March 2011
1 post
February 2011
1 post
Tekken
The only effective defense against thorough and coherent poly causal social science is to tell the author that it would have been more rigorous of them to stretch the plausible causality of a single variable.
November 2010
2 posts
gift ideas
1) a collection of famous authors’ dissertations.
2) An audio book of Jack Donaghy reading Distinction.
geographies
If you read Judith Butler too quickly you might end up becoming a slam poet.
September 2010
1 post
Two Line Thesis
secondbalcony:
Explanundum: ex-religious people tend to be real cocky people.
Explanation: ranking your own judgement over that of all the smartest people that you know worked out, so you stick with it.
This also works pretty well as an explanation of Camron’s personality.
July 2010
3 posts
read in the Midnight Marauders voice
If you’re an academic you’re asking yourself what can the wikileaks documents on Afghanistan do for me? This reaction is a natural effect of the petite bourgeoisie positionality of academics. This is your position. According to Althusser your predominant social reflexes are opportunism and selfishness. You may be aware that the information from the wikileaks is of civic value and may...
New Left Review Reviews?
On allegories
the organizational structure of the standard Judith Butler or Saba Mahmood critique basically runs as follws: we have these highly circumscribed ways of talking about important issues that privelege very limited types of agency while making other claims, grievances, agencies unintelligible. Usually these things work as binaries and those who work really hard to put forward third pole that is more...
June 2010
1 post
For The Record
secondbalcony:
I’m against a blanket boycott against Israel but I support reactive sanctions. In case you wanted an Israeli vantage point. Anyway, back to my regular scheduled programming of semiotics and preciousness.
I support sanctions against Israel (general and strategic) but I oppose voluntarism and have some pretenses of analytic lucidity. The problem with the BDS movement is that the...
May 2010
1 post
got 99 problems
Spivak’s frequently quoted human rights=Social Darwinism aphorism is cool and all, but, it’s pretty hard to find a movement to be proud of from the nineteenth century to the present that doesn’t rely on a philosophical logical that couldn’t be plausibly anologized to Social Darwinsim. Look, Social Darwinism (i.e Eugenics) is disgusting but Spivak’s argument...
April 2010
8 posts
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An unsung moment in the history of assimilating...
when this was screened in course on Gender & Sexuality in the Middle East and North Africa the first response was: “I can’t believe they wear jeans. They look like hipsters :)”
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advance reviews of my thesis
“Good…interesting…intriguing”-My advisor, all said in a indifferent tone of voice while criticizing my analysis and telling me which of the anecdotes he enjoyed.
“Second, it’s an interesting paper”-A friend, reading mostly for grammar and style.
“I can tell you wrote it because the language is convoluted.”-A friend, over drinks.
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“Respect This” Prodigy of Mobb Deep.
“Yet inside the universities, especially in Istanbul, things are moving in a different direction and a younger crowd of journalists and historians – Turks, Armenians and others, sharing their results at workshops, generally united in their dislike of nationalist pieties – has been transforming and broadening our understanding of what took place. Their work reveals the deeply engrained...
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March 2010
6 posts
1 tag
“After spending a few months absorbing the shock of his diagnosis eighteen months...”
– New York Magazine on Tony Judt.
In spring 2006 a friend of mine and I approached Judt after watching him turn a four person panel (featuring himself, Christopher Hitchens, Gideon Levy and Elias Khoury) into a debate with Hitchens. We told him how much we appreciated his arguments and asked if he...
1 tag
That shit just sounds good.
If I hear one more person use the word ‘problematic’ as a sophisticated way of saying ‘yeah, thats kind of fucked up.’ I’m going to start acting smart/dumb real quick, play like I don’t understand what they mean by ‘problematic’ and start a conversation about Althusser. I’ll make exceptions for people who actually do the work of problematizing...
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Fuck Yeah Exemplar Literature
“It would not be quite right to say that as a historian he combined extreme partisanship with rigorous objectivity. He had no need to combine them: they were the heat and light and belonged to each other. He scorned the ‘impartiality’ and ‘conciliatory justice’ of the scholar who pretends to ‘stand on the wall and behold at the same time the besiegers and the...
February 2010
13 posts
Fetishizing the other
From Carmen Bryant’s It’s No Secret: From Nas To Jay-Z, From Seduction To Scandal—A Hip-Hop Helen Of Troy Tells All. As told to me by The Onion A.V. Club
Introduction:
What made Shawn so unique from other men I had dated was that he became my best friend. He really listened to me and when I spoke he would look intently into my eyes. It was almost like he was recording my every word to...
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What's Really Good?!?!
Peli Grietzer’s blog Second Balcony is so overloaded with things I like and agree with that I simply don’t have the time to make my own blog into a Grietzer’s Greatest Hits list. You’ll just have to settle for this gem and research Grietzer’s brilliance on your own
1. i’d love to write a short story where we discover earth18, a planet that’s exactly like...
Nutmeg
“But the point is that the last 150 years of trying out new ways to make meanings in art made a big fucking impression on a lot of kids, and a lot of these kids started bands. And other, younger kids who couldn’t care who Gertrude Stein was get the virus listening to Patti Smith and Bowie and the Pixies, and sometimes one of those kids turns out to be Kurt Cobain and then weird abstract...
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