations would not be allowed to pillage the oceans. The only reason this is a problem in the first place is because the state and transnational regualtory bodies have legalized it.

>>11583816
>Fishing charter
Opps I meant to say fishing vessels

>>11583816
>Hardin is unscientific but Jensen is
>>11583826
Literally said you think private property shouldn't exist but ok mr. Anarcho-primitivist

>>11583784
Well I dont have the guidance part. So maybe not

>>11583849
>Hardin is unscientific
No, I said his usage of 'the tragedy of the commons' is, this has nothing to do with Hardin, just his poor usage of the word "commons" which runs contrary to the meaning of the word "commons" is.
It's totally unscientific, it has no grounding in science. Likewise I never mentioned Jensen and that isn't someone I listen too either way. Hardins work on the CEP is respectable, although it doesn't work like that IRL, and the theory has some peoblems. His "tragedy of the commons" is a shit show.

Private property shouldn't exist, I have no reason to believe that you know what private property is, and every reason to believe that you have no idea what property is.

>>11583910
>Private property shouldn't exist
All you really had to say to let everyone know you're an idiot desu

>>11583941
Whatever retard, I've read Smith, I've read Locke and Hobbes. Take away all the liberal frosting and private property is the biggest scam in history.

>>11583956
>someone not letting me on some land they paid money for is a scam
>starts name-dropping to feel like a big brain

>>11583956
Not him, but maybe once you move past your teens and read more, you'll be able to attend a thread without smuggling in your "private property is oppression" mantra even though it has nothing to do with it.

>>11583970
Being able to own land, let alone land you do not live on, is a giant scam.
It's why all those people live in the slums of new Delhi and not on the land they tended for thousands of years, it's how colonists scammed native Americans out of there home, it's how all the Brits were scammed out of the commons. Private property is a legal fiction.
Weren't you the one complaining about Chinese corporations buying up all of Australia?
I got news for you sweetie, that wouldn't be happening without private property.

>>11583976
>Private property and "the Tragedy of the commons" have nothing to do with each other.
He was the one who mentioned private property and called it the tragedy of the commons. I am more than justified in correcting that error.

>>11584014
Ocean isn't private property

>>11584032
Fishing vessels and there catch sure as shit are private property. Overfishing is caused by the privatization of the oceans, more particularly the privatization of the oceans fisheries. So that is the private enclosement of the commons, which is antithetical to the tragedy of the commons, unless you think publicly traded corporations acting on behalf of their shareholders is equivalent to individual people acting on their own self interest I don't see how you could deny that.

>>11584057
Yes anon, in a management situation on a macro scale a private corporation replaces the individual. Don't get your panties in such a twist over language. If you're so autistic about the use of "commons" just call it the tragedy of the great plains or something, because private property is not a closed system (this is why farmers and ranchers talk to each other, they don't want to go blowing up cattle wire or shooting shepherds again)

>>11584083
>Private property is common property
>Stop using words in there intended context based on historical precedent.
What's in the self interest of an individual and a corporation are two different things. There is a reason this "tragedy of the commons" only applies to privatized commons(not the commons).

>>11584109
Corporations are ran by individuals so nice going buddy.

>>11584083
>because private property is not a closed system
By definition as a legal abstraction it is. Private property may not exist in a closed system (the real world) but as a legal first fiction it is closed system merely made up of closed sets. As a virtual whole(outside of the realm of private property) it is open, but not as private property, as the whole that is represented by the semiotically constructed system of private property.

>>11584128
And a car is ran by a driver, does that mean cars are people?

>>11584141
Private property doesn't exist in a legal closed system dude.
>>11584150
No but if a car runs onto the sidewalk and kills 15 people the driver will probably be arrested.

>>11584158
Yeah, you can't make a car go faster than it's able to go provided by the boundaries set by it's machinery.
Just like you can't make a corporation do something incompatible with what it is required to do, maximize profits for the shareholders.
Humans however have complete control of there oreintation, unlike cars and corporations which are limited by there machinery.
Yes property is a closed system, read delueze 'Cinema'

>>11584177
>read deleuze
Property is an open system, you can't just dump toxic waste into a hole on your ranch

>>11583595
More like fucking Americans and their inability to read a sentence that has a comma in it. Go suck Hemingway’s zombie dick, retard.

>>11584210
this is why i told you to read cinema. what is said in the first chapter about bergsons thesis and then framing in the second chapter is relevant and applicable to property as well as it is to film.
I think we will find that you dont really disagree with me here, just an issue of what the system is and its distinction from the whole. There may be a better way to introduce you to this, but im new to deleuze. This also what i got from Peirce which is the reason why i picked up cinema in the first place.
anyways getting into a tangent about ontology, isnt necessary.
look, i don't know why you deny the distinction between the commons and private property but you need to stop being so silly.

>>11584275
Private property is a necessary tool for the continued existence of threatened wildlife. The commons exists here as privately owned landed that ranchers and others often agree not to divide with fences so things like deer and bobwhite quail or cattle have more resources.

>>11584297
ranchers frequently fuck with wildlife, i own a few cattle and a piece of property myself.
subdivision(property) and subsequent fire suppression destroyed bobwhites where i am, they are locally extinct now. private property is a scourge to wildlife, look at what is happening to brazils cerrado. private property is only necessary because it exists in the first place.
people would still live on and manage land without property, without raping it for material, selling it to developers and moving on to the next place. Property makes land a liquid asset which detaches property owners from the consequences of destroying it, especially when we are talking about fisheries
>Newfoundland cod collapse
>no problem just divest and move your money to the Alaskan pollock fishery

>>11584339
>private property is a scourge to wildlife
More like
>human actions always have impact on wildlife
Seriously fool megafauna have been wiped out by us long before some first wrote up laws

>>11584360
>similar things can have different causes
>its not ur actions it jus humon natare!
how does that have anything to do with what is happening today?

>>11584339
Also
>I'm against private property
>owns property
I wonder how you'll rationalize this
>>11584371
The existence of property does not create overhunting and pollution.

>>11584383
>I wonder how you'll rationalize this
better me than someone else, as a matter of fact i would prefer to own all the property. I dont think its a good idea to allow things like that to happen, when in rome eh?
>The existence of property does not create overhunting and pollution.
it definitely creates pollution, all those factories are privately owned. They must care about profits over pollution to fulfill their purpose, maximizing profit.
Private property for agriculture is by far the biggest cause of habitat/biodiversity loss, nitrate pollution and many other horrible things.
this is why i told you to see what happened to the cerrado after being privatized.
the difference between property and the commons is analogous to the difference between a pine plantation and a climax forest

>>11584426
>factories exist because of private property
>not because of exponential human population growth
inb4 you tell me the 7 billion people arose from the existence of land deeds and not the addition of welfare factors like medicine and clean water.

>>11584447
population growth has alot top do with privatization. the world bank frequently boasts how privatization improves access to medical care and food. This makes alot of sense, having your land privatized and your populations moved in to urban areas where they get unlimited food from international supply chains is definitely going to relieve the external constraints on human population growth. Capitalism, which is grounded in private property allows people to temporarily live far beyond their means.
so overpopulation is yet another symptom of capitalism and the infrastructure supporting international trade and highly centralized ownership of commodities.

>>11584488
Overpopulation is the inevitable trend of any animal that has seemingly infinite resources. It is all due to being a super predator. It is not caused by the formal division of land.

>>11584500
The formal division of land is what allows us to have "seemingly unlimited resources"
as i just explained
>It is all due to being a virtus dormitiva

>>11584521
No, improvements in agriculture and medicine are what allows for that seemingly unlimited resources. They didn't develop penicillin because some guy built a fence and the green revolution (supported the rising population from lack of disease killing everyone) killed more animals than fences have.

>>11584547
yeah, all these golf courses in the middle of the desert are just an inevitable result of overpopulation, it has nothing to do with them being private enterprises that could care less about sustainability as long as they can turn a profit?
unironically learn basic economics.
state sovereignty(which provides for property) and private enterprise are responsible for the unsustainable growth. Being able to but food from the other side of the world has nothing to do with these population booms.
http://www.lasvegasgolf.com/courses/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4123908/

>>11580551
That’s a retarded argument. Who gives a fuck what it’s built on? You can have plenty of fragmented “Other”s without some mumbo-jumbo “Altogether Other.” This is what Plato does to the French brain.

>>11584600
>all these golf courses in the middle of the desert are just an inevitable result of overpopulation
Yes people moving to formerly uninhabitable spaces are a result of improving technologies. They build golf courses because they have a hobby of golfing. It helps nobody to be a reductionist.

>>11584600
The baby boom happened in America because of improvements in healthcare and education. It's happening all over the world now because of improvements in those countries. Increasing private property is a symptom of population growth.

>>11584628
>improving technologies
no, the reason we use technology the way we do is for different reasons, private property is what our economy is based on, are you denying the importance of economics in this?

>>11584651
No motherfucker people live in the desert because we developed better irrigation techniques and air conditioning, not because of private land ownership.

>>11584650
>Increasing private property is a symptom of population growth.
no, its an active measure planned buy states, corporations and IFIs. Privatization always happens before population growth and healthcare modernization. Keyna, Brazil, china, Bangladesh, ect all had population booms AFTER privatization.
we could not just sustainable support our population, but live in a beautiful ecological society if people lived better. Property is in our way, people live in vegas because there is a lot of money to be made on that private property which drives its economy.
whats next you gonna tell me those casinos are just hobby projects?
get real, i dont know why you are defending private property when you obviously dont understand how your economy works, must be your programing

>>11584670
>, people live in vegas because there is a lot of money to be made on that private property which drives its economy.
>whats next you gonna tell me those casinos are just hobby projects?
>get real, i dont know why you are defending private property when you obviously dont understand how your economy works, must be your programing

>>11584710
>i dont know why you are defending private property
As a land owner yourself you should really understand why someone might want to live on land that they own.

>>11578092
now this, this is good stuff

>>11584735
>As a land owner yourself you should really understand why someone might want to live on land that they own.
property isnt the same thing as possession, the bank or state will take my property if i dont pay the bills, people shouldn't have to own the land they live on in order to live on it. Buying and selling land is degenerate.
private property is used to evict people from there homes, in the case of india, homes that were maintained for thousands of years. Property is legal theft.

>>11584980
>people shouldn't have to own the land they live on in order to live on it.
that's called renting
>buying and selling land is degenerate
Whomst do you get your values from friend?

>>11585006

>that's called renting
renting is wrong.
>Whomst do you get your values from friend?
Land belongs to whatever is living on it. Ive seen how degenerate real estate and privatization is, it killed all the things i liked and i dont even recognize my own home. it literally flooded us out of our land(dam for recreational lake)
it happens all over the world.

>>11585041
>Land belongs to whatever is living on it
wow excellent squatters rights, can't wait to show up at your house and have some nice property

>>11585061
if im living on it it wouldn't belong to you, this is the way it worked for almost all of human history before private property was established through British common law. Your scenario about showing up to my house betrays a disability to understand land, and home outside the artificial terms of property ownership.

>>11585097
Ok but what if I kill you? Private property and the right to defend it exists for this reason.

>>11585107
>Ok but what if I kill you?
then you are a murderer
>Private property and the right to defend it exists for this reason.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, no
read Locke, Smith, and Marx sweetie, your ALEC education is showing

>>11585134
>read Locke, Smith, and Marx sweetie
Jesus dude I'm sorry the corp of engineers built a dam to provide energy to people but your issue is with eminent domain laws.

>>11585160
it was a private company and a real estate project.
eminent domain is just more bullshit property ownership, state sovereignty means they state technically owns all of the land, they just give it to private ownership. Property depends on the state to justify it, it is a legal fiction. All around the world people are forced out of their homes because the state decided to sell the property out from under them. This is also how black people were property, how the colonists stole native American land and continue to do so in south and central America.
you think if you killed my and took my home, that you would just get away with it? my friends, neighbors, and relatives would get you back? in a world without police and with private property it will also happen. People can protect themselves and their home regardless of property. And justice still happens regardless of property.
please learn what private property is.

>>11585201
>you think if you killed my and took my home, that you would just get away with it? my friends, neighbors, and relatives would get you back?
Bro people have been getting killed and having their land stolen all the fucking time. Literally would've gotten killed by some idiots with bigass sticks 10,000 years ago.

Did you even talk to your state and local government about this or did you just cry about it on 4chan?

>>11585236
>Bro people have been getting killed and having their land stolen all the fucking time. Literally would've gotten killed by some idiots with bigass sticks 10,000 years ago.
thats not why we have private property though. That isnt why 18th century Britain invented private property. Private property has nothing to do with people defending themselves

>>11585296
lmao dude just get a tax exemption if you hate them so much

>>11585296
>lmao dude just get a tax exemption if you hate them so much
please read a book about property or something

I took Education and only had one professor like what some of you are describing. I had some other retards in the Ed Tech courses but they just had no idea about internet privacy.

Anyways the one weird course I had

>one group is doing a presentation on the Chinese labour on the railways
>two of the group members are chinese
>one is black
>one is white
>they make a cartoon about a child asking her grandfather about the railway and make the grandfather has a Chinese accent
>the professor goes on a rant about how what they did was racist
>apparently Chinese people can be racist to themselves as they "internalized it from white people"

>>11585322
nah I don't buy into your retarded idea that we should've stayed with 18th century agriculture where a bunch of peasants sat around and thought their "farming skills" were hot shit.

>>11580437
Glad to see Mark Fisher get a shout out on /lit/, based

>>11585335
Well thats not my idea.