Comments on: Ain’t no gullible in the white man’s dictionary

By: r. maltoban

r. maltoban — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:51:40 +0000

“Angela Y. Davis cum Cleopatra Jones-style”

Whew. I need a cigarette.

By: Sifu Tweety Fish

Sifu Tweety Fish — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:34 +0000

Goodbye lemuel! Goodbye secondharmonic! Goodbye nonsensical argument that I haven’t really bothered to try and follow!

I’m just kidding, of course. You’re welcome to keep on hashing out whatever the hell it is you’re hashing out; I’m not really reading it anyways.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:17:47 +0000

Secondharmonic, you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Bye-bye.

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:34:37 +0000

‘MArxist “geographer”‘. Geographer is in quotes because, as I am sure most everyone here is aware, you can be a geographer who also *happens to be a Marxist* and that is fine; but if you let it inform your ‘geography’, inform your studies, then it is not so good. And that is apparently what Harvey does.
Just as a biochemist/molecular biologist could also happen to be a ‘creationist’; but if she let it infrom her scientific judgements that would not be very legitimate.

Cognitively ‘Marxist geographer’ is about on the same level as ‘Aryan ethnologist’ or ‘Social Darwinist epidemiologist’. And no, a correct response to that isn’t: “but those two 19th century pseudosciences were WRONG, and Marxism is right”.

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:09:07 +0000

brent evidently–it gets a lot of gullibles like LJ and Booman heated up and tearing at each other. The fact that it doesn’t exist isn’t a bug (like your truly’s icon) but a feature.

By: brent

brent — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:57:30 +0000

From what we’ve seen of the “post-racial” folks at TUCC, it’s a lot more believable that Michelle would open up in front of friends who think that whitey is responsible for all their suffering.

And that is the point of this nonsense isn’t it? There are apparently a lot of people like yourself who find this utterly ridiculous smear plausible based upon what you think is true about a group of black people and a church you know almost literally nothing about. The architects of this particular hit job knew what they were doing in that respect. No proof will ever be provided because, of course, none exists but the effect will be almost as powerful as if it did.

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:57:24 +0000

here’s the relevant part of the thread, from March.

secondharmonic Says:
March 24, 2008 at 6:17 am
I agree with all your criticisms. Marx was trying to *save* the classical labor theory of value from itself. Whether he totally succeeded is another question. Are there ways to define the labor power, or else the value added in some responsible maybe even ’scientific’ way? You’d have to talk to a PhD econometrics person. Maybe there are.
Are the actual prices of things in this sense determinable, i.e. if you ran a simulation do you get the whole set of prices and outputs for a bunch of commodities with the set-ep parameters of a given real economy realistically? Maybe someone has done so by now, but I haven’t heard of it.
Harder than climate models, I would think. Much harder.
In order to even get started with a consistent ‘relative price level’ system, I would think you’d have to complile a list of equivalent goods/services and use that as your ‘bootstrap’. My suggestion: the price of an hour’s worth of services from the ‘average upscale prostitute’ in any economy is 1 ‘harlot’. All goods and services in the economy are to be normalized to ‘harlots’. So, 5 grams of gold = 1 harlot, say, or a bushel of apples is approximately 0.5 harlots, and so on.

lemuel pitkin Says:
March 24, 2008 at 10:45 am
You’d have to talk to a PhD econometrics person.

One would think so. Fortunately such people someimtes write their thoughts down in books and articles, so it turns out not be necessary to literally talk to them after all.

(You could start with the discussion of the LTV in David Harvey’s The Limits of Capital, if you like. It’s pretty accessible.)

By: secondharmonic

secondharmonic — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:45:21 +0000

Actually I was. And you answered me with saying to the effect of ‘Go look up Harvey, punkinhead’.
What is econometrics? Well I am not googling this, but I would say offhand the study/profession of compiling/analysing statistics and MEASURES of economic inputs and outputs. Insofar as that has to do with resource inputs, it could fold within its domain ‘economic geography’. But the input from ‘human resources’ is probably larger. And no. considering human resources as part of geography, which Harvey may do, is not really legitimate, as ‘geos’ means ‘earth’, and ‘graphia’ means ‘writings’.
Looking forward to seeing your papers in print.

By: PotatoHead

PotatoHead — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:41:09 +0000

I dunno. Plenty of gullible people believed Hillary openly prayed for the assassination of Barack Obama on tape and in front of a newspaper editorial board (which later endorsed her candidacy).

The BO people have set the bar for gullibility pretty low.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:34:30 +0000

you later claimned that I had an inadequate understanding of his labor theory of power.

Yes, I did. Possibly I was wrong, altho “googling a wiki article” doesn’t strike me as the soundest source of knowledge here.

And then you pointed me to some Marxist ‘geographer’, when I was talking about econometrics

The quotes suggest you doubt whether David Harvey is really a geographer. So he’s been fooling the whole profession for decades? Scandalous!

And no, you were not talking about econometrics. Do you even know what the word means?

On balance, I think my level of jerkiness toward you has probably been about right.