I will never understand how one can justify means with goals.
It can't work because means are to goals what seeds are to plants, what causes are to effects.
Yet... people happily join a cancel mob... to prove they are "inclusive".
It must be a post-modernism thing, a refusal of logic as a tool of the white-male... I don't know.
But I'd really like a computer running without such logic.
I think it really just boils down to the evaporation of nuance and a black and white mentality where nothing exists in the middle lest it show sympathy to the other "evil" side. So if you dont jump on the bandwagon and what it stands for you are assumed and treated like you are on the opposite side. So you do it so you arent left out by "your people"
Take RMS as an example, to the cancel crowd it boils down to: RMS supports pedophilia, is hurtful to sexual assault victims, and hates women. So in their mind you are either pro social justice and women's rights and thus want to cancel RMS, or you are a rapist or rapist apologist and want to support him. There is no inbetween, there is no nuance. So unless the american liberal mentality is the group you are already outside of and dont associate with you will jump on board or be considered the bad guy, so you jump on board, even if you do have a sense of the nuance, you wont date say it.
This happens from the conservative side too on other issues, and this one. If you may not want to cancel RMS but still dont agree with him the conservative american crowd might just equally consider you the enemy (though there are issues they care more about than this one).
In the end the people who have it the worst are the ones in the middle who actually see the nuance and talk about it. Those are the people both groups (who make up 98% of americans) will hate. Each will see them as a member of the other group when in reality they are hated by both. So the true social suicide in america is caring about details, nuance, and not being extremist on every issue... and the result is massive toxicity.
I don't know Americans enough to argue on that, but having just 2% of people who does not feel the need to join a mob or another, look quite incredible to me.
I'd argue that it's not the issue at work with #RMS, even just because there are signers both letters from all over the world.
Indeed to be honest, I see the real suffering of marginalized Americans is being weaponized (through these cancel mobs, but not only) against other peoples outside the US, to impose solutions to problems we do not have.
I don't think this is reconducible to a polarization that do not recognize nuances, though.
To me, it looks like a mix of identity politics (people trying to create a followship for themselves) and fear of complexity (inability or refusal to understand or even just recognise the huge complexity of our world).
I think that what @Vectorfield described here on post-modern truth might have a role: https://qoto.org/@Vectorfield/106004674022466292
Yet, I think that #Informatics might be useful to navigate outside these phylosophical swamps through probabilistic models, explicit and well defined contexts and dialogue between different perspecitves: http://www.tesio.it/2019/06/03/what-is-informatics.html
The problem is epistemic through.
Let's try to assume the perspective of an anti-realist #SJW that does not care about what #Stallman said or did just to move the global debate on his theme.
Let's even forget Stallman.
How can I teach him the informatics that run his own computer if he refuse logic as a tool of oppression?
This way, he refuse to understand what could reveal him his actual oppressors and free him.
@Shamar @freemo @xj9 The woke ideology derives mainly from two schools of thought, one is postmodernism, the other is Critical Theory.
The term “Critical Theory” commonly causes confusion because it can refer to the Frankfurt School of Marxist critics, including György Lukács, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse (see also, neo-Marxism and New Left), or it can refer to the use of other similar—but distinct—critical social theories, such as those that have their roots in postmodernism, such as postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, intersectional feminism, disability studies, and fat studies (see also, Theory and post-Marxism). Sometimes this confusion is expressed disingenuously by academics who dislike criticism of critical theories, and sometimes it is expressed sincerely by those whose fields of philosophy have not kept up with the fast development of Social Justice scholarship.
The Critical Theory of the “Institute for Social Research,” which is better known as the Frankfurt School, focused on power analyses that began from a Marxist (or Marxian) perspective with an aim to understand why Marxism wasn’t proving successful in Western contexts. It rapidly developed a “post-Marxist” position that criticized Marx’s primary focus on economics and expanded his views on power, alienation, and exploitation into all aspects of post-Enlightenment Western culture. These theorists sometimes referred to themselves as “cultural Marxists,” and were referred to that way by others, but the term “cultural Marxism” is now more commonly used to describe (a misconception of) postmodernism (see also, neo-Marxism) or a certain anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. The big-picture agenda of the Frankfurt School was to marry Marxian economic theory to Freudian psychoanalytic theory in order to explain both the rise of fascism and the reasons that the communist revolutions were not taking place in Western democracies as had been predicted.
Max Horkheimer defined a “Critical Theory” in direct opposition to a “Traditional Theory” in a 1937 piece called Traditional and Critical Theory. Whereas a Traditional Theory is meant to be descriptive of some phenomenon, usually social, and aims to understand how it works and why it works that way, a Critical Theory should proceed from a prescriptive normative moral vision for society, describe how the item being critiqued fails that vision (usually in a systemic sense), and prescribe activism to subvert, dismantle, disrupt, overthrow, or change it—that is, generally, to break and then remake society in accordance with the particular critical theory’s prescribed vision. This use of the word “critical” is drawn from Marx’s insistence that everything be “ruthlessly” criticized and from his admonition that the point of studying society is to change it. Of note, then, a Critical Theory is only tangentially concerned with understanding or truth and has, as Hume might have it, abandoned descriptions of what is in favor of pushing for what the particular critical theory holds ought to be. The critical methodology, then, is the central object of concern, and it is the tool by which Social Justice scholarship and activism proceed.
The Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School primarily looked at systems of power in terms of how they exploited and oppressed the working class and, more broadly, the everyday citizen, or certain everyday citizens (as opposed to members of the various elite classes). Speaking very generally (thus charitably), the purpose of critical theories (including the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School) is to make visible the underexamined or invisible presuppositions, assumptions, and power dynamics of society and question, criticize, and, especially, problematize them. Indeed, the primary objective of critical theories is problematization (identifying something as “problematic,” which means it stands against the normative vision adopted by the critical theorists in question, and this, in turn is understood to mean in support of any unjust assumptions or power dynamics).
One of the ambitions of the Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School was to address cultural power in a way that allowed an awakening of working-class consciousness out of the ideology of capitalism in order to overcome it. Particularly, these theorists had decided that the reason the communist revolution had not yet successfully spread throughout the West is that something in liberal Western culture must be preventing it. The goal of the Critical Theory (of the Frankfurt School), in that sense, was to identify what those issues were and find ways to dismantle them. As such, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci’s, concept of hegemony—the dominance of one particular set of ideas over all others in a society—has been influential on the development of Marxist and post-Marxist critical theory and also on the development of the (structuralist) critical methods of postmodernism. Among their conclusions is that the dominance of hegemonic ideas in society leads to the marginalization of other ideas, thus preventing change and maintaining oppression.
Critical theories in a broader sense are largely understood to be the critical study of various types of power relations within myriad aspects of culture, often under a broad rubric referred to in general as “cultural studies.” These moved the question of power dynamics away from generalized hegemony and into the various hegemonies created and maintained by and over the various identity groups in society (see also, knowledge(s), ways of knowing, epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression). These include postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race Theory, intersectional feminism, and critical theories of ableism and fatness. They are to be found within many disciplines and subdisciplines within the theoretical humanities, including cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, ethnic/race/whiteness/black studies, sexuality/LGBT/trans studies, postcolonial, indigenous, and decolonial studies, disability studies, and fat studies. Critical theories of various kinds are also to be found within (but not necessarily dominant over) other fields of the humanities, social sciences, and arts, including English (literature), sociology, philosophy, art, history and, particularly, pedagogy (theory of education).
The use of critical theories within these disciplines leads to a highly theoretical, ideological, and interpretive approach to cultural, artistic, and identity issues, all of which are to be studied in a critical way, not necessarily rigorously. The meaning of the word “criticism” here is specific, not as one might expect it to be used in the common parlance, and refers to seeking out ways in which problematics (according to some normative moral vision for society) arise within functional systems, particularly the systems of social and cultural power in liberal, Western, and scientific settings. There is, in the critical method (as noted above), no need to understand these concepts or structures; only a need to pick at the ways in which they can be construed to be imperfect.
The focus on identity, experiences, and activism, rather than an attempt to find truth, leads to conflict with empirical scholars and undermines public confidence in the worth of scholarship that uses this approach. Because critical theories nearly always begin with their conclusion—their own assumptions about power dynamics in society, how those are problematic, and the need for their disruption or dismantling—and then seeks to find ways to read them into various aspects of society (see discourse analysis and close reading), the body of scholarship that has been growing for the last fifty years has become a towering and impressive mountain with very insecure foundations.
https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-theory/
Thanks @Vectorfield for this long analysis of #SJW philosophy and epistemic approach.
To me, the dynamics of powers and the importance of problematization of them in culture and praxis is pretty important (that’s something I actively do in many context) but I see it as a step (and a method) toward the effective modelling of truth (the search for truth, for falsifiable knowledge, the aim of #hackers’ #curiosity), not to as renounce to it.
At the end of the day, for a hacker, “You cannot argue with a root shell” is a fundamental epistemic rock to build upon.
That’s why, probably, despite being an oppressed and marginalized minority, hackers are not going to be loved by SJW. Because we cannot renounce to the search for truth, without renouncing to be hackers at the same time.
I’d like to read something about this from @zacchiro and from @mcp_ about what you wrote (for very different reasons).
I just have a question on what you wrote: who first proposed the “manufacture” of problematics and truth (that is lying) as a method for political identity activism?
I’d like to find a clear statement about this.