Literally.
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.
The schools are pumping out more of these zombies every day.
They are so righteously sure they hold the final answer, that all you out there should just shut up and sit down. How can anybody work out a compromise with that attitude?
Large groups of any society are apt to become fractious when inappropriate limitations are placed upon them. When the attitudes become too intransigent, civil discourse is no longer possible.
Somebody once said, to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war. Winston Churchill, I think. A man wise far beyond his times.
I most likely agree with the basic views of this writer, but that is a very long article to swim through just to confirm that. Some publishers will pay by the word, so perhaps he had to use this expanded format vs something more concise.
“They are so righteously sure they hold the final answer, that all you out there should just shut up and sit down. How can anybody work out a compromise with that attitude?”
Hence my tagline.
L
In effect, what we have here is the Nazi Party taking over Germany, and Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Invading France. Invading Russia. Killing millions of Jews, Gypsies, and anyone who disagrees with their Party Politics. And, when questioned, theses Nazis get all defensive and say, "Hey, we're the victims here. The whole system was rigged against us at Versailles."
They don’t debate because they know they are right and we are wrong so what’s the point. They don’t need to change our minds. They control everything and are slowly changing American culture. They are winning.
I have several times heard, usually in a smug voice, “my truth.” I’ve also read it over and over, “my truth.” In arguments you hear “my truth” when the other side has been challenged with some irrefutable statistic. Let’s say the conservative quotes some FBI statistic to the effect that whites are shot at greater rate than blacks. The response might be, “Well, my truth is that blacks are targeted by whites.” Actually, it wouldn’t matter if for, let’s say, a year, no blacks were shot be whites at all. Well, “my truth” is there are historic wrongs meaning it’s okay for blacks to target whites.
TL;DR - “There ain’t no arguing with Commies”
This author is excessively wordy. My graduate school editing professor would have a field day with this piece.
The bottom line: there’s no regressive endpoint to which these idiots can point where society was “better.” They dive back to 1619, but there’s no real substantial global reason for it. Why not 1492 when Columbus set sail to the Americas? Or the beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1337? Or the conquests of the Mongols in the 1200s marked by the fall of many historic dynasties? They glom on to what they perceive as historical hot spots with no intention of explaining why those eras were better for any body.
Challenge a Work adherent with explaining their ideal social worldview or historical pivot point, and they can’t. They can’t tell you why they’re oppressed, just that they are. They can’t tell you what is their end goal, just that “something” needs to change. There’s no reason or logic to their claims or their goals. It’s change for the sake of change. I call this the “do something” cabal. But then all of this thought I’ve committed is obviously racist because I’m privileged by my whiteness and my cisnormative upbringing means I can’t understand any of their plights, but don’t ask them about their plight. It just is.
Woke=indoctrinated
They learn they are always right and do not need to listen to those that challenge their programmed mind.
I think this is an important article and I will read it closely.
Thanks for posting it. ‘Pod
Literally.
That’s just it.
They don’t debate because they don’t think they need to.
Shut up and sit down, peasant/oppressor!
It’s because it is their religion. Not many here on FR would be willing to constructively debate the existence of God. It’s the same mindset.
"...As a fifth and final point, since this is getting pretty long already, remember that Critical Social Justice activists tell us more or less constantly how exhausting it is to fight this constant uphill battle in which no one takes them seriously (read: fight shadows of their own nightmarish projection)."
That’s not TriggleyPuff!
Further, I no longer need to debate them.
Their self-righteousness led to the ‘20 election steal.
The hatred of Trump was so perverse and complete within Democrat America that cheating was considered noble, patriotic, encouraged, and free from prosecution.
Everybody hates him, —they assume—nobody cares if we cheat, people are pulling for us to beat him by any means necessary, so don’t worry about cheating
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