Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

ksuave -- re 'serious reading' -- as you know, oh it gets worse, lol, much worse (e.g. [linked in] http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=27066404 ) -- author was doing his best

Hegel's signal accomplishment was to really discretely articulate and bring into contemporary Western philosophy the concept of the dialectic -- but he failed to get beyond using it in his further and inherently futile attempts to define abstract absolute prescriptive/positivist principles, rather than fully getting (or being willing to admit the ramifications for his further pontificating) that in the dialectic he had already nailed the one absolute before then basically missing from contemporary Western philosophy -- the simple reality that the dialectic (not limited to just dualistic interactions and influencings, can be and often enough more than just two things/sides involved) is inherently the absolute logic of our inherently endlessly particular and always changing social reality -- and that thus, the entire sum and substance of what is to be learned from philosophy boils down to "if observed facts fit your ideas about how such things are, great, keep working on things cuz there's always more to learn and figure out, and if observed facts don't fit your ideas about how such things are, in particular the more sharply they don't fit, the facts win, and you gotta try again" -- there is no abstract absolute silver bullet concept or principle the sublime contemplation of which can impart actual understanding of social reality as it exists -- no easy way out; to understand something you have to (preferably self-consciously) do the work of learning the particular facts of the thing and figuring out an understanding that in fact fits those facts -- any further pretense and prancing around in the name of 'philosophy' is (at best) self-indulgent exhibitionist mental wankery; that 'rational choice' stuff is particularly ludicrous jabbering drivel -- and see my further thoughts at the link above and at http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=26706638

somewhat similarly, as his signal accomplishment Marx took the dialectic and put it to use defining the particular real and rather significant dialectic between capital and labor in the development and continued evolution ('reproduction') of industrial capitalism -- and then he promptly ran into the ditch trying to use that breakthrough in the apprehension of reality as it stood to define abstract absolute prescriptive/positivist principles -- that ultimately and not surprisingly, as respectively have Hegel's (to this moment in our very own fascists), have ever since mostly 'served' in the form of being used to 'rationalize' decidedly anti-reality-based legitimating ideologies employed by (essentially, whether or not self-identifiedly) fascist authoritarians

kindly forgive the Hegel flashback -- way back when, spent a lot of time going through and unwrapping his stuff -- as I suspect is painfully apparent in my writing in this post -- ruined me for life