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Vectorfield

@fsf I think it's not Richard Stallman, but the low-grade "journalists" and woke "activists" (And probably the big tech oligarchs behind the scenes) who cancelled him in the first place with defamatory lies and unfounded accusations by means of harassment and intimidation that owe us an apology. The woke should pay a price.

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Vectorfield

@doliu666 Yes, I think he's not alone in thinking so, many other people would also agree that a lot of these parasitic ideas derives from the academic left, especially the French leftist intellectuals. Intellectuals are particularly susceptible to religion-style Ideologies. The French historian Raymond Aron have written about this in his book 「The Opium of the Intellectuals亅, although he was mostly criticizing the widespread intellectual adherence in his time to Marxism.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Op
amazon.com/Opium-Intellectuals

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Vectorfield

“人必须接受自己的出生，一如接受自己的死亡：这就是成熟。” —威廉·莎士比亚

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Vectorfield

@doliu666 From what I heard, he seems to be suggesting that academic institutions that spend too much time on Social Justice scholarship should be defunded, did he mention that in the book ?

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Vectorfield

@timorl @freemo
1.backgrouds and experiences


No, we still have major differences, the differences include the meaning the word systematic(or systemic) I don’t think this word bears enough clarity, I think the system is complicated and does not necessarily lead to similar experiences, let alone similar ways of thinking. You can not separate one factor of the so called system from the other, for example, if a poor black man is having a hard life, maybe it’s because he’s black, maybe it’s because he’s poor, maybe it’s because he didn’t have a father, maybe the culture where he grows up from has a negative effect on his accumulation of wealth. If one is a black millionaire then I don’t think he shares the oppression the poor blackman suffers , and certainly I think he is more privileged than a white truck driver. The woke people you interact with talks a lot about race? What if I say the woke I interact with don’t? How representative are the people you interact with? The rise of identity politics is often analyzed in combination with the decline of class politics, by dividing people according to their inherent biological identities of combating interests you are inevitably going to wreck the unity of the working class. One of the major opposing voice against wokeism from the left has been coming from the traditional economical-class-oriented ones. Robert Reich, Zizek Slavoj, Russel Brand, Paul Embery, to names just a few, have long been critical of the new left’s obsession of identity politics,
m.youtube.com/watch?v=9bgkBrFo
m.youtube.com/watch?v=472lCEy4
m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwbq5T1g
m.youtube.com/watch?v=iIZb1dCc
spectator.co.uk/article/left-b
The word socialist website was one of the first and most firm adversaries to counter the woke narrative of American history after the NYtimes had published the 1619 project, saying,「The interaction of racialist ideology as it has developed over several decades in the academy and the political agenda of the Democratic Party is the motivating force behind the 1619 Project. Particularly under conditions of extreme social polarization, in which there is growing interest in and support for socialism, the Democratic Party—as a political instrument of the capitalist class—is anxious to shift the focus of political discussion away from issues that raise the specter of social inequality and class conflict. This is the function of a reinterpretation of history that places race at the center of its narrative.」, and「The racialist campaign of the New York Times has unfolded against the backdrop of a pandemic ravaging working-class communities, regardless of race and ethnicity, throughout the United States and the world. 」 If the woke were so concerned about class politics, why would the traditional socialists and economic leftists consider the woke to be reactionary forces? I don’t think the woke ideology, the woke movement, or its rationalizers placed much significance to class.


Now you’ve acknowledged that inner differences within a group might be bigger than between the groups, yet you gave the argument that treating people as individuals you might miss actual problems caused by society, the word “might” is quite subtle, I’m sure you do recognize the fact that the word “might” isn’t the same as “surely”, so what’s the problem here? Of course you “might” neglect something while not focusing entirely on one specifics issue , but to which degree? And the question could come in the other way round: By focusing on the group identity, you might miss the other factors, which of course does not just include invidual decision making, but also Class, Culture, Region, Religion, etc. Isn’t it also a problem? If you think you have to eliminate the possibilities implied by the word “might”. The biggest problem with not treating people as individuals but as members of a group is that when you stop viewing people as real humans with flesh and blood, but instead, cogs of machines, incarnations of abstract forces, you opens the door for dehumanization and demonization, which then clear the pathways for genocide, mass murder and starvation, as human had experienced during the 20th century, many of which were started with good intentions. Should we improve the living conditions of individuals by not making their outward biological characteristics become reasons for discrimination?(which in the process, might lead to the temporary focus on certain group categories) Yes. Should we treat individual as means for the collectivist utopia? No.


2.Systematic racism


Yes, I’m tired of the discussion, I’m wasting my energy, but I didn’t forbid you from offering arguments for systematic racism, and yed it’s a very relevant question, if you feel the need to do it, write whatever you want.


3.Empirical data
I’ve responded to your first two claims in previous paragraphs, so let me just answer your third claim: The results in social sciences are quantifiable. What do you mean by the word results? The results of what? The results of the entire social science? I’m afraid that’s too broad. The question I asked was “Too which degree people’s thinking are affected by the external factors, such a identity backgrounds, are they quantifiable?” The example I gave is whether you can tell the exact percentage numbers attributed to each factors when you replied to my toot.You still can’t do that. And no social scientist was able to do something similar, for instance, trump was elected in 2016 as the US president, did any social scientist figure out the reason X Y Z why he was elected, and attribute the right numbers? For example “ The reason Trump’s election as president is 20% due to people’s dissatisfaction of the establishment, 10% due to Trump’s stance on border issue, 25% due Hilary Clinton’s unappealingness, 20% due to Trump’s economical policy, etc” So far I’ve seen none of them. Neither have I seen analysis like “Racism in today’s America is 15% due to historical injustices, 20% due to capitalism, 10% due to unconscious bias, etc” What? Percentage numbers are insignificant, prediction is what really matters? Well, did any social scientist before 2020 successfully predict that there would be a pandemic in the next year, we would be living under lockdowns, and America would handle it poorly? I don’t see any. Were there any social scientists in the 1980s who could successfully predicted that Soviet Union would collapse in 1991? I don’t think so, probably by survivorship bias someone did the right predictions. But no social scientist would say it with the certainty of a weather forecaster that these and these(such as a pandemic) would happen, or wouldn’t happen in the next year, the next month, even the next day. You can’t predict human events in the same you predict weather, I’m surprised to learn that a man like you, who values so much of the importance of uncertainty, would be so sure in our ability to predict something as unforeseeable as our human society.


4.Intentions and incentives


What do you think are behind the statistics? Feelings, motives, experiences, objective factors? or are they merely results of random data distribution? The definition of the word incentive on Wikipedia is that 「An incentive is something that motivates or drives one to do something or behave in a certain way.An incentive is something that motivates or drives one to do something or behave in a certain way. There are two type of incentives that affect human decision making. These are: intrinsic and extrinsic incentives. Intrinsic incentives are those that motivate a person to do something out of their own self interest or desires, without any outside pressure or promised reward. However, extrinsic incentives are motivated by rewards such as an increase in pay for achieving a certain result; or avoiding punishments such as disciplinary action or criticism as a result of not doing something.」, do you agree with this definition? If you don’t please offer a better one, the current one you provide is indeed too abstract, and too detached from real life. So I agree with Wikipedia that an incentive is an factor that leads one to certain actions, whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic, subjective or objective. So do the woke have the incentive to to bad things? Of course they do, as I mentioned before, the desire to accumulate or maintain power, as you agreed, many woke people are not marginalized at all, they are very often privileged middle class white liberals, very often the media people, the academics, the bigtech oligarchs or the establishment politicians. So the resaons these people embraced the woke ideology, were, at least in part, due to the fact that the woke ideology helps establish or reinforce their moral authority, grants them the censoring power, diverts people’s attention from their own corruption. Even an average woke person were able to benefit materially from the woke ideology, for example, the call for more diversity in high paid jobs make get some wokish blackman or transwoman into a position of privileged without a fair competition. Today, diversity training has become a multi billion industry,(while knowing it won’t work) about $8 billion a year is spent on diversity trainings in the United States alone, according to (mckinsey.com/featured-insights)
(washingtonpost.com/outlook/des)
Those who are engaged in the training industry—the crital theorists, woke activists, certainly benefit a lot from this. commentarymagazine.com/christi
A black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker, according to New York Police Department data. In 2020, blacks made up 50 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in New York City, even though blacks are 24 percent of the city’s population. Whites made up 10 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in 2020 in New York City but account for 32 percent of the city’s population. Yet according to the woke narrative, Asians and Jews are stripped of marginalized status due to the comparative economic success of their demographics, their participation in “whiteness,” or other factors.
m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_599
theatlantic.com/education/arch
www.cjnews.com/living-jewish/check-your-jewish-privilege.
Affirmative action were also used to disadvantage Asians(who are stripped or the victim status by woke ideology) in favor of African Americans southerncalifornialawreview.co
The woke supporter could benefit a lot materially from this by discriminating the other groups in favor of their own.
Ibram X Kendi said on the Atlantic that “To oppose reparations is to be racist. To support reparations is to be anti-racist.” So by advocating woke politics, people like Kendi were able to be paid materially using someone else’s money for their historical victim status, which is a benefit.


Could the woke be incentivized to do bad things? Absolutely.


5.Merits of bad ideas


Relevance of being good or bad – it’s not about being inherently incorrigible. Why it’s not incorrigible? Your understanding of the texts seems to be very different from average people? If what you do as an individual agent doesn’t matters because you are hopelessly incentivized to be a rasist, not matter how anti-racist you are as a person, you are considered incorrigible. Unless you join the woke and dismantle the system, you are racist. What if one disagrees with the woke’s take on the system? What if one think the system systematically benefits the woke? Why is it that the non-woke should check their privilege, not the woke themselves? As I talked before, the woke are also incentivized to do bad things. The woke have absolute certainty about their claim of the system as if it is the truth, but shouldn’t they realize that their own framework have their own blindposts that they are not the arbiters of truth? You have claimed yourself to be well aware of existent models’ imperfections and the importance of uncertainty, why aren’t you being uncertain now? You seems to be absolutely sure that the woke ideology is true? It’s very had to believe you are the one spending so much time trying to prove 2+2 is laiden with historical baggage. Maybe your absolute certainty of the wokeness is exactly the result of dismantling 2+2=4.


6.2+2=4


Oh, there you became a skeptic again, maybe a person need to become a 2+2=4 skeptic first, in order to embrace something as absurd as wokeism.


7.On objective knowledge


Did you feel I just asked too many questions? Yes, indeed. So what about just answering the first three of them? How do you know you subscribe to utilitarianism and realism? How do you know you are sure your knowledge of moral objectivity is neither neutral nor objective? How do you know what racism is? Please answer them in the language of common folks, no jargons, no specialist expressions, would you?

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Vectorfield

I think it's more than something you do, it's the responsibility of a citizen to cast his vote using his reason and common sense, and to resist emotional or psychological manipulation, which could be manifested in the form of "voting is cool". Voters decide the fate the of a country, irrational and irresponsible voters will lead their country to destruction.

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Vectorfield

革命与乱世并生，不择手段的人容易在乱世中取胜。

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Vectorfield

@timorl @freemo


1.Your first argument:


“systematic” is not the same as “systemic”. In this context it just means that people will be exposed to experiences drawn from different distributions, and these distributions depend on various properties of their backgrounds. The traits of these backgrounds are also not distributed evenly, so the distributions will be different in systematic ways – to give an uncontrovensial example people in Poland will have different experiences than people in China, and these differences are not purely random.


My response: I think it is true that 1. backgrounds affect experiences 2. experiences affect people’s thinking. But I think you are quite unclear about what backgrounds mean here, It could be identity categories, but it could be cultures or places as well, it could also be economical classes, or political systems, etc, the questions is which virable is the most important? I don’t think a white working class male truck driver is more privileged than a rich black transwomen, by stressing the significance of one virable your are inevitably going to downplay the others. The example you gave is that people in Poland will have different experiences from people in China, of course they will, but you neglecd the fact that an urban middle class Chinese would have more in common with a middle class Polish than with a poor Chinese farmer or worker who lives in a remote village.There are 1.4 billion Chinese people, the difference between one Chinese with the other might well be larger than his difference with a foreigner. So I agree that backgrounds affect experiences but the backgrounds we are talking about is more complex than you might realize. Backgrounds are complex, so are experiences, for example, both A and B are born from a middle class family, and they are both Male Han Chinese, but it’s still wrong to suggest that they share the same experiences, the likelihood is high that their may encounter very different people and very different things. Do backgrounds affect experiences? Yes. Systematically? Again, the term is still vague, so I can’t give you an answer, but I can tell you people from the similar backgrounds still have very different experiences. And it should also be called into question that people would react to the similar experiences similarly.


2.Regarding to systematic racism:


First, you are not offering a clear definition of the word systematic, second, the article you provided is too long, I have no time to look into each arguments and give answers to all of them, I agree we can look for evidence for or against specific claims of systemic racism, but I’m afraid this would be too time-consuming.


3.On empirical data:


OK, now you acknowledged other factors, for example, colour affects thinking(it should also include class, politics, ideology, culture, social media, etc) the question is you don’t seem to take these factors into consideration when analyzing race and racism. Which is exactly what I pointed out earlier, that the background is more complicated than you realized. If the link you provided (which I can’t access) indeed proves multiple factors other than race influence people’s beliefs, it would exactly demonstrate what I said was right. The other question is whether it is quantifiable, I can not access the link you are providing(only the abstract is available), so I don’t know what is says, but I don’t think it can, because human mind is not that easy to understand. Even ourselves cannot tell the exact percentage of different factors’ influence on us when we are making decisions. For example, you saw my toot and replied to it, why did you do that? To which extent it’s because you are interested in the topic I’m discussing? To which extent it’s because you want to defend the woke ideology? If it’s because you want to defend the woke ideology, to which extent it’s because people around you share your politics, how much is it connected which your economics status and educational background? Another reason why we are having this discussion is because we are both using decentralized social platform that has little cenorship, so why is it that you choose to use mastodon, not Twitter, as the platform? We can go on and on and on, I don’t think you can analyze all the factors and attribute the right numbers of percentage. If such a small and plain action that yourself had you can’t be explained in a quantified way I don’t think you can do it with other people’s more complex activities(I don’t think anyone can). To make such a general claim on a group of people is more impossible .


4.Intentions and incentives:


What you seem to be arguing is that incentives are the objective mechanisms leading people to different actions, which does not necessarily have anything to do with intentions. So a good person may have the incentives to do bad things, right ?


But even if it’s true, it still doesn’t invalidify my argument. Let me put my argument again: it doesn’t change the fact that the anti-racists, or liberals have the incentives to do bad, for example, to accumulate more power and privilege, to justify the lying, to divert people’s attention from their own corruption.(although they may not be bad people) And it doesn’t change the fact that the non-woke have incentives to build a equal and just society, for example, to reduce inner conflict, to solidify the country, to ensure peace and order, to be moral.(although they may not be good people) I don’t know why you’re arguing this. The woke screams at people because they refuse to recognize that this is the case? No no no, it’s because although they may be genuinely anti-racism, but objectively they may accumulate power and privilege by framing these who disagrees with them as bad people. I think we should be talking about woke privilege, or left privilege, which has largely be ignored because these people portrayed themselves as good guys. Woke politics is exactly the system you are describing where people’s good intentions are served for awful ends


5.Merits of bad ideas


I don’t think being good or bad is irrelevant is a good idea, I think you take it as a good idea because it serves the woke politics that you agree with, you are to emotionally invested into the woke agenda so you just ignore its obvious absurdity and awfulness.(make it should be called the woke bindspot, to paraphrase Robin DiAngelo’s words) Why Being good or bad is not relevant is an attack on human agency? Certainly it is, it means it doesn’t matter whether you are good or bad, racist or anti-racist, you are inherently incorrigible, why can’t you see something so obvious? “Whites have blind spots on racism” is a general claim that misses a lot of nuance, basically it means when the white people think they are not racist it’s because they can’t see they are, so whatever how hard you are trying to overcome racist bias, you are still racist, because you are blind to racism. Really, it’s really weird to see people holding these preposterous claims, it’s like they are never growing up.What you are doing is seeing a asburd wokish claim through the positive lens of social justice, ignoring their absurdity, justifying them with language games, then declaring it as the right interpretation. The woke are constantly calling everyone a bigot, but really, they should check their own prejudices and biases. SJWism is focusing on the bad incentives? Yes, anyone’s but their own, claiming moral high group and attacking people from a position of authority, that’s something everyone can do, if they are childish and irresponsible enough, or that they see themselves as arbiters of righteousness.


6.2+2=4


I’m not going to argue with you abstractly on this matter, It’s pointless, you want to believe 2+2=4 is a story we tell ourselves? Fine, believe whatever you want. You want to believe physics is homophobic or biology is misogynistic? Fine, but “a bomb made with white math and white science is going to blow someone up regardless of whether they accept the truth of its reality or not.” The discussion here is meaningless.


7.On objective knowledge


You have not answered my previous questions: How do you know you subscribe to utilitarianism and realism? How do you know you are sure your knowledge of moral objectivity is neither neutral nor objective? How do you know what racism is? How do you know you are not a racist? You haven’t answered these questions, you just proposed something new, which only brings more questions: How do you know you don’t either believe something is true or false? How do you know you are as sure of “2+2=4” as you can be? How do you know you are very sure about where you are right now? How do you know your knowledge about anything (including morality) is biased?(that mean this knowledge is biased too) How do you know your biases have to lower (but not eliminate) your credence in your beliefs affected by them? How do you know even if objective knowledge is unattainable, truth can still be approximated to the best of our ability? How do you know you would be able to know about yourself? How do you know I think you wouldn’t? How do you know “systematic” is not the same as “systemic”? How you know systemic racism in the US is a problem? How do you know being subject to incentives is also not a thing that should imply a person is good or bad? How do you know being able to recognize that the frameworks we use are frameworks and not universal truths is absolutely crucial to progress, also scientific? How do you know I seem to be unaware of any kinds of reasoning under uncertainty? Do you really know what uncertainty is? Do you really know what objectivity is? Do you really know what knowing is? If your answer to these questions is that you know all these through subjective feelings and lived experiences, then how do your know that your subjective feelings and lived experiences correspond to the reality? How are you sure that my subjective feelings and lived experiences is not superior and more correct than yours? And what if I give a different answer to these questions, are you going believe your answer or mine? Unless you are going to acknowledge there are basic principles of logic and reason, that are knowable and applicable to all, you will be stuck to these questions forever.


(I’ve spent too much time on this thread, which, as far as as I can see, isn’t meaningful, I guess you are going respond endlessly, but I don’t want to give endless replies. I’ll reply two more times up to maximum, and close the conversation)

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Vectorfield

@Shamar @freemo @xj9 The notion of “Problematize”


Problematizing is the functional core of Critical Social Justice and its Theory and activism. To problematize something is to look for, identify, manufacture, and/or “expose” the “problematics” in it or associated with it. Problematics are ways in which the phenomenon, entity, person, circumstance, object, etc., under examination falls short of the moral agenda that necessarily lies at the heart of the critical theory examining it (by definition of a critical theory, which must be normative against what it sees as “oppression”). Of particular interest are ways in which those things might marginalize, exclude, minoritize, harm, cause oppression, or maintain or legitimate dominance and injustice through the machinations of systemic power.


Problematizing is, as adherents to Critical Social Justice and other critical theories would say, the process of making those oppressions (and other moral failings) “visible.” Put otherwise, problematics are what critical theories criticize, and problematizing is how it does its criticism. The goal of this activity is to replace false consciousness (especially internalized oppression) with critical consciousness (i.e., wokeness) and thus agitate for a social and cultural revolution.


It is impossible to overstate the central relevance of problematizing to the Theory and praxis of Critical Social Justice. This is because problematizing is the chief epistemological tool of any critical theory, which is taken to a particular extreme in the critical Theories of Critical Social Justice (e.g., critical race Theory, postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, whiteness studies, fat studies, disability studies, gender studies, women’s studies, masculinity studies, media studies, and critical pedagogy). That is, problematization is the primary, if not sole, means by which a critical theory decides whether or not a concept is valid and thus constitutes authentic knowledges (or “truths”).


To understand this, it is helpful to understand how other systems of thought utilize similar tools. Consider two other domains: philosophy and science. The primary means utilized in this regard in philosophy is called defeasibility, which is a process where an idea is challenged by potential “defeaters,” which are statements that, if true, would either contradict the existing claim or that expose failures of logical validity or argumentative soundness. Philosophical ideas that survive this process are, until that changes, provisionally granted the status of not being defeated, which is to say potentially good ideas that one can treat as knowledge. In a sense, then, rigorous philosophy proceeds by defeating (anti-verifying) bad ideas and retaining as good ideas (knowledge) those that still survive the relentless anti-verification process of defeasibility.


In science, defeasibility isn’t considered enough because it is possible for something to be perfectly logically acceptable and yet out of correspondence with reality. Truth and falsity therefore take on a different meaning under scientific approaches to knowledge that is described by the “correspondence theory of truth,” which roughly states that that which is true is that which corresponds with reality in some way. Thus, the scientific method, in addition to theoretical defeasibility, adds an extra dimension called falsifiability. A perfectly undefeated hypothesis in science can still be falsified by testing it empirically and finding out that it does not correspond with the results of experiment, which are taken to be reflective of reality (see also, objectivity and positivism). This circumstance was, perhaps, most eloquently expressed by the physicist Richard Feynman, who remarked, “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”


In critical theories, problematization plays an identical role as defeasibility in philosophy (and theoretical science) and as falsification in (experimental) science. Those are processes within those domains of thought that allow people utilizing them to decide which ideas are bad, thus anti-verifying them. Ideas that have heretofore survived this process are provisionally considered “good” in some sense. In both philosophy and science, that status of “good” results in being considered “truth” or “knowledge.” In critical theories, by their very definition, truth and falsity are, however, largely beside the point, and in postmodern critical theories, like the Theory of Critical Social Justice, they are entirely beside the point. Ideas are either problematic or not (yet) problematic, and the effort to produce “knowledge” is establishing which ideas have not (yet) been problematized out of the possibility.


Understanding this requires understanding critical theories and their differences from what were offered up as a comparative alternative, traditional theories. Philosophy and science, relying upon defeasibility and falsifiability, are both traditional theories, which seek to understand the truth and reality of a situation, circumstance, phenomenon, etc., as fully as possible in as perspicacious terms as possible. That is, they seek to understand their object at hand in as much detail as possible and to do so in as objective a way as can be managed. This is especially true of the sciences. Critical theories—or, specifically, Critical Theory (see also, Frankfurt School and Neo-Marxism)—were introduced (by Max Horkheimer, explicity) in the 1930s as a kind of companion to traditional theories that could highlight the moral shortcomings (according to Neo-Marxist morals) of traditional theoretical understanding and thus refine knowledge not just to be informative but also liberatory from oppression and injustice.


Originally, Critical Theories were supposed to be used in tandem with traditional theories, which care about that which is true and that which is false, while introducing problematization as an additional means by which we might sweep “bad” (now, morally bad, not epistemologically poor) ideas off the table to create a better system of knowledge that is simultaneously effective and moral (again, according to Neo-Marxist morals, though this could certainly work with many other moral agendas). Even within the context of the Critical Theory movement itself (see, New Left), however, anti-intellectualism slowly took over (this is unsurprising, given what is being outlined here), leading one of the chief Critical Theorists in history, Herbert Marcuse, to bemoan the anti-intellectualism in radical and liberation movements by the early 1970s (see also, radical feminism, black liberationism, black feminism, liberation theology, postcolonialism, and liberationism).


To explain how this eroding intellectualism in critical movements at a guess, problematization is a much easier (and subjective) approach to disqualifying statements than defeasibility and falsifiability. All it requires is the capacity to claim offense or blame a system, or to do so on behalf of someone else or an identity group. In other words, traditional theories are hard, requiring setting aside one’s feelings and ego, usually obtaining significant education and training, and proceeding with extreme caution and care. Critical theories are comparatively easy, requiring only the ability to complain and somewhat plausibly connect one’s complaints to the system of power being critiqued by the critical theory (be that ideology, economic, knowledge, discourse, government, or some combination thereof). In the hands of intellectuals, then, critical theories will be one thing, but in the hands of non-intellectuals (or people pretending to be more intellectual than they are), they are quite another. (One will notice this simple observation explains much over the last half century.)


With regard to Critical Social Justice, the anti-intellectualism and centrality of problematization via the (highly interpreted – see also, authentic) “lived experience” of oppression (see also, knower, ways of knowing, and standpoint epistemology) reaches an altogether new height because of the profound influence postmodern Theory has had upon it. Critical theories absent postmodernism have always been constrained by their relationships with traditional theories—thus truth, falsity, and reality—even in the hands of anti-intellectual radical activists. What’s true still mattered. The central contention of postmodern philosophy, however, is an extension of the critical ethos: what’s true is beside the point (see also, Foucauldian, episteme, and power-knowledge). Postmodern Theory sees knowledges as culturally contingent and socially constructed (see also, social constructivism), and thus the correspondence between truth and reality becomes irrelevant as compared with the political application of propositions that have been authenticated and legitimated as “true” by the (powerful elites in the) culture that recognizes them as such (see also, discourses, narrative, and metanarrative).


The Theory of Critical Social Justice can be understood most simply as the fusion of this simplified understanding of postmodern Theory and critical theory with the intention of achieving what it calls “Social Justice” through identity politics. In this sense, the relevance of postmodernism is that it allows the critical theory of Critical Social Justice to set aside matters of truth and falsity altogether (because they miss the point, because objectivity is impossible anyway but politics aren’t), thus problematization becomes the core and chief epistemological tool of the entire program. Thus, in Critical Social Justice and its Theory and activism, ideas that are in any way problematic are deemed invalid whereas ideas that are not (yet) identified as problematic are valid, and this process is (nearly) wholly unconstrained from matters of truth and falsity in reality (and objectivity is seen as an undesirable myth claimed only to maintain hegemonic power, which is itself problematic). The result is that problematizing (through discourse analysis, close reading, and other critical qualitative methods) becomes the chief occupation of anyone in Critical Social Justice who is interested in producing “knowledges,” including by disqualifying actual knowledge from that status.


There are many direct results of this elevated epistemological status of problematization that, once understood, render many perplexing features of the Critical Social Justice project surprisingly comprehensible. For example, intersectionality becomes both inevitable and irresistibly popular because it is a means of doing cross-discipline application of problematization to other critical theories. (The “margins” spoken of in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s most famous paper, “Mapping the Margins” (1991), wherein she laid out in great detail what intersectionality should do, are the margins of (white) (radical) feminism and of (male/masculinist) black liberationism, both critical theories of identity. Thus, the purpose of intersectionality was, ultimately, to problematize each of these critical theories for being insufficiently critical.) This is believed to refine the knowledges of those critical theories by applying the core epistemological tool in ways that had been overlooked (due to influences of hegemonic power and willfully ignorant self-interest, of course).


The resulting elevation of intersectionally modified standpoint epistemology through the constant engagement of one’s positionality (relationship by identity to systemic power) is also utterly predictable. Engaging positionality becomes a chief occupation of Critical Social Justice in Theory and praxis because the lived experience of identity-based oppression is deemed to be the most authentic means by which someone can identify problematics or admit their inability to do so (due to internalized dominance), thus establish their status or limits as a knower. This also explains why engagement with the literature and views of Critical Social Justice only counts as legitimate if one ends up agreeing with it: it only accepts problematizing (i.e., critical) epistemologies as the way to do critical theories.


In summary, problematizing is the critical-theoretical equivalent of falsifiability in science, which is to say the primary means by which it disqualifies hypotheses and other propositions from being considered knowledge. Unlike in traditional theories, however, problematization can apply not just to ideas but to the people who produce them, perhaps as a result of the explicit adoption of Freudian psychoanalytic theory into Critical Theory by the Frankfurt School, meant as a corrective to Marxian thought. Thus, people must engage their positionalities, which can render them unqualified as knowers due to the influences of willful ignorance, hate, and internalized dominance, thus designating their claims on relevant topics as problematic and inadmissible as knowledges. They must “stay in their lanes” and “shut up and listen.” People who expose themselves (or are exposed – see also, mask) as sufficiently problematic are to be called out and summarily canceled due to the fact that this identifies them as so complicit in hegemonic power and thus oppression that they must have their status as a potential knower (permanently) revoked to prevent further harmful malpractice and contamination of the discourses.


This means the chief practical activity of activists and Theorists in Critical Social Justice—that portion of the demand of critical theories that calls for praxis—is problematizing. Every possible cultural product (as understood under radical social constructivist assumptions) must be examined, critiqued, and problematized to the full extent that Theory indicates. This imperative therefore hijacks the epistemological and ethical engine of liberal societies and turns them into dysfunctional critical ones. It is in this vein that they attempt to seize every means of cultural production and turn them to critical theory (see also, critical pedagogy and decolonize).


newdiscourses.com/tftw-problem

1
Vectorfield

@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.


newdiscourses.com/tftw-critica

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Vectorfield boosted
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1
Vectorfield

@timorl @freemo Well, since you want to continue this nonsense, let’s continue, but this time I”ll keep it short.


1.You are still not offering any sufficient evidence to support the claim of systematic(or systemic, depending on what kind of language game you want to play) racism.


2.You are still not taking other factors within the system (e.g.weather, colour, heath, social media, economy) into account.


3.You still failed to provide empirical data that quantities how one’s identity category (or the social and political system one lives in) affects one’s thinking. For example, data that quantities how one chinese’s mind would transform had he grewn up from Poland, or how a Blackman’s thinking would(Systematically or systemically, choose as you wish) change if he were white.


4.Even you change the word “intentions” into “incentives”, it doesn’t change the fact that the anti-racists, or liberals have the incentives to do bad, for example, to accumulate more power and privilege, to justify the lying, to divert people’s attention from their own corruption. And it doesn’t change the fact that the non-woke have incentives to build a equal and just society, for example, to reduce inner conflict, to solidify the country, to ensure peace and order, to be moral.


5.You are not disagreeing with the cliam that 「Mein Kampf」 and 「Краткий курс истории ВКП亅are not meritless, you just put out another book and said it’s also not meritless, so? Being not completely meritless doesn’t make it any better than 「Mein Kampf」 or 「Краткий курс истории ВКП亅because even these books has some “insights” as you might call it. You can find all the useful things from Robin DiAngelo, however “Being good or bad is not relevant.” is a complete rejection or human agency and historical progress even if people truely have the incentives to do bad.(they have incentives to do good as well, you’re only focusing on the part to do bad, yet you didn’t apply the same standard to the woke) “Whites have blind spots on racism” is a total denial of human’s reasoning capacity and their ability to overcome prejudices even if people belonging to different identity categories experience differently and they have incentives not to overcome prejudices( again, you are only focusing on the incentives to maintain prejudice, and apply this standard only to one side) The fact that you can find “insights” from them doesn’t make it a good theory , because you can do it with any theory as long as you think they’ve got the right politics, although you tried to appear neutral.


6.It’s completely predictable that you would find this 2+2=4 is cultural construction interesting and insightful, Western civilization seems to have produced a lot of intelligent sophists who are extremely capable of building complicated concepts and constructing abstract ideas. I’m not going to elaborate on why a civilization that denies the objective of something as basic as 2+2=4 is doomed to fall, maybe the western civilization indeed has reached the end of development.


7.You are now saying you subscribe to utilitarianism and moral realism. But really, how do you know you subscribe to utilitarianism and realism? Maybe what you are truely believing is white supremacism(or black superemacism), you just didn’t know it, because your knowledge about yourself is biased and not neutral, your brain have deceived you into believing you are an utilitarianist and moral realist while you are not. You said you are sure your knowledge of moral objectivity is neither neutral nor objective. However, if all knowledge is inherently biased you shouldn’t be sure of anything, you shouldn’t even be sure that you are not sure. The idea that knowing your knowledge being biased by your experience helps your seek the truth may also be nothing more than a delusion, because how do you know your knowledge is bias by your experience? And how do you know knowing this would help you become less biased? It could be a story you tell yourself as well. Being subjective and biased doesn’t mean it’s completely detached from reality? Come on! Seriously? You don’t even know when or if you are being subjective and biased, and if you don’t know when or if you are being subjective and biased, how would you even be able to know anything about reality, let alone knowing how your perception is related to it? Are you saying racist is bad? Sir. May you are a racist but you just don’t know it, maybe you don’t think racist is bad, maybe your don’t even know what is racist at all. Unless you are going to admit objective knowledge is possible and attainable, we can go and on and on and on. Sadly, you seems to be only interested in defending”the guy on the right side”.


Ok, here is my response, do you want to continue?

1
Vectorfield

@timorl @freemo Do you really believe these stuff? You seems to be very good at rationalizing absurd claims that otherwise would be obviously wrong. That reminds me of this guy spending thousands of words trying to prove 2+2=4 is a cultural construction.(mathvalues.org/masterblog/of-c) I don’t know the reason why you are trying to rationalize the woke ideology, probably you think they have got the right politics(on the right side), probably your moral impulse has overridden your common sense, probably you are trying to enhance your rationalizing skills by putting yourself into such a strange position, or you’re sincerely buying into these stuff. Anyway, by putting yourself in this position, you have really chosen a place that is very hard to defend.


So let’s get to the first argument “The first can be rephrased/generalized as: people from different backgrounds will have systematically different beliefs, due to having systematically different experiences.” Well, I think your rephrasing is no wrong, but incomplete. What you are missing here is that 1.Racism has been redefined, meaning not one’s personal attitudes towards race and racism but one’s position in the “system” so what you think or do as as individual doesn’t matter, so long as you are not actively dismantling the system through which your privilege is preserved, you are racist. 2.The system we have today in countries such as the US is entirely racist, by racist it means it’s the “normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country, and it’s in the interest of the privileged, both psychically and materially, to maintain that system. I think the change of definition is a dishonest and dangerous move because it manipulates on people’s assumptions of the meaning of the words, if the critical theorists could do it this way, other people could do it as well, it’s an awful precedent. And the words racism, with its meaning redefined, doesn’t make clearer of things, instead it obfuscates, racism in this sense could mean literally anything, and if it could mean anything, it means nothing. So that’s my disagreement with point one, my disagreement with point two is that we shouldn’t assume the conclusion first and use it’s as an uncontestable fact. If you are going to assume something, you need to prove it, by proving I mean not providing subjective feelings and lived experiences that are useless and unfalsifiable, but by offering statistics, facts, logical conclusions. I don’t think the critical theorists, the woke, and people like you have proven it, so it’s silly to treat systematic racism as unquestionable and generally accepted knowledge. Now coming back to your point: “people from different backgrounds will have systematically different beliefs, due to having systematically different experiences.” My question is, what do you mean by systematic? Is it systematic racism? Or capitalism? Or liberal democracy? I don’t think your point would be valid if what you are talking is systematic racism, as it’s not true. It’s a narrative, not a fact. So are people’s beliefs affected by the political system and economical system(and culture) in which they live? Definitely. The question is to which degree are they affected, and would it mean that they are affected in the same way? I should say that I don’t know the exact amount of influence that these systems weild on our thinking, and so far as I can see, no one has quantified them, and I don’t think they will ever be able to, which means when we are using such concepts we are only using them in an abstract sense. We could use examples, give analogies, but we can’t test their effect in a rigorous and empirical way. That means, if we want to talk abstractly, build concepts around them, it’s okay, but if we want to count them as objective standards, no, and it’s not really much helpful for us to understand how people think if we are taking a factual and evidence based approach. And I don’t really think that the social “systems” are the only factors affecting how we think, for example, wheather certainly has an impact on people’s thinking, so is colour, and our health condition, if we are thinking systematically, why don’t we take these into account? Oh, of course we can not neglect the effects of social media, and the different impacts of different types of social media, Twitter users have different behavior patterns compared with users of YouTube, and users of centralized platforms don’t behave the same with users of decentralized platforms. I can add many factors that affects our thinking from all walks of life, the list is almost infinite, depending only on how “systematic” you wish it would be. Do you see the problem here? I hope you do. Even if we take all the factors into account, we still don’t know the actual process of how they affect people. But there’s one thing for certain that even when people are under the same influence of the same factors, experiences, or “systems”, people still don’t react in the same way, this is because we are different individuals and we don’t think the same, we don’t feel the same, and we would naturally behave differently. To thinks that people belonging to the same identity category all have the same ideas is another way to say” If you don’t think this way, you ain’t black!” We should always stress the importance of the diversity of ideas over the superficial diversity of identities. Critical theory, along with its “systematic” thinking is dimnishing individuality and promoting group mentality, which is not only factually false, but also anti-human-nature, it’s also a direct assault on human agency and individual freedom. Whatever ideas you find interesting or useful from this theory doesn’t change this fact.


Your second point: There are incentives within society to keep various structures of power in place. Again, few people would deny it, the question is to which degree these incentives are effective? are they quantifiable? I don’t think we can answer these questions and we can only talk about them in an abstract way, except for that you can read everyone’s mind, and measure them, which is impossible. And by stressing on the significance of these particular bad incentives, you are neglecting people’s other incentives of good will, for example, the incentive to care, to help, to heal, and the incentive to build a fair and just society. It’s the good intentions of people, despite their identity categories, that have made the astounding progress in the history possible (it’s simply false to claim that no progress or very few progress has been made). The danger lies here if you have such a deeply cynical view of human intention that everything people do is for the purpose of preserving power and privilege: If people are constantly being blamed or demonized despite doing nothing wrong have have no malicious intentions, they will actually stop engaging the other camp of people of good will, and start the Hobbesian zero sum power play, where the most unscrupulous wins. The result of this may range from the complete discard of historical progress to the establishment of an autocratic state. This is why It’s very dangerous and irresponsible to demonize the other side and not respecting your opponent. Besides, the same logic can also to applied to your own camp as well. For example, your said the dominant identity group who enjoy more power and privilege have the ill-intentioned will to preserve their power(for the sake of argument let’s assume it’s true), but what about the subordinate identity group? Don’t they also have the desire for power and privilege? The desire for power and privilege is ugly, why do you think this particular group’s desire for power and privilege is noble? It seem to me really absurd to think this way. A argument can easily be made that the true intentions of the so called anti-racists to to build a caste system where the one with the most victim status enjoys the most privilege power. And It’s largely true, Some people in the United States argued that gay white men and nonblack people of color—generally assessed as marginalized groups—need to recognize their privilege and antiblackness(news.trust.org/item/20190502130719-tpcky/), somebody insisted that lighter-skinned black people recognize their privilege over darker-skinned black people.( mediadiversified.org/2018/04/26/we-need-to-talk-about-light-skinned-privilege/),Straight black men have been described as the “white people of black people.”(verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-the-white-people-of-black-people-1814157214). The white liberal’s commitment to anti-racism and anti-fascism can also be read as ill-intentioned too. Why? Because the white establishment is playing identity politics in order to hide people from the fact that these corrupted DC politicians, especially these within the Democrats, are detached from the lives of average American citizens, that they have led people down, cheated on the people, what they did during the Iraq war and financial crisis was a brazen betrayal, and they have implemented mass surveillance without people’s consent. By playing identify politics, they have diverted people’s attention from their corrupt deeds onto something superficial. The Media class is corrupted as well, that’s why they don’t report the news and use identity politics as the justification for propaganda.
Do you see the double-edge effect of Cynicism? I hope you do.


The part of DiAngelo


It’s more than obvious that Robin DiAngelo’s claim is entirely based on the claim that the American society is systematically racist—a vague term that carries little substance nor is it based on facts. Extraordinary Claims requires Extraordinary Evidence—something they are not providing. The sentence “Being good or bad is not relevant.” is a complete rejection or human agency and historical progress. “Whites have blind spots on racism” is a total denial of human’s reasoning capacity and their ability to overcome prejudices.You seems to be extremely versed in extracting “merits” from awful theories, but I’m sure you can extract similar stuff from 「Mein Kampf」 or 「Краткий курс истории ВКП亅, if you only focus on the “merits”. The question is not whether or not the woke ideology is entirely bad(the same could apply to literally everything in the world), the question is how would these ideas play out in reality and in which way the society would mainly be affected. Telling people on the other side that they are inherently bad people no matter what their intention are while rejecting individual agency is a bad way to formulate racial progress, in fact this approach is the hindrance to racial progress, it doesn’t continue the legacy of civil rights movement and it’s running the risk of losing out the progress entirely.


I noticed that you said you are personally annoyed that the school of mathematics taught in schools is treated as given and unchallengable. I don’t know which country you grow from in or which civilization you belong to, but as soon as your country have stopped teaching 2+2=4 or ceased to teach the law of gravity, your country, and your civilization is doomed to fall quickly, a country or a civilization that denies the very basis of objective reality will soon self-collapse, if not be conquered by countries like my own: China. The country that spends least time on the fashionable nonsense and recognizes the importance of science and technology will become the most competitive country, the country that rejects 2+2=4 will lose the ability to self-defense. That’s very simple.


S, O, & DA 2: “Well, this just seems like the claim that morality is important. If you believe murder or theft is bad you will not accept that people can stay neutral in these matters, same for the beliefs about systemic inequality.” Morality is important, but if your moral impulses override your reason, the noblest intentions may well end up with the most disastrous outcomes. Morality that is incapable of handling the reality is not morality at all. If being moral means believing hidden oppressive power structure underlies all of the society’s interactions, yet are visible only to the ones who are woke, then I am afraid this kind of morality is the pseudo-marality that is only compatible with pseudo-realities. Pseudo-realities are conspiracy theories without conspirators, such conspiracy theories challenges the basics of human reasoning, even the most ardent supporter of Donald Trump still maintain the sensibility that prevents them from believing wild stories like these, I used to believe the rise of alternative realites is an isolated problem that is limited to trump supporters, I’ve changed my mind after seeing how the left behaves.


S, O, & DA 3: I’m not sure if it’s still meaningful to write about this, to talk about abstract stuff detached from daily experience. But since we’ve came so long and it’s about to finish, let’s continue. Before I start I would like to ask you a question: You seem to agree with the idea that racism is bad, immoral, but really, why do you thinks so? How do you know it’s immoral? Is is just your subjective personal feeling or something built upon objective standards? If the answer is the former, then how is it that your subjective feeling is superior than other one’s? A white supremacist’s subjective feeling is no bad than your own, if morality is subjective. If the answer is the later, that is, there are some objective standards upon which our moral decision could be made(for example, less harm, more care, reciprocity). It must means that there are objective moral principles that precede our feelings, and can be known. If these moral standards can’t be known, then how did you know it? You might answer “these moral principles happens to correspond my subjective feelings.” But the question continues: How do you know your subjective feelings correspond these objective standards? And how did you which moral standards are objective? If there exists knowable moral standards that apply to all, then, by definition, there are objective knowledge about morality, which is also to say, knowledge can be neutral and objective, except you are going to agree that racism is as moral as anti-racism.


Here is my reply to your questions, hopefully I’ve made myself clear. I don’t think I’m ever going to convince you as you seems to be too emotionally invested in critical-theory-style anti-racism, although you try to distance yourself from Social Justice Activism. I’m writing to people who might be reading our debates on this thread. I think both of us have made our position clear, If you still want to continue this debate, that is, in my view, not very meaningful, it’s fine, we can go on.

1
Vectorfield

@timorl @freemo It’s one thing is to make a claim based on statistics and facts about widespread bias that may have affected our judgement. It’s quite another to assume that just because one belong to a specific identity category, he is inherently biased, or racist, misogynistic, etc, which is exactly what the woke ideology thinks.


Quoting from Delgado and Stefancic,


What do critical race theorists believe? Probably not every member would subscribe to every tenet set out in this book, but many would agree on the following propositions. First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational—“normal science,” the usual way society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country. Second, most would agree that our system of white-over-color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material. The first feature, ordinariness, means that racism is difficult to cure or address. … The second feature, sometimes called “interest convergence” or material determinism, adds a further dimension. Because racism advances the interests of both white elites (materially) and working-class people (psychically), large segments of society have little incentive to eradicate it.


(Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (third edition) by Critical Race Theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. )


Quoting from Robin J. DiAngelo,


Being good or bad is not relevant. Racism is a multilayered system embedded in our culture. All of us are socialized into the system of racism. Racism cannot be avoided. Whites have blind spots on racism, and I have blind spots on racism. Racism is complex, and I don’t have to understand every nuance of the feedback to validate that feedback. Whites are / I am unconsciously invested in racism. Bias is implicit and unconscious.


(Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism)


And


One of the key contributions of critical theorists concerns the production of knowledge. Given that the transmission of knowledge is an integral activity in schools, critical scholars in the field of education have been especially concerned with how knowledge is produced. These scholars argue that a key element of social injustice involves the claim that particular knowledge is objective, neutral, and universal. An approach based on critical theory calls into question the idea that objectivity is desirable or even possible. The term used to describe this way of thinking about knowledge is that knowledge is socially constructed. When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it.


(Sensoy, Ozlem, and Robin DiAngelo. Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education, second edition. Teacher’s College Press: New York, 2017, p. 53.)


And


“we do not intend to inspire guilt or assign blame… But each of us does have a choice about whether we are going to work to interrupt and dismantle these systems [of injustice] or support their existence by ignoring them. There is no neutral ground; to choose not to act against injustice is to choose to allow it.” (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. xxiv)


“Critical theory challenges the claim that any knowledge is neutral or objective, and outside of humanly constructed meanings and interests.” (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 187)


“Critical social justice perspectives:


There is no neutral text; all texts represent a particular perspective


All texts are embedded with ideology; the ideology embedded in most mainstream texts functions to reproduce historical relations of unequal power.


Texts that appeal to a wide audience usually do so because they reinforce dominant narratives and serve dominant interests” (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education) (p .210)


“Our analysis of social justice is based on a school of thought know as Critical Theory. Critical Theory refers to a body of scholarship that examines how society works, and is a tradition that emerged in the early part of the 20th century from a group of scholars at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany” (Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 25)


“Efforts among scholars to understand how society works weren’t limited to the Frankfurt School; French philosophers (notably Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan) were also grappling with similar questions… This work merges in the North American context of the 1960s with antiwar, feminist, gay rights, Black power, Indigenous peoples, The Chicano Movement, disability rights, and other movements for social justice”
(Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education)(p. 26)

1
Vectorfield

@hector

THE CASTE SYSTEM OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Because of its internal complexity and single-minded focus on oppression, intersectionality is riddled with divisions and subcategories, which exist in competition with—or even in unrepentant contradiction to—each other. Some people in the United States therefore argue that gay white men39 and nonblack people of color—generally assessed as marginalized groups—need to recognize their privilege and antiblackness.40 This can lead to the insistence that lighter-skinned black people recognize their privilege over darker-skinned black people.41 Straight black men have been described as the “white people of black people.”42 It is also not uncommon to hear arguments that trans men, while still oppressed by attitudes towards their trans status, need to recognize that they have ascended to male privilege43 and amplify the voices of trans women, who are seen as doubly oppressed, by being both trans and women. Gay men and lesbians might well find themselves not considered oppressed at all, particularly if they are not attracted to trans men or trans women, respectively, which is considered a form of transphobia and misgendering.44 Asians and Jews may find themselves stripped of marginalized status due to the comparative economic success of their demographics, their participation in “whiteness,” or other factors.45 Queerness needs to be decolonized—meaning made more racially diverse—and its conceptual origins in white figures like Judith Butler need to be interrogated.46


In the real world, attempting to “respect” all marginalized identities at once, as unique voices with the inherent, unquestionable wisdom connected to their cultural groups, can produce conflict and contradiction. We saw examples of this when the lifelong human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell was accused of racism for criticizing black rap musicians who sang about murdering gay people.47 It appeared again in the confusion and conflict about whom to support when ethnic minority beauticians essentially misgendered a person claiming to be a trans woman by declining to wax around her testicles on the grounds that their religion and customs prohibited contact with male genitalia.48


All this “sophistication” keeps intersectionalists busy, internally argumentative, and divided, but it is all done in the service of uniting the various Theoretically oppressed groups into a single meta-group, “oppressed” or “other,” under an overarching metanarrative of Social Justice, which seeks to establish a caste system based on Theorized states of oppression. Social Justice in the contemporary sense is therefore markedly different from the activism for universal human rights that characterized the civil rights movements.49 These liberal, egalitarian approaches sought and seek to equalize opportunities by criminalizing discrimination, remedying disenfranchisement, and defeating bigotry by making prejudice on the grounds of immutable characteristics socially unacceptable. They thus provide an achievable goal for the well-meaning liberal individual: treat people equally regardless of their identity. The Social Justice approach regards this as, at best, naivety about the reality of a deeply prejudiced society, and, at worst, a willful refusal to acknowledge that we live in that kind of society. Consequently, the only way to be a virtuous person under Social Justice is to assume that these power imbalances and prejudices exist everywhere at all times, masked by the egalitarian false-promises of liberalism, and assiduously seek them out, using the right kind of Theoretical analysis. For Collins and Bilge,


Social justice may be intersectionality’s most contentious core idea, but it is one that expands the circle of intersectionality to include people who use intersectionality as an analytic tool for social justice. Working for social justice is not a requirement for intersectionality. Yet people who are engaged in using intersectionality as an analytic tool and people who see social justice as central rather than as peripheral to their lives are often one and the same. These people are typically critical of, rather than accepting of, the status quo.50


This is echoed by Rebecca Lind, who defines intersectionality as “a multifaceted perspective acknowledging the richness of the multiple, socially-constructed identities that combine to create each of us as a unique individual.”51 However, by this method, the “unique individual” is not really understood as an individual at all. As noted, the number of axes of social division under intersectionality can be almost infinite—but they cannot be reduced to the individual. Theory insists that only by understanding the various groups and the social constructions around those groups can one truly understand society, people, and their experiences. This conceptual shift facilitates group identity and thus identity politics, which are often radical.


Because of intersectionality’s sheer versatility as a tool, it appeals to those involved in many different forms of engagement, ranging from legal activism and academic analysis to affirmative action and educational theory.52 Mainstream activism has also eagerly embraced intersectionality—especially its concept of privilege, an idea that is vigorously insisted upon, often to the point of bullying and browbeating. (From “Cynical Theories”)


39.Adam Fitzgerald, “Opinion: Time for Cis-Gender White Men to Recognise Their Privilege,” news.trust.org, May 2, 2019, news.trust.org/item/20190502130719-tpcky/.
40.Jezzika Chung, “How Asian Immigrants Learn Anti-Blackness from White Culture, and How to Stop It,” Huffington Post, September 7, 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/how-asian-americans-can-stop-contributing-to-anti-blackness_b_599f0757e4b0cb7715bfd3d4.
41.Kristel Tracey, “We Need to Talk about Light-skinned Privilege,” Media Diversified, February 07, 2019, mediadiversified.org/2018/04/26/we-need-to-talk-about-light-skinned-privilege/.
42.Damon Young, “Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People,” Root, September 19, 2017, verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-the-white-people-of-black-people-1814157214.
43.Miriam J. Abelson, “Dangerous Privilege: Trans Men, Masculinities, and Changing Perceptions of Safety,” Sociological Forum 29, no. 3 (2014).
44.Sara C., “When You Say ‘I Would Never Date A Trans Person,’ It’s Transphobic. Here’s Why,” Medium, November 11, 2018, medium.com/@QSE/when-you-say-i-would-never-date-a-trans-person-its-transphobic-here-s-why-aa6fdcf59aca.
45.Iris Kuo, “The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans,” Atlantic, September 13, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/the-whitening-of-asian-americans/563336/; Paul Lungen, “Check Your Jewish Privilege,” Canadian Jewish News, December 21, 2018, www.cjnews.com/living-jewish/check-your-jewish-privilege.
46.Zachary Small, “Joseph Pierce on Why Academics Must Decolonize Queerness,” Hyperallergic, August 10, 2019, hyperallergic.com/512789/joseph-pierce-on-why-academics-must-decolonize-queerness/.
47.Peter Tatchell, “Tag: Stop Murder Music,” Peter Tatchell Foundation, May 13, 2016, www.petertatchellfoundation.org/tag/stop-murder-music/.
48.Arwa Mahdawi, “It’s Not a Hate Crime for a Woman to Feel Uncomfortable Waxing Male Genitalia,” Guardian, July 27, 2019, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/27/male-genitalia-week-in-patriarchy-women.
49.Pluckrose and Lindsay, “Identity Politics Does Not Continue the Work of the Civil Rights Movements.”
50.Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 30.
51.Rebecca Ann Lind, “A Note From the Guest Editor,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 54 (2010): 3.
52.Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall identify three overlapping “sets of engagements”: “the first consisting of applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics, the second consisting of discursive debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm, and the third consisting of political interventions employing an intersectional lens.” Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 785.

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Vectorfield

@timorl @freemo I think you’re getting me wrong, what I am not saying is that wokeism is the cause of all our problem today(I think it’s the symptom of our problem, just like trump). What I am saying is that one of the intellectual roots of wokiesm, that is, radical skepticism and subjectivism, hostility towards reason and facts, is a very important contributing factor to the problems we have, including wokeism. Yes, I don’t think by simply removing wokeism we are going to fix the problem in the academy, because the academy have lost their commitment to truth first, then they are captured by these wokeish idea second. Yes, I don’t think getting rid of wokeism in the media would be the long term solution, for as long as the reporters and columnists have no interest of telling the truth as it is, it’s just a matter of time before they take on an another narrative, probably more wild and abusrd. And while the environment for public discussion can be improved for a while if wokeism is gone, It’s still impossible to build the common ground if people continues to believe that there is no object reality that preceds our emotions, feelings, cultural influences, that you have your reality, and I have mine. If people fail to build their consensus on the very basics of the physical and social world, there is no way they can move forward, and they can’t deal with the problems facing their civilization.

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Vectorfield

@timorl @freemo I would like to inform you that ideas have consequences, the consequences of radical skepticism and subjectivism are many, to name just a few:


In the Academy:


So in the academy- the supposed engine of knowledge production, you have professors and researchers who no longer care about objective reality and dismiss the scientific methodology as tools for white-male-domination, who are only interested in pushing and indoctrinating a certain ideology, then scholarship is transformed into activism. Note that while social sciences and liberal arts are among the most infected departments, the STEM field are not immune. For example( quoting from Cynical Theories):


「Since 2010, there have been an increasing number of proposals from within engineering, arguing for the use of Social Justice concepts in that profession. One 2015 paper proposes that an engineer should “demonstrate competence in the provision of sociotechnological services that are sensitive to dynamics of difference, power, and privilege among people and cultural groups.” In the book Engineering and Social Justice, published by Purdue University Press, we read many variations on the same theme and a worrisome recommendation: “getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need in engineering education.” Meanwhile, arguments have been made that mathematics is intrinsically sexist and racist because of its focus on objectivity and proof and because of disparate outcomes in mathematics education across racial groups. One 2018 paper asserts,


Drawing upon Indigenous worldviews to reconceptualize what mathematics is and how it is practiced, I argue for a movement against objects, truths, and knowledge towards a way of being in the world that is guided by first principles—mathematx. This shift from thinking of mathematics as a noun to mathematx as a verb holds potential for honouring our connections with each other as human and other-than-human persons, for balancing problem solving with joy, and for maintaining critical bifocality at the local and global level.」


The result of that? The engine of knowledge production becomes broken


In the Media:


If the responsibility of a journalist is no longer to speak truth about the powerful and to inform the public faithfully of what is going on(since objective reality is unattainable and truth is whatever the powerful decide is true), but instead, to promote agendas that they deem are moral and righteous, then the media organizations will not spend time on actual news reporting, but instead, create narratives in the service of their agenda. Media organizations becomes propaganda organizations.


The result of that? Distrust of the media, Alternative realities.


In the broader society:


A liberal society is able to exist because it has functional conflict-solving mechanisms that can peacefully mediate the frictions and disputes among different interest groups, which requires the willingness and ability to participate in civil conversations and reasoned debates. Underlying these interactions is the belief that through health and repectul conversations people are able to reach a common ground. But what happens if people think is impossible to have civil discussions because there is no objective standard upon which common ground is built and that people of different indentiy background are unable to communicate with each other due to their different lived experiences (e.g. Standard Point Theory, the belief that knowledge comes from the lived experience of different identity groups, who are differently positioned in society and thus see different aspects of it. ). If subjective feelings (determined by different lived experiences as members from different identity backgrounds) is all that matters, what if your feeling disagrees with mine? If peaceful conversation and negotiation is gone, hobbesian style zero-sum power play becomes the only option.


I don’t think the intellectual core of wokeism can be divided from how wokeism is put into practice, we can not solve the problem if we don’t know its root causes, only when we understand what happened and why it happened, can we figure out what is going on and why it’s going on, these knowledge then will guide us in dealing with the problem.

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Vectorfield

@freemo There is a deeper reason why the woke tend to believe absurdity and lie about people:The postmodern philosophy underlying their ideology is anti-realist


For most of us, the concept of “truth” doesn’t seem terribly complicated until we try to define it. Truth is… what’s true—this is actually the first definition for “truth,” paraphrasing a bit, in some dictionaries. Truth is that which is in accordance with reality is another. Philosophers understand that “truth” is a more complicated topic, and people in different schools of thought have different understandings of what truth is. Some, for example, hold that truths must be in some way transcendent of all human contingencies—that which absolutely holds for all people in all times (sometimes in all possible universes). Scientists tend to use a more pragmatic understanding (sometimes called “provisional truths”) that could be rendered as statements about reality upon which we can bet and reliably win. Most people, including nearly all scientists and many philosophers, generally agree that for something to be a “truth” means its having something to do with accurately describing reality.


The postmodern school of thought, which profoundly informs the Theory of Critical Social Justice, however, does not see truth this way. In fact, it is openly hostile and radically skeptical of these understandings of truth, which might generally be described as being “realist” in orientation because they see some correspondence between truth and reality. Postmodernism is generally anti-realist in orientation, meaning that it does not necessarily see a connection between “truths” and reality. Truths might happen to describe reality, say as the Earth and the Sun describing a dynamic system in which both travel along eliptical orbits around their common center of mass (which is inside the Sun), or not, say as the Sun going around the Earth. Under postmodern thought, both of these understandings are “true” in the cultures that consider them true. That is, postmodern thought sees truth as entirely a matter of human (social) contingencies. This is what the American postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty meant when he wrote, “We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there.”


Truths, in postmodern Theory, are socially validated statements about reality, which means that they are, ultimately, products of not just the cultures that produce them but of power within those cultures. The French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault described this as power-knowledge, insisting that knowledge claims (truths) are ultimately only expressions of power. This sound strange, but the logic is accessible. What is considered true is decided by people by some social process of validation, the thinking goes, so “truth” is a social and political status conferred to certain ideas, which is then reinforced by their acceptance as true. Simultaneously, “truths” confer (political) power, as “knowledge is power” implies, because if it is accepted that a proposition is true, then people who accept it as such will behave accordingly. Thus, Foucault Theorized that “truths” are socially constructed by the systems of power (and the powerful within them) in society and then used to dominate, particularly in the attempt to maintain their power and exclusive status (see also, hegemony, episteme, and biopower).


Most of this anti-realist, political understanding of truth (and knowledge) has been imported more or less intact into Critical Social Justice.


In Critical Social Justice, “truth” is still considered culturally contingent, but because of the strong influence of identity politics at the core of the Critical Social Justice project (which could be said to use critical and postmodern Theories to do identity politics – see also intersectionality and positionality), the relevant cultures are ones rooted in various identities Theorized to be “minoritized.” Thus, “knowledge” and “truth” as we generally conceive of them are considered shorthand for “cis, straight, white, Western, male knowledge” or “cis, straight, white, Western, male truth” (see also, white science, white mathematics, and white empiricism, and also feminist empiricism), which are just one way of knowing. In fact, they’re a particularly bad one because these dominant groups not at all aware of their self-serving biases or limitations of their own knowing system (see also, internalized dominance and meritocracy).


Thus, on the other hand, Critical Social Justice generally believes in cultural knowledges (e.g., racial knowledge) that have been marginalized by “dominant discourses,” which are deemed to be straight, white, male, able-bodied, thin, Western, Eurocentric, etc. These are believed to arise because different identity-based cultures have different ways of knowing (epistemologies) thus recognize different knowledges, and dominant ways of knowing (e.g., science, reason, logic, dialectic – see also, master’s tools) are believed to have utilized their greater power to unjustly exclude them from the range of “acceptable” ways of knowing and knowledges (see also, epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and epistemic violence).
newdiscourses.com/tftw-truth/

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Vectorfield boosted
🎓 Dr. Freemo :jpf: 🇳🇱

I'm really happy to see how the situation played out. Not only did he get to stay on the board, but to see such an overwhelmingly stronger support for him then dissenters gives me hope.

Its not that I like or dislike RMS, but the argument against him was so beyond absurd that it is concerning that it got momentum at all. But of course to listen to the detractors you'd think he supported sexual assault or something. Lets just hope these sort of people who will lie and exaggerate a situation in some false sense of "social justice" never become the majority, there are too many people like that already and it is getting in the way of achieving any real lasting social justice when these people are crying wolf louder and louder every day.

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Vectorfield

@fsf The problem isn't only that these organizers shouldn't be removed for someone's announcement they are unaware of, or that the tech media have misrepresented Richard Stallman by manufacturering the statements he didn't make, the crux of matter is that even if Stillman has made a controversial, offensive or even harmful claim, he shouldn't be punished by someone outside of the organization, and shouldn't be removed from his position until his statement have caused direct and evident damage to someone elese . I'm disappointed that you didn't take a tougher stance against the intolerant woke ideology.

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