Snowe will vote "Yes" on Senate Finance HC billFollow

Also, if you wanted to know my reason, you might actually bother to read my posts.

Hilarious, that you think I haven't. Hilarious further, that insinuating this is a close cousin of zepoodle telling you that you don't "get it."



Point has nothing to do with intent. Stop conflating these. You want to know his intent? Study history and his time (for whatever reason you want.) It's useless and fails to be valuable for making our own thesi in response, but you can do it nonetheless, and enjoy your knowledge of Freuds psychology. Want to understand his point? Read his points! Points and intent are separate entities and combining them into some conglomerate of understanding is a rape and desecration of what it means to do a good judgment of argument.



Of course not. It's an anecdote used to prove a posibility, not a probability. The fact that this possibility exists at all is terrifying - to hear a man assert that beating your fucking wife can be ethically okay as long as your society deems it so, and a woman assert that women who stand up in those novels and contexts are wrong, because that's not the pervasive culture - that is incredible, as in "I cannot imagine a situation where this would be credible." The critique of the west has little to do with it, but the backlash, the self-loathing and the fear are almost certainly necessary conditions for this kind of refusal to judge.

Besides, wife beating exists in "western" culture also, but for some reason you get relativists who refuse to apply the same damn standards they do to themselves, to other cultures, not because they think that ethics is invalid, not because they re sociopaths, and not because they really feel that relativism is right, but because they are cowardly.

Second point: the fact that you're positing the existence of anything "western" to critique in the first damn place, the fact that you feel the need to determine the essential qualities of some pervasive perspective, the fact that anyone would be so ludicrously misguided with their goal of obtaining knowledge, is approximately as stupid as when the direction of it is reversed. It's not like I'm unfamiliar with orientalism and Said. I love those sorts of polemics, really, but it irritates the **** out of me when people fail to take the natural corollary from it - the idea of "western" society is as much a pejorative (a pejorative to be discarded)as the "oriental."

I'm pretty disappointed in everyone here, really.

Why? Tailmon isn't here.

Except for Sassy of course. He's a bad, bad man.

Edited, Oct 17th 2009 4:10pm by Aripyanfar

Hey, at least he is classy enough to wear panties.

Yeah, no ****. I didn't even have to try.

It obviously doesn't count if the panties are already twisted...

That's like going outside in a storm and claiming responsibility for the grass being wet.

Firstly, you're conflating points and intent in a horribly confusing manner.

Secondly, reading about Orwell acolytes and his upbringing and his background is all really useful, provided the question we're asking is "What was Orwell thinking when he wrote such-and-such?" We're not asking that question. We're not asking "What did Orwell want to express?" because as we all know, the message an author intends to convey and the message he actually conveys are often quite different.

We're not asking "What message did Orwell intend?" We're asking "What message did the reader take from it?" That's the question Pensive was approaching at the start. And for the purpose of discussing that question, Orwell is irrelevant. Orwell's life is irrelevant; the reader did not live Orwell's life. Orwell's friends are irrelevant; they are not the reader's friends. The only connection between Orwell and the reader of his text is his text. We're asking the reader a question.

You can ask "What message did Orwell intend?" all you want. It's a shallow question. It tells us very little, except trivial biographical details about Orwell. It doesn't help us relate to the text; it helps us relate Orwell to the text. We're not disputing that - provided you ask that question - Orwell is a central subject for examination. But it's not a good question to ask, and frankly it wasn't the question we were asking.

By contrast, when we go to Kavekk and say "Kavekk, you read 1984, yeah? What'd you think it was about?" we're very clearly asking Kavekk a question. And the answer is important for Kavekk, because it tells him something about himself, and it's important for us because it helps us relate to Kavekk as opposed to a dead British socialist who can't relate back. And it's important because the answer is obviously going to change from person to person, and whether a person thinks Orwell was a socialist or an anti-communist or the author of a trashy political horror novel will tell you something about the person.



The presumption that men and women have qualitatively different modes of thought and comprehension is inane, inaccurate, and ultimately harmful.

Assuming that you aren't trolling, Ari, I'm disappointed. You may as well have suggested that we study phrenology.

Edited, Oct 18th 2009 3:04am by zepoodle

For ****'s sake, Anna, men and women only differ in trivial physical characteristics. No sex or gender is more special than the other, and presuming so is to engage in the same arrogant self-deception that created gender discrimination in the first place.

I'd like to point out that no-one here was discussing gender until you brought it up. You seem incapable of participating in any discussion without imposing a false male-female dichotomy. This seems sad.



Don't you understand? When you study Orwell's life, you're not engaging with something beyond the text. You're engaging with a second text, and furthermore, it's a trivial one. You're reading Orwell's life, picking out the bits you think are important, then holding them up and saying "Here! Here is where Orwell's true meaning lies, in his time in Burma, in his choice of a pen name, in his travels in Northern England." You're not touching on Orwell's meaning. You're not surpassing the text. You're engaging in a separate text, asking questions about it and then deceiving yourself as to the nature of the answers.

You can't relate to Orwell without the text. You've never met him, and besides, he's dead. Now, you're reading Orwell's biography and thinking "here I will bypass the text, connect to Orwell and find the true meaning of the text" but you aren't connecting to Orwell. His life story is just another text to engage with. And the "true meaning" you're seeking is just your judgment of his life. A judgment which, I may say, tells us far more about you than it does Orwell.

This is what I'm talking about. Gender is not relevant to this discussion. You keep bringing it up because you don't seem capable of viewing the world outside of a male-versus-female dichotomy. It's sad, it's limited, and it's really fucking annoying. I mean, what the fuck is a "masculine form of thinking?" What is it? Really?

You end every goddamn discussion - every single one - with some variation on the form



I don't disagree with you because you're a woman, Anna. I disagree with you because I think you're wrong.

Did you make that post based on the second hand relations of sartre that come up randomly when I'm talking to you? Cos if you did, that was kind of sweet.



Lots of women do also. Tons, in fact, realize how pernicious such thoughts are, and ari has done so on multiple occasions.

The thing with ari is that her points are neither your points, nor my points, nor zepoodles points: they are her own. She doesn't exactly need me or you to defend her, and certainly not appropriate her ideas, but I will say that her thoughts have different nuances and different goals, and you speaking for her is about as idiotic as me speaking for her.



Not one single male in this thread has remotely approached saying anything like this. You seem to be arguing against people who aren't here.



Jesus christ anna. It's like you can't have a discussion with anyone without demonizing them. I've been painstakingly, mindfully delicate and consciously forcing myself to not devolve into some counter-psycho evaluation of you or anyone else just to prove my points, or to get into some personal sort of pissing contest about your discipline, sex, gender, age, area of study, or basically anything about you not related to this once facet of hermeneutics. Have I made some generalization about older generations? Have I remarked on the ridiculousness of your profession? Have I even payed the slightest heed to your sex or gender except to state that I don't care what it is, because they are both rad? No, no, and hell no. Is it that hard to give the same courtesy to other people? Isn't one of the beautiful aspects of the female mind the ability to have empathy? Use it.

You want to know why your thoughts are insidiously harmful, and why the process of assigning gender and all other sorts of contextual crap to? Read your goddamn posts in this thread again, and note every time where you incorrectly infer or assume information about someone's point due to the transparently obvious and unequivocally false conceptions you have about them in your mind. It doesn't work in literature, and it doesn't work here. Good day to you.

I don't know what this means, and it's not directed at me, but I'm answering it.

Again, I don't know what this means, and most probably nothing I've read with relate to literature, but I've read feminist stuff, that would probably not be considered literary.

A lot of it was politics, and most of it is really awesome. Some of it's not so awesome.

The coolest one was Simone de Bau... de Beai... Beauvoir, who most people seem to consider really awesome in feminist circles, and she was a total ******* genius in everything I've read either about or by her, awesome enough that Kavek should make a poster about her.

Her spirit is, unfortunately, not at all present in most modern ideas of feminism which I encounter. Or are they?! Who knows? She's dead. We could worry about her history and class in the world and bother ourselves with understanding the true meaning of her work, or we could have a meaningful discourse which doesn't bother with that sort of thing, because what she said is more important than who she was.

I don't know what this means. I compared it to rape here, and I still will, because that's really the most appropriate word for it. What else should I call a destructive and wanton force which has nothing but the forceful degradation of both literature and society, as well as the individual human spirit, in its crosshairs, leaving both in shambles were that force to get its way?

Notice how, still, I'm not ******* attack you, by doing so: at the worst, I'm being callous, and at the best, forgetful. I have not made a single assertion at all about you, neither implied nor spoken, not any set of things in which you belong, so I'm feeling pretty awesome about being Mr. Innocent as far as prejudice and malice are concerned.

I seriously hope you have another example, or were thinking of another example. I could think of lots, but not in this thread, and the occasion would be improbable up until maybe a year ago.

This is why we read entire posts, which often contain premises and conclusions. What you've quoted is a conclusion.