#the slurring slovene

[hotcat37]

22 for bojere :)

hope you don't mind that I wrote it in the deaf AU <3

22: in a rush of adrenaline

They'd lost track of time easily. The hours fly by when Jere spends them with Bojan. Right now they're stumbling down the street, the Slovene hanging off of his shoulder, helplessly giggling when Jere almost trips.

Perhaps they've had a few too many drinks. But they're still very much responsible, because neither of them took the car. Jere is counting on Slovenia's public transport to get them home.

"I hhhhad a great time with....with you tonight!" Bojan slurs happily, pressing sloppy kisses onto the side of Jere's flushed face.

Jere leans into the brunette's uncoordinated but loving touches with a big smile. He makes sure to keep Bojan upright, supporting him. If it comes down to it, he might just have to give his boyfriend a piggyback ride to the bus stop.

Speaking of bus, one races past them next to the sidewalk. Jere doesn't pay it much attention until Bojan suddenly gasps, halfway through the ramble the Finn truthfully wasn't really listening to anyway, a dramatic little noise that makes him pause. He quickly types out a message while his lover dumbly stands there.

What is the problem?? 😵

"That's....that's our last bus!" The younger man squeaks out. Jere follows his gaze and sure enough, there's the bus that just sped past them, now motionless in front of a red light. Jere grimaces once he notices that the bus stop is still quite a distance away and their ride home is way closer to it than they are.

They absolutely have to catch this bus. So while Bojan audibly whines and fears for the worst beside him, Jere turns to his boyfriend with a determined expression. The Slovene stops yapping right away at the look on his face and before he can even say anything, Jere has clasped a hand around the other man's wrist.

"R...uuu....nn!"

He all but drags Bojan behind him as he makes a run for it. The brunette in question is mumbling curses and nonsense under his breath but manages to keep his legs moving surprisingly well for a drunk guy. The bus starts moving again as the light turns green but Jere is determined to get them on there no matter what it takes. He runs as fast as he can, sprinting once the bus pulls over to the stop, Bojan helpless to do anything but follow him.

In the end, the both of them manage to hop inside just as the doors close shut behind them. They're wheezing, completely out of breath, just quietly standing there and panting before breaking out into uncontrollable laughter.

"You're crazy!" Bojan accuses, eyes crinkled with a big smile. Just as Jere is about to type a snarky response, he loses his balance when the bus abruptly lunges forwards, sending him practically flying into Bojan's chest.

"Eep-!"

Bojan is beneath him on the floor of the bus, wide brown eyes blinking up at Jere, hypnotizing him. Jere's heart is still racing in his chest from the effort of running and the leftover sense of adrenaline, and he can't help himself. He leans down to kiss Bojan. In the back of this half empty bus, at around 1 AM, Jere kisses his Slovene.

It's complete bliss for a few seconds up until Jere gasps like a fish out of the water. Through all the excitement and chaos, he'd forgotten that he doesn't need to hold his breath to kiss Bojan.

[mocacheezy]

The funniest thing to me is how a slur in one language might be a completely regular word in another.

Slut (swedish) translates to End (english)

And this got me thinking...

Slut (slovene) translates to Hunch (english).

"SLUTNJA!" cries a woman in the street, pointing at a lady in a tight fitting short dress, while she clutches her pearl string purse close to her chest.

The lady and her friends exchange glances, checking for any stains or tears on her clothes. One of the men in a sparkly green suit steps forward, motioning to his jacket. In a patient, exaggerated voice he asks her, assuming the woman before them isn't a fortune teller and just a confused tourist.

"Suk-nja?"

The woman hunches her shoulders and glares, scurrying into the nearby tailor shop, flushing brightly at the snickers of the passing people as she mutters to herself.

Or,

Fagot (slovene) translates to Bassoon (english)

"Ti si fagot!" cries the foreign homophobe, not understanding why the fags around him erupt into fits of laughter.

"Ponosni fagot" becomes a hit from a new queer band, the name of it on racks upon racks of t-shirts. The foreigner fumes, looking like a bass band newbie as he stomps away from the store.

It makes me giggle, how wonderful is it that a language where trying to insult someone results in calling them an instrument in their own language. It's funny if a person doesn't know they are being (incorrectly) insulted. But even funnier if they know it and are pretending they have no idea what the person is talking about.

Puns are great. XD

[follivora]

This is genuine question : although queer is the word I prefer and identify with the most, I only ever use it in english. It does exist in my language but we still don't really use it. I wonder how it is for slovenians 🤔

It's used here as "queer" while speaking czech as well (like everyone is gonna know what you mean), I mean we say gay and that's english anyway, we don't have other (non slur) word for it.. so i suppose slovene is gonna be the same? idk @ slovenes please interact

[dynamoe]

Boy Genius on AO3 | Prologue | Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 | Ch 5

I've been drawing my theoretical concept for a Conjectural Technologies: ORIGINS spin-off for months, so I finally committed to putting words to it.

Your eyes will be better off reading on A03 but I'll post chapters here if it gets it to people who'd want to read this sort of thing.

↓ Chapter 1 is below the fold ↓

Fifteen years pass (more or less). Norman has Stormed. The Man from Hope gets inaugurated. Downtown LA smolders while the Balkans are sparking. And then this shit...

Chapter 1: I'm A Loser, Baby

“Fffzzztttt… just your average kids but--- chhhhh…. their parents say there’s a problem! Help! They’re teenagers now and wow, they’re out of control!”

Plink! A bottle cap ricocheted off to the upper left. Jenny remained unfazed, being as she was pre-recorded a thousand miles away in Chicago.

“Fffzzztt… to a MAKEOVER or it’s off to BOOTCAMP! Today, on the Jenny Jones Show….fzzzztt….”

A second bottle cap grazed Jenny Jones’s shoulder as she turned to a stage full of stewing parents sitting next to children in corpse paint, 12” platforms and spiked mohawks straight out of central casting for “miscellaneous dystopian thugs” in a Chuck Norris film.

Another bottle cap arced high and dinged off the bent-wire-hanger aerial, the static finally consuming the image entirely.

“Got it. Pretty fucking good for having no goddamn depth perception,” Billy slurred to an empty trailer, cracking open the last of the Zima four-pack. He rubbed the eyelid over his missing eye, no idea where his eyepatch went but didn’t care.

“’Zima’ means winter in Polish, Slovene, Slovak, Serbo-Croat, and Czech? There’s some fucking trivia for you,” he mumbled while choking down his 4th bottle of the day, trying not to think about how tasted like drinking scotch tape soaked in air freshener. Or like flat Sprite mixed with aluminum foil and rubbing alcohol. Zima was clear (all the best products were these days) and it was cheap. The TV commercial for Zima showed irreverent hip young people laughing with some loser in a dumb hat who couldn’t pronounce his esses right so maybe the product spoke to him. Most importantly, the product made him drunk. He laid back in his nest of empties and snack food and trash on the couch.

The door squeaked and rattled as Pete White struggled to open it with his foot, his arms full of packages. He staggered a few feet and he released his armload onto the kitchenette counter into a postal landslide. He turned back to notice Billy on the couch where he had left him— unshowered, unshaved, in the same dirty clothes, scowling with a smoldering cigarette hanging off his lip.

“Encounter: level 12 Alcoholic Divorced Dad Dwarf of Middle Earth. Plus-one against child support.”

“Ugh. Shut up,” Billy muttered as flicked ash into a branded Conjectural Technologies coffee mug. One of 500 White had ordered to “get their name out there,” and then left in a pile in the storage closet.

“Aw, Jeeze,” Pete grumbled, fanning the smokey air with last month’s issue Sassy from the mail pile, “You know it’ll be impossible to get the smell out of the curtains. Do you have to smoke in here? Huh?”

“Do you have to put magnetic poetry all over my hand when I’m sleeping?” Billy angrily raised his magnet-crusted mechanical hand, shedding “majestic” “symphony” and “purple” as he moved it.

White smirked, internally delighted, “I couldn’t find a pen so I was leaving you a note reminding you to get a haircut. I feel like I’m living with a scale model of Snake Pliskin.”

“WhatEVER,” Billy snarled. He didn’t disagree his long greasy hair made him look like an Irish Setter drowning in Crisco but what did it matter? Nothing mattered.

White frowned. “You’re really harshing the dynamics of our double act, pally, with this self-pity thing. I can’t play dryly acerbic without a naive optimist to play off of, y’know.”

“I’m just…” Billy killed the last of the bottle and pitched it weakly into the pile, his anger drained, “You know if I went to MIT like I planned to I would have graduated this summer.”

He flicked “languid” and “cacophony” off his wrist, “Maybe I’d even have a doctorate, too. I dunno.”

White busied himself with the mail. Billy wasn’t throwing out accusations yet but his train of thought could turn ugly for him depending how the ZIMA hit him.

“I was the greatest mind in a generation. What am I doing with my life?” Billy muttered, staring at the burning end of his cigarette. Melancholy, “I shelve books part-time at a public library! An ape could do my job,”

“An ape would probably do it better! Because they have longer arms. Oh, and they could climb the shelves!” White chimed in, “But they’d probably, like, crap everywhere so that’s a minus.”

“Nights I wash fucking dishes at a ‘50s-themed diner in a mall.” A sudden rage, “A WILDLY INACCURATE ‘50s-themed diner!” He jumped to his feet.

“We Built This City on Rock & Roll — released 1985 by Starship — does not belong on the house music! ‘Chicken fingers’— invented 1976 in Savannah, GA — do not exist in 1955! I tell the general manager all the time, but does he care? Where’s the stifling suburban malaise? Where’s the simmering feeling of nuclear dread? This so-called ‘theme’ your institution perpetrates is willful disinformation!”

White relaxed; this rant could go on for hours and he wasn’t the target.

Billy concluded, “Being an adult SUCKS.”

“Takes most people more than a year into it to figure that out. Still a genius. Congratulations, Billy,” White said.

Billy sighed, exhausted again. He crawled back to the couch.

“I finally cleared out the PO Box.,” White said, indicating the packages on the kitchen counter.

“Mine. Mine. Mine,” White claimed a stack of music mags and mailers from bedroom record labels out of the mail pile. He tapped a box from a scientific supply warehouse, “That’s probably the catalyst solution we ordered for the mind control experiment.” He found a couple padded envelopes in the pile and shook them, “VHS tapes. From your internet super highway nerd friends. Go soak in nostalgia. Get the stink off you.”

Billy perked up slightly. White raised his arm to toss them over but Billy shrieked, “No! Don’t! You’ll damage them.”

White rolled his eyes, and walked the packages to the couch, “They made it through the mail from —” he checked the labels “— Murfreesboro just fine. They’re not going to break eight feet from me to you.” He stacked the envelopes on the top of Billy’s head and joined him on the couch.

White sorted the remaining mail into piles. More supplies for Conjectural Technologies projects. Bills. Catalogues. Another letter from Billy’s mother — oof, save that for later. He wanted to keep Billy’s mood up for as long as possible. He pocketed it.

“Whoa,” gasped White.

“What?” muttered Billy, tearing open the first envelope.

“We got an invitation from the World Super Science Forum,” White said, puzzled. A glossy brochure as nearly big as a Trapper Keeper slid out of the envelope, sparkling with metallic ink. It looked like a wedding invitation for a giant who also happened to be an art director.

“As if,” Billy scoffed without even looking up from his coveted “105: The Ticking Monkey. Long Edit. KTLA Cartoon Cavalcade. NOTE: Missing Closing Credits'' VHS tape. All the heavy negotiation on the alt.fan.rustyventure USENET group to set up this trade had finally paid off.

“It’s gotta be the sign,” White gestured to the ceiling, above which $700 ($1344 today) of neon he commissioned to flash their company name to a rarely-traveled backroad in the middle of the desert, tripling their electricity bill. “Neon demands respect.”

Billy was a million miles away, squinting at the tape’s edges for potential cracks in transit and mentally tabulating how many more episodes eluded his decades-long quest for a complete collection of the series.

“Word must be getting out about our…,” White beamed in salesman mode before stumbling on the landing, “Uh, work?”

Conjectural Technologies didn’t do shit and both of them knew it. But here was an invitation to the premier professional Super Science conference in the US.

“It’s in Seattle this year. That’s like the coolest city in the world right now.”

“Frasier lives there,” Billy said flatly. He was still woozy. Zima-drunk.

“It’s basically the new Vatican,” White agreed, “Ground zero for both the tech and expensive coffee industry and the home of ‘the Seattle sound.’”

“They throw fish. In the market,” Billy said, suddenly very sleepy. Why did he drink so much Zima? Oh, he remembered it was because he hated himself and his garbage-failure life.

White read through the brochure like a kid tearing into a Sears Christmas Wishbook, “Technology demos. Lectures. Hey, we’d get to go to an awards dinner at the top of the Space Needle. This looks so cool.”

“We should go,” Billy said, drifting into semi-consciousness.

“Yeah!” White turned to the final page of the invitation. Early registration - $550 ($1044 in today’s money) a person. Does not include airfare. “Oh.”

He showed Billy the price without speaking. They both sat silently. Living paycheck to paycheck, that was astronomically outside their budget.

“THIS is why Super Science is dying out,” Pete said angrily, slapping the brochure, “It’s like, you gotta be a legacy or already have a compound or a ton of government contracts to even pay for this shit. It’s MORIBUND! The same old scientists. Same old IDEAS. What about the scrappy independents on the fringes! THAT’s where the next big thing is coming from.”

“A lot of passion from a ‘scientist’ who does jack shit,” Billy snickered, half-asleep.

Pete looked at the brochure again, “It’s too bad we didn’t get invited earlier. It says here ‘Boy Genius’ admission is half-price.”

“Makes sense,” Billy muttered, “Trying to stem the tide of potential future science geniuses defecting to Silicon Valley. No kid even thinks about going into Super Science anymore.”

“AND their parent/guardian/sidekick/lab assistant can plus-one for free — I’m at least two of those!”

A pause.

“Just tell them I’m a kid.”

“Huh?”

“Register me as a ‘boy genius’ and take the discount.”

White was shocked, “You want to lie?”

“If they find out what can they do to us? Kick us out?”

“Did your high horse bolt the stable? Dishonesty from Baby Billy “I Never Do Anything Wrong” Whalen?”

“JUST LIE!” Billy shouted, “Register Conjectural Technologies for the Conference. One Boy Genius. One… whatever you are.”

Billy rolled over, looking green, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

on archiveofourown.org Prologue | Ch 1 | Ch 2 | Ch 3 | Ch 4 | Ch 5

[najlepshy]

Making my nephew listen to klemen klemen so he learns every swear word and slur contained in the slovene language

[leyhejuhyunghan]

Sloven, tidy, dapper, natty, slur, smarmy, unctuously, fulsome, dowdy, drab, tatty, unkempt, dishevel, disheveled, tawdry, boo

Sloven, tidy, dapper, natty, slur, smarmy, unctuously, fulsome, dowdy, drab, tatty, unkempt, dishevel, disheveled, tawdry, boo

https://yourjuhyunghan.tumblr.com/post/627398603707744257/sloven-tidy-dapper-natty-slur-smarmy

Sloven: a person who is habitually negligent of neatness or cleanliness in dress, appearance, etc. a person who works, acts, speaks, etc., in a negligent, slipshod manner.
 Tidy: any of various articles for keeping things tidy, as a box having small drawers and compartments. an antimacassar (a small covering, usually ornamental, placed on the backs and arms of upholstered furniture to prevent wear or soiling; a tidy.). 
Dapper: neat; trim; smart: He looked very dapper in his new suit. lively and brisk: to walk with a dapper step. small and active.
 Natty: neatly or trimly smart in dress or appearance; spruce: a natty white uniform.
 Slur: to pass over lightly or without due mention or consideration (often followed by over): The report slurred over her contribution to the enterprise.
 to pronounce (a syllable, word, etc.) indistinctly by combining, reducing, or omitting sounds, as in hurried or careless utterance. to cast aspersions (a damaging or derogatory remark or criticism; slander) on; calumniate (to make false and malicious statements about; slander.); disparage (to speak of or treat slightingly; depreciate; belittle, to bring reproach or discredit upon; lower the estimation of); depreciate (to reduce the purchasing value of (money), to lessen the value or price of, to claim depreciation on (a property) for tax purposes, to represent as of little value or merit; belittle, to decline in value.): The candidate was viciously slurred by his opponent.
 Smarmy: excessively or unctuously flattering, ingratiating, servile, etc.: the emcee with the smarmy welcome.

 Unctuously: characterized by excessive piousness or moralistic fervor, especially in an affected manner; excessively smooth, suave, or smug. 
of the nature of or characteristic of an unguent (an ointment or salve, usually liquid or semiliquid, for application to wounds, sores, etc.) or ointment; oily; greasy.
 an ointment or salve, usually liquid or semiliquid, for application to wounds, sores, etc. Fulsome: offensive to good taste, especially as being excessive; overdone or gross: fulsome praise that embarrassed her deeply; fulsome décor.
 disgusting; sickening; repulsive: a table heaped with fulsome mounds of greasy foods. excessively or insincerely lavish: fulsome admiration. encompassing all aspects; comprehensive: a fulsome survey of the political situation in Central America. abundant or copious.
 Dowdy: not stylish; drab; old-fashioned: Why do you always wear those dowdy old dresses?, a dowdy woman.



Drab: dull; cheerless; lacking in spirit, brightness, etc. having the color drab. dull gray; dull brownish or yellowish gray. any of several fabrics of this color, especially of thick wool or cotton.


Tatty: cheap or tawdry; vulgar: a tatty production of a Shakespearean play.
 shabby or ill-kempt; ragged; untidy: an old house with dirty windows and tatty curtains.

 Unkempt: not combed: unkempt hair. 
uncared-for or neglected; disheveled; messy: unkempt clothes; an unkempt lawn.
 unpolished; rough; crude.



Dishevel: to let down, as hair, or wear or let hang in loose disorder, as clothing. to cause untidiness and disarray in: The wind disheveled the papers on the desk.
 Disheveled: hanging loosely or in disorder; unkempt: disheveled hair. untidy; disarranged: a disheveled appearance. Tawdry: (of finery, trappings, etc.) gaudy (brilliantly or excessively showy, cheaply showy in a tasteless way; flashy, ostentatiously ornamented; garish (crudely or tastelessly colorful, showy, or elaborate, as clothes or decoration, excessively ornate or elaborate, as buildings or writings, dressed in or ornamented with bright colors, excessively bright; glaring.).); showy and cheap. low or mean; base: tawdry motives. 
cheap, gaudy apparel.
 Boo: (used to express contempt or disapprobation or to startle or frighten).
 an exclamation of contempt or disapproval: a loud boo from the bleachers ((sometimes singular) a tier of seats in a sports stadium, etc, that are unroofed and inexpensive, the people occupying such seats).
 to cry boo in derision.

[socialistexan]

Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers, but of course the enemy does not have to be Jewish. Each culture specifies the national enemy. Even though in Germany the foreign, the unclean, the contagious, and the subversive often mingled in a single diabolized image of the Jew, [Roma] and Slavs were also targeted. American fascists diabolized blacks and sometimes Catholics as well as Jews. Italian Fascists diabolized their South Slav neighbors, especially the Slovenes, as well as the socialists who refused the war of national revival. Later they easily added to their list the Ethiopians and the Libyans, whom they tried to conquer in Africa.

Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. I think it is fair to expand the American Fascist Enemy to include Latinos. (Note: edited to remove racial slur)

[theculturedmarxist]

What really makes me mad when I read critical (and even some favorable) reactions to my work is the recurring characterization of me as a postmodern cultural critic – the one thing I don’t want to be. I consider myself a philosopher dealing with fundamental ontological questions, and, furthermore, a philosopher in the traditional vein of German Idealism.

Everyone who has seen Hitchcock’s Vertigo remembers the mysterious scene in the sequoia park where Madeleine walks over to a redwood cross-section of an over-thousand-year-old trunk showing its growth history by date, points to two circular lines close to the outer edge and says: “Here I was born . . . and here I died.” In a similar way, we can imagine a philosophy muse in front of a timeline of European history, pointing to two date markers close to each other and saying: “Here I was born . . . and here I died.” The first marker designates 1781, the publication date of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the second one 1831, the year of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s death.

For me, in some sense, all of philosophy happened in these fifty years: the vast development prior to it was just a preparation for the rise of the notion of the transcendental, and in the post-Hegelian development, philosophy returns in the guise of the common Judy, i.e., the vulgar nineteenth-century empiricism. For me, all four great German idealists — Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel — articulated a distance towards idealist subjectivity and gained a non-metaphysical insight into the essence of history and the alienation of our existence. They struggled with how to break out of the horizon of absolute subjectivity without regressing to pre-transcendental realism.

But which Hegel am I referring to here? Where am I speaking from? To simplify it to the utmost, the triad that defines my philosophical stance is that of Baruch Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza is arguably the pinnacle of realist ontology: there is substantial reality out there, and we can get to know it through our reason, dispelling the veil of illusions. Kant’s transcendental turn introduces a radical gap here: we cannot ever gain access to the way things are in themselves, our reason is constricted to the domain of phenomena, and if we try to reach beyond phenomena to the totality of being, our mind gets caught in necessary antinomies and inconsistencies. What Hegel does here is to posit that there is no reality in-itself beyond phenomena, which does not mean that all that there is is the interplay of phenomena. The phenomenal world is marked by the bar of impossibility, but beyond this bar there is nothing, no other world, no positive reality, so we are not returning to pre-Kantian realism; it is just that what for Kant is the limitation of our knowledge, the impossibility to reach the thing-in-itself, is inscribed into this thing itself.

Furthermore, Hegel is NOT a critical thinker: his basic stance is that of reconciliation – not reconciliation as a long-term goal but reconciliation as a fact which confronts us with the unexpected bitter truth of the actualized Ideal. If there is a Hegelian motto, it is something like: find a truth in how things turn wrong! The message of Hegel is not “the spirit of trust” (the title of Robert Brandom’s latest book on Hegel’s Phenomenology) but rather the spirit of distrust – his premise is that every large human project turns wrong and only in this way attests to its truth. The French Revolution wanted universal freedom and climaxed in terror, Communism wanted global emancipation and gave birth to Stalinist terror… Hegel’s lesson is thus a new version of Big Brother’s famous slogan from George Orwell’s 1984 ”freedom is slavery”: when we try to enforce freedom directly, the result is slavery. So whatever Hegel is, he is decidedly not a thinker of a perfect ideal that we approach infinitely.

Heinrich Heine (who was Hegel’s student in the philosopher’s last years) propagated the story that he once told Hegel he cannot endorse Hegel’s formula “all that is actual is rational,” and that Hegel looked carefully around and told his student not too loudly: “Perhaps, I should say: all that is actual should be rational.” Even if factually true, this anecdote is philosophically a lie – if not an outright invention of Heine, it represents Hegel’s attempt to cover up from his student the painful message or truth of his thinking.

Such a Hegel is the central point of reference of my entire work.

[theculturedmarxist]

[theculturedmarxist]

Don’t fall into the trap of feeling guilty, especially if you have the luck of studying in such a rich place. All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory. Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”

Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.”

But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?”