Critical Theory is Systemically Brainwashing Us

[Suzanimal]

I've come back to this thread several times trying to figure out what ethnomathmatics is. SMDH...



Next time I make an error balancing our checkbook, I'm gonna tell Mr A it was ethnomathmatics and to check his privilege - he's a shameless power hoarder

 

[A Son of Liberty]

I was struck by exactly the same sense when I watched the documentary videos about the events at Evergreen State College (see post #25 in this thread). When the context would call for reference to "people" (either in the abstract, or with respect to particular individuals), the student "activists" would sometimes speak of "black and brown bodies" ... not "people" ... "bodies" ...

I found it extremely off-putting and creepy. But I guess that's just my "white privilege" coming through ...

Yes! - creepy... it's cultish, like they're giving new names to mundane definitions and concepts in order to bestow a certain ceremony upon them, perhaps to convey that they understand them better or more *deeply* than anyone else. It just reeks of hucksterism to me. But I guess that makes sense considering that the entire curriculum is just made-up gibberish.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Why are these people - these mushy, soft-headed pseudo-academic types - always so prone to use utterly meaningless phrases like, "...moving through the world with other living beings..."? Whenever I hear or read tripe like that I'm instantly repelled, and assume I'm in the presence of someone who thinks meat comes from the grocery store.

These people are the worst.

I was struck by exactly the same sense when I watched the documentary videos about the events at Evergreen State College (see post #25 in this thread). When the context would call for reference to "people" (either in the abstract, or with respect to particular individuals), the student "activists" would sometimes speak of "black and brown bodies" ... not "people" ... "bodies" ...

I found it extremely off-putting and creepy. But I guess that's just my "white privilege" coming through ...

In both her fiction and non-fiction, Ayn Rand made more than a few trenchant observations about the kind of "concrete-bound" mentality that seeks to reduce everything to gross physicality (such as mere "bodies" that are "black or brown" - or "meat [...] from the grocery store"). She called such people the "mystics of muscle." Quite apropos, no?

Also relevant to all this is the following article at New Discourses:

To Boldly Go: Critical Animal Studies, the Final Frontier
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/boldly-go-critical-animal-studies-final-frontier/
Timon Cline (15 October 2020)

[Bold emphasis added - OB]

Introduction

An article from this summer in Psychology Today by Katherine Compitus demonstrates how far critical social theories can take us if fully imbibed. In the article, Compitus attacks “speciesism,” which is “the concept that one species (usually human) considers themselves superior to other species.” No species is superior, just different, says Compitus. Instead, she prefers to relegate all species to the lowest common denominator: “We are all living beings.”

[...]

Compitus may seem fringe, but she is working from the assumptions, and toward the aspirations, of a distinct critical social theory of relatively recent vintage (predictably) known as Critical Animal Studies (CAS). In 2012, the New York Times was already reporting on the advent of CAS at top universities, Dartmouth, NYU, Wesleyan, etc. Noting that animal studies emerged from Cultural Studies, the article continues, “Some scholars now ask: Why stop there? Why honor the uncertain boundary that separates one species from all others?” Let that sink in. That was 2012. That was before anyone outside of the academy was really talking about critical social theories. That was before Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo had captivated the popular imagination (and the Amazon bestsellers list). That was before Black Lives Matter played out the convictions of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in real time.

[...]

Critical Animal Studies: Humans and the Others

[...]

Heteronormativity and Humanormativity

[...]

Speciesism and Racism

[...]

Law is Anthropocentric

[...]

End Game: The Abolition of Man

[...]

Conclusion: Animal Farm

CAS presents a truly frightening prospect: the elimination of the most basic foundation of Western civilization, the priority and unique status of human beings. The result is the relegation of all “living beings” to animal status. Ironically, where CAS theorists think that the elimination of species distinctions will eliminate the means of oppression, it will, in fact, almost certainly make it easier to dehumanize whoever the marginalized group happens to be. If we are all relegated to the lowest common denominator then whatever can be done to an amoeba can be done to a human person. Any argument otherwise would be arbitrary and capricious.

CAS has followed the same trend in the academy as other critical social theories: slowly transitioning from a niche discipline to being regularly featured on course schedules to making appearances in mainstream publications.[SUP][46][/SUP] The sheer absurdity of the discipline and its core assumptions should not induce us to sleep on it, as they say. We must recognize that if half-baked ideas like “white fragility” can so easily and quickly capture the public discourse then so too can ideas like “speciesism.” The same lazy logic and resentful worldview animates—to use a word no doubt offensive to CAS scholars—both.

The New York Times article quoted above relays arguments based on a human-centric standard. That is, if certain non-human animals use language and even possess an analog to our conception of morality, then is a distinction really as stark as we imagine? That was 2012. Things have progressed since. Now, the cutting-edge scholars detest such human-centric arguments. The human-animal binary is socially constructed and should be dismantled because it is oppressive, full stop. To allow some animals to qualify for legal rights or a diminished form of personhood only perpetuates the liberal status quo that centers humans and elevates rationality.

This signals a big shift in only a few years. Presumably, CAS theorists were making such arguments all along. The difference is that they are now quite comfortable openly expressing them to the public, and even more so in college classrooms. This development is even scarier when we survey the gullibility of the media and intellectual class, at the moment, for anything having to do with race. The connection made between the speciesist binary and racism makes CAS ripe for more mainstream reception. Look for it soon at a course list, think piece, and protest event near you! If CAS is fully imbibed—not an unlikely prospect given what we’ve seen so far—we will move rapidly from “four legs good, two legs better” to “four legs good, two legs just the same,” or, if you like, “all animals are equal, some are more equal than others,” to “all animals are equal, and we are all just animals.” We are all farm animals now.

Were the Grievance Studies team to attempt another hoax today they might have a more difficult time. The CAS literature is almost beyond parody. A specious connection between dog parks, misogyny, and rape culture is one that a publication like the Journal for Critical Animal Studies would almost certainly accept. The only question would be whether “Helen Wilson” could come up with a proposal that was radical enough.


[FULL ARTICLE AT LINK: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/boldly-go-critical-animal-studies-final-frontier/]

 

[Occam's Banana]

@wokal_distance on "EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATIC"

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1295629934652583936
Thread compiled @ threadreaderapp.com: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1295629934652583936.html​

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1/
EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATIC!

Paw Patrol, Barbie, Dr. Seuss, and Christmas are all problematic, but why?

The Theory behind it is called "Critical Theory," and the woke use it to attack literally everything anyone does, so we need to understand it

Critical Theory: A thread

2/
What is Critical Theory?
In 1937 Max Horkheimer defined Critical Theory in his paper "Traditional and Critical Theory."
He said Traditional Theories try to understand and give unbiased accounts of how the world, or society, works.
Traditional theories are purely descriptive!

3/
According to Horkheimer, traditional theories don't tell us what's what is good or bad. The only thing a traditional theory provides is an explanation of how things in the world, or society, actually function.

For example: the theory of evolution is a traditional theory.

4/
Critical theory is different.
Critical Theory is oriented toward critiquing and changing society. Critical Theorists have a moral vision for how society should be, and [they] use the tools of critical theory to say whatever doesn't line up with their ideology is oppressive and evil.

5/
The original Critical Theorists were neo-Marxists. Where Marx focused on economics, neo-marxists wanted to take Marx's views on economics and politics and extend them to all aspects of culture. That way they could attack, not just capitalism, but all of liberal democracy.

6/
While The Institute for Social Research (sometimes called the Frankfurt School) where Horkheimer wrote his essay was ground zero for critical theory, we must also look at the influence of another neo-marxist: Antonio Gramsci (founder of the Italian Communist party)

7/
Like the Frankfurt School, Gramsci focused on culture.
Gramsci believed politics must be reinforced by culture, he realized that even if communists grabbed power, if the popular culture says communism is bad the power grab won't last because the people will revolt.

8/
Gramsci said in order to get into power and stay there, the communists would need to have broad popular and cultural support. The only way to get that would be to have what he called "cultural hegemony."

Cultural Hegemony is a very important idea in Critical Theory. It says:

9/
Cultural Hegemony is cultural dominance. Gramsci thought those who make and control culture determine which beliefs and ideas are spread through society. So the worldview and ideology of the culturally dominant people becomes the dominant worldview in society.

10/
To recap:

Traditional Theories describe how the world works.

Critical Theories extend the neo-marxist critique to all of culture and society and say how it should change.

Critical Theorists almost always see cultural dominance as necessary to get and keep power.

11/
So lets look at how this actually works among woke people.
Step 1. A woke person analyzes society to find anything which isn't woke. Literally anything will do: books, movies, shoes, food, sports; any element of culture a woke person thinks could be woke, but isn't woke.

12/
It's important to note there doesn't have to be anything wrong with the cultural item picked. A woke person might choose to analyze something which is fine: a book everyone loves, a bank that does it's job, good police which aren't abusive; It doesn't matter what's picked ...

13/
[... b]ecause step 2 is problematizing, and anything can be problematized.
This is when the Critical Theorist analyzes the thing that wasn't woke, which everyone was happy with, which no one was bothered by, and raises hell about it. Why do they do that? There are two reasons:

14/
The first is that they think the only reason we are o.k. with non-woke things is because we have been socialized by our culture to accept them. If we were "woke" we would realize how oppressive and evil Paw Patrol and Christmas really are.
The second reason is because ...

15/
[... w]e have been conditioned by our society to accept "problematic" things as normal so we let them slide. The solution then, is to "problematize the existential situation," and raise hell about it so the problematic nature of the thing in question (say Christmas) is made visible

16/
During the process of problematizing the woke will provide explanations for why the thing is problematic. For example, suppose they problematize math. They might say that claiming math is universal (and saying 2+2=4 is always true) upholds white supremacy. I'm not kidding:



17/
Or take for example marriage:
We would take evidence from biology and say humans often fall in love and many humans have a biological desire to engage in reproductive behavior. Thus we invent marriage as a cultural support for people who fall in love or have children together

18/
That is, one of us might use traditional theories to understand the biological reasons for humans falling in love (or reproducing), and the sociological reasons society would invent a thing like marriage. We may even study the psychology of humans who get married!

19/
Critical Theory might say marriage exists in order to establish a patriarchy. The family is created to socialize men to become wage slaves for capitalists and socialize women to be human incubators that produce offspring so the supply of wage slaves is maintained.

20/
If a husband and wife were to push back at this and say that is not in fact why they got married, the critical theorist would tell them that they have a "false consciousness." They are not aware of the ways their thoughts and emotions are controlled by the cultural hegemony.

21/
And the power of cultural hegemony lies in its invisibility. Culture doesn’t seem political, it’s just the songs we sing, the books we read, and the language we use. But really culture is a politics that doesn’t look like politics, so their marriage is political!

22/
This is how critical theory proceeds in everything. They will take every little thing, from the totally innocuous, to the fantastically beautiful, and then claim that in actual fact that [innocuous or] beautiful thing exists to support some kind of evil system that needs to be dismantled ...

23/
because ThE SyStEm Of PoWer AnD thE SyStEmiC PoWeR of The DomInAnT StRucTUre Is ... And on and on they'll go.

They start with their conclusions and ignore truth as they prescribe activism to grant themselves power while tearing down ideas, institutions, and cultural norms.

24/
Critical Theory is cynicism masquerading as wisdom. It has cloaked itself in the legitimacy borrowed from more rigorous disciplines.

So show people that. Ask questions. Ask for proof. Demand evidence. When they offer more theories in lieu of evidence call it out ...

25/
When they assume what they claim they can prove call it out ...
When they use one of their argumentative sleights of hand call them out ...

Then demand evidence.

If they don't have any then you dismiss their claims and don't give in even if they raise hell.

26/
Critical Theory is nonsense, let's start saying so.

fin/

 

[Occam's Banana]

@wokal_distance on "White Supremacy"

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1318267770694348800
Thread compiled @ threadreaderapp.com: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1318267770694348800.html​

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1/
EVERYTHING IS ROOTED IN WHITE SUPREMACY!!!

-holidays
-Disneyland
-theater
-Doctors
-Church
-libraries

The Woke think everything is "rooted in white supremacy." Understanding why they say this is key to cracking the code of woke ideology.

So let's look at it

A Thread ��



2/
"Rooted in White Supremacy" is a term from woke academic literature, so it comes loaded with the worldview of wokeness; And the worldview of the wokeness is NOT the same as the worldview of enlightenment liberalism.

The worldview of wokeness is postmodernism.

3/
This means there's more going on then it first appears.

In 1997 the critical race theorist Charles Mills wrote "The Racial Contract," and the first sentence in that book is: "White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today."

4/
Mills redefines "white supremacy" so [that] white supremacy is no longer a belief based on prejudice. It's an *unnamed political system.* How the woke cash out the claim [that] White Supremacy is a political system, and not just a belief, is what allows them to say everything is rooted in it.

5/
In 1995 Paul Quin argued [that] the Source of Racism in the deep south was not prejudice, but a "system of culturally sanctioned beliefs and attitudes which condemned African-Americans to a subordinate position."

The whole quote here is essential reading:



6/
The idea is that racism is caused by a system. That system exists because a set of interlocking beliefs and attitudes that oppress Black people gains social currency by being "culturally sanctioned."

Well what does it mean to be culturally sanctioned?

7/
What it means is that the institutions of cultural production (music, media, churches, universities, etc) that produce art, science, beliefs, ideas, and politics have accepted and perpetuate the beliefs and attitudes that place white people above black people.

8/
This means woke people think White Supremacy is not the name of a belief, it is the name given to the "pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority" that results from cultural institutions sanctioning racist beliefs in what they produce.

9/
We have one more concept to unpack and then we can explain why this is all nonsense.

Postmodernism, which the worldview operating here, comes in part from the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida. You can see [that] the influence of Derrida's ideas about language are present here.

10/
Derrida said that words are always defined in terms of other words, they do not get their meaning from their relationship to the world or how they are used by people, but rather they get their meaning from their relationship to other words. This has 2 consequences:

11/
1. The meaning of words is no longer tied to the world, and
2. Derrida said words contain "traces" of other words.

It is 2 that concerns us here. The idea being [that] words contain "traces" of other words. IE: the word 'pig' has traces of words like "pink," "animal" and "mammal."

12/
The idea [is] that words contain traces of other words, ideas contain traces of other ideas. The result is that the woke think that documents, texts, and stories can contain the traces of ideas that are not mentioned directly. This applies to all types of communication.

13/
For example, a woke person might say [that] the scientific term "black hole" contains traces of ideas about race, because "black" can refer to both a color and a race. As such, using the term "black hole" to refer to something negative is racist.

Here's a video of someone doing that:

VIDEO: https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1318311516588834816/pu/vid/320x240/EfPOHW7ZHL1t8pcg.mp4​

14/
If you combine all of this together, you get the idea that all ideas, concepts, and values are fruit of the culture tree that they grew on; as such, they always contain the seeds, the "traces," of the culture they came from.

So now the conclusion is obvious.

15/
Because of past racism, the woke think [that] every ideal America is founded on is fruit of the poisonous tree of "white supremacy."
Capitalism, due process, free speech, equality under the law, objectivity, the scientific method; all contain the seeds of White Supremacy.

16/
The woke think the notion of free speech arose in the enlightenment period when slavery was still practiced, and so came out of a racist culture. They would say [that] the cultural soil free speech grew out of was racist, and so free speech is "rooted in White Supremacy."

17/
This logic can be applied to every single idea, concept, art piece, text, poem, scientific discovery, philosophy, or anything else that showed up in an American or Western context.

Thus everything from black holes to medicine to Disneyland is "rooted in white supremacy"

18/
The flaw in all of this is [that] it assumes every idea takes on all the characteristics of the culture that created it. It's cultural guilt by association that says everything a culture ever did, and every belief it ever had, is contained in everything it ever made.

This is nonsense.

19/
Imagine thinking synthetic antibiotics are racist because a German, Paul Ehrlich, invented them in the early 1900's and there was some serious racism in Germany at that time

I'm an ethnic Jew, and let me tell you if I get pneumonia, y'all best be giving me my damn amoxicillin.

20/
So, that's what's going on when you hear woke activists and social justice activists talk about things being "rooted in white supremacy."

It's an idea that uses a theory which is detached from reality, and it is used to smear enlightenment liberal ideas as racist.

21/
It is complete nonsense, so when someone pulls this out on you, call it out for what it is and push back.

/fin

 

[Occam's Banana]

@wokal_distance on "Woke people are liars"

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1316958063321096192
Thread compiled @ threadreaderapp.com: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1316958063321096192.html​

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1/
Woke people are liars.

They are blatant hypocrites. Always. Every time. Without exception.

The only reason she wants to "end civility" is when she wants to drag someone or [bully them].

But ...

@courtneymilan





2/
If she gets dragged she will cry "this is harassment" and play victim.

Everything they do is like this. All of it.

All the little rules and conventions they try to make us adopt are just [their] attempts at making social rules that allow them to bully people. That's it.

3/
Every one of their silly little social expectations, all their social memes, are just attempts at justifying their power moves, treating people badly, or excusing their terrible behavior.

And all of it is laced with bitterness and resentment.

All of it ...

4/
"stay in your lane"
"get educated"
"emotional labor"
"white tears"
"fuck civility"
"mansplain"
"the audacity"
"listen and believe"
"check your privilege"
"take up space"
"read the room"
"white fragility"
"caucasity"
"rethink this"
"this isn't a good look"
"yikes"

5/
Woke Social Justice activists have created an entire dictionary's worth of social jargon as a way to cover up their power moves and justify their horrible treatment of other people.

It's as simple as that.

6/
And they do this while engaging in the snarkiest, most passive-aggressive "Mean Girls" style bullying you can imagine.

They complain about "microaggressions" while they use every underhanded social maneuver you can think of [to] try to get one over on well-meaning people

7/
The entitlement is astonishing and surpassed only by the arrogance. They claim you're ignorant, demand you get educated, talk down to you as if you are stupid, and then act like they have done you a favor and demand that you pay for the privilege of being treated like garbage.

8/
And if you don't agree, they have an entire vocabulary dedicated to why you can't possibly be disagreeing in good faith:

"shite fragility"
"toxic masculinity"
"gaslighting"
"whitesplaining"
"complicity"
"implicit bias"

And I could go on, and on, and on.

It's all so tired.

9/
They go looking for things to be offended by and upset about so that they can put on the cloak of victimhood and indignation and use it to grab power, usually by posting about it on social media for clout.

10/
The result is that these people have the most elaborate set of social delicacies to be put into use since Victoria was on the throne.

I could go to Buckingham palace for tea with the queen and have fewer social delicacies to worry about than when talking with a woke feminist.

11/
And it all exists for no reason other than to give them an excuse to pile on unsuspecting people who mess up.

Enough.

Dismiss it. Rudely. And when they complain about that, and they will, just smile and say "civility is complicity"

And let them stew in the irony.

/fin

 

[A Son of Liberty]

It's remarkable how much of this has seeped into the rank-and-file left/Democrat. I've encountered a lot of victimhood, grievances, condescension, and the like by people whom I'm certain are not schooled in this business. I suspect they learn it osmotically, perhaps while watching leftist news programs or toobs...

 

[Occam's Banana]

@wokal_distance on "Woke Hypocrisy on Capitalism"

Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1301437976463831040
Thread compiled @ threadreaderapp.com: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1301437976463831040.html​

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1/
While activists disrupt, dismantle and deconstruct everything from art to tech, corporations are going woke.

Why? Because despite the woke rhetoric about "income inequality," there is ZERO ideological conflict between wokeness and capitalism. None.

I'll explain.

A thread :







2/
Thinking wokeness is opposed to capitalism is a mistake made by both the woke and by those opposed to wokeness.

In fact, wokeness is a major driver of capitalism, and according to McKinsey more than 8 BILLION dollars was spent on diversity training in 2017.



3/
The woke say they're opposed to capitalism because it produces income inequality, but then they engage in the most vulgar capitalism you ever saw in your life.

Here, AOC complains about income inequality, wears a $3,500 wardrobe for a magazine shoot, and then defends herself :







4/
The previous generation of the social justice left was similar.

Adbusters magazine was produced to fight against brands like Nike, in hopes of putting a dent in the conformist culture they said resulted from capitalism.

They now have their own brand of VERY expensive sneakers:





5/
This is because for both the counterculture from 1960-2010 (hippies, punks, etc), AND woke culture from about 2010 until now, capitalism works.

Why? Because none of their core values or ideological commitments are actually at odds with the functional requirements of capitalism.

6/
The woke may disagree with how current capitalists operate, but wokies have no problem with buying and selling goods in and of itself. No woke person ever turned down an opportunity to get paid. Ever.

Here, Shaun King bashes capitalism while charging $21,000 for a speech:





7/
This is why Layla Saad, author of "Me and White Supremacy," has absolutely no problem selling her book (foreword by Robin DiAngelo, who we will get to) [while] also selling a variety of 90-minute online courses for $97 each.







8/
Wokies often claim to be against capitalism, but this is because the woke think that capitalism is a system of exploitation connected to slavery. The objection that they actually have to capitalism is that it enforces racism. Where they do not see racism, they have no objection.

9/
Now, it is true that wokies can read racism into anything, but the key is that they do not read racism into THEIR capitalist ventures.

This is why @DrIbram says you can't separate capitalism from racism while he appears in advertising for McDonald's [and sells] books on Amazon.









10/
@timjacobwise is open about this. He [says that] while current capitalism compromises us all, the problem is not the buying and selling of things, but rather the power relations in HOW the exchange is done and if there is income inequality.

Tim charges $10,000-$20,000 per speech.







11/
The concern over power relations is why the woke always get more radical as they sell things. If they don't continue to radicalize, they become the "status quo," which is not allowed, because in wokeness, if you become the entrenched "status quo" then you become the oppressor.

12/
The woke have a very strong moral objection to ever becoming the entrenched "status quo" sitting at the top of "the system" in society, so they must always guard themselves to remain radical.

@deray makes this point before giving a talk sponsored by Wells Fargo:





[CONTINUED IN NEXT POST]

 

[Occam's Banana]

[CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST]

13/
When "fighting racism" or doing some other work of wokeness, getting paid is encouraged. This is often done while claiming that capitalism is evil (by a woke definition). Here, Robin DiAngelo trashes capitalism while charging $20,000 per speech and $340 for a phone consultation.





14/
Getting clout is just as important as getting paid, as this allows you to preach wokeness.

Here, Colin Kaepernick, who gets paid millions of dollars for Nike ads, discusses [...] another million dollar deal with Disney.





15/
Remember, the woke place massive importance on discourses, as in their view discourses are how structures of power are made and dismantled.

Here, Jemele Hill gets paid by Disney to help Colin Kaeprnick get paid millions of dollars to tell his story of being oppressed:





16/
The market for wokeness is why we see corporations like Ben and Jerry's Ice cream show concern about pay equality for "Latinx" women. Now, only 2% of hispanics use the word "latinx" and Ben and Jerry's is too expensive for poor people, but it's the discourse that counts!







17/
This same rule extends to PepsiCo.

Their brand Mountain Dew announced that they believe Black Lives Matter. Unfortunately from my perspective, rights for exploited black workers in developing nations don't matter to PepsiCo. But remember, in wokeness it's the clout that counts!





18/
I say that with some sarcasm and anger, but it is what the woke think. They are focused, not on the material situation, but on the discourses in society.

Which is why as long as the woke discourse is perpetuated, the woke will largely be satisfied ...

19/
This is why Chase Bank is able to avoid bad publicity while they face billions of dollars in fines for foreign currency manipulation while the CEO gets paid 31 million dollars in salary.

They took a knee (and this is no joke) in front of the vault they keep piles of cash in.







20/
None of this should surprise any of us. It's been going on forever. Kurt Cobain, leader of the alternative rock scene in the early 90s, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a shirt that said "Corporate Magazines Still Suck":



21/
And Nikole Hannah Jones said that capitalism was the motor of slavery and then was a part of Emancipation Conversations, sponsored by Shell oil.

In her head, this was not hypocrisy because it was her getting sponsored and wokeness was being spread:





22/
I hope what you get out of this is two-fold:

1. No matter what they say, wokies will monetize literally anything at the drop of a hat.

2. The woke care about discourses, identity, and narratives. The living conditions of people usually are a secondary concern.

So ...

23/
As fun as it was to have a laugh at what appears to be stunning hypocrisy, there was a serious point.

For reasons I tried to make clear, in their own system the woke aren't really hypocrites, they're just finding ways to get paid to put wokeness into everything they can find.

24/
Is what they are doing totally unhelpful? Yes.
Is their method of getting paid utterly cynical? Also yes.
Is this ethically defensible in any world other than wokeness? Absolutely not.

/fin

 

[A Son of Liberty]

For reasons I tried to make clear, in their own system the woke aren't really hypocrites, they're just finding ways to get paid to put wokeness into everything they can find.

Critical Theories are, by their own admissions, a virus.

I'm not aware of any virus which is discriminating as to how it infects the host.

 

[Occam's Banana]

It's remarkable how much of this has seeped into the rank-and-file left/Democrat. I've encountered a lot of victimhood, grievances, condescension, and the like by people whom I'm certain are not schooled in this business. I suspect they learn it osmotically, perhaps while watching leftist news programs or toobs...

I think that's almost certainly what happens. And it's not like these rhetorical techniques haven't been used since humans first started talking (and maybe even before that). But the woke have distilled, concentrated and weaponized them - and then the rank-and-file left, being "woke adjacent" and having been exposed to this stuff via social media, have adopted them, too. Monkey see, monkey do ...

 

[Occam's Banana]

Critical Theories are, by their own admissions, a virus.

I'm not aware of any virus which is discriminating as to how it infects the host.

That is an excellent analogy.

A lot of people seem to think that Critical Theory (CT) and wokeness are inherently Marxist, or that they are some kind of new-fangled version of Marxism.

But they aren't. Post-modernism (of which CT is an outgrowth) rejected Marxism just as sternly as it rejected capitalism.

As @wokal_distance points out below (and which James Lindsay has also said elsewhere). the only thing CT takes from Marxism is Marxism's "theory of conflict." CT does not endorse any particular economic system, Marxist or otherwise. Critical Theorists may adopt the rhetoric or Marxism as and when it suits their purposes, but it is a big mistake to think that their end goal is the institution of "state socialism" or what-have-you. Their objective is to acquire as much money and institutional/social power as they can, by whatever means.

As a result, Critical Theory is presently a much more fundamental and insidious threat than Marxism is even close to being.

https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1313209917809934336

https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1313210841743777792

 

[A Son of Liberty]

That is an excellent analogy.

A lot of people seem to think that Critical Theory (CT) and wokeness are inherently Marxist, or that they are some kind of new-fangled version of Marxism.

But they aren't. Post-modernism (of which CT is an outgrowth) rejected Marxism just as sternly as it rejected capitalism.

As @wokal_distance points out below (and which James Lindsay has also said elsewhere). the only thing CT takes from Marxism is Marxism's "theory of conflict." CT does not endorse any particular economic system, Marxist or otherwise. Critical Theorists may adopt the rhetoric or Marxism as and when it suits their purposes, but it is a big mistake to think that their end goal is the institution of "state socialism" or what-have-you. Their objective is to acquire as much money and institutional/social power as they can, by whatever means.

As a result, Critical Theory is presently a much more fundamental and insidious threat than Marxism is even close to being.

https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1313209917809934336

https://twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1313210841743777792

Interesting - for some reason I've been operating under the presumption that postmodernism is a neo-Marxist movement... or more precisely that it has been co-opted to be a neo-Marxist movement. I'm going to have to look back to see where possibly I picked up that notion.

 

[Mach]

A politically correct overview of The Frankfurt School.... and those "conspiracies."

 

[Occam's Banana]

In my previous post, I misspoke when I said that Critical Theory is an "outgrowth" of post-modernism.

"Woke" Social Justice theory is actually a fusion of Critical Theory and post-modernism, which developed more or less independently and were brought together in the 1980s & '90s ...

Interesting - for some reason I've been operating under the presumption that postmodernism is a neo-Marxist movement... or more precisely that it has been co-opted to be a neo-Marxist movement. I'm going to have to look back to see where possibly I picked up that notion.

In a sense, post-modernism was co-opted by neo-Marxists ... or, depending on how you look at it, neo-Marxism was co-opted by post-modernists ... (this dynamic is mentioned in the article below ...)

Actually, post-modernism is a post-Marxist movement, rather than a neo-Marxist one. (It is "post" Marxist because the acid bath of deconstruction dissolves Marxism as thoroughly as it does capitalism - or any other such "meta-narrative.")

The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (or "Cultural Marxism") is a neo-Marxist movement. (It is "neo" Marxist because it "renewed" Marxism on cultural rather than economic grounds).

Critical Social Justice (or "Wokeness") is a fusion of neo-Marxist Critical Theory and post-Marxist post-modernism.

There's a long but good article by James Lindsay at New Discourses on this subject:

The Complex Relationship between Marxism and Wokeness
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/complex-relationship-between-marxism-wokeness/
James Lindsay (28 July 2020)

I was recently asked by someone reading my forthcoming book with Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories, if I would explain the relationship between Marxism and the Critical Social Justice ideology we trace a partial history of in that book. The reason for the question is that Cynical Theories obviously focuses upon the postmodern elements of Critical Social Justice scholarship and activism, and yet many people, particularly among conservatives, identify obvious relationships to Marxism within that scholarship and activism that seems poorly accounted for by talking about postmodernism. This confusion makes sense because postmodernism was always explicitly critical of Marxism, naming it among the grand, sweeping universalizing explanations of reality that it called “metanarratives,” of which it advised us to be radically skeptical.

The goal of Cynical Theories is to add clarity to this admittedly complicated discussion and lay out how postmodernism is of central importance to the development of what we now call “Critical Social Justice” or “Woke” scholarship and ideology. This is actually only one part in a far broader history that certainly draws upon Marx (and thus all the German idealists he drew upon), though in a very peculiar way and through a number of fascinating and, themselves, complex historical and philosophical twists.

One of these is the development of postmodernism, upon which we write, and another is the development of “neo-Marxism,” which is sometimes referred to as “Cultural Marxism.” This is a development of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, and it too was explicitly highly critical of Marxism in its economic particulars, though it retained the underlying ethos and ambition of overthrowing the ruling classes and establishing some variation on communism. Clearly, a third line of thought that bears some relevance is the long and, again, complex history of “social justice” thought, which can be approached in any number of ways, including religious, liberal, communist, and, as we explain in the book, “Woke,” which must be understood to be its own thing in its own context, whatever its intellectual history.

Because we had to pick a narrow enough focus to fit the book into fewer than 100,000 words, we did not do much development into the Critical Theory side of Critical Social Justice, though it is hopefully obvious that that is where the “critical” part of the terminology comes from. Postmodernism used criticism, or critique, in this fashion, but it also used other tools, including what Michel Foucault called “archeology” and “genealogy,” though these were obviously heavily tainted by the “critical” mindset and mood. Nevertheless and obviously, the title of Cynical Theories plays off the fact that Critical Theory is somehow key to it—and the cover art makes this explicit—and the argument we make, though in a rather different fashion, is that Critical Theory and postmodernism fused in the late 1980s and early 1990s into what we named “applied postmodernism.”

Whether one sees this fusion as Critical Theorists in the “liberationist” tradition taking up postmodernist tools to deconstruct oppressive power or as postmodernists taking up the Critical Theory worldview as a point of solidity in an otherwise completely liquid formulation of society and everything in it is, perhaps, a matter of perspective and debate (Helen and I differ somewhat on this point, for example). It may be of importance, but for the present discussion it is not. What matters is that this particular fusion, applied to the specific question of increasing social justice, is what became the “Critical Social Justice” scholarship and activism that we dedicate the book to exposing, explaining, and providing a clear alternative to. (You’ll have to pardon me that I’m using my updated terminology for it here, “Critical Social Justice,” whereas we only called it “Social Justice scholarship” when we wrote the book.)

People who observe that Marxism is somehow tied into all of this Woke stuff, then, are certainly not wrong, but it just as certainly isn’t Marxism. Marxists, like the real thing, might be behind this whole “Social Justice” phenomenon, or ready to come in after it tears society apart, as it does, but the Woke themselves are not Marxists, proper, and neither are the Marxists Woke. The simplest way to put this would be the following:

• Critical Theory is “neo-Marxism,” or, as it’s sometimes phrased, “Cultural Marxism,” which plainly derives from Marxism and retained much of what was core to its thought while completely modifying other aspects of it in the hopes of achieving communism.
• Postmodernism is a particular form of “post-Marxism,” which had given up more or less entirely on Marxism and thus everything else, though it was still a fairly significant fan of communist efforts as they played out in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was no friend to liberalism.
• Critical Social Justice is the intentional fusion of these two schools of thought with the goal of achieving its ideas about “Social Justice” through radical identity politics.

None of this is simple, though, unfortunately, and so it all requires more elaboration. A quick history might therefore be in order. The relevant object to understand, though we don’t develop this specifically in Cynical Theories, is Marx’s “conflict theory,” which he derived from Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

[... FULL ARTICLE AT LINK: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/complex-relationship-between-marxism-wokeness/ ...]

 

[A Son of Liberty]

Yes... thank you.

From your link:

So, neo-Marxism is Marxian but not Marxist, in that it continues the conflict theory-style analysis of Marx into a different realm and does so toward essentially Marxist ends. One could say this is a distinction without a difference, but that is incorrect. The consequence of this shift is profound. It means that rather than attempting to unite workers and seize the means of economic production, as the Marxists had envisioned, the neo-Marxists wanted to change culture itself. This led them to find multiple sites of the oppressor/oppressed dynamic in society and get inside peoples heads with it, which they derived from the intentional forced marriage of Freudian psychoanalysis into Marxian social theory. They led them to understood the importance of seizing the means of cultural production—education, media, arts, journalism, faith, and entertainment—though, in many respects, they weren’t particularly good at it. For that, they would need the postmodernists and the critical pedagogists, as we shall see.

The neo-Marxists were critical of Marxism but not all that far from it, and they explicitly sought to agitate for a genuine Marxist revolution by means of agitating for it culturally instead of economically. That is, their goal was to use culture and ideology as a proxy by which they could effect the revolutions of the various underclasses. These they hoped to unite under a banner philosophy of “liberationism,” where by “liberation” was still very much meant liberation from the abuses of a capitalist post-Enlightenment society.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Whether one sees this fusion as Critical Theorists in the “liberationist” tradition taking up postmodernist tools to deconstruct oppressive power or as postmodernists taking up the Critical Theory worldview as a point of solidity in an otherwise completely liquid formulation of society and everything in it is, perhaps, a matter of perspective and debate (Helen and I differ somewhat on this point, for example).

For more on the intricacies involved in the post-modernism/Critical Theory/Marxism/etc. aspects of Wokism, here's the content pointed to by the "differ somewhat" link from my previous post:

Postmodernism Versus Critical Social Justice
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/04/postmodernism-versus-critical-social-justice/
New Discourses (14 April 2020)

Wait, what?! Postmodernism in its original form would be against Critical Social Justice?! You heard that right. It, like Marxism, would have been, and to the extent that it still gets forwarded, it is.

To explore this seemingly bizarre fact, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose join old-school postmodernist and libertarian thinker Thaddeus Russell on the Unregistered podcast. In this episode of the Unregistered podcast, these three thinkers take a very deep dive into the roots of Critical Social Justice and its Theory. This means diving deep into each of Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, critical theories more broadly, postmodern Theory, and the more modern fusion of these, for the agenda of Social Justice through identity politics: Critical Social Justice.

In this podcast, the three tease apart the contributions of the original Critical Theorists (1920s-1970s), original postmodernists (1960s-1980s), and today’s Critical Social Justice ideologues (“1989”-ish to present) and discuss how these various threads have contributed to today’s runaway moral panic and culture war. Though they each have disagreements with one another in the details, they generally concur that Critical Social Justice is a continuation of the radical New Left (thus Critical Theory) that has taken up elements of postmodern Theory to push its allegedly Socially Just metanarrative: “The Right Side of History.”

Thaddeus Russell has taught at six elite American universities, including teaching modules on postmodern thought, and has since founded his own educational platform, Renegade University, in addition to hosting the Unregistered podcast. He is also the author of A Renegade History of the United States.

Helen Pluckrose is an independent scholar of culture and postmodernism who led the collaboration with James Lindsay on the forthcoming book Cynical Theories (due out “after the pandemic”), which explores the postmodern influences upon Critical Social Justice.

Thaddeus Russell, Helen Pluckrose, and James Lindsay can all be followed on Twitter: @ThaddeusRussell, @HPluckrose, and @ConceptualJames.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sUkmBX8jUE

 

[kahless]

The majority brainwashing is from the mainstream media and Hollywood. Even this topic they decided for you to debate right now. A revolution, EMP or an asteroid strike is the only thing I think that can break this damn life long hypnosis.

 

[Occam's Banana]

I was going to post about this a few days ago, but I forgot about it until this topic of Marxism vis-à-vis Social Justice "wokeness" came up.

It's an article by the ICFI (International Committee of the Fourth International [1]) at their World Socialist Web Site:

Factional warfare erupts in New York Times over the 1619 Project​

From the article:

Working class Americans, black as well as white, draw inspiration from the great and ineradicable achievements of the two American revolutions. They believe human equality is a principle to be fought for and made real, not a “founding myth,” as the Times sneered. The lynch-mob style attacks on statues of Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln and Grant, encouraged on Twitter by Hannah-Jones, anger and disgust them. Worse, the clear connection of these attacks to the 1619 Project has allowed Trump and his fascist supporters to posture as custodians of the democratic heritage of the American Revolution and the Civil War.

That's right ... socialists are defending Jefferson (or at least his statues) and American history against the "woke" crowd ...

Say what you will about old-school Marxists (I certainly do), but at least they're not obsessed with racist, gendered, and/or ethnic identitarianism.

"Classical" Marxists have no use for Critical Social Justice theory. In fact, they see it as dangerous diversion that prevents the "workers of the world" from uniting, because SJWism and "wokeness" are so hell-bent on dividing people into groups that have nothing to do with class and the struggle of the proletariat.



[1] "International Committee of the Fourth International" ... ? LOL. Redundant much?

 

[Occam's Banana]

See post #23 for others: