Comments on: Jack Bauer and Growing Up Rich

By: Introducing The Situationist - Gorkemgozleme Sports | World's Sport News

Introducing The Situationist - Gorkemgozleme Sports | World's Sport News — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 02:12:20 +0000

[...] Jack Bauer and Growing Up Rich [...]

By: The Unproductive Situation of Picking Underdogs in the NCAA Tournament « The Situationist

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:02:42 +0000

[...] read the rest, click here. For a related Situationist post, see Cheering for the Underdog and Jack Bauer and Growing Up Rich. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Subconscious Human Bias in NCAA Tournament [...]

By: drowsy

drowsy — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 20:39:36 +0000

Very tempted to ask about Batman/Bruce Wayne, but I’ll save you from that.

What i’d like to ask is for you to point me in the right direction – I’d like to study this sense of ‘not earning it’ and how some politicians who are brought up in privileged circumstances manage to avoid the ‘hadn’t earned it’ stigma, while others are permanently tarred with it.

Looking forward to tackling some of the books in the margin.

By: Patrick S. O'Donnell

Patrick S. O'Donnell — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 23:05:00 +0000

Jost’s work on ‘system justification theory’ as described here brings to mind the following from Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx (1985):
Both the freedom to change employer and the freedom to become an employer oneself give rise to ideological illusions that embody the fallacy of composition. The first is the inference from the fact that a given worker is independent of any specific employer to the conclusion that he is free from all employers, that is independent of capital as such, to the conclusion that all workers can achieve such independence. It might look as if the conclusion of the first inference follows validly from the premise of the second, but this is due merely to the word ‘can’ being employed in two different senses. The freedom of the worker to change employer depends, for its realization, mainly on his decision to do so. He ‘can’ do it, having the real ability to do so should he want to. The freedom to move into the capitalist class, by contrast, only can be realized by the worker who is [to quote Marx] an ‘exceedingly clever and shrewd fellow.’ Any worker ‘can’ do it, in the sense of having the formal freedom to do so, but only a few are really able to. Hence the worker possesses the least important of the two freedoms—namely the freedom to change employer—in the strongest sense of these two senses of freedom. He can actually use it should he decide to. Conversely, the more important freedom to move into the capitalist class obtains only in the weaker, more conditional sense: ‘every workman, if he is an exceedingly clever fellow…can possibly be converted into an exploiteur du travail d’autrui.’ Correlatively, the ideological implications of the two freedoms differ. With respect to the first, the ideologically attractive aspect is that the worker is free in the strong sense, while the second has the attraction of making him free with respect to an important freedom. If the two are confused, as they might easily be, the idea could emerge that the worker remains in the working class by choice rather than necessity (p. 211).

By: Michael McCann

Michael McCann — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 21:14:47 +0000

John, Thanks for these kind comments and also your comments on Only Baseball Matters--we really appreciate them and hope The Situationist will be a great read.

By: John J Perricone

John J Perricone — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 19:17:49 +0000

I am so pleased to know that you guys are out here, doing such outstanding, really ground-breaking, writing. I am sure I am a situationist, albeit, unknowingly and unintentionally, and will get my eyes on just about any book that will further illuminate this mind-beinding subject. Great, great work.