On BullShit, Ad Hominem, Election 2017. Crossed Purposes

rogerglewis May 3, 2017 4 Comments

Are We at Crossed Purposes? A default setting, if we are honest with ourselves. Crossed purposes is an inevitable outcome where we admit it is our practice to anticipate most of what we are going to hear? So as much as we like to think we listen being at crossed purposes is likely far more common than we realise, every conversation has its own unwritten small print this small print is the lens with which all anticipation and interpretation of external information gets filtered back into our deeper thoughts and are assigned their proper place in our own conceptual order of meaning to OurSelves. Singularly not in any Royal We sense, but sui generis to our own design between our individual self and the great cosmological static, out there outside of our individual existence.

When we gain knowledge of the world are we experiencing it or are we thinking it? It is really a combination and a cycle between, Sleep and dreaming and Awakeness and automatic experiences. External Sensing and imaginings within our being as thinking portal.

The eyes are the window to the soul looking in, but the soul is us looking out and acquiring physical experience of possibilities outside of our thoughtful imaginings and interpretations of sensory inputs.

our human Being is a portal that offers access to dimensions of Being and dimensions of thinking and combines the dimensions of Being and Thinking. When we employ our powerful interdimensional apparatus to synthesise shareable goods or sometimes we synthesise a combination of Bads.

So does that make any sense or is it Bullshit.

On BullShit.

Is Derrida full of bullshit? Part 1

May 3, 2017rogerglewisLeave a commentEdit

Ideal for the Election Season and Brexit Bluster. How Much of Brexit Narrative BullShit?

BlauBlog

Why is there so much bullshit in politics? Does a particular kind of bullshit flourish in French philosophy?

These are questions which have excited lots of academics in recent years, partly because they are fascinating and important questions – but mainly because it allows us to swear in public.

Academics discuss two key ideas of bullshit. (I’m working on a third, but it’s not ready yet.) The first and most famous comes from Harry Frankfurt’s famous essay On Bullshit. The essence of bullshit, for Frankfurt, ‘is not that it is false but that it is phony.’ The bullshitter may or may not deceive us, or intend to deceive us, about the alleged facts. ‘What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise.’ In short, the essence of Frankfurt-bullshit is phoniness, indifference to truth.

Frankfurt’s essay is great fun, but quite frustrating, not least because of the…

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Is Derrida full of bullshit? Part 2

May 3, 2017rogerglewisLeave a commentEdit

A satisfying Part 2 on Bull Shit. A disappointing absence of Freudian Psychoanalysis.

BlauBlog

Part 1 outlined two notions of bullshit: Harry Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit as phoniness or indifference to truth, and Jerry Cohen’s notion of bullshit as unclarifiable clarity.

We saw too that Cohen claimed – very naughtily, without references – that there is a lot of bullshit in Derrida. Such sentiments are quite widespread.

I’m only going to look at one passage by Derrida which has been called bullshit by Brian Leiter, a prominent philosopher who is bitingly critical of Derrida on his excellent blog, Leiter Reports. Leiter has a deliciously acerbic approach to ‘frauds and intellectual voyeurs who dabble in a lot of stuff they plainly don’t understand’. Leiter is a Nietzsche expert who reserves special vitriol for Derrida’s ‘preposterously stupid writings on Nietzsche’, the way Derrida ‘misreads the texts, in careless and often intentionally flippant ways, inventing meanings, lifting passages out of context…

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2 Comments

midcenturyart@yahoo.com

/ April 23, 2016

I read your post from a few years back on old Jacques Derrida and 9/11. I read most – or perhaps all of the posts and it seemed that all of the esteemed and incredibly well-educated men and women who posted were unaware of the significance of the 9/11 date. Perhaps the ones who claimed to be historically aware should be sent back to school. It was chosen for a reason and that is why referring to it by the date makes perfect sense, post-structural analysis be damned.

The 9/11 date was chosen because that was the date that the Turks were turned back at the Gates of Vienna. As someone who has some historical awareness, I was in Vienna for the 500th anniversary celebration of the event back in 1983, when I was in my 20s. That was the day King Jan Sobieski, a Pole of course, riding to Wien’s relief, saved Vienna and Europe. This event would not be celebrated today, too dangerous of course and King Jan’s victory is being reversed as I write. There is a large sculpture of Saint John of Capistrano with his foot on a dead Turk on the cathedral in Vienna, reflects the Siege of Vienna and the survival of Christendom.

Things like this do not matter to most on the left because they chose to discount the religious motivations and goals of the Islamists. The Islamists intend to create a worldwide caliphate, so reversing and avenging losses like Vienna in 1483 or Leptanto in 1571 have significance to them. Whether their dreams of Islamic hegemony are realistic or not, is of course, besides the point. Jihad is what motivates them and waging war on the United States and the West, in any way possible is Allah’s will.

Now of course, simply writing August, 1914, should need no explanation, unless of course you are a post-modernist. To most of we normally witted individuals, it conjures up images of saber rattling, mobilization, then the start of a disastrous war. If I type “1066,” most of us know that means a turning point in world history, the Norman Conquest. If we type “December 7th” or “Pearl Harbor,” it represents another turning point. If we type May, 1940, any literate Frenchman who is not a post-structauralist would know what it represents.

The date 7/11 means something to most Londoners, as does 3/11 to Spaniards. 9/11 should simply be another turning point in history, when most of us came to terms with just how destructive asymmetrical Islamic terrorism could be, a morning when we saw the world change. It doesn’t really require any literary analysis, any more than the gang rape of thousands of young Muslim and Christian girls in Syria and Iraq today or the destruction of the very roots of Western Civilization in the Fertile Crescent calls out for it. When I see them toss a suspected homosexual off a building, somehow, some sort of literary analysis and intellectual back-and-forth, like a series of tennis volleys is the last thing from my mind, but that’s just me. So, when I heard the thud of the people who jumped off the buildings to avoid being burned alive, my thoughts were about how to stop more similar events, not to put my own intellectual spin on it, or to try to parse the meaning of the term 9/11.

The writings of Sayyid Qutb, سيد قطب‎,the Muslim Brotherhood philosopher,who chose America as Islam’s enemy and impediment in the 1940s, long before any of the stock excuses were operable makes fascinating reading. They are available in Arabic as well as English. After Nassar gave him his just deserts, his brother fled to Saudi Arabia, where he popularized his brother’s work and forever cemented the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahhabis. Ever since their has been hell to pay. One of Muhammed Qutb’s acolytes in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s was a rich young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. There you have the roots of 9/11.

Muslim radicals have a core philosophy and an abiding faith that they are carrying out Allah’s wishes. The fact that western intellectuals want to ignore this or attempt to award them motivations much closer to their own hearts does not make it any less true. Thanks
- Adrian Blau
  
  / April 26, 2016
  
  Thanks, but you’ve missed the point of the debate, which is about why the date is called what it is, not why it was chosen for an attack.

Ghost Dance (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This section possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (June 2012) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Ghost Dance is a 1983 British film directed by Ken McMullen. This independent film explores the beliefs and myths surrounding the existence of ghosts and the nature of cinema.

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Plot[edit]

Through the experiences of two women in Paris and London, Ghost Dance offers an analysis of the complexity of our conceptions of ghosts, memory and the past. It is an adventure film strongly influenced by the work of Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard but with a unique intellectual and artistic discourse of its own and it is this that tempts the ghosts to appear, for Ghost Dance is permeated with all kinds of phantasmal presence. The film focuses on philosopher Jacques Derrida who considers ghosts to be the memory of something which has never been present. This theory is explored in the film. This film has also been compared with the following works: Celine and Julie Go Boating, Thelma & Louise, O Lucky Man, Sans Soleil, Week End, and Viva Maria.^{[citation needed]}

Cast[edit]

Crew[edit]

Producer – Ken McMullen
Writer – Ken McMullen
Cinematographer – Peter Harvey
Music – David Cunningham, Michael Giles and Jamie Muir

External links[edit]

Ghost Dance at the Internet Movie Database

Roger Lewis shared a link.

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Ghost Dance Clip 1

Ghost Dance (1983) a film by Ken McMullen- Clip 1- Ghost Dance is a visually impressive and complex examination of ideas about ghosts, memory and the past se…

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Roger Lewis shared a link.

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Derrida On ‘Ghostly Hauntings’ … And Kafka’s ‘Ghost’

In these two clips from Ken McMullen’s improvisational ‘Ghost Dance’ (1983), Jacques Derrida describes an ‘unnatural’ ghostly haunting whereby the dead are t…

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