Posted on 08/08/2021 4:59:01 AM PDT by MtnClimber
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked why it is that the Woke won’t seem to have a debate or discussion about their views, and I’ve been meaning to write something about it for ages, probably a year at this point. Surely you’ll have noticed that they don’t tend to engage in debates or conversation?
It is not, as many think, a fear of being exposed as fraudulent or illegitimate—or otherwise of losing the debate or looking bad in the challenging conversation—that prevents those who have internalized a significant amount of the Critical Social Justice Theory mindset that prevents these sorts of things from happening. There’s a mountain of Theoretical reasons that they would avoid all such activities, and even if those are mere rationalizations of a more straightforward fear of being exposed as fraudulent or losing, they are shockingly well-developed and consistent rationalizations that deserve proper consideration and full explanation.
I often get asked specifically if there’s some paper or book out there in the Critical Social Justice literature that prohibits or discourages debate and conversation with people who don’t already agree with them. I honestly don’t know. I’ve looked in a cursory fashion and haven’t found one, but, then, Critical Social Justice scholars are also rather incredibly prolific (an undeniable benefit of having no rigorous standards to meet and a surplus of ideological zeal, as it happens). That is to say, there’s a lot of Woke literature out there, and maybe someone has explained it very clearly and at length with a lot of specificity, but if so, I haven’t seen it. So far as I know, there’s not some specific piece of scholarship that closes the Woke off to debate, like a single paper or book explaining why they don’t do it. It’s just part of the Woke mindset not to do it, and the view of the world that informs that mindset can be read throughout their scholarship.
There are a number of points within Critical Social Justice Theory that would see having a debate or conversation with people of opposing views as unacceptable, and they all combine to create a mindset where that wouldn’t be something that adherents to the Theory are likely or even willing to do in general. This reticence, if not unwillingness, to converse with anyone who disagrees actually has a few pretty deep reasons behind it, and they’re interrelated but not quite the same. They combine, however, to produce the first thing everyone needs to understand about this ideology: it is a complete worldview with its own ethics, epistemology, and morality, and theirs is not the same worldview the rest of us use. Theirs is, very much in particular, not liberal. In fact, theirs advances itself rather parasitically or virally by depending upon us to play the liberal game while taking advantage of its openings. That’s not the same thing as being willing to play the liberal game themselves, however, including to have thoughtful dialogue with people who oppose them and their view of the world. Conversation and debate are part of our game, and they are not part of their game.
1. They Think the System Is Rigged Against Them The first thing to understand about the way adherents to Critical Social Justice view the world is just how deeply they have accepted the belief that we operate within a wholly systemically oppressive system. That system extends to literally everything, not just material structures, institutions, law, policies, and so on, but also into cultures, mindsets, ways of thinking, and how we determine what is and isn’t true about the world. In their view, the broadly liberal approach to knowledge and society is, in fact, rotted through with “white, Western, male (and so on) biases,” and this is such a profound departure from how the rest of us—broadly, liberals—think about the world that it is almost impossible to understand just how deeply and profoundly they mean this.
In a 2014 paper by the black feminist epistemology heavyweight Kristie Dotson, she explains that our entire epistemic landscape is itself profoundly unequal. Indeed, she argues that it is intrinsically and “irreducibly” so, meaning that it is not possible from within the prevailing system of knowledge and understanding to understand or know that the system itself is unfairly biased toward certain ways of knowing (white, Western, Eurocentric, male, etc.) and thus exclusionary of other ways of knowing (be those what they may). That is, Dotson explains that when we look across identity groups, not only do we find a profound lack of “shared epistemic resources” by which people can come to understand things in the same way as one another, but also that the lack extends to the ability to know that that dismal state of affairs is the case at all. This, she refers to as “irreducible” epistemic oppression, which she assigns to the third and most severe order of forms of epistemic oppression, and says that it requires a “third-order change” to the “organizational schemata” of society (i.e., a complete epistemic revolution that removes the old epistemologies and replaces them with new ones) in order to find repair.
This view is then echoed and amplified, for example, in a lesser-read 2017 paper by the Theorist Alison Bailey. Therein she invokes explicitly that in the neo-Marxist “critical” tradition, which is not to be mistaken for the “critical thinking” tradition of the Western canon, critical thinking itself and that which is seen to produce and legitimize it are part of the “master’s tools” that black feminist Audre Lorde wrote “will never dismantle the master’s house.” Since nobody ever believes me that she really writes this, here’s the quote:
The critical-thinking tradition is concerned primarily with epistemic adequacy. To be critical is to show good judgment in recognizing when arguments are faulty, assertions lack evidence, truth claims appeal to unreliable sources, or concepts are sloppily crafted and applied. For critical thinkers, the problem is that people fail to “examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of daily life… the basic problem is irrational, illogical, and unexamined living.” In this tradition sloppy claims can be identified and fixed by learning to apply the tools of formal and informal logic correctly.
I see that James Lindsay thinks of himself as a Liberal, in the classical sense- respect other points of view, study other points of view while defending yours, who is horrified at the new Left putting everything into Marxist struggle terms.
At the end of the day it all boils down to this: they abhore the civilized lifestyle. They are anti-civilization.
They are coyotes complaining that they are living in a society full of domesticated dogs. What are the dogs to do?
Summarized: argumentation is a weapon, as far as the Left is concerned. The only thing which matters is the Revolution.
Speech which advances the Revolution is “Truth”.
Speech which works against the Revolution is “Lies”.
They are in a state of war against us. When our speech reveals us as being “the Enemy”, then the response can only be to attack and destroy the Enemy, by whatever means necessary.
There can be no coexistence with the Left.
It’s a subtle description, “my truth.” Tossed out as if personal experience somehow supercedes the objective truth. It should be corrected whenever spoken.
This CRT, SJW, BLM and whatever other bullshit promoted seems to rely on a fantasy land of lies, feelings and personal/cultural shortcomings. We need to fight it on every level including this stupid attempt to give relevance based on “my truth.”
Parents who truly hate their children send them to Public “Schools”.
Then those that send them to college must really, really hate them.
Look no further than the Frankfurt school and critical theory.
This is the result of universal suffrage.
The self-esteem movement and everybody got a trophy.
I began to refuse to attend the meetings in protest. I said until I hear someone say "I don't know what happened or what to do about it yet?" I will no longer participate. I mean why have a meeting if an organization and each manager knows everything and knows what needs to be done about it?
These self licking ice cream cones are everywhere! Their flavor is the tastiest. They satisfy! They celebrate their uncompromising goodness. It's not just social and political wokeness. The mindset has permeated every aspect of our social and industrial processes.
Of course, College Student Loan debt cannot be discharged in Bankruptcy, their Doctorate in Ethnic Studies makes them an Amazon Slave for life.
“They control everything and are slowly changing American culture. They are winning.”
I would say, that in the main, they’ve already won.
I disagree that the change is happening slowly. The change in perceptions of social norms (opinions on issues like drug use, sexual orientation) was slow to change, but as soon as a tipping point was reached, the changes happened pretty fast.
All thru 2020 I heard people talk about things going back to normal. There’s never any going back. A new “normal” will eventually emerge, but the wheel only turns one way.
Conservatives think Liberals are people with bad ideas.
Liberals think Conservatives are bad people.
And now we’re all “suffraging” because of it.
I go by the saying “There’s my truth. There’s your truth, and then there’s the truth”. We all go by our own truth be it left or right but it doesn’t make it “the truth”.
It’s impossible for even them to keep up with what is “proper”.
Lots of big words mumbo jumbo’ed together to form a totally unreadable article.
I can sum it up for you in one sentence:
I want what you have, and I am going to take it from you, by force if necessary.
While we like talking about ‘red pills’ on our side, don’t ever forget that the Matrix is a leftist death fantasy written by perv trannies.
The article is spot on — free people are to them just sheep in an evil system we can’t see or be able to see, and must be eradicated.
Many of us have a Final Answer to their Final Solutions.
“How can anybody work out a compromise with that attitude?”
I have STATED it since 2003 on FR nearing a thousandth time now.
WE CAN NEVER CO-EXIST WITH THE LEFT. Stop pretending you can. You can’t. For the country to survive, one side has to “go”.
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