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i have had a constant headache for almost a week now. it's starting to piss me off.
i've got 14 pages of my thesis done, though the introduction needs more added and a lot of editing and one page is just the beginning of the strauss section and i'm not sure where it's going to end up. but there is one completed section. i think next i'm going to work on the post-cold-war, pre-9/11 neocons and how they were sorta drifting. defense planning guidance and kristol/kagan and finally PNAC. i read a bunch of stuff on strauss today, which was sorta a digression from what i should really be thinking about -- it's much more conceptual and right now i want to focus on the historical. i think the more conceptual stuff i'm really going to need to work with juviler on, to make sure i'm not making little mistakes in interpreting things. there was a lot of talk a couple years back when i was still taking classes that SIPA really misses out on a lot of postmodern political philosophy in its core courses, and that seems to fit my experience. i didn't even take the SIPA core course, as i wasn't eligible, but my human rights classes were very focused on enlightenment thinkers. danchin tried to sneak in some other stuff, but he had a tendency to go overboard in his early lectures and then get backed up as the semester went on, so the later stuff got rushed. as such, we talked a lot about locke, mill, and rousseau, and that was the stuff i already knew very well from chicago. i was frustrated about this at the time and am only more so now. i got a little bit more from the kuflik class, including rawls and kymlicka and a greater understanding of libertarianism. but i'm still undereducated in a lot of the offshoots of marxism. i think part of that is a general feeling in the international relations community that since the fall of communism, marxist philosophy isn't relevant anymore. that may be true, but for someone who's trying to get a greater understanding of the historical situations that gave rise to neoconservatism, having to educate myself on trotsky and gramsci has been a little frustrated, because i don't have anyone to bounce things off of to see if i'm understanding them right -- to the degree that there's one right way to read them, of course.
but yeah. headache. not fun.
i've got 14 pages of my thesis done, though the introduction needs more added and a lot of editing and one page is just the beginning of the strauss section and i'm not sure where it's going to end up. but there is one completed section. i think next i'm going to work on the post-cold-war, pre-9/11 neocons and how they were sorta drifting. defense planning guidance and kristol/kagan and finally PNAC. i read a bunch of stuff on strauss today, which was sorta a digression from what i should really be thinking about -- it's much more conceptual and right now i want to focus on the historical. i think the more conceptual stuff i'm really going to need to work with juviler on, to make sure i'm not making little mistakes in interpreting things. there was a lot of talk a couple years back when i was still taking classes that SIPA really misses out on a lot of postmodern political philosophy in its core courses, and that seems to fit my experience. i didn't even take the SIPA core course, as i wasn't eligible, but my human rights classes were very focused on enlightenment thinkers. danchin tried to sneak in some other stuff, but he had a tendency to go overboard in his early lectures and then get backed up as the semester went on, so the later stuff got rushed. as such, we talked a lot about locke, mill, and rousseau, and that was the stuff i already knew very well from chicago. i was frustrated about this at the time and am only more so now. i got a little bit more from the kuflik class, including rawls and kymlicka and a greater understanding of libertarianism. but i'm still undereducated in a lot of the offshoots of marxism. i think part of that is a general feeling in the international relations community that since the fall of communism, marxist philosophy isn't relevant anymore. that may be true, but for someone who's trying to get a greater understanding of the historical situations that gave rise to neoconservatism, having to educate myself on trotsky and gramsci has been a little frustrated, because i don't have anyone to bounce things off of to see if i'm understanding them right -- to the degree that there's one right way to read them, of course.
but yeah. headache. not fun.