Posts by DCBCauchi
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m not surprised, they have jobs that are very much reputation based, and often extremely cushy.
The story of how Mayan writing was deciphered is a salutary case in point.
The guy in charge of the field (a small one, in which one person could easily dominate, especially as it was riven by the divide between the 'dirt archaeologists' who grubbed about in poor people's houses and the 'students of kings' who spent their time on stela etc) made his reputation standing on a couple of important planks: that Mayan writing was hieroglyphic, not syllabic, and that it had no relation to the language the Mayan people living around them spoke.
Needless to say, both of these were dead wrong. When he came to realise it, he couldn't admit it, because to do so would knock out the planks he was standing on. So the whole bloody field, rendered pointless by petty political bickering anyway, had to wait for the bastard to die before sensible people could get on with their work, put the findings of everyone together, talk to the people around them, and actually look at the bloody things they were meant to be studying.
It's a fucking crime.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to Sacha,
I believe you’re confusing the latter with nutty neoliberal theories about private benefit from tertiary education that were used to justify introducing student fees.
I do not believe I am.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I dunno, I reckon that there’s a further duty on academics as people who are paid to think, and have been put in a very specific part of society, to go beyond the general responsibilities of citizens in this one area.
This was, once upon a time, the alleged point of universities. They served no masters, neither church nor king, and pursued knowledge for its own sake, because knowledge pursued for its own sake benefits everyone. Or so wise people thought.
Long ago though, the people (who claimed to be) paying the bills started insisting that the knowledge pursued serve particular interests: nowadays rendered using weasel words such as ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘skilled productive workforce’. Proper academics objected to this, but the administrators took a different view.
And now, as a result, the only real value of universities lies in their libraries, pretty much. And anyone can get into those.
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Oh look, here's a nice article about one of my heroes:
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to HORansome,
If you are going to argue that her expertise applies to commentaries on what is, in essence, the current global financial system
I’m arguing nothing of the sort. That it is ‘in essence, [commentary on] the current global financial system’ is entirely your characterisation. It does not match my reading of the piece (whenever it came out was) at all.
Yours is an unwarrantedly reductive characterisation. Your ‘essence’, I suggest, like that of many narrow specialists commentating, is entirely misplaced.
The essence of it all, I reckon, is in the social system, of which the financial system is only a part (a weird artificial abstract part no less). And on that, historians (easily the best humanities degree, if you’re going to bother with one) are eminently suitably qualified to comment.
Qualification isn’t a matter of what degree you’ve bought.
Take, for example, another historian who’s written about early Pakeha explorers in New Zealand, in this case Tasman’s voyage. The early explorers were extremely important for many reasons, you see, not least visual art. Cook’s Endeavour turned into an art school off the East Coast, led by the young Quaker Sydney Parkinson.
Cook was a Yorkeshire farmer’s son, eminently practical, who’d come up through the hawse hole and made his name by his surveying ability (and some dashing action against the French on the rivers of Canada). He knew Parkinson’s drawing skills were important things he needed.
On Tasman’s voyage though, they used different drawing conventions, ones developed by the merchant princes of the Low Countries. Now this historian who wrote a book about it isn’t an academic. He’s a sailor. He put himself as near as he could to Tasman’s anchorages,off the coast around Nelson, took careful photos, then compared the photos with the coastal views from Tasman, which most (probably all) academics considered to be merely fanciful. Because they were narrow specialists and couldn’t read the pictures in front of them.
(Oh, and now I see I've wasted my time, as you've pre-emptively bowed out. Great.)
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'Stick to your own field' indeed!
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to HORansome,
a combination of sociology and political philosophy (with some economics thrown in) about the here and now
Have you actually read any of her books? That is her field. What do you think the early relations of Maori and Pakeha consisted of?
Two quite different social organisations interacting politically, militarily, and economically, in a way that is directly related (through causality) with the situation we find ourselves in here and now.
And I thought you were a stickler for titles other people give people. You still haven't got hers right.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to HORansome,
a suitably qualified academic in a field relevant to the discussion society is having
You mean a Dame Professor in History writing in an opinion piece of a few hundred words at most about how history can inform the discussions we’re having now? Someone who's specialised in early relations between Maori and Pakeha?
Remind me quite what your problem with this is?
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I love how various commentators of various stripe try to maintain that 'the occupy movement' is coextensive with the people in various camps in various cities. Who are they trying to kid? It's interesting seeing who still thinks they're better off serving other people's interests. Who still thinks we're all gullible.
The cops, in other counties at least, with their particularly stupid institutional mentality, seem to think they can deal with the movement by violently breaking up the camps then flushing out and harassing the remnants. Most individual cops I've met are fine, some good value even, but put them all together to make decisions and something weird happens...
(And how many people know someone busted for pot who's had a much smaller amount than what they had taken from them put before the court? Those cops swore on oath that that was true. And everyone took them at their word.)
All the usual suspects trying their usual tricks. Then looking down the barrel perplexed when all they hear is a 'click'. Is it a click? As some guy explained 'that Gramsci shit', the gun's in each of our heads.
The cops at least are about to openly show who's making their decisions: the good ones or the 'bad apples'.
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Up Front: Casual, Shallow and Meaningless, in reply to DCBCauchi,
The word 'phatic' means that what you're conveying is not the sense of your words as such, but an amorphous 'Yeah mate, I'm with you.'
And as the man said:
'Who is with me is against me!'
Speaking of words to live by.