Don’t Oppress My People With Your White Devil Science
In the video below, filmed at the University of Cape Town, members of the science faculty meet with student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university and not pay their bills. During the meeting, one of the staff, one of the “science people,” points out that, contrary to claims being made by a student protestor, witchcraft doesn’t in fact allow Africans to throw lightning at their enemies.
He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave. Repeated cowed apologies ensue. The offended speaker, the one claiming that Africans can in fact throw lightning at each other – and who disdains “Western knowledge” as “very pathetic” – then uses the apparently scandalous reference to reality as the sole explanation for why she is “not in the science faculty.”
There being no other, perhaps more obvious, reason.
Among the gems, this:
That, since you ask, is where the lightning-hurling crops up, cited as a guiding example of this New, More Glorious Paradigm. Like science, if only in name, but browner and therefore better, obviously.
I sometimes wonder if the Clown Quarter of academia might actually be a massive and rather perverse behavioural experiment, the point of which is to see just how credulous and mentally deformable human beings are.
Lifted from yesterday’s comments. Via AnotherFred.
Update:
Given the air of farce, it’s hard to tell exactly how sincere or disingenuous those filmed above are being. Perhaps the ostensibly respectful audience is held in place, in part, by a morbid curiosity. However, what is obvious is the protestors’ delight in passive-aggressive leverage and games of social dominance. The appeal to witchcraft and “sacredness,” the pretence of victimhood and injured feelings, all of it seems a pretext to cow the faculty, the “science people,” and to indulge in scolding. Some people really enjoy that kind of thing, of course, and will become cartoonish and absurd in order to indulge in it.
As Nikw211 notes in the comments, the students don’t seem overly troubled by the largely white, Western origins of the claptrap they regurgitate. But the claptrap is flattering, and is intended to flatter, and thereby seduce. It offers excuses. Not least for mediocrity. And so we have students, supposed intellectuals, demanding they be taken seriously while claiming, based on nothing, that the scientific method and tribal superstition are just rival epistemologies and therefore – yes, therefore – somehow equal in their accuracy and usefulness.
And despite the inevitable rumblings of racial oppression, I can’t help wondering whether the students would be similarly indulged and deferred to if they had paler skin.
Update 2:
In the comments, Theophrastus steers us to a piece in the Times, which offers a taste of the studious climate at the University of Cape Town and elsewhere:
Science lecturers contacted by The Times said that violence at the country’s universities had made work almost impossible. Many are afraid to speak out against the students. Lecturers warned of an exodus of academics to overseas universities or privately owned institutions… While none of the academics would comment on the “Sciencemustfall” movement, one referred to a period in the early 2000s when Thabo Mbeki, the president at the time, refused to allow an antiretroviral treatment campaign for people with Aids. Mr Mbeki’s health minister promoted a traditional African method for fighting disease: a concoction of garlic, beetroot and onion.
As a result of such identitarian pieties, which include burning historic artwork and smearing statues with human faeces, I’m sure the protestors will soon be surging to the forefront of intellectual endeavour.
student protestors who wish to “decolonise” the university and not pay their bills.
They don’t want to pay for their education because it won’t make them any smarter or employable.
They don’t want to pay for their education because it won’t make them any smarter or employable.
It helps if you bear in mind that Angry Studies, around which such protests congeal, tends to attract people of fairly limited ability and who find themselves struggling in an environment intended, at least originally, for people smarter than them. And which typically results in a dissonance between their self-image, their vanity, and the facts of the matter. Happily, Angry Studies offers endless excuses for why these difficulties, these feelings of inadequacy, are not their fault, but the fault of everyone else.
If you call science ‘Western knowledge’ you haven’t understood how science works.
Somewhat related, the first item here and of course this.
Spot on, Dan. Testing all assertions is what has lead to ‘Western’ knowledge. Taking all assertions as true is what leads to this shower of self-absorbed wibble-heads.
Will she give up her phone and Internet access when she ‘decolonises’ her culture back to primitivism?
That sort of belief in magic rather than science is what leads to this:
And this.
So good luck with that.
Also relevant, the last item here, an interview with Dr Duke Pesta, in which he details the politically-induced ignorance of his students and the fact that it’s all but impossible, career-wise, for a professor to fail 40% of his students, even though 40% of his students really shouldn’t be there, even with lowered standards.
the politically-induced ignorance of his students
That.
That.
Well, the students’ ignorance – in this case of elementary history regarding slavery – isn’t, I think, an accident or random oversight. They’ve been steered to a false and loaded conclusion, one that many will regurgitate as a kind of self-validation, in order to conform with a preferred narrative of their leftist ‘educators’. They may know bugger all about history, even at university, but they’re exploitable.
How long before universities start to dump their humanities courses, like excising rotting flesh to save the whole?
You see this a lot in Africa, and other places. Somebody – like the woman doing the talking – has found herself slightly smarter than those around her locally, who are as thick as pigshit (i.e. believing in witchcraft) and uses that smidgen of additional intelligence to manipulate those around her. This goes on for some time until she genuinely believes she is smarter than everyone else, and doesn’t realise there are whole continents of people far smarter than her. She then proceeds to make an utter fool of herself and demonstrate that she’s as dumb as a box of rocks on a global measure.
I saw this working with Nigerians and Indians. They’d try to fool me using childish, dumbass tricks and rhetoric that probably work on an uneducated farmer, believing they are smarter than anyone else. This is why the 419 scams are so notoriously bad, they really think the whole world is as thick as those around them.
How long before universities start to dump their humanities courses, like excising rotting flesh to save the whole?
Why? Those are their best revenue generators and low cost on the expenses side. Humanities are similar to philosophy as in this old joke…
Dean, to the physics department. “Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn’t you be like the math department – all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper.”
I for one, would simply LOVE to be able to throw lightning at my enemies.
How morbidly sullen and po faced the student is, turning what was being enjoyed by all with laughter into her solemn facile lecture. Watch as the merriment is sucked out of the faces as they bend to the correct stance when confronted by this week’s unacceptable discourse.
> The offended speaker …
I wonder if the same offended young woman – the one so offended by (white) Western modernity – is fully aware of the extent to which she is merely regurgitating the ossified words of long dead, white western European male intellectuals?
I mean at one point she quite literally parrots Sartre (“western knowledge is totalising”) and the whole de-colonising shtick comes from Said which in turn came from Foucault.
If she wants to ‘decolonise the university’ those might be good places to make a start before having a go at the scientific method.
I wonder if the same offended young woman – the one so offended by (white) Western modernity – is fully aware of the extent to which she is merely regurgitating the ossified words of long dead, white western European male intellectuals?
Heh. Cake for that man, stat.
Clown sittings are worldwide apparently.
This cobblers is just one African manifestation of the pan-global cobblers turning our universities into kindergartens: http://bit.ly/2cvLtsR Really, you have to laugh at it or you’d be opening your veins…
[S]he is merely regurgitating the ossified words of long dead, white western European male intellectuals?
Original thought is like Original Sin. They both happened a long time ago to people you couldn’t possibly have known — Fran Lebowitz
I for one, would simply LOVE to be able to throw lightning at my enemies.
You already can, or close enough, if you can lay your hands on a firearm. As superpowers go, that one would be kind of meh.
The Dalston Mercury thing…is this the new Rickroll?
It’s striking to see the radical difference in demeanor between asinine student agitators and their opponents. In the case above, the faculty would have been well within their rights to drive the speakers from of the room with questions, criticism, laughter, and an earnest discussion of the university’s obviously questionable admission standards. Yet the one (reasonable) attempt at criticism draws an invocation of “sacred space” and a demand for an apology, which the speakers receive.
This is but one of many incidents where supposedly “marginalized” students and their fellow travelers rail against their oppression and low status, all-the-while shouting down or silencing their oppressors or resorting to acts of violence, as we saw with the Creature of Indeterminate Gender’s attack on Lauren Southern in Toronto.
I doubt the sanctimonious mob would display a modicum of decorum in any of these instances if the positions were reversed.
They’re being the oppressors while donning the robes of the oppressed; it must be a heady experience.
How long before universities start to dump their humanities courses, like excising rotting flesh to save the whole?
I’m not optimistic about that ever happening. The universities are complicit in this abuse. They view their students as a means to an end, the end being to keep the tenured professors and the administrative staff employed. The goal of the bureaucracy is not to accomplish anything except keep the bureaucrats employed.
Instead, the Obama administration has declared war on for-profit colleges and universities. While some of these are indeed using aggressive sales tactics to recruit students, what they generally try to offer is a chance at a career based on some sort of vocational course of study. Many of the “students” that we see in these links who are getting degrees in anger studies could have had meaningful lives if they had been oriented toward a course of study more in line with their abilities at one of these for-profit schools, or even at a not-for-profit college if it offered vocational courses. But that would mean that university staff would have to care about their students rather than viewing them as a way to keep their paycheck and their perks.
You have to believe that university deans understand that most of the courses they allow to be “taught” on their campuses are crap, and yet they allow it to happen, and the lives of these students are damaged beyond repair. They are all scum, if you ask me.
They’re being the oppressors while donning the robes of the oppressed
The principle seems to be “If you don’t let me abuse you, then you’re being mean and I’m the victim”
You have to believe that university deans understand that most of the courses they allow to be “taught” on their campuses are crap, and yet they allow it to happen
The fact that universities are classified by the IRS as “non-profit” throws a lot of people off their true nature. They operate like any other business. Non-profit, in the legal sense of the term, doesn’t mean an institution doesn’t make money. It just means the profits they earn have to be poured back into the organization, rather than paid out to investors, which is not exactly a problem if your goal is to pay yourself and your cronies as high a salary as possible. Think of the liberal arts as a product line from a business, and it all makes sense. Not enough people can buy the STEM product line – it requires actual competence, after all. Even the business school product line requires a level of competence many people do not possess. But almost anyone can buy the Angry Studies product line, which means a lot more “sales” and thus a lot more revenue for the business.
Most of these people complain about what exists, but have no concepts about what they want in its place. I have no problem with someone proposing an alternative (as long as it has some resemblance to reality) but merely expressing jealousy in the form of “My relatives contributions aren’t recognized like Newton’s” begs the question “Do you have any idea why those ideas weren’t accepted?”. And while the logical person in that rather mixed bag of students was reprimanded, he posed the correct response in the form of “There is no objective proof for that supposition”.
As we used to state, University of Cape Town, UCT (with a silent “F”)
Universities Marxist teachers created this. It is the construction of a discretionary power structure via language and PC racism. It what all revolutionaries do.
And in revolutionary way they of course will be destroyed by the the whirlwinds they create but until then they feel the ultimate power over others.
I’m angered that she has culturally appropriated the corrective lenses she’s wearing. If she can throw lightning bolts, why can’t she restore her vision to 20/20?
“Not enough people can buy the STEM product line – it requires actual competence, after all. Even the business school product line requires a level of competence many people do not possess. But almost anyone can buy the Angry Studies product line, which means a lot more “sales” and thus a lot more revenue for the business.”
And yet, !Hillary wants to make college more “affordable.”
Not enough people can buy the STEM product line – it requires actual competence, after all.
As it happens, I just got off the phone with my STEM-major son who faces the quandary of deciding which of four co-op job offers to take, any one of which annually pays more than most of the students in the above video will earn in the next five years.
Science? Fuck, yeah!
Better give her a Rhodes Scholarship.
to see just how credulous and mentally deformable human beings are.
That’s a keeper.
To be sure, western Science! – the zealous, projecting, exclusionary religion of scientism and as such quite distinct from science – is a thing. Of late it’s accounted for a pile of not-uncommonly subsidized interruptions of discovery and aberrations of knowledge. AGW is one but there are plenty more, plenty even embraced by self-styled, objective, classical realists looking to support a whim, lifestyle, or position. The phenomenon knows few cultural or political lines. It spans them freely.
But to me the interesting nexus is where we see just how credulous and mentally deformable human beings are. There we find self-delusion and fancy displacing objectivity from all angles. Why look for what you already think you know can’t possibly exist?
None of that is novel, but it can be a warning that there’s little difference between what is said to be science and what really is knowledge. The human spirit knows few limits to deformability.
Non-profit, in the legal sense of the term, doesn’t mean an institution doesn’t make money. It just means the profits they earn have to be poured back into the organization, rather than paid out to investors, which is not exactly a problem if your goal is to pay yourself and your cronies as high a salary as possible.
I wish more people understood this, but sadly I’ve come to understand that it’s surprisingly easy to throw people off the scent with a pleasant-sounding name. (Cf. human rights, social justice, Affordable Care, the 99%, etc.) I used to think people wouldn’t fall for things like that these days; I also thought the argument was settled in favour of free speech. How naive I was.
I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that the total remunerative packages for non-profit jobs rival or best that available in the private sector. Certainly it’s common to see people working for various quote-unquote charities pulling in an enormous salary, which they can supplement with a consulting business that does very well off the connections they make through their day job.
A silly woman rapping on X-Factor is an insult to all black people, and her act turns the clock back to the days of the Black and White Minstrels. And it also has something to do with Brexit, apparently.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/11/honey-g-x-factor-blackface-novelty-rapper-post-brexit-uk?CMP=share_btn_tw
Tim Newman, great comment.
Just look at their surroundings, a (bleak) modern university classroom, every inch of it engineered by western men using scientific knowledge discovered by other western men. Plastics, glass, metal, linoleum, synthetic fabrics, paper, graphite, rubber, silicon, drywall. And inside the walls, electrical conduits supplying electricity generated a great distance away while pipes provide clean water and evacuate waste.
And these idiots, these cargo-cultists, take it all for granted. For them, this is all just white man’s magic, essentially no different from their folk tales of witch doctors casting lightning bolts at their enemies.
Better give her a Rhodes Scholarship.
Heh.
Western knowledge is very pathetic to say the least
Yeah, pathetic enough to conquer your entire continent. Maybe the witch doctors should have just tried zapping the colonialists with their lightning bolts.
Maybe the witch doctors should have just tried zapping the colonialists with their lightning bolts.
Oh, I’m sure they tried – the real point being, “how did that work out for them?”
Ten writes “Of late it’s accounted for a pile of not-uncommonly subsidized interruptions of discovery and aberrations of knowledge. AGW is one but there are plenty more, plenty even embraced by self-styled, objective, classical realists looking to support a whim, lifestyle, or position.”
Some blog or other recently pointed me to a fine Guardian article on the fatuous history of nutrition science, the USDA Food Pyramid, Taubes, etc. The article was fine in the sense that it laid out in painful detail the backstabbing, self-dealing, and other bollocks associated with that history.
But… (And for god’s sake I hope you knew there was going to be a “but”)
The Guardian article elides ENTIRELY the interplay of national politics, academic and scientific reputation, and funding. They neglect to point out that the WHOLE FIASCO is only important (meaning, it maimed or killed millions) because government decided to claim it had identified TRUTH and published it as INDISPUTABLE and GOVERNMENT CERTIFIED.
I was Shocked, Shocked, I tell you! to see that elision in the Guardian article.
I gotta stop reading things like that. My doctor is starting to wonder why my blood pressure does not respond well to medication.
My doctor is starting to wonder why my blood pressure does not respond well to medication.
I hear the barbers have a promising new process involving razors and leeches.
Why whine when you can throw lightning bolts?
Lightning bolts….pfft. Is that the best you got? I can watch you cross the street while I’m on the other side of the world. I can vaporize your entire village and sterilize the country for 50 miles around it. So don’t push me too hard.
That too is western science.
Why are they (almost)always women and why do they always talk so fast?
He is promptly scolded for “disrespecting the sacredness of the space,” which is a “progressive space,” and is told either to apologise or leave.
And so he apologizes three times. I don’t know which is worse.
And so he apologizes three times. I don’t know which is worse.
It’s all such a farce, bordering on surreal, that it’s hard to tell how sincere anyone is being. Which makes the protestors’ delight in leverage all the more obvious. The appeal to witchcraft and “sacredness,” the pretence of victimhood and injured feelings, all of it seems to be a pretext to cow the faculty and indulge in scolding. It’s a game of social dominance.
Some people really enjoy that kind of thing. Though not the kind of people you’d want to befriend or employ.
The offended speaker, the one claiming that Africans can in fact throw lightning at each other – and who disdains “Western knowledge” as “very pathetic” – then uses the apparently scandalous reference to reality as the sole explanation for why she is “not in the science faculty.”
An except from my current reading:
The book is Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness
The author is a very long time cultural appropriationist and white boy named Loch Kelly.
—I think arguments could be presented that Kelly is even more offensive to duh rite people than Bert Hellinger or Ekhart Tolle . . .
This hearkens to a fourth level, one a corollary to Peck’s fourth level of awareness itself. First Peck:
Sociopathology
Religion
Skepticism
Enlightenment
Now in terms of knowledge:
Primitivism
Classicism
Progressivism and scientism
Enlightenment
And then science
Primitivism
Medievalism
Modern science
Second wave science
The distinction between the third and fourth sciences is indistinct but real. Many accepted sciences of the last 200 years – some of them quite mature and contemporary – are currently falling to their replacements. Then it can take a hundred years to replace one of them in the conventional wisdom.
Note that just as a sound religion may inform or be confirmed by an enlightened view, so too the SecProgg’s scientism will demean Classicism when the latter was actually very enlightened. Some of these rankings are self-imagined and others are objective and arguable. The problem is that there are elements in the third levels that resemble sociopathy and primitivism, and that third level is where bias and discrimination against religion and classicism enter. It is the problem of elitism and it can be very narrow minded and exclusionary. It protects itself against new evidence.
The same, then, is true of Science!, the zealous, accepted, know-it-all reliance on obsolete stuff from eighty or fifty or even twenty years ago that any kind of partisan will fall back on to refute a newer or better base of knowledge that doesn’t well fit his cultural biases. We see it in nutrition studies, cosmology, origins, philosophy, and psychology, among others.
Whatever state man’s real, objective knowledge rises to, it won’t resemble progressivism’s whims. But it also won’t much resemble the modern rightist view either. Hal’s quote from Kelly is a good example. Some rightists will inspect it for evidence that meditation is the domain of hippie liberals and all good scientists therefore know there’s nothing to it.
Just as rightists inspect nutrition science to see primarily if it hews to Taubes and thereby to upstanding red state BBQ lifestyling. You can see how the need leads the facts, at times conditioning them.
One of the more ironic revised stances of our times – and a kind of intellectual reappropriation – is that where God created the world in the seven days of Darwinist evolution. Science! is cool and trendy and it’s malleable too.
Umm, you can throw lightning at people provided you have a Van Der Graaf generator handy and they’re within arm’s reach. Did it myself at school. Most satisfying.
The offended speaker, the one claiming that Africans can in fact throw lightning at each other – and who disdains “Western knowledge” as “very pathetic” – then uses the apparently scandalous reference to reality as the sole explanation for why she is “not in the science faculty.” There being no other, more obvious reason, of course.
The Dunning-Kruger generation.
Did it myself at school.
Yes, but you had to use the science of the noted white honky cracker-ass redneck mofo (he was from Alabama) Robert Van de Graff to do it , so it doesn’t count.
The Dunning-Kruger generation.
Somewhat related, Duke Pesta (mentioned upthread) on the creep of cultural Marxism and its stupefying effects.