Did the CIA fund creative writing in America?

[norton ash]

Nah, we like the non-football concussions we get beating our heads against brick walls.

[coffin_dodger]

I can't believe any of you are even choosing to interact with such a belligerent clown

One of the most interesting, thought-provoking and challenging discussions on RI for some time and you want to close it down?

[Luther Blissett]

I think I have the sufficient patience needed for engagement and discussion. I don't care.

[Joao]

Maybe a friendly helping hand from the CIA is a good thing if it prevents the negro liberals from achieving hegemony over the flat earth. Knock yourselves out.

[brekin]

coffin_dodger wrote:

One of the most interesting, thought-provoking and challenging discussions on RI for some time-

I guess things have been that bad then, huh?

[Wombaticus Rex]

Maybe a friendly helping hand from the CIA is a good thing if it prevents the negro liberals from achieving hegemony over the flat earth. Knock yourselves out.

It's encouraging to see you having more fun here. I'd be really bummed if you left.

[JackRiddler]

FB, of course you won't attend a Left Forum, or anything else apparently. Observing the outside world would be hazardous to this essentially hallucinated world-view of yours. I call it hallucinated not because it or you are "crazy," but because one only need read what you write to see that you don't cite examples, or readings, or arguments of individuals, or aggregate studies, or anecdotes, or any evidence at all. You spin general condemnations around given names or keywords, then weave speculative webs where anything else you feel like can be thrown in.

As with the example of Luther's environmental project, it takes you little time to reach some environmentalists you don't name who once said something horrible, so that you can always repeat it as if it constitutes an eternal essence of the category.

I'll give only one example of what empirical observation might have done for you. You should know that on your "leftist" NPR, on the day after the "universally venerated" Howard Zinn died (it's funny reading your shit from within a history department where I now am, where I can see the reality of how universally unvenerated he is, sadly, but anyway...) yes this very NPR, arm of the Left Culture Attack on America, did something I have never observed them do with any other obituary piece: They gave time to David Horowitz to trash the dead man as a traitorous beast who seduced and destroyed a whole generation of students with his America-hating lies -- basically, to talk as you do about the Left Forum, etc. That is the reality of NPR, of the status of the left, and of the continued right-wing hegemony over American culture -- where it's Planned Parenthood under attack by Congress. Zinn may be taught in thousands of classrooms, but many thousands more are under the sway of the Texas School Board standards for history. The closest thing to a KGB in the U.S. today is the state of Arizona.

It's an amazing act of self-distraction you are pulling on yourself. I guess it can happen -- to have seen the power and the crimes of the neocons, it's not so surprising that many then need some miniature and preferably harmless target to adopt instead, like poor Judith Butler. (!!!!!!) (Butler and Cheney to the dock!) Or ethnic studies.

In many cases of such undisciplined mish-mashes and turning of every term on its head I see intentional confusionism at work, but yours comes across like some serious emotional displacement going on. Confronted with the reality of the crimes in which we are all forced to participate, I hit a lot of walls just for the fuck of it, myself. You make up a parallel universe with more manageable crimes, where the masterminds are Zizek or Peter Singer or some ethnic studies curriculum.

tapitsbo, not so far off from that yourself. As I've understood it, and I think Luther missed it but perhaps you can clarify it for him: So if he gets to speak at all within a university setting, it's already suspect since there are police also involved. (I mean, they must be there, somewhere, it's a city, out on the street, look around, you'll see them, they're all over, plus the university security, etc.) So Luther's complicit because his speech protected (from what?) by police brutality. As I see the logic proceeding, I guess this means that anyone speaking at all and not being disappered immediately is to be taken as an assumed Borg-unit of the Them, and anything said out loud is serving the system either through affirmation or controlled opposition. How are you getting away with it, though? I mean, you're posting to potentially thousands of readers on an Internet invented by the Pentagon and, ultimately, protected by police brutality. So your tactics - sorry, "arguments" - apply equally (better actually) to you. An interesting commonality with the general attack on reality currently taking place at RI. Not that it's all coordinated -- some techniques are just easy.

[tapitsbo]

Complicit? That is a strong term. I was simply suggesting that the university system as it currently exists regularly resorts to heavy policing, including the use of undercover agents to egg on violence during protests accompanied by stormtroopers in riot gear reinstating the regular programming... I mean I see the security guards on a daily basis, who ultimately are there to help set the barriers of the discussion. Were all this hustle and bustle to be open-sourced we sure would see a changing of the guard in terms of the voices given the most airtime.

Luther is hardly defending the status quo, he's not what I mean when I say establishment and neither are you although you seem to be interpreting this differently from him. "Establishment" to me means stuff like the NYTimes, stuff that nobody necessarily believes yet conveniently enough allows most folks to easily get pointers on what they should be cautious about questioning.

The loudest voices decrying police brutality absolutely depend on it as well as other vicious methods, they just want a tighter leash on their enforcers. That doesn't change the fact that any sane person should hate sadistic cops.

You're obviously intelligent enough to know that I don't intend the reading you're applying to me. Obviously I'm not suggesting the likes of Butler or Zizek are equivalent to neocons. But they supply a role in the production of the officially approved reality, their recurring presence in wurlitzer media leads me to believe this. Or move a little to the drab centre and people like Habermas or Fukuyama do something similar.

Also what irks me about the term neocon is that it sounds like it refers to a point on a hypothetical democratic spectrum when as best as I can tell the US federal gov't is basically permanently beholden to neocon policies at this point, even Sanders or Trump would hardly veer far from this position.

I could use your "conversation" tactics but it would not give me any satisfaction. Anyone reading these posts should be able to see you're applying the same sorts of conflations as FourthBase.

But while we're at it, let's go back to your assertion that the Western system lacks a philosophical master narrative. Way to naturalize it and make it seem neutral!

Oh, and what do you all see the goals of the CIA involvement in humanities as having been? Surely something more interesting than mere anti-communism? Do people here feel they were successful?

[JackRiddler]

But they supply a role in the production of the officially approved reality, their recurring presence in wurlitzer media leads me to believe this.

So the evidence of this is their recurring presence in "wurlitzer media"? First, it's untrue, unless the phrase has no meaning. Show me that either has been "recurrent" on the TV vehicles owned by the Big Six media conglomerates. (Jacobin, academic journals and Facebook posts don't count as "wurlitzer media.") I checked the Times and Butler's a regular in their six-way philosophy debates. Zizek seems to be referenced about four times a year. They had him debating Stephen Kotkin on Stalin.

Second, neither "officially approved reality" and how one contributes goes without definition.

Third, you can be a recurring presence and yet not be supplying such a role (though anyone might be used as an object), or supply such a role without being a recurring presence.

Or move a little to the drab centre and people like Habermas or Fukuyama do something similar.

Really, are we going to bother with any distinctions?

But while we're at it, let's go back to your assertion that the Western system lacks a philosophical master narrative. Way to naturalize it and make it seem neutral!

I clearly didn't and wouldn't say that. I said the humanities no longer provide the Western master narrative, as you seem to think.

[tapitsbo]

] It might not come from humanities institutions anymore, but the ideological kernel still emanates from or is at least deeply caught up in the same sorts of concerns. Corporate think tanks massage conversations about the meaning of just about everything.

I was referring to ultra-famous intellectuals for a reason, they have clearly been granted a license and authority that was denied even to someone such as Wilhelm Reich.

Even petty, dismal regimes have something like the humanities at the centre of their efforts to steer sense-making.

Do you feel like deep state agendas have failed to manipulate humanities or social sciences?

Maybe you might feel that allegations Antonio Negri was tied to the Italian strategy of tension are reactionary fluff. I am undecided.

I am more convinced that groups like the Fabian Society have exerted major influences in these areas, and much more deftly than groups like Leo Strauss' disciples, whose agenda has been ironically much more transparent, for all their pompous praise of esoterism.

The FMSF and related efforts notably managed to sideline certain strains of feminism which had at least tangential sustenance in areas such as humanities, as well.

Just because some cranks made Butler a hate object at some time in the past doesn't mean her theses haven't fertilized the lives of a vaster more relevant demographic, and not without the eager helping hand of lots of institutions outside academia proper.

I would wager that mumbling about the Illuminati and German Idealism must really make you see red, Jack...

No doubt you wouldn't disagree that the officially propped-up dichotomy between the Austrian and Keynesian versions of economics is a much more brute force application of control, but the context always seems to lead back to philosophical and narrative projects whether they originate in erudition, terrorism or both. Nevermind people like Bernays...

And wandering back to the thread topic again is it true that Jung provided therapy for Dulles' family?

And speaking of the Pentagon I guess Chomsky had some good gigs there too in his early days. Playing a role is not the same as being a paid agent, although it's obvious that literally happens too, therefore this thread...

[Project Willow]

Labels aren't what they used to be.



I was infuriated yesterday when my local weekly published this article, "Why I Won't Write a Review of Suffragette", because the film is "racist", then I remembered that a good chunk of this paper's ad revenue comes from prostituted women, displaying themselves like cow carcasses on its back pages. Rump: 50% off this week!

I have no idea what liberal means anymore.

[norton ash]

Wow. Mind blown by the Seattle paper... and the disclaimer on Kant's Critique. I have no words.

[General Patton]

Wow. Mind blown by the Seattle paper... and the disclaimer on Kant's Critique. I have no words.

They stick that on all kinds of things now as a cover-your-ass boilerplate. The Great Gatsby, various Shakespeare works, ect are having a trigger warning added to them at some Universities. If it was any good at all it should have a warning on it.

[tapitsbo]

It's great that there are massive sections of the world where that isn't happening, though.

[tapitsbo]

So I really doubt anyone will disagree that social science is guided to a large degree with a thick and heavy deep state agenda.

What sorts of similar influences are at play, anyways, in humanities? If any? The OP of this thread attests to some but surely there's more to talk about here than Cold War old hat.