On 12/10/06, Sean Andrews <cultstud76 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm fine with being your little example of dodgy, overly complex
> explanations--particularly since your reasons for preferring it are
> basically that it can be read, as the kind of ideological obfuscation
> you'd like to say any complex explanation can be revealed as
> containing.
>
> But let's be clear that I did mention that this is something I've
> gleaned from experience (i.e. it's "true" also in your terms), which
> is that all the buildings in which I live and work have these same
> characteristics and most were built at relatively the same moment in
> the same geographical area--some even contain identical fixtures and
> air conditioner convector units and similar layouts even though they
> are technically twenty or so miles apart. And in the few buldings
> like this that contain a few windows that can be opened, they are on
> the periphery of the building and therefore do little to circulate the
> air through the closed doors of the management and/or senior faculty
> that enjoy most of the windows and all of the rare opening windows.
Sean, Sean and all subsequent:
I was making fun of myself, not arguing against you!
Is self-irony so foreign a practice among us that it is now obscure and thus I must condemn myself as an obscurantist when ever I do my 'self-ironic' shtick? You are not even an example, except of my own momentary _desire_ to believe everything that you say even in the specific case of Doug's building. So I took this momentary desire to believe the grand explanation, and to believe that it must apply in this specific case, facts be damned, as a rather silly way to criticize my own reach for the grand explanation. It had little or nothing to do with you and I apologize profusely for requiring you to write a long polemic against my self-irony.
Or maybe I am simply not good at it anymore.
Or maybe no one got the reference to Jack Benny. Rather obscure I admit. But it was in the service of art.
Jerry
What I wrote:
Monaco's moral musings on this thread:
So why do I prefer Sean's explanation to Doug's? In other words I prefer the explanation about capitalists preferring to shuffle off the consequences of their choices onto the public at large to the explanation that you can open the window and buy fans. I prefer Sean's explanation to Doug's even though it is Doug's story and Doug's office and he is an eyewitness who can tell me the truth of the matter and has no reason to lie. But Sean's explanation is so much more satisfying, and of course the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Still, still, I want to disregard Doug's reliable reply and hold onto the safety of the fact that we can trace all of this back to capitalist profits, in the big and the small. So Doug must be lying or not telling us the whole truth. He must be. Soon I will forget what Doug said about fans being retro and only remember Sean's much more complicated, less razor-like, analysis of the externalities caused by insurance companies and real estate profits.
No[w] that is ideology! Now that is an instance of preferring the complicated explanation to the simple explanation when the simple explanation is true but the complicated one is more satisfying.
Hmmm, maybe I should stop criticizing Zizek and Angelus (what a flying pair) and concentrate on myself. [I was serious here by the way.] But it is so much more fun criticizing others than trying to improve myself.
Well, back to the cartoon of life. Everything I know about myself I learned from listening to old Jack Benny radio shows.
Jerry