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.
Didn’t Gropy Joe tell us that he chose “truth” over facts?
In a word, secession.
Mope. We’re done talking.
In other words, logic is racist.
When a Woke tells you how offended they are just smile warmly and say ‘You’re welcome!”
Then expressly do it again if it’s something you are want to do.
To this I will add that accommodation doesn’t placate, it emboldens.
Same as with militant Muslims, as a matter of fact.
They easily offended, especially the easily offended by proxy (by what they imagine should offend others of certain descriptions), only become easier to offend if people give in.
Given that power and influence among the Woke gravitates to the most obnoxious and the loudest, who live the farthest out on the ragged edge of their enflamed sensibilities (always emotionally derived from the crowd or themselves rather than received from any more stable source) it’s small wonder that the woke are like hyper-puritans without purity.
If they stop taking one of the masters tools “our money”, then i could care less what these bozo’s rationalize or emote in their case.
Can one not be raised except by lowering another?
It sounds like that is what this “ black feminist epistemology heavyweight” is implying.
The old Brezhnev doctrine. The ratchet of ‘progressive’ only goes one way.
Religious cults do the same thing. They do not like to be countered in argument.
And they think I don’t know that they are my existential enemy.
Dumb bastards.
Start putting a few holes in some of these bastards and they’ll shut up.
That graphic looks like a good playbook for societal success, doesn’t it?
Not only that, but they are worthless by any measure. JordanPeterson has commented extensively about these TWOTs. He is a published and accomplished author on clinical psych. One thing he notes in the field (with which I can related since I’ve also done research — not that field) is that the value of your research is reflected in how it is used to further scientific exploration. Each paper should (if it has value) be used as a stepping stone to more research, and more papers. That is how science works and how you can know if what you did is appreciated.
On this, he noted that of the hundreds if not thousands of papers/theses published on issues like gender, equity, inclusion, yada, yad — they are not referenced once. Not once.
So, all of these “knowledgeable” publications are worth nothing even within the field, much less without.
Next time someone pontificates ask them how many references they have, how many times in other papers is their work used. If they don’t know this, either it never was or they don’t have the ego to have checked — which is even less likely.
And, if you look at similar treaties signed under similar circumstances the Versailles treaty was not an outlier. Nazi apologists always go to this: “We were the victim.”
BS. You got yourself in trouble, got beat by everyone else in the world, and then elected a pompous Ahole who promised you salvation.
Sounds like an Ad by the Democratic National Comm.
Yep.
In my family it’s every life experience I’ve had that runs counter to ‘progressive’ thought is my mythology. It’s an easy, quick way to dismiss reality by saying it never happened. It’s just your fantasy, but it really never happened the way you say because my ‘progressive’ belief knows with certainty that those types if things never happened.
They are cult fanatics.
“Every white person is racist. If you don’t admit you are racist that proves you are racist because you can’t see your own racism. You will always be racist and there is nothing you can do to stop being racist. So admit you are racist and give me your stuff.”
I had a similar experience growing up when a famous baseball player moved into our neighborhood. Since it was the first black family in our neighborhood, plus the father was famous and physically intimidating, my parents wouldn’t hear it when I said his son was basically an @$$30/e. My sister babysat for him and called him ‘the brat’.
So my parents didn’t try to stop my grown sister, they focused on me, presumably because I was younger. I have come to see that a lot of this bullshiite is based on physical size rather than truth.
Well, that arrogant putz son became a baseball player himself, perhaps one of the greatest of all time except that no one liked him because he was such an @$$#0/e and he injected steroids. Yes, the family on our street was Bobbie Bonds and I hung out with Barry Bonds as a kid. I was made to feel something was wrong with ME just because they were a famous black family that could do no wrong. I’m lucky in that the vast majority of people I tell this story to will actually agree with my assessment of the character of ‘the brat’.
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