I'm a good bad salesman :)

One night I had a woman in her early 50s call up asking for advice on what would be best for a first-timer. She was really embarrassed and nervous about coming in, so I said I'd stay open and let her make a choice after-hours. I think initially, she'd only wanted one "standard" vibrator but b/c I was able to make her feel comfortable and explain various things, she ended up spending close to 200 bucks and leaving with 3 items in her brown paper bag :)

Moonlit:

IOW because academics insist on discussing purely in theoretical terms this creates the situation where this sort of stuff is not discussed by ordinary people. BUT IT SHOULD BE because it is the fabric of everyday life and also because our 'mostly much less educated and experienced' ancestors had no problems understanding many of these concepts, and acting on them.

I couldn’t agree more. These self-identities affect how people accept or dissent from particular world-views, and help create the present and future. It helps to have the tools to analyze how & why you & others respond to ideas.

the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary research

I’m not an academic, but I was into interdisciplinary research, too. My undergrad degree was in philosophy & creative writing, with physics & religion playing a major part of my senior thesis. My grad degree is in public policy, which is interdisciplinary by design, incorporating poli sci, planning, economics, and ethics, but I focused on labor movements, which involved lots & lots of history.

Hayden, you are so there with me boy it is almost freaky.

I’m getting that same sense of pea-podity.

the world is a complex tissue of events, in which connections of various types alternate or overlap or combine, thereby determining the texture of the whole.

YES! I personally lean towards ol’ Schopenhauer on this one, too, whose ideas of the dynamic nature of reality anticipate Chaos Theory. Or, when we bring it to human interaction, Game Theory.

the unity of all things

Supported by Bell’s Theorem (1964, IIRC), which holds that any particle that has been in contact with another particle retains a sort of superluminal “intelligence” of the other. Pardon me for saying, but that’s some freaky Zen shit for physicists to state.

This holds that all things perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected and are different aspects of a larger or deeper reality, which cannot be directly experienced, understood or even described.

I agree, but again assert that belief in or knowledge of the existence of something ineffable is fundamentally useless. Now, harnessing that power for, say, system-modeling or telecommunications, would be a Big Step Forward for humanity. Problem is that only powerful people tend to immediately benefit from harnessing power like this.

In fact, if cosmologists are on the right track, all of this may be only comprehensible from a ‘universal’ perspective, where ‘universal’ means ‘belonging to the universe’.

Perhaps, but partial modeling for prediction would still be useful.

Especially necessary when you are examining the 'inevitability' of something that almost everyone admits is major, affecting almost everybody, but nobody can actually explain what it is.

Yeah! That’s what I’m saying about modeling. I like & agree with the man-o-war analogy, too.

what I am saying is that something that is so goddam important, inevitable, vital, life shattering, should be understood a great deal better than it currently is, and that includes academia as well. I'm saying that many of the assumptions and pre-conceptions that have spread as part of the 'church of globalisation' have already been debunked, demythologised, and outright exposed as lies and wrong, so why are they still being preached as if they were gospel. See Gramsci for the answer.

OK, I’m with you on this, too. There is no other explanation for the adherence to the economic theories of Milton Friedman or what’s-his-face Hayek, or any other economists so damn determined to prove the necessity of the unfettered free market that they throw common sense out the window.

Nutty:

I dig this. It's like talking in lawyerese: lawyers aren't intentionally obfuscating; they're just being really, really specific about which word means which thing.

Yeah! Great analogy.

she could not be convinced that political theories have no inherent moral bias.

I had grad students in my ethics class who had the same biases. Kind of stunning, really.

99% of my formal training in politics is from analysis of nationalist (fictive) literature. Which is a way of saying, I have no formal training at all.

I disagree. I’ve got minimal poli sci training, but enough to know that the prevailing models suffer from the same top-down approach of most history from before the advent of social history in the 1960’s (are, most of all, are just tools to describe aggregate behavior, not indicators of individual reasoning). Political analysis from a literary perspective must traffic in its own models, which are as valid.

Moonlit:

Indeed, it is the threat to liberty, equality and fraternity, solidarity, citizenship, political identity and obligation posed by the current challenges to the existing world order that fuels and publicly legitimates the continuously expanding forces of resistance.

See, I didn’t know what started all of this. Excellent.

I say, however, that an understanding of globalisation, anti-globalisation, and their significance to world order is not possible without considering the normative implications of world system models. This necessitates looking beyond the hegemonic institutions and social and power relations, to their origins and how and whether they might be transforming, and also involves paying careful attention to the opening up of public space to moral and ethical concerns that is a prevalent feature of this interregnum.

Shit, yeah. To get back to my pet issue, the major problem faced by modern labor activists is how to organize on a global scale across rampant cultural differences. I’m glad that you’re doing what you’re doing, because it seems pretty obvious that we need an academic language with which we can discuss these issues writ large.

Sorry for the disparate things going on in this post. I haven't had much time to be here today, nor to work on my reply.

But then I'm not a fan of anything veggie that pretends to be meat. Hello? Gave up meat for a reason here!

Fiona! Sister!

I'm wondering if we aren't so freaking sure Saddam has weapons of mass destruction because we sold them to him... (by "we" I mean "President Reagan")

I was under the impression that back when we had inspectors they just showed up with old invoices to use as check lists.

I'm not a fan of anything veggie that pretends to be meat.

Me too! I might eat it by mistake!

Seitan Chinese-style (it's sold as "braised wheat gluten) is yummy.

You need to get turnips (this by the way is strictly the ONLY dish where turnips are allowed anywhere near my stomach) and lashings and lashings of yummy mashed potato

whilst chiming in on the haggis-love, I should point out that most Scots of my acquaintance have said "turnips" but actually meant swede. Which makes for that nice orangey blob plus white blob plus brown blob effect on the plate. Mmmm haggis. It's like peppery meaty porridgy stuff. In a good way.

vanishes in a non-political puff of smoke

that most Scots of my acquaintance have said "turnips" but actually meant swede

Wait, SWEDISH PEOPLE are the secret meat ingredient??? HAGGIS IS SWEDES!

sssshhh, meara. If the Swedes find out I've told you, I'll have to kill you.

t Alec Guiness voice

These are not the root vegetables you're looking for

t /Alec Guiness voice

All of which led to the best banner I ever saw at a football game, when Scotland were playing Sweden, some wag had a banner that said "Swedes are neeps". Ahh, raises a smile to this day.

And you haven't lived till you try an Arbroath Smokie.

Bwah! Oh, that's nice. Like the local lad who put a sign up outside the junkyard which had rusty cars piled high inside it, saying "Car Park Full". Nice.

And you haven't lived till you try an Arbroath Smokie.

NOW you're talking. Arbroath Smokies are indeed lovely. Good breakfast food, 'specially with poached eggs. I'm also partial to Cloutie dumplings, although I can't spell 'em.