Famous People Who Died

I enjoyed his book on bullshit jobs, but too say he was an intellectual giant is pushing it....a lot.
 
Yes, I think that is actually part of what's great about him. He only used the "minimal intellectuality" required to come up with something useful/interesting, but in general was focused very much on action. Hardly any academic and philosophical wanking, just as much as is necessary to get the work done.
 
Fair point. I enjoyed Matthew Crawford's The Case For Working With Your Hands, but he has a tendency to philosophical musings which upsets the flow of the book a bit...
 
I enjoyed his book on bullshit jobs, but too say he was an intellectual giant is pushing it....a lot.
Thats because On this, like with most other things, you speak from a place of misunderstanding. The man was one of the best we had at understand power dynamics and our relation to them. Truly a great loss for society. A staunch defender of judiasm and of a jewish homeland. Or as you might describe him, an antisemite. Here's a very instructive video that you should watch and i know you wont truly ingest.
 
Thats because On this, like with most other things, you speak from a place of misunderstanding. The man was one of the best we had at understand power dynamics and our relation to them. Truly a great loss for society. A staunch defender of judiasm and of a jewish homeland. Or as you might describe him, an antisemite. Here's a very instructive video that you should watch and i know you wont truly ingest.


...unlike your good self who is very comfortable equating Zionism with Nazism. You may, or may not be an anti-semite Rambo, but you do hold anti-semitic views.

Oh and by the way, try and resist the urge to pollute every thread with your conspiratorial bullshit. This belongs in the Politics thread.
 
...unlike your good self who is very comfortable equating Zionism with Nazism. You may, or may not be an anti-semite Rambo, but you do hold anti-semitic views.

Oh and by the way, try and resist the urge to pollute every thread with your conspiratorial bullshit. This belongs in the Politics thread.
 
Revelatory...!!!
of course you'd be sarcastic about a man who spent his entire life delving into the actual causes of problems in society and ways to fix them. its much easier to sit behind your computer and claim your lived existence is the epitome of the human condition. i'm sure there's a guardian op-ed you'll be able to find from 6 years ago that says Graeber was a secret nazi as well.

 
Fair point. I enjoyed Matthew Crawford's The Case For Working With Your Hands, but he has a tendency to philosophical musings which upsets the flow of the book a bit...
I might pick that up, it's an interesting topic. I read The Craftsman by Sennet a couple of years ago, enjoyed it a lot.
 
of course you'd be sarcastic about a man who spent his entire life delving into the actual causes of problems in society and ways to fix them. its much easier to sit behind your computer and claim your lived existence is the epitome of the human condition. i'm sure there's a guardian op-ed you'll be able to find from 6 years ago that says Graeber was a secret nazi as well.



No, I was being sarcastic about the tweet you posted which confuses banality with profundity.

As said, I've read one of Graebers book's and enjoyed it. I have/had no animus towards him whatsoever...
 
No, I was being sarcastic about the tweet you posted which confuses banality with profundity.

As said, I've read one of Graebers book's and enjoyed it. I have/had no animus towards him whatsoever...
got it, so dont hate the man just everything he stands for.
 

R.I.P. David Graeber
2020 September 4



tags: Obituary

by Ian Welsh

So, David Graber’s dead. Author of “Debt” and “Bullshit Jobs.” An anthropologist, anarchist and fierce activist. The link to his obituary is to the Guardian because it amuses me: he stopped writing for them after they helped smear Corbyn for anti-semitism (a charge Graeber fiercely refuted). Somehow they don’t mention that in the obituary.

Debt was and is an important book. Graeber goes into how money was actually created, as debt, and in effect a way to force people to work for money, even though they didn’t want to. (This is a vast over-simplification and you should read it.) Bullshit Jobs posited that about 40% of jobs don’t need to be done or are actively harmful, and went into some details. I don’t own either of them (read them in bookstores), so I can’t refresh my memory, but Debt in particular struck me at the time as important.
Graeber got some historical details wrong, but none of them were sufficient to undo his overall thesis, and he was roundly hated by historical economists for the book.
He has one more book coming out, “he Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity,” written with David Wengrow.
When I heard the news of Graeber’s death I was shocked. I didn’t know him, we weren’t friends. But he was doing actual important work, he was fiercely willing to stand up for what he believed right, and the work he was going to do won’t be done now. At age 59, he had probably another 10 years and two or three books, possibly important, in him.
De Gaulle quipped that “the graveyards are full of indispensable (people)” and mostly he’s right, most people’s deaths don’t matter much to anyone who didn’t know them. Someone will replace them who will do about as good a job.
But an intellectual or artist worthy of the name is, in some sense, indispensable. There are works they will not do, and if they don’t do them no one will.
I didn’t know Graeber, and I can’t claim to be personally sad. But he had important work still to be done, and no one will do it now. And without him to defend Debt from its attackers, it will lose luster and importance (because it’s the sort of book which must be destroyed by status-quo defenders, as it suggests capitalism is not what it claims to be.)
May he rest well, and if there is an afterlife, may it be kind to him. He will be missed by people who never knew him.
 
got it, so dont hate the man just everything he stands for.

Again no, you can't condense complexity into simple slogans, that's what politicians do...

Y'know, I've never met anyone who wants to make the world a shitter place...just people who disagree on how to make it better.
 

Okay if President Trump gets to fill the vacancy and Obama didn’t get to with a year remaining in his term then something is truly fubar.
 
Okay if President Trump gets to fill the vacancy and Obama didn’t get to with a year remaining in his term then something is truly fubar.

Trump supporters have been busily trying to rationalise it all day today.
 
It was Ginzburg who died? I thought it was Larry King.

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Nobody picked up Juliette Grecco, French actress and ex-girlfriend of Miles Davis.
Yes. French postwar chanteuse who hung around with the left Bank set - Sartre, Camus etc.


She had a certain look. Though not really the sort of music that I listen to .
 
I always felt Mac Davis seemed like a likeable fellow. His song "Lubbock in my Rearview Mirror" always reminded me of my departure from that dull city in the summer of 1973, which also marked the end of my career in higher education...although I didn't realize it at the time.
 
I was an assistant professor. I had already earned the Ph.D. degree at UCLA and did a post-doctoral year at the University of Texas. I was hoping to parlay that into an assistant professorship there. Didn't happen, so I took a job as an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech. Early in my third year I was denied tenure, mostly because some of the faculty disliked my right-of-center politics. I think there was also some envy because I had outpublished many of the faculty--no great feat in that hive of drones! By that time the academic job market was absolutely saturated, and I never returned to the Halls of Academe. In hindsight, with all the demented political correctness regnant there these days, it was probably just as well.
 
Frank Windsor actor 92.

Z-Cars cast went on to bigger things. Colin Welland, Brian Blessed. Jimmy Ellis was good too.

Theme tune also lives on with both Everton FC and Watford FC.
 
I was an assistant professor. I had already earned the Ph.D. degree at UCLA and did a post-doctoral year at the University of Texas. I was hoping to parlay that into an assistant professorship there. Didn't happen, so I took a job as an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech. Early in my third year I was denied tenure, mostly because some of the faculty disliked my right-of-center politics. I think there was also some envy because I had outpublished many of the faculty--no great feat in that hive of drones! By that time the academic job market was absolutely saturated, and I never returned to the Halls of Academe. In hindsight, with all the demented political correctness regnant there these days, it was probably just as well.

You had a lucky escape...
 
You had a lucky escape...

At one time I really fancied a life in academia as a college lecturer or professor. But once in higher education, it really turned me off. It dawned on me it was a political game. And back then, I was too earnest to engage.
 
At one time I really fancied a life in academia as a college lecturer or professor. But once in higher education, it really turned me off. It dawned on me it was a political game. And back then, I was too earnest to engage.

When I passed the CASM my supervisor wanted me to continue to a doctorate. Couldn't wait to get the fuck outta there to be honest...LOL
 
When I passed the CASM my supervisor wanted me to continue to a doctorate. Couldn't wait to get the fuck outta there to be honest...LOL

One of my kids godfather's is and the missus's extended circle of friends are top heavy academics (with the exception of an artist). They all share same credentials: super duper PhD status and yet, they've got nothing I would expect house/apartment wise to reflect that. They've all been divorced mind you. And one of them is a heir of Karl Marx and there are a lot of apartments, holiday homes, etc., that his weighty tomes have funded and handed down. And yet they live semidetached mediocrity, until they inherit their allotted share aged 62, or whatever it is.

Needless to say, they all think I am a cunt.
 
One of my kids godfather's is and the missus's extended circle of friends are top heavy academics (with the exception of an artist). They all share same credentials: super duper PhD status and yet, they've got nothing I would expect house/apartment wise to reflect that. They've all been divorced mind you. And one of them is a heir of Karl Marx and there are a lot of apartments, holiday homes, etc., that his weighty tomes have funded and handed down. And yet they live semidetached mediocrity, until they inherit their allotted share aged 62, or whatever it is.

Needless to say, they all think I am a cunt.

The problem with doctorates is that by their nature they are (over)specialised, not much use if you are of a practical disposition.

We employ several of them, not much good in a design capacity mind, we employ them as subject matter experts.
 
I sometimes have had the feeling that if it weren't for the American cult of "college" and fetishism over degrees, I might have made my way through the world just about as well if I have gone out into the world to seek my fortune when I graduated from prep school at the age of 17!

I have long felt that if we had good high schools that imparted basic verbal and mathematical skills and a modicum of general knowledge and culture, we could shut down 70% of our colleges and universities and not suffer any great loss.
 
I sometimes have had the feeling that if it weren't for the American cult of "college" and fetishism over degrees, I might have made my way through the world just about as well if I have gone out into the world to seek my fortune when I graduated from prep school at the age of 17!

I have long felt that if we had good high schools that imparted basic verbal and mathematical skills and a modicum of general knowledge and culture, we could shut down 70% of our colleges and universities and not suffer any great loss.

My formative years were the back-end of the 80s in the UK and going to university still had a sense of status and privilege. Educating Rita captured the belief that a university degree would free you from the toiling classes and you would rise above working class culture and escape it completely. Now it's the norm. Back then it was still all rather liberating. Somehow a university degree, in whatever subject, would guarantee you a job for life in a management role and you would never have to suffer the indignity of being unemployed, or a crappy job. Now all of that's gone.

Many skills and subjects are best taught on the job. Accountancy for one.
 
My formative years were the back-end of the 80s in the UK and going to university still had a sense of status and privilege. Educating Rita captured the belief that a university degree would free you from the toiling classes and you would rise above working class culture and escape it completely. Now it's the norm. Back then it was still all rather liberating. Somehow a university degree, in whatever subject, would guarantee you a job for life in a management role and you would never have to suffer the indignity of being unemployed, or a crappy job. Now all of that's gone.

Many skills and subjects are best taught on the job. Accountancy for one.
No fees to be paid back then. Quite a generous grant paid to students and opportunities to earn more in the holidays. Full employment and graduates earned more than non graduates.

Then Blair decided an arbitrary figure of 50% of the population should be graduates. Education became one huge racket.
 
No fees to be paid back then. Quite a generous grant paid to students and opportunities to earn more in the holidays. Full employment and graduates earned more than non graduates.

Then Blair decided an arbitrary figure of 50% of the population should be graduates. Education became one huge racket.

I use to work in the holidays, one year I earned GBP 17,000 which was a lot for someone who was a full time student.

And overdrafts, the old Barclays bank wouldn't give me one for GBP 100 just before the summer holidays began. I remember a friend had one for GBP 700 and it was like wow they're deep in the mire.

My nephew finished his accountancy degree about 18 months ago has gone into food sales and has GBP 60,000 worth of debt.

What a way to start your career.
 
No fees to be paid back then. Quite a generous grant paid to students and opportunities to earn more in the holidays. Full employment and graduates earned more than non graduates.

Then Blair decided an arbitrary figure of 50% of the population should be graduates. Education became one huge racket.

Tuition fees were free, grants were means tested.
 
Tuition fees were free, grants were means tested.

But way back, wasn't there a tax rebate for parents that would cover the grant? I remember a colleague telling me about this. That would have been in the 70s I guess.

The Japanese fashion designer, Kenzo Takada, has died of Covid-19 at 81. I had a couple of Kenzo shirts in the early 90s, just before he sold the brand to the LVMH Group. Very bright. I was hanging on to the 80s back then.
 

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