Fools, Frauds and Firebrands

Thoughts?

>The book received considerable negative response from the political left in Britain and this had consequences for Scruton's career. In retrospection, Scruton described it as "the beginning of the end of my academic career".[2]

Lefties really are a butthurt group of people.

Bought it about a month ago. Quite the slog actually. It's alright, but Scruton does a fine job of elucidating the theories. It reads like a work of continental philosophy at times.

Crap lit for another board.

Would buy and read.

Now the question is where is the one for the intellectual vandals of the right?

Why did you buy so many user?

Dime a dozen.

>Would buy and read.
You have Glenn Beck on your shelf?

Roger Scrotum

It wasn't me that is a picture from Roger Scruton's Twitter.

>It reads like a work of continental philosophy at times.
That would explain this
A lot of the Brit academia like to do the whole "our analytic philosophy is the truly left wing philosophy". I say a lot, it's fairer to say "enough" probably.

Scruton literally accepted money to shill for tobacco companies.

I actually think it's alright. I know for a fact that his treatment of the Sniffling Slovenian (Žižek) pisses off Žižekians to no end.

His takedowns of Foucault/Sartre were also good - and long overdue in a time when post-modernism gets itself taken so seriously.

That said, I'm a Nietzschean first and foremost, so there are times when his conservatism jars with me ('Cultural Christianity'/etc). That said, he's one of the more reasonable conservatives - as opposed to reactionaries who actually want to turn back he clock.

If you actually read what he wrote in that time, you'd see that he was a quintessentially impartial/indifferent moderator of the whole debate.

There are plenty of retards who think that if you don't want smokers shot on sight, you're pro-smoking.

The trouble I had is that he throws around the word "nonsense" a lot - when it comes to Foucault/Sartre/Derrida/etc.

I mean, it might be valid - but hardly insightful. Most people would agree that shit is nonsense.

He also had a propensity to ad hominem - bringing up Sartre's/Foucault's sex lives, etc.

I think he wrote that Foucault's argument about big buildings like schools/etc being akin to prisons was somehow voided by him going into a similarly big building for his AIDs treatment.

A few low blows, overall. He could have done better, but the book was clearly intended as a rant of sorts.

Liked it. Don't agree with him on everything though.

You're only figuring that out now?

You don't have to be a zizekian to know that quoting something out of context ("Hitler wasn't violent enough") with no explanation is silly.

Scruton might have some good moments, but he certainly has plenty of bad ones.

What does that quote mean in context, then?

Read what Zizek means with "violence" and just read some text where Zizek says that (I'm pretty sure there are a few). Zizek claims that while Hitler used a lot of violence (killing, etc), he didn't use "enough violence" since Hitler wanted to keep things like capitalist dynamics more or less intact.

This might actually be a decent quote to explain it, though it isn't the one where he literally says "Hitler wasn't violent enough":

>One should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions — but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”
In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.

Now whether he actually is right about the nazis being this or that is another story, but he isn't praising Hitler or his violence or asking for more violence in the more obvious sense of the word. He is calling Hitler a shit.

tl;dr Hitler wasn't violent enough = Hitler was a conservative rather than a proper reformer of society/its dynamics, like someone like Gandhi was.

>Crap lit for another board.

Ugh fucking this. Why are we even giving attention to right wingers?

It should be a fucking rule that Veeky Forums stays fucking left.

fucking thissss

I mean lmao kys if you read grandpa shit like scruton lmao

>It's hard to read
>It challenges my privilege/weltanschauung
>better dismiss it as nonsense and ask for """facts"""

is this or Fashionable Nonsense the most white male book of all time?

Are you implying non-whites are more accepting of post-modern philosophy?

I can't even think of a non-white post-modern philosopher.

>muh frenchies are so smart and complicated to read
Don't fall for it OP. It's easier to geberalize and dismiss these vastly different thinkers than it is to crack a book and get diwn to some real criticism (which btw implies having read, digested, and mastered the topic wherein one can condescend).

gerbilize*

Fanon
Weheliye
Spivak
Puar
Bhabha
hooks
West

of course you can't think of any—you don't read them

I'm not sure what the point of this post was. I didn't say there weren't any non-white postmen.