Elsewhere (185)
George Will on the terminal stages of leftist academia:
A Washington State University professor said she would lower the grade of any student who used the term “illegal immigrants” when referring to immigrants here illegally. Another Washington State professor warned in his syllabus that white students who want “to do well” in his “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” should show their “grasp of history and social relations” by “deferring to the experiences of people of colour.” Another Washington State teacher, in her syllabus for “Women & Popular Culture,” warned that students risk “failure for the semester” if they use “derogatory/oppressive language” such as “referring to women/men as females or males.”
Janice Fiamengo on the same:
What we are witnessing on university campuses across North America is not by accident or incidentally about the rejection of reason and of the Western intellectual inheritance. Its central object is to destroy the past and remake the present through the practice of the raised fist.
See also this collection of “social justice” demands by suitably processed students. And remember, it isn’t a spoof.
And Jonathan Haidt on the high school roots of this Idiot Weeping Fever™:
As long as many of our elite prep schools are turning out students who have only known eggshells and anger, whose social cognition is limited to a single dimension of victims and victimisers, and who demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, it’s hard to imagine how any university can open students’ minds and prepare them to converse respectfully with people who don’t share their values. Especially when there are no adults around who don’t share their values.
As regular readers will have noticed, “social justice” dogma leads not to moral sophistication but to a kind of mental coarsening; a mix of vanity, unrealism and an absurd reactiveness. All cultivated and indulged by so-called educators who imagine themselves as radical and enlightened. And as Glenn Reynolds notes,
A cynic might say that academia became fiercely supportive of free speech when such a stance was useful to protect leftists within its ranks, and lost interest in free speech once the leftists took control.
Feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.
‘Imagine a million people. Now imagine that they’re ghosts, being bodiless and propertyless and generally disconnected from the material world. Also imagine that they’re aliens, being unafflicted with various human drives and not having basic human knowledge. Now imagine that they are going to be incarnated into human bodies soon, but they don’t know which ones, and they’re negotiating beforehand how they should divide the Earth between them after reincarnation. Finally, imagine that they’re all very risk-averse. Therefore, here’s what I conclude will be the logical endpoint of their negotiations: everyone being equally well off, because they’d be very afraid of the possibility of incarnating into someone who is worse off. Clearly, now, my speculation as to the result of million-person peer-to-peer negotiations among hypothetical ignorant risk-averse alien ghosts planning mass incarnation is the correct way to redistribute goods in our present society, because justice’.
Isn’t this basically what Scientologists believe in?
‘My middle son attends a public STEM university with 60/40 male-female split. It’s been remarkably free from all the identitarian bru-ha-ha at other universities. My son noted that a professor inquired in class why the university had escaped the craziness. A black student raised his hand and said, “We’re studying to be engineers. We don’t have time for that bullshit.” Added a female student, “That, and Fallout 4 just came out.”‘
If I could set up a university from scratch, it would focus initially on STEM subjects. Then I might include an International Studies school which will major on diplomatic, political and military history; a Business school; and a Languages school (no linguistics – you are either there to learn French, or Mandarin, or Arabic, or you can fuck off).
Any proposal to set up a topic with the word ‘studies’ will be vetoed.
So far, the damage is mostly limited to the “Humanities”. If it takes solid hold in the Engineering and Sciences, God help us all.
Can anyone think of actual, concrete, achievable steps to stop this madness?
Well that question becomes: how do you reverse a large sociological trend (or how do you create a competing one)? To which the answer is obviously, you can’t.
But reason prevails surprisingly often. You just have to fight the good fight. If nothing else, imagine that Milo has been run over by a bus and it were only you defending freedoms.
Certainly hones your debating skills anyway 🙂
If it takes solid hold in the Engineering and Sciences, God help us all.
What do you think the climate change thing is? Po-Mo science, that’s what.
I confess that your precis of it is somewhat baffling, and a quick perusal of the Wiki entry scarcely more illuminating.
It’s a crime novel set in medieval Italy at a monastery. Several bizarre murders take place. A brilliant monk and his young protege set about solving the crimes In The Usual Way: analysis of clues, deduction, etc. Everything you’d expect in a good, solid murder mistery from Sherlock Holmes to Midsomer Murders.
You follow the problem-solving process through twists and turns and plenty of dense explanations of medieval philosophy, politics, theology, etc.
Then the monk comes up with a brilliant solution. And then you find out what really happened, and it’s totally different from what the monk thought it was, and yet it fits the same set of clues.
It’s just that the monk was using Occam’s Razor, whereas the real events were so strange that no sane person could have interpreted the clues that way.
The movie has the events but doesn’t emphasize the slipperiness of the semiotic system that the monk used to come to his errant conclusion.
It’s a long novel and hard to plod through unless you find minutae about medieval philosophy to be fascinating.
So that’s why they didn’t include it in the course: it demonstrates something true about crime-solving novels and by extension potential truths about reality, and We Can’t Have cogent discussions about reality because Patriarchy.
Re: Lacan
I’m not sure I would so swiftly throw him and his ilk out the window. While I certainly agree that his writings are confusingly obfuscating to an obscene degree and that admiration for this sort of thing frequently borders on religious fanaticism, I still think there are some good and interesting points to be made.
For instance, the whole business with complex numbers. I certainly don’t think Lacan’s lack of clarity does him any favors, but the mathematical analogy does seem to bear out. To wit, although there is nothing in our daily macro-physical existence that corresponds to complex numbers (in the way that we can model, say, direction or gain/loss by positives & negatives), there nevertheless are at the micro-physical level things that DO behave in these ways (or at least our best models say so). Lacan seems to be saying that there are concepts operating at the unconscious level which don’t behave like anything we can clearly model off of our conscious experiences. So just as we can’t point to anything macro-physical to represent the square root of negative one, we can’t point to anything conscious to represent the concepts Lacan claims accurately model our unconscious processes.
Now, maybe I’m totally wrong about it, but when put that way, it’s not a terribly unclear or radically far-fetched idea. It’s just that whenever you read anything from these guys, everything is so larded up with pseudo-intellectual padding and show-off obscurity that it drives away anyone who’s not already predisposed to fawn over the supposed genius of it all. And with the fawning comes an antipathy against clear, testable statements, which would lead to actual progress in the field, since one could begin to discard models that don’t actually bear out. But then, the fewer theoretical accretions, the smaller your field and the more accessible your specialty to non-experts…so it’s no wonder: Bullshit propagation qua job security over actual intellectual investigation/communication. *SIGH*
Not quite. Scientologists also believe that the alien ghosts are psychic leeches and there are several of them attached to each human, inhibiting our power over space and time. If you pay $$$$$ to the Scientologists to perform Thetan Removal Operations, you can remove these psychic leeches (it’s not really their fault, though, they’re just attached to you because they have traumatic memories of a galactic genocide and being thrown into a volcano) and you will regain the power to control space and time with your mind.
Err, no. All power engineering is done using the mathematics of complex numbers, wwith the imaginary component corresponding to the imaginary part; throwing gigawatts around is, I would suggest, macrophysical.
although there is nothing in our daily macro-physical existence that corresponds to complex numbers
Oh, i dunno…Ever work a government project? The schedules depend on complex numbers and are printed on mobius strips.
TomJ: yes, I’m well aware that macro-things like electricity and fluid flow are modeled based on complex analysis. My point is that you don’t experience the complex numbers in those forces like you do experience the integer 3 by, say, tapping your toe 3 times. I can very easily show you +5 and -5 by walking 5 steps forward and then 5 backwards. I can’t as easily show you i. Yes, there’s the complex plane representation, but a clearly visible 2D axis doesn’t quite capture it all since you can do the same with R2.
I finally got to watch the Milo video. I love Milo. He’s in the same camp (SWIDT) as Jeff Goldstein and Our Host, who gleefully alternate between deep, cogent analyses and crude but sophisticated humor.
(1) The Feminist never explained why so many women cannot find their True Vocation in life without being “encouraged” in a particular direction. Maybe she’s too young to remember when medicine and biology were very definitely NOT female-dominated nor thought of as “girly.”
(2) The reason men continue to dominate math, physics, engineering, and software programming is that most people on the Asperger/autism continuum are boys. Born that way. Unless you have a brain with the Aspie organization, you will not enjoy — and often will not even grasp — the type of work that’s required in those fields. As a tech writer in IT, every day I am exposed to how those guys think, and it’s crazy different from how I think (I’m half-Asped myself) and how the rest of the population thinks. They’re the kids from chess club who are absolutely LOVE to obsess over minutia in quantities great and small, the more complicated the better. Either you have the chops or you don’t. Unless The Feminist would like to induce autism in more girls, the gender disparity will remain.
(3) The Feminist rhetorically assumes that the “consent classes” contain mere Useful Information, no more politically charged than a driver’s ed course. The Feminist also fails to acknowledge that churches and families and Civil Society used to “teach men not to rape” (or play grab-ass in the bus, or otherwise assault a woman) until the Sexual Revolution destroyed it all, egged on by whom? By feminists, natch.
(4) The Feminist asserts that the existence of an aggressive woman (her) and a nurturing man (her squeeze) proves that gender is totes fluid. She does not bother with the idea that female aggression might be qualitatively different from male aggression or that male nurturing might differ from female nurturing in ways that are important to the psychological development of children. You can have 1000 shades of red and 1000 shades of green without any overlap.
(5) The Feminist’s foundational assumptions about the malleability of human nature serve to create the Illusion of Control, wherein everything The Enlightened find “problematic” can eventually be rectified by that illustrious tribe.
(6) The Feminist failed to explain why raising children with gender-related expectations is malum in se. With the exception of effeminate boys being brutalized by their peers (and fathers, often), the effect of gender expectations isn’t such a big deal. I was never a girly-girl like my sisters, I was never told to “be a lady” (and if I had, I’d have ignored it), and the coolest person in the neighborhood (by us kids) was an athletically talented girl who played Little League Baseball with the boys and bested them all.
(7) The Feminist likewise failed to recognize that children choose their toys and manners of play according to what interests them, not by what the larger culture expects. I played with dolls when I felt like it, I played with Tonka trucks in the sandbox when I felt like it, and if there were gendered expectations about my playtime I was blissfully unaware of them. She has obviously not raised her own children: she’d be shocked by how early little boys begin to delight in construction equipment and little girls take interest in babies.
I love Milo.
I like that his approach is unforgiving and unrepentant. The standard feminist boilerplate, which so often goes unchallenged out of politeness or social habit, or reflexive sympathy, is poked and mocked, which can prompt his opponents to reveal things that are quite… instructive. There’s a disregard for social propriety that’s more than just amusing.
For instance, one feminist opponent claimed, post-debate, to have been besieged on Twitter with misogynist hate and unspecified “threats,” thereby confirming her own righteousness. Milo promptly combed through said tweets in search of anything remotely matching her descriptions – and then pointed out, very publicly, that in fact she was bullshitting. In terms of the mainstream UK media, one isn’t supposed to entertain the possibility that sometimes feminists lie.
The reason men continue to dominate math, physics, engineering, and software programming is that most people on the Asperger/autism continuum are boys.
It’s often struck me that the feminists complaining about “male dominance” in STEM subjects are generally women whose poor logic skills and disregard for evidence suggest they wouldn’t thrive there, even if they were vocationally interested in the subjects.
The Feminist’s foundational assumptions about the malleability of human nature serve to create the Illusion of Control, wherein everything The Enlightened find “problematic” can eventually be rectified by that illustrious tribe.
Yes, mankind could be fixed, permanently, if only we’d hand over the keys, if only we’d surrender.
[ Edited. ]
There’s a disregard for social propriety that’s more than just amusing.
I love how he kept asking whether his comments were in violation of the “Safe Spaces Code.”
You just KNOW that they had to factor in his homosexuality as a mitigating factor before ruling on it.
You just KNOW that they had to factor in his homosexuality as a mitigating factor before ruling on it.
Absolutely. And so he exploits it, quite rightly.