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I think i've said this before, but DSF reminds me exactly of that guy from Kung Pow who thinks losing is winning. He's never been owned harder in a thread yet somehow he thinks he has the upper hand here.
maybe you can say that about Boston, but unless the Suns have plans to play defense and fire D'Antoni, they're not a championship caliber team.
I think i've said this before, but DSF reminds me exactly of that guy from Kung Pow who thinks losing is winning. He's never been owned harder in a thread yet somehow he thinks he has the upper hand here.
THAT would be great, but then the waterworks would increase and people at the in and out drive thru would have extra salt on their fries.
No, it'll be funny if the Suns are lucky enough to advance to the Finals and lose to Boston. Then he'll be on a Celtics board talking about boring Boston is, how Bill Simmons doesn't know anything about basketball and the Suns get better tv ratings.
Doesn't that already happen when the Suns are playing?
If they don't win they will also be crying about how Stern hates them soooo much!!
One thing I almost forgot to mention is the vagaries of taste. All things being equal, most people probably wouldn't buy some of the team uniform color combinations in normal clothing on a dare.
In the early '90s, silver and black was popular, and you saw tons of Raiders, White Sox, and Spurs gear. By the middle '90s, teal was the rage. I can't imagine that all of the teal merchandise sells well today, despite the various teams' records.
In other words, even team merchandise sometimes sells or doesn't sell for reasons that have nothing to do with the team itself. I would assume that Nielsen ratings are also influenced by extraneous things that have nothing to do with who is playing that night. For example, Wednesday is a church or extracurricular activity night for many households. Friday nights are a complete washout in many communities during high school football season.
Question Reggie: What is more amusing? da_suns_fan and his poor attempts at logic, or freedarko's pretentious wankery?
I came across this sentence in the comments section of the latest post, and I've determined that it doesn't mean anything at all, I don't think the word "systemic" is being used properly.
http://freedarko.blogspot.com/2007/1...good-time.html
The thing you want to take from Marx is methodological - a sense of systemic relationality and a sense of crisis. FD usually does that exceptionally well.
Lol, I was thinking about that too, hahaha
You should be embarrassed by your poor usage of periods, and lack of use of spaces.
In my opinion, they are not using "systemic" properly for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, the statement is not a correct description of Marxism, or more specifically, dialectical materialism. Marx saw "systems" as a form of dialectical idealism. In other words, humans impose their ideas (system) on a material reality that may or may not relate to human ideas in a systematic way.
Marx believed that reality (material cir stances) determined ideology, whereas most Continental philosophers before Marx believed that matter reflected metaphysical ideas or ideal forms. (Plato would be the classic example of "idealism" in this sense, but Marx was mostly responding to the work of Kant and Hegel.) However, there is still a dialectical relationship between matter and ideas for Marx. Matter determines ideology, but ideas do have some power to to infuence material cir stances. In the final analysis, matter is primary for Marx, however. The revolution comes not becuase of a changed international consciousness or communist ideology, but becuase technology and international capitalism make such a revolution possible.
I would agree with the first half of the quote. Dialectical materialism could be characterized as a "methodology." If one accepts Marx's fundamental premise, then the rest of his work is just the "heavy lifting" of applying dialectical materialism to world history. To say that Marxism or dialectical materialsim is a "systemic relationality" is assinine, to be quite blunt. Ignoring the fact that the statement may be a nonsequitur in of itself, Marx viewed his life work as debunking the systems of Western thought (and the overly systematic Kant and Hegel in particular). Marx also saw many world-historical events or technological advances as major paradigm shifts that essentially rendered the past meaningless and destroyed social relationships. Many of the "systems" and "relationships" we perceive are constructs, accidents, or coincidences for Marx.
At any rate, the Free Darko crowd really burns my beans. I occasionally play the role of a pompous ass for my own amusement (and hopefully the amusement of others). Most of those clowns are dead serious, however. If they really believed half of their own crap, they wouldn't watch NBA basketball anyway. Marxism may be one of my favorite topics, as I am a former Russian language and Soviet Area Studies major. I would be the first person to tell you it has absolutely nothing to do with basketball, with the possible exception of the racial composition of ownership.
I have to admit that I think DSF is my favorite poster on here. His everpresent optimism is something I wish I had in my miserable life.
Yeah, I was posting comments as "Zeke" in that post. That's the same reaction I have to them as well: they truly seem to believe the weird mythologies they build up around various players, and they seem to get off on the idea that they can tie basketball into some sort of greater political or cultural truth. I can't stand pretentiousness, and it reminds me of some of the experiences and people I ran into as an undergrad in college. They remind me of music and art snobs: "Oh, we have a much richer and deeper appreciation of hoops than you do."
A lot of people would call that 'delusion', you know.
Some might, but it honestly brightens my day. He has a little of that poster "Dirk Nowitzki" in him, with less icons and obnoxiousness.A lot of people would call that 'delusion', you know.
Thank heavens for that.
If d_s_f was as trigger-happy with the emoticons as Dirk Nowitzki, half of Spurstalk would be covered in clapping hands and pink elephants.
but Dirk Nowitzki just does that to act goofy, and is more than capable of having a good, serious basketball discussion. DSF is simply stupid, nothing more.
I think the NBA gives us an interesting window on the state of race relations in the U.S. This has nothing to do with any deep significance of basketball; it's just that the majority of players are African-American (and the majority of ownership is Caucasian). IMHO, it really doesn't get much deeper than that.
I've never met a real intellectual that thought of themselves as an intellectual. For example, Elie Wiesel was a guest lecturer at my college. If ever anyone qualified for the label "egghead," it's Wiesel. However, five minutes with the guy told you he was much more interested in people than ideas for their own sake. I've run into that quite a bit over the years.
The average person is more than capable of understanding something like Das Kapital, but he/she doesn't have the time, inclination, and/or discipline to tackle a book of that length. I think that is what aggravates me about intellectual snobs the most. The majority of these fools don't seem to understand that their "deep understanding" is largely a byproduct of privilege and leisure. A working family with three kids doesn't have the money or leisure time to take in a Jean-Luc Goddard film festival. Many people would say that the average American has no interest in that sort of thing, but again, I think people are too quick to sell others short. I really like Japanese movies, but my introduction was Godzilla, not Kurosawa.
I guess another way to put it would be to quote my former minister: "There's no one more hateful and mean-spirited than a self-styled liberal intellectual."
Why would anyone want to have a serious basketball discussion with you?
Youre a cliche. No different from monos or mardigan.
Don't pout just because you got owned.
^ Why would anyone want to have a serious basketball discussion with you?
You're a cliche. No different from DannyB or yourcheatinheart.
Don't pout just because you got owned.
Also, you were missing an apostrophe in you're. Capitalize your O, mother er.
When was I owned? I believe I already dismissed that crazy notion, as it was your utter inability to read and comprehend english that caused it to arise to begin with.
Chomsky had a very interesting take on this. He once made a comment to the effect that what goes in universities isn't so much intellectual work as intellectual "life." It's very cozy and comfortable to get tenure for discussing well-known works of literature of comparing and contrasting the different approaches of philosophers, but is it intellectual work? A car mechanic in some ways performs more intellectual work than an English professor, it takes real talent and skill to be able to diagnose and fix a broken car, and his contributions to society are more valuable. I once really pissed some liberal arts grads off when I said that I could get 80% of their education with a library card and for free, while they paid thousands of dollars for the privilege.
I just waded through that Free Darko thread, and I have to commend you. I wouldn't have had the patience.
That was "pretentious wankery" at it's worst (which covers a lot of ground). The entire premise was sloppy pseudo-intellectualism. An NBA player cannot be part of the bourgeoisie, because he does not own or control the means of production (the NBA franchise itself). It went downhill from there... The responses to your Zeke posts were classic. Some of these guys must have gone to the P.T. Barnum school of rhetoric: "When you can't dazzle them with dexterity, baffle them with bull ."
C.S. Lewis once wrote that "university politics are bitter precisely because the stakes are so small." I read that and realized that I had no future in academia. Unfortunately, I went into ministry, and I had to learn the hard way that Mr. Lewis should have also mentioned denominational politics in a footnote.
I like your mechanic example. Here's another one. A black guy and a white guy working side by side doing physical labor know a lot more about race relations than anyone in an ivory tower.
There's website I used to visit called plastic.com. It was basically a political/current events board. It used to be a lively place to discuss politics or whatever, but it became a narrow echo chamber along the same lines.
I don't want to totally dog academia, but sometimes I think it's helpful to remember what it's useful for and what it isn't.
So... I've been away from a computer for six days. What have I missed?!
"This is the thread that never ends... it just goes on and on, my friends... Some people started typing, not knowing what it'd be, but now it just continues on just like my misery... This is the thread that never ends..."
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