Resistances and such

In Cultural Studies (a well-meaning Marxian political project that is not really a science, however), resistance has been spotted everywhere: any symbol or purported meaning can be exegisised as such. I too, sometimes try to play Devil's advocate too trying to see cop-outs that people attempt at least as a coping strategy: like people glued to their smartphones might be trying to create a sense of connection and intimacy in the social environment that alienates them from each other. However, I still find this strain of glorifying "resistance" rather flimsy. This kind of "resistance" reminds me of that scene in Precious where the protagonist is imagining herself a star singer on a stage while her stepfather is raping her again. We are getting screwed over big time, the sooner we realise it, the sooner you can do something meaningful about it. Foucalt was right, a shift in knowledge begets a shift in power relationship.

Supermarket bread and mass control

Human earthlings are mad: they go crazy about the calorific value of their food and joust over vegan suitable or non-suitable snacks but no one seems to wonder if "mono- and  di-acetyltartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerdies of fatty acids" is something you need your bread to contain (and end up in your system). Why do "esters of synthetic fats with a composition similar to partially digested natural fat esterified with other natural acids" need to be used to make something that comes out just fine when simply made from only flour, water, and salt? I have googled around and sent a couple of emails and here's what I have seen/read.

Modern supermarkets flood their food packaging with excessive, overwhelming data on the amount of calories in a slice, the presence or absence of celery, and other superfluous trivia, while the full ingredient lists are deviously omitted. I had to beg Marks & Spensers' Nutrition department do divulge any information on what they actually put in their French baguette. Their (probably unpaid) intern responsible for communicating with pesky inquirers shared with me that "we don’t have a list of ingredients for categories of products available in a format I can share via email". How very smart for a major supermarket chain not to have one in 2015! Their colourful website, once again plastered with tangential factoids and the word "healthy" in every other sentence, suspiciously skirts around the most important issue: what is the food actually made of?

One of my most vivid memories of my trip to Croatia was seeing full lists of ingredients on every price label in the bakeries. Their content was such that I stopped buying bread after that. In the UK, however, no such info can be found. The Vegan Society have somehow managed to procure a list of ingredients on Lidl's house-brand baked goods, something Lidl do not publish on their own website nor displays in their shops. Instead, Lidl has opted for an Instagram-style display of heavily photoshopped pictures as well as typical fancier-than-PowerPoint marketing-bullshit and essentially irrelevant number juggling. Chocolate twists barely containing any actual chocolate aside, their produce is abound with such insalubrious things as cysteine (an amino-acid derived from human hair), palm oil and diphosphates. At the same time, highlighted in bold text, no doubt to make them out to be the culprits, are things like wheat, rye, milk, eggs, and sesame. The Orwellian Newspeak mission is accomplished: war is peace and peace is war! Tetrasodium diphosphate is good, wheat is bad!

From these little observation, two things become clear.

Firstly, quantitative data is the latter-day language of power, used to manufacture wilful, even enthusiastic ("Let's all lose weight by going low-carb!") consent across large swathes of the populace. Instead of arbitrarily drawn quotes from the Holy Writ to prove just about anything under the sun, now we have the highly elevated art of number-juggling, the so-called "hard figures" to the very same end.

Secondly, this kind of mass control works because the education system does not equip the majority of people with  knowledge necessary to navigate successfully through life, just with enough indoctrination to 'believe in science'. Not having basic understanding of chemistry and biology, because you chose Media Studies and PhE for your A-levels, will inevitably result in a lifetime of feeding on the worst in biochemical engineering, never knowing where your illnesses come from. The "freedom to choose" turns out to be the worst form of slavery, that very "iron cage" that repulsed Max Weber so much.

Sad truth for you, earthlings

All human social  systems only produce waste and difference. That's it.

Ayn Rand and the spirit of Neo-Liberalism

Ayn Rand's spirit is in everything that people, ranging from her disciple Alan Greenspan to the starry-eyed and bushy-tailed business studies undergrads, do.Hers is the Neo-Liberal motto of the deserving vs. the undeserving, an arbitrary, misanthropic choice to divide the humanity, in this case based on their ability to participate efficiently in the market economy, dehumanising those who can't, none different from any other equally pernicious dividing ideology, we have seen so many of them bringing suffering ad destruction to the world.

The foundation of any ideology/personal belief system is in such pre-logical, emotional choices, arguing rationally with whatever rationalisation is built upon that won't achieve anything, because that logic is a mere projection of the now unconscious, internalised value. For example, the seemingly rational approach of treating the rest of reality - people, society, nature - as "externalities" to economy, rests on the irrational belief that market is a wise force that sorts out everything and is worth sacrificing anything for. As a result, we get a situation where market wins at the expense of  exactly everything else: people, society, nature. This kind of pernicious "truths" are fed to young, unsuspecting minds in university departments as unquestionable axioms by imposingly looking, glib professors, indoctrinating them to become the enthusiastic foot-soldiers of forces that sacrifice entire nations' livelihoods, the cooperative spirit of communities, humaneness, whole ecological systems, physical and emotional health of millions, for the sake of growth, i.e., the constant expansion of credit to sustain the fractional reserve system of making money out of nothing.

On "believing" in science

A believer in science is just like any other believer. Reality only opens to the kind of your inquiry, the scientific method is just one of those kinds, so you always get only a partial view, albeit self-entitled to righteousness... just like most others...

Is there something behind academic verbosity

The vapid, self-indulgent verbosity of the latter-day academia has become proverbial.  Clever jibes from inside the ivory tower like the infamous Postmodernism Generator make a nice exposé of the likes of Homi Bhabha's 90-minute projectile verbal vomit.

However, is there anything more to academic pontification than an elaborate (and often well-funded) exercise in intellectual masturbation. Actually, rather often than not egg-headed boffins do make sense but their wording is so arcane that it does sound like. Let me furnish you with an example.

"The mythopoetical totality of Western hegemonic discourses serves as the epistemological base for the post-colonial legitimation of the Eurocentric world order." In reality, put in plain English, it boils down to "white folks know better so get on with it!" but you can't really say that, can you?

The years of immersion into that kind of jargon make academics incapable of expressing themselves in any other way. As a result, whatever ground-breaking revelations they may have about the world, stays safely within the campus, for the rest of the world can see their lips moving but can't comprehend what they are saying.