Letting Go of the Tiger
16th May 2021
Severian is ready to give up.
When it comes to philosophy, at least, the idea’s the thing, not the prose, a few obvious exceptions like Nietzsche aside. It’s important that you know what e.g. Kant and Hegel said, not how they said it, and since any competent “intro to” book will give you both the “standard” (consensus) view and the most common alternate readings, you really don’t have to plow through The Critique of Pure Reason or, God help us, The Philosophy of History. Intros are fine*, and they’re especially fine for guys like Marx, whose Collected Works with Engels run at least fifty (!) big honking volumes.
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Just as Cultural Marxism was nothing more than question begging, a smokescreen of ponderous Teutonic prose to keep Marxists from believing their own lying eyes, so #Woke is an increasingly unhinged attempt to convince the True Believers that a society which is actually pretty fucking great for almost everybody is, in fact, a benighted hellhole of oppression. We’ve all seen it, so a single example will suffice: I’ve met three trannies in my life. One of them was in India, where there’s apparently some kind of sub-caste ritual thing they do, which though fascinating in itself isn’t germane.