Does Woke Intersectionality Require Individual Rights?

American Thinker ^ | 13 Apr, 2021 | Lawrence M. Ludlow

[MtnClimber]

Drilling down into the fallacious logic underlying intersectionality makes it easy to see that it has a glaring Achilles' Heel.

The “woke” assumptions of critical theory (CT), critical race theory (CRT), and intersectionality come from defective cognition that can easily be spotted by those who study formal logic – a discipline becoming harder to find in today’s woke government schools. As I showed in a recent article, despite containing a fallacy that was discarded back in the 12th century, even architectural firms such as the Smithgroup are embracing woke theories such as CRT. we don’t expect architects to be great thinkers, but when a company falls for a scam, you have to roll your eyes a bit.

There was a time when the failure to meet logical standards required rejecting a theory. But that won’t stop today’s critical theorists and their faith-based spinoff religions. Why? Because they refuse to submit to an external logical critique.

To them, the system of Western logic itself – the system that is used to construct bridges that stand upright, and that enables surgeons to operate successfully aerospace engineers to design and build airplanes that fly without crashing – is intrinsically biased. They see formal logic as a “socially constructed” form of white-male oppression.

Kimberlé Crenshaw and Her Intersecting Collectives

In their book, Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay trace the postmodern origins of critical theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the host of “grievance studies” that include disability, women’s, queer, and fat studies – to name just a few. All are fueled by some form of resentment that – we are told – can only be addressed by granting special privileges to groups of oppressed victims defined by their identity politics.

[MtnClimber]

James Lindsay has some very good interviews on youtube. I highly recommend them.

[rarestia]

This entire exercise is in place to remove responsibility for individual actions and place everyone in some sort of victim group. It’s impossible to have a normal conversation with one of these people, because every subject can (and according to them, should) be boiled down to victimization.

[ctdonath2]

Short version: intersectionality cannot recognize “individual rights” precisely because that would require recognizing “individual responsibility”.

Tangent: Biden’s “no right is absolute” is a confusion over one’s responsibility for the consequences of exercising a right.

[ProgressingAmerica]

Not completely.

Benjamin Constant wrote about the “Liberty of the ancients” and the “Liberty of the moderns”, and it is easy to see why the French Revolution failed - because it wasn’t like the American Revolution in that it was all based on collectivism.

Collectivism is why all of the old ancient societies failed. Individualism is the one reason why America lasted for so long comparatively. All of these kids are being taught collectivism, ancient Liberty, in the schools.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/constant-the-liberty-of-ancients-compared-with-that-of-moderns-1819
https://www.city-journal.org/benjamin-constant-value-of-liberty

We all better get out there and start protesting, or there won’t be anything left to defend and we find ourselves in gulags.

[otness_e]

Well, technically, the Roman Empire and maybe China up until it went Communist lasted significantly longer than America (America itself only lasted over two centuries currently. The Roman Empire lasted half a millennia, maybe a full millennia if we count Byzantine), so I’d rather we wait until we at least get to our quad-centennial before we claim we outlasted all of the old ancient societies.