Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Danyl, are you seriously denying the possible bottom-line utility to New Zealand of studying the LOTR? We made a very large amount of money off precisely that cultural studies crap you reckon is a waste of money.
Yes. It was made by someone who never went to university, and I don't think Lacanian/Gramscian analysis of LOTR played a huge role in adapting it to the screen.
Actually, I feel bad about bringing up the Harry Potter, LOTR courses; it was a bit of a straw-man, I didn't expect people to argue that it was vital to the nations economy.
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FWIW, PAS is a much "safer" place for women to post than Kiwiblog, and obviously that counts for something pretty significant in my book.
That is valuable, and it's something guys like me can occasionally lose sight of. But if someone logs onto Kiwiblog and disagrees with DPF about something they're going to get a lot of criticism hurled their way, but it's a pretty diverse community and they're also going to get a lot of supporting comments and endorsement, whereas at PAS the general tendency is for a dissenting voice to get absolutely buried with abuse. Once again, not a huge issue for me until people accuse me of being a dick when I respond to it.
How, then, do you respond to Megan C's theory that courses you consider 'trivial' may not be useful for their subject matter necessarily, but because they teach analytical thinking and writing?
Well that's easy. You can teach people analytic thinking and reasoning skills without exposing them to subject matter that is trivial, or that they can effortlessly aquire on their own. You don't have to 'study' Harry Potter - you can go do an LLB.
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Danyl, and I would address this to others as well, do you really think it’s okay to insult people just because this is the internet?
No. I do think (a) it’s okay to insult people when they insult me and (b) this happens more often on the internet, because people aren’t communicating face to face.
It appears to me that you don’t like what you perceive as “academia” and that you project this across all intellectual activity – if it doesn’t materially progress socio-economic well-being, it shouldn’t be paid for by the state/taxpayer. But the part of that you appear to be missing is the “socio-” bit.
Well I’ve failed if I’ve given that impression, since I work at a university and I really like it.
I don’t miss the socio bit – I’ve talked about it quite a lot. But there does have to be an element of utilitarianism somewhere along the way to justify spending the public’s money, given the worthiness of the other things it could be spent on.
So if asked to justify spending it to teach New Zealand history, say, I’d reply that it is a taonga that is unique to our nation. It doesn’t benefit my back pocket, but a case can be made for it. And Ben makes a good case for philosophy as a means to teach critical thinking and dialectic. (I still find most philosophers totally incomprehensible, in a way that most scientists aren’t, so I am not entirely sold on his point.)
But a course that teaches, say, Harry Potter and C S Lewis, for people to take because they’re not sure what they want to do with their lives, and justify retrospectively because they like to think it helped them out in some other career, in rather nebulous ways, is not – to my mind – a good way to spend the public wealth. That’s my base case. I don’t think it’s that provocative or unreasonable, and most of the people who do seem to be people with degrees in such courses.
One last point: a couple of commentators have pointed out that Russell is some kind of rara avis because he can think critically even though he has not been to university! The obvious reply to this is that almost everyone in our society who is intelligent and intellectually curious can go to university, so he’s rare in that respect, not in that he’s somehow, amazingly, stumbled onto the ability to think for himself despite not having attained an undergraduate degree.
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From Russell, sometime yesterday:
Danyl, you do realise you do this all the time here?
You make a provocative statement, behave as if the subsequent discussion is some sort of unusual response that only proves your point, then declare the debate over.
Which would be fine if you didn’t insist on being such a dick about it. A little respect and good faith would probably serve you better.
It's a frequently recurring phenomenon on PAS: someone comes along and disagrees with the clique's gestalt consensus - a National supporter, someone who doesn't like Obama, or occasionally me - and some of the commentators engage them in vigorous debate, which is the value of PAS, and about a dozen more regulars pile on top. Not to debate, just to sneer and insult and call the person stupid, a troll, a barbarian, a twatcock and other similarly droll terms for daring to have opinions different from their own. And if the person on the other side of the herd responds to them in kind, then you step in and sternly warn them to argue in good faith. Well, I don't mind being insulted - it's the internet - and I really like insulting people back, but the last part of that process always erodes my respect for you a little.
It's also a nasty online culture - far more so than Kiwiblog, since it's rather more sophisticated. Again, I relish that - but it does mean you don't get to take the moral high ground.
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English at Otago teaches a summer school paper on magic in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and… C S Lewis I think
Thanks for bringing it to my attention, since it helps my assertion that these are mostly just hobby courses for the privileged and not valid investments of the taxpayers money.
Anyway, I've made my points and short of any new arguments, I think we've covered the subject. I get that people are defensive about the premise, because my assertion means that they've wasted years of their life and quite a lot of money, but defensiveness, outrage and accusations of barbarism are not arguments. Ben - you've made some good arguments, and in making them make a good case for the validity of a philosophy degree.
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Isn’t the entire point of universities that they are first and foremost institutions of higher learning, and not training providers?
To me the point of a university is to train people in areas that require higher learning to master them, ie: people studying economics generally need to study history, lawyers or mathematicians may need to study philosophy etc, and there's been a huge amount of mission creep in which the subjects that were supposed to supplement an education become the purpose of (some peoples) education.
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It’s colored your blog though, which I would suggest is actually a more important thing to New Zealand than your IT career, which is only useful to you.
Well, my IT career was also important to the financial companies I worked for in London and New York - so there's my great contribution to society right there.
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Danyl has already admitted to not practicing what he preaches.
That is a little unfair. I was eighteen when I went to university and studied things like religion and ancient greek, and I'm now in my late 30s, so a little inconsistency is, I think, allowed - and unlike other liberal arts students in this thread who went onto diverse things, I didn't find myself quoting the original text of the Iliad in my subsequent IT career. It was not a brilliant investment of the taxpayers money.
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Nah, it's smaller than the last Harry Potter novel, which I have seen several times on buses.
Those poor people, reading Rowling on the bus instead of paying for a Professor to teach them how to analyse it within a critical framework.
Actually, Danyl, I didn’t read a lot of books at all. What I did mostly was engage in dialectic, much like what we are doing right here. It is something that you can only learn by doing it, and that’s not going to happen on the bus unless you’re on a bus full of philosophers who are prepared to give you their time on it.
If only there were some other venue for discussion and debate about, well - subjects like this! - other than a university classroom.
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Then it won't take you a minute to explain why Grey's Anatomy isn't in the hands of every underprivileged commuter in the country.
It's too big.
Everyone could get themselves a piece of that at the library, or on the internet, who needs a whole school for that?
You really want me to explain the premise behind professional qualifications to you? Really?