Philosophizing evil and the practical application of Bataille's "will to...

In the Name of Anti-fascism | Clarissa's Blog

In the Name of Anti-fascism | Clarissa's Blog

It’s like the tribal wars that are permitted to take place in the name of “anti-colonialism”. The words and the concepts dominate, but the realities do not matter and neither does death. We are living in a world of abundant stupidity where people think they know what things are, but assuredly do not, no matter how much evidence is presented to them. Mugabe learned this trick. Just start killing and call it “anti-colonialism”. Everyone then goes along with it like docile sheep.

As I keep pointing out, the wounding at the base of the Western psyche is its fear of being identified as “colonial” and from this comes the whole distortion of the Western psyche and its capacity to take in reality. He gets stuck on words and attributes too much meaning to them because he is afraid to take in political and historical meaning

In the Name of Anti-fascism | Clarissa's Blog

In the Name of Anti-fascism | Clarissa's Blog



Postmodernism comes back to bite people on the butt. You can’t talk about real things anymore because the words themselves dominate and people don’t have the wherewithal or courage to be able to separate the phenomena from the label.

Summarizing the theory of intellectual shamanism; & the curtain falls

Update. (30 December 14). Spiritual maturity, mending distortions, mov...

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RADICAL SHAMANISM

Creepy as hell

Oil rig worker says he saw Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 burst into flames | Perth Now

Women in power stymied by gender bias

Women in power stymied by gender bias


Gillard's reputation as a negotiator, and what she describes as her focus while in office on ''how you get it done, the pragmatic things, even the compromises, the things that are necessary to achieve change'', made it hard to for the electorate to understand the matters on which she would stand and fight. While a male leader might have been praised for passing more than 570 pieces of legislation and his pragmatic capacity to get things done, Gillard may have been punished for violating the stereotype of female politicians as a moral cut above the rest because of the perception she lacked moral bottom lines.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/women-in-power-stymied-by-gender-bias-20140124-31ehh.html#ixzz2vo2GHQ5E

Let us get away from crude and overly simplistic ways of defining privilege

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Chris Hedges | Suffering? Well, You Deserve It

Chris Hedges | Suffering? Well, You Deserve It

“The basic conventions of public discourse are those of the Enlightenment, in which the use of reason [enabled] us to achieve human objectives,” Offer said as we sat amid piles of books in his cluttered office. “Reason should be tempered by reality, by the facts. So underlining this is a notion of science that confronts reality and is revised by reference to reality. This is the model for how we talk. It is the model for the things we assume. But the reality that has emerged around us has not come out of this process. So our basic conventions only serve to justify existing relationships, structures and hierarchies. Plausible arguments are made for principles that are incompatible with each other.”

Self-knowledge and the authoritarian-tending character

This is what I saw in Marechera's writing

Why Creativity Is Risky Business | Psychology Today



Highly creative people, it turns out, break through the usual constraints and let in a lot more of the available information, and thus they need to process and organize this increased information flow in untypical ways. The term for thistrait, Carson explains, is cognitive disinhibition, which Carson describes as “the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival.”

Neocolonialism and the agenda of "becoming natural"

Contentious Disciplines | Clarissa's Blog

Contentious Disciplines | Clarissa's Blog





I'm currently rereading a book that came out a long time ago, in 2001, called THE LIAR'S TALE.  It was very big in the USA, I believe, perhaps one of those listed on the New York Times best seller of books (do I have that reference right?)



Anyway, the author just really, really hates postmodernism.   It's not like he hates it with nuance, but in a basic, crude fashion.  He maintains it is fanciful and immoral.   But then he begs the question as to what is not fanciful and what is moral.   It's really not so self-evident as his own rhetoric would imply, especially by virtue of his very strong stance against this movement.   Although he makes one or two historically-based arguments about what he thinks is going on when movements develop, he falls back on a rhetorical appeal to gender differences, ultimately.   At least that his how I read him.  He literally says that Descartes thought that to embrace the truth was "manly and strong".   So by implicit contrast, postmodernism would be feminine and frail, not unlike Eve in The Garden being deceived by a duplicitous snake.   This kind of appeal to "common sense" is common in books written around that time.  Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate makes the same implicit argument: science is masculine and ought to be respected, but social engineering is a project of the left and is silly because, biologically, we're just not "like that".



USA intellectuals, it seems, really need to learn to make an argument that does not implicitly and surreptitiously appeal to how American Christians have learned to evaluate gender.  What these writers do is very predictable and intellectually fraudulent.

A traumatic turn to wholeness Vs. the fragmented self

Bataille's perspectivism: the meaning of "nothing"

What is an intellectual shaman?

"Common sense" Vs. the shamanic tragic modality

There is a way in which I write and think, which is often taken for almost its precise opposite. This is due to philosophical unsophistication, but also to the attribution of emotionality to women. I'd like it if we could rise above superficial tendencies, to view historical and personal circumstances in more complex terms. The tragic modality, related to Nietzsche's ideas, involves a double-take in perception of the past. One assumes a capacity for action on the part of all humans, including the protagonist. Then also, one also recognises that fate can overcome the one who would choose his/her own destiny. By putting together these two dynamic aspects of existence, one ascertains the presence of tragedy. But if one responds to a text or a philosophy in a basically passive mode, one will not sense tragedy, but rather pathos. Women's texts are thus read as lacking a tragic component when the critic implicitly assumes that no dynamic action would have been possible either on their parts or on their behalves. The critic thus betrays his or her fundamentally flawed thinking.

Why not just proclaim oneself great? part 2.