Deconstructing "Progressive " thought

[Good2Golf]

If only the Roman Catholic Church would rescind its prohibition of birth control...small steps...

[/half joking]

 

[Kilo_302]

What happened? So did this column writer get into bed with David Suzuki and Stephen Hawking to come up with this latest fear-mongering about why capitalism will be the doom of us all?  :

Forbes

Or maybe Science.

 

[a_majoor]

Outstanding look at how Socialism really looks at and treats people:

https://bradrtorgersen.wordpress.com/2016/02/21/why-i-cant-be-a-socialist/

Why I can’t be a socialist
Posted on February 21, 2016

I’ve tried (over time) to explain my opposition to socialism in these terms:

1) Socialism’s ultimate disregard for the dignity and rights of the individual.

2) Socialism’s ultimate disregard for the economics of human nature.

3) The inevitable suffering and misery that results from 1 and 2.

First, because the root philosophy of socialism is Marxist (ergo, redistribution and leveling across economic tiers) socialism requires an authority capable of bending the knees of the people to the will of the state. There is no form of national socialism which has ever existed without very powerful governmental authority, and a police force capable of backing up that authority. This authority (and that police force) tend to show little (historical) regard for the individual, because socialism is focused (in the ideal) on benefit to the aggregate, not the welfare of the single person. If you’re going to have socialism, you have to be able to make people with “too much” give up things, so that people with “too little” receive those same things. This incredible power—however well-intended in its origins—invariably attracts the worst kind of bloody-handed leadership: psychopaths, sociopaths, and zealous devotees of various forms of social engineering.

Second, socialism is forever battling against the gravity field of human nature. Ergo, socialism is a state-sponsored moral remedy for the natural “selfish” virtue that individuals are entitled to the fruits of their creativity, intelligence, and labor. This warping—group or state “management” of the creation and exchange of intellectual and physical product, not to mention currency—undermines and devalues the very labor which socialism claims to venerate. Men who discover they don’t have to work to keep their bellies full, usually don’t work. Men who discover that working 50 hours a week, gets them no further ahead than working zero hours a week, also don’t work. Societies which bankrupt the incentives to work, always collapse. Fewer and fewer people carry more and more of the burden, until the whole thing crumbles. It happened in Soviet Russia. It is happening in Greece and Venezuela.

Third, the combination of intrusive and coercive state authority, with social engineering and terrible-minded leadership, and the grinding-down of incentives, has resulted in an overwhelmingly documented record of human woe, unlike anything ever seen in history. These facts are not a matter of rhetorical flourish. The Holodomor. The killing fields of Cambodia. China’s Cultural Revolution. The desolation of North Korea and Cuba. The destruction of national economies. Gulags. Poverty. Hunger. Death. So much death. Death unending. The snuffing out of well over a hundred million human lives, during the 20th century alone. That’s nine figures to the left of the decimal, if you want to write the number on a piece of paper and look at it. Men. Women. Children. Starved. Beaten. Jailed. Tortured. Mutilated. Mass graves. Erased from history—because they were deemed to be “in the way” of progress.

Of course, America’s fresh crop of socialists don’t see it like that. Like almost all socialists, the dream of making Utopia is simply too irresistible to them. It doesn’t matter what happened before—nor what will happen again, because we forget history (and repeat history, on this subject) with soul-destroying regularity. America’s socialists have been told (often from the cradle up) that socialism is not only sustainable, but an unalloyed good. Anyone who objects is deemed obstructionist, or even outright dangerous—we are merely “in the way” of progress.

I fear that the United States is the proverbial frog in the kettle. We’ve been gradually adding components of socialism to our national fabric since the early half of the prior century. In 2016, we seem to want to throw caution to the wind, and give the state unbridled ability to “improve” our lives, by making our decisions for us. We have corrupt political parties who thrive on a bread-and-circuses model; for selection of governing personalities. Sooner or later, that gradually warming water is going to be brought to a boil—and cook us. There is nothing magical about the United States that will prevent all the horrors of the 20th century, from happening here too.

The state that “takes care of” you in the ways you desire, can also “take care of you” in a very permanent, very undesirable fashion as well.

I wish more of my countrymen understood this. Alas . . . socialism is the irresistible flame to which the well-meaning, ever-hopeful moths are eternally drawn.

I try to see a positive future. But it’s mighty tough these days.

 

[a_majoor]

Fun meme to explode progressive snowflake's heads:

If you want to see a real "safe space", here is an example from Israel:

 

[a_majoor]

Venezuela’s then-minister of education lays out the Socialist program in plain language for everyone to see and hear. Too bad there are millions who will literally read this and either actively deny it or pretend it never existed:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/228040/

QUOTE OF THE DAY “’A couple of years ago, [socialist Venezuela’s] then-minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was ‘not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos’ (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.’”

Or to put it another way, “They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please. . . .”

 

[a_majoor]

Progressivism as a mental disorder. That does explain a lot about the behaviours of the SJW wing of Progressivism:

http://thedeclination.com/pretending-to-be-something/

Pretending to be Something You’re Not
by Dystopic | Mar 3, 2016 | Celebrity Stupidity, Culture War, Decline, SJWs, Sociology | 11 comments

A woman I’ve known for some time is fond of making great declarations of intent which she’ll never follow through on. Once, she explained that she was going to go to medical school and become a plastic surgeon. “Lawrence,” she told me, “I’ll look you up when I’m living up the good life.” I’m not sure if she expected to create some kind of jealousy in me, or if she really believed all of this and was trying to be gracious to her friends. But, a few months later, her goal to become a plastic surgeon had been completely forgotten.

You see, a new movie had come out, the recent adaptation of The Great Gatsby, and this woman had decided that bringing back flapper fashions was her new and great cause. Later, of course, this would be forgotten and set aside in favor of some other ambition. After a time, I simply ignored her statements and just nodded my head politely whenever she spouted off her latest life dream. She returned to her life as a live-in nanny in a modest home.

She is a Progressive, at least so far as her limited political outlook can be said to be anything. Bernie Sanders memes fill her Facebook wall, and she is quick to express her disapproval of Republicans. For whatever reason, I have been granted an exception for being “pretty smart” and “something of a dick, but kinda funny.” But her forbearance doesn’t extend much beyond me.

To be fair to her, she’s actually a very intelligent woman, and I suspect if she truly desired to be a plastic surgeon or a fashion designer, it would be within the realm of possibility. But I also know she’ll never be any of these things. Like most people in modern America, her attention span is abysmally short and nothing ever seems quite good enough to her to be worth real investment of time, effort, and resources.

Americans like her are everywhere, and when presented with the evidence that they have failed in life, they cannot bear the shame. They will insist that they really are fashion designers, or video game developers, or whatever else they wished to become. Zoe Quinn of #GamerGate fame presented herself to the world as a video game developer, even though the extent of her professional experience was writing the outline for a text-based game no more complicated than a Word Document, that she then handed to someone else to code.

If this is a “video game” I’m an Oscar Meyer Hot Dog.

I remember someone once questioning whether or not I was a DJ, because I was not personally known to him (as if only famous DJs were real DJs). I explained that I’ve been DJing in night clubs around my home region since around 2005 or so. I have a regular residency at one night club, and a quarterly regular gig at another. I spin guest gigs 3 or 4 times a year at the biggest and most popular club in my city, and have spun in nearby cities, also. It’s bad enough that my wife gets irritated with me because getting a Friday or Saturday night to ourselves is absurdly difficult to do. My largest gig is the Gasparilla Parade, where I DJ on top of a parade float in front of hundreds of thousands of people.

I’m not famous like Armin Van Buuren or DJ Tiesto, but I am a DJ and have long experience and professional history to back it up.
notadj

I’m a little eclectic. Okay, I’m fucking nuts, but it’s a bit of a stage theater — still, DJing as a Crusader Knight was probably way over the top.
The point is, I wanted to become a DJ, and I spent time, effort, and money in order to learn the craft (for those that care, I learned on CDJs but can also mix competently on vinyl — I still have a pair of Stantons for that), obtain the proper equipment, and promote myself. I have to wonder when some Progressive is going to pop out of the woodwork, shove a laptop in front of me loaded with a playlist in Windows Media and say “see, I’m a DJ too, accept me!” If the aspiring DJ is a woman of the RadFem variety, she’ll undoubtedly claim any attempt to belittle her “experience” is blatant misogyny or something.

Before you think “well that’s all just supposition.” No, it isn’t. Everybody seems to think they are a DJ because, once upon a time, someone let them choose the songs at a frat party or, God forbid, they pirated Virtual DJ off PirateBay. Everyone thinks they are the star of the show. Once, a woman proclaimed that it was her birthday, and that the entire club should listen to Rihanna’s Birthday Cake song as a result. She understood the dance floor better than the guy spinning them for a decade, you see, and they all wanted to know it was her birthday. She insisted she was a better DJ than the DJ. After she became rude and obnoxious, threatening to “tell your boss” I decided to play Deadmau5’s Attention Whore instead.

As the crowning refrain hit “I’m a big attention whore” in bimboified tones, I pointed to her and laughed. Suddenly a great big hole opened up around her on the dance floor. Nobody wanted to be associated with her. But the dance floor loved it — they always like a bit of drama, and I was happy to provide. It’s my job after all.

Arrogance is something we all fall into from time-to-time, but we’ve reached new heights with this sort of pretentious garbage. It’s like most of these people believed it when their teachers called them “special” and “unique” in school. But then they get out in the world and realize that, like the Deadmau5 song, they are just attention whores.

Zoe Quinn is no more a game developer than I am a quantum physicist. But she’ll say otherwise incessantly, while refusing to write a single line of code. Randi Harper spends more time complaining about GamerGate than contributing to the FreeBSD world. Phil Fish basically stole someone else’s game and then, ironically, started calling himself a DJ (I watched the video – it was horrible). And then Anita Sarkeesian claimed she was a “gamer” in order to market her videos wherein everything is decried as racist, sexist, and homophobic.

Men pretend to be women. People pretend pedophiles are normal, but Christians are evil. Pundits claim to be impartial journalists. Shaun King is Black. Don’t get me started on Otherkin (you have the soul of a werewolf? Da fuq?). Then I read a headline where a guy was asking why people assume that he’s gay because he’s a guy having sex with men. Everybody is pretending to be something they are not. Words have become meaningless. I guess I’m just waiting for resumes to become the latest “oppressive tool of the Patriarchy.”

People want all the credit for none of the work. And I guess that’s nothing new. The only thing that’s changed is that this has somehow become normalized to the point that telling somebody they really aren’t that is now oppressive and discriminatory. Think I’m crazy? This is really a thing:

Yeah, how soon will we have to hire pilots that can’t fly and have no experience merely because they said “I’m a pilot.” In my usual morning reading, I came across the history of Captain Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully ditched Flight 1549 in the Hudson River after a bird strike knocked out the engines. When this happened, he had accumulated something like 19,000 flight hours, and described his ability to save the passengers thusly:

“One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

Later Sullenberger lamented that the airlines were hiring less qualified pilots:

We have some carriers that have hired some pilots with only a few hundred hours of experience. … There’s simply no substitute for experience in terms of aviation safety.

Maybe someday, the great goddess of Diversity will demand that Zoe Quinn be hired as a pilot because she said she was one. And, after all, she once flew a bit on her Playstation. This notion of people’s delusions being accepted as fact, merely to placate their feelings, is going to go nowhere good. Watch for airplanes plowing into terminals like flaming arrows of apocalyptic wrath, because feelings.

Next week, I’m sure my friend will say that she is a developer, or a chemist, or a priest. I don’t know. The sad thing is, she is a really good nanny. Instead of pretending to be something she’s not, because it has become fashionable, she could tell the truth and say “you know, I’m pretty good with kids.” But I suppose that’ll never happen.

 

[a_majoor]

What campus cry bullies really want. "Triggering", safe spaces and other nonsensical demands are just the tip of the iceberg:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261991/what-campus-crybully-wars-are-really-about-daniel-greenfield

WHAT THE CAMPUS CRYBULLY WARS ARE REALLY ABOUT
The end of education as we know it.
February 29, 2016  Daniel Greenfield  120

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

The campus wars aren’t really about race. Race and the rest of the identity politics roster are the engine for transforming an academic environment into an activist environment.

The average campus already skews left, but it maintains the pretense of serving an educational purpose. The demands put forward on various campuses begin with racial privileges, but do not end there. These demands call for politicizing every department, the mandatory political indoctrination of all students and faculty, and the submission of non-political academic departments to activist political ones.

The campus wars are a declaration that activist non-academic departments that offer identity politics analysis while contributing nothing and which often owe their existence to campus clashes from a previous generation, should dominate all areas of life and thought at every university.

Imagine if physics majors rioted and demanded that every single area of study on campus had to incorporate theoretical physics and hire physics majors. That is exactly what is happening with identity politics studies. It’s a naked power grab that has the potential to redefine academia as we know it.

While black students are the public face of the campaign, behind them are embedded faculty radicals like Melissa Click whose abuses recently led to her firing from the University of Missouri. Click’s body of work, gender, race and sexuality analyses of popular culture, is fairly typical of the activist faculty behind the power grab. Media studies is often confused with journalism, but the two have little in common. Media studies has become a guide to politicizing culture by viewing it through the intersectional lens. 

Click’s husband, Richard Callahan, who also took part in the harassment, is a religion professor on paper, but in practice offers class analysis of religious practices. These resumes are fairly typical of the faculty activists behind the crybully insurgency. They may belong to anthropology, sociology, religious studies or a dozen other departments, but all they ever do is overlay their political filter over a given field.

They’re not academics; they’re activists with a mandate to impose their filter on everyone.

When we talk about political correctness, it isn’t just about banning certain jokes. That’s the smallest part of it. Political correctness is about making the political filter, the left’s lens, mandatory for all.

The campus wars are dividing universities between academic departments and activist departments. The activist demands call for embedding activism deeper into the structure of universities with more activist deans, departments and professors dedicated to their agenda. Funding is diverted from education to activism. Activist curriculums become mandatory to recruit more student activists.

Student activists demand exemptions from their studies for activism and academic bankruptcy that will allow them to erase entire semesters from their records. Academics take a backseat to activism. The purpose of the institution ceases to be education. Instead the university exists to manufacture more activists to make more demands, first of the university, and then of everyone else.

The only possible outcome of giving into these terroristic demands is the escalation of the conflict as activist departments use their new resources to expand the scope of their pressure tactics. In the timeless struggle for academic resources between faculty and departments, student activism is a nuclear weapon.  And the endgame of this struggle is the triumph of activism over academics and ignorance over knowledge.

The crybully targets in this latest round of campus wars have been university presidents and student leaders. Baseless claims of an unsafe environment are used to leverage leadership changes that either bring activist allies to power or new leaders that are terrified enough to give in to activist demands.

Even the rise of BDS has been embraced by non-Muslim social justice activists as a means of forcing out Jewish and even non-Jewish student leaders. Allegations of Zionism were used by Students for Justice in Palestine co-founder Hatem Bazian to block Jewish student leaders back in his student days. That tactic has been revived on California campuses as one more political offense to be exploited by activists.

The multiplication of petty political offenses is an Orwellian tactic for enforcing the activist agenda.

None of this is really about the imaginary hate crimes or offensive Halloween costumes. The activists invent pretexts for activism. And they will always find something that makes them feel “unsafe” and traumatized even if they have to invent it. The high pitch of their hysteria usually makes up for whatever logical and factual deficiencies there are to be found in their latest claims of victimhood.

The crybully demands are not the final campus endgame, but they do offer us a disturbing preview of it.

Their ideal campus is a political organization, not an educational one, whose primary mission is indoctrinating students to view all matters through a race, class, gender, sexuality lens for the purpose of political activism. It’s not just the Western canon being eradicated, but learning as we understand it.

The activist complex doesn’t believe in education, but in a constant process of reeducation in which an evolving left adopts new positions, purges dissenters and reeducates the public to the new position.  It does not believe in facts, historic, moral or scientific, but cultural perspectives. It does not draw the line at cultural perspectives in media studies, but insists on a feminist mathematics and rejects what it calls Eurocentric physics. Giving its activists control of universities would unleash Lysenkoism on a grand scale as every area of science would be broken down into perspectives of gender, sexuality and race.

The left claims to love science, but with their victory science as we know it would cease to exist.

This is not hypothetical alarmism. For example, the California Polytechnic State University demands call for forcing engineering students to take “anti-racist science and technology” studies. Princeton’s Black Justice League warned that, “Learning about marginalized groups, their cultures, and structures of privilege is just as important as any science or quantitative reasoning course.”

At the University of Virginia, the demand was that “every course should strive to recognize minority perspectives and every department should make it a goal to offer multiple courses that include or focus on minority perspectives”. Biology would discuss eugenics and Systems Engineering would “discuss culturally sensitive industrial organization”. Such demands have become altogether typical.

While race is being used as a Trojan horse for the crybully movement, the practical outcome of such policies would make academic departments subservient to activist departments. The latter would take over and hollow out the former leaving nothing but worthless degrees and student debt. Graduates would be qualified to do little except be activists and “allies” in their chosen fields. Their mission would be to propagate and enforce politically correct doctrines in the classical Soviet political commissar sense.

Safe space culture would silence dissent among faculty and students while creating activist student-faculty organizations empowered to conduct an endless cycle of purges and protests. College would be free and utterly useless for anything except turning out the next generation of community organizers. It is not only the ideas themselves that are endangered, but the entire mechanism for exchanging them.

The activist model would not only eliminate intellectual diversity, it would eliminate education.

The campus wars are about political correctness as a way of life. Inside every crybully wailing about their fragility is a totalitarian screaming to be put in charge of every single professor and student. 

 

[Lumber]

*sigh*

They can protest and demand all the want. Engineering and Professional (Law, Architecture, etc) degrees will not suffer at the hands of political correctness because there isn't anything to be politically correct about. Sure, they may present arguments as to why current Engineering and Professional curricula are politically incorrect, or that they marginalize certain cultures/races, but those arguments will be thin and easily refuted, receiving attention only thanks to the clamour of those spewing them.

As for the social sciences... does it matter what they actually teach/don't teach in those classes? You can't get a job with them these days anyhow.

 

[a_majoor]

While you and I might think the content and nature of STEM courses make them relatively immune to SJW shenanigans, the activity is not aimed specifically at the content, but rather the person of the students and faculty.

Teaching them that there are areas which cannot be debated, that rational thought does not apply outside of very narrow boundaries and that you individually can be carved out of the herd and rendered unemployable because you have transgressed against whatever ism/phobia de jour is currently in vogue. The issue isn't to be able to do STEM disciplines, but rather to control people and make them afraid to speak or act lest they draw the wrath of the SJW establishment.

I have been following a fascinating thread on a blog by a person calling himself Vox Day. He has chronicled a development in the "Open Source" community where SJW's (who do not contribute code at all) try to force "Codes of Conduct" on projects and then proceed to wreak havoc on the various projects by using these "codes" to harass and eventually eject people from the project. SJW's also tend to congregate in HR positions (answering your question about what use non STEM degrees are in terms of employment). Other examples are the bankrupting of the GNOME project after hiring a "diversity and outreach" officer, who blew the budget on "outreach" to woman and minority programmers (rather than hiring coders who knew their stuff and could contribute). And upthread there is the example of the Gamergate instigator who insists they are a "Game designer" despite never having written code at all.

This isn't even new, science and technology have been "politicized" in places like Nazi Germany, the former USSR and Communist China, and woe betide anyone who objected to the idea that things like the Aryan Race, "Deep Plowing", Lysenkoism or smelting steel in backyard furnaces on the basis they didn't exist or work.

Wow, they skys opened and granted me this example:

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/228434

ACADEMIC GIBBERISH WATCH: WE HAVE ANOTHER WINNER! “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research.” “Yes, I too was sure this was a parody, but in fact the lead author is the associate dean at the University of Oregon.”

 

[big.guy.for.you]

It kind of disturbs me how much credulity certain social sciences are treated with, especially those married to postmodernism. Every once in awhile I read an op-ed, a book excerpt, or even a paper published by such-and-such sociologist or gender theory professor or whatever, and it just blows my mind how actual paid-and-tenured academics will just give their opinion and frame it as incontrovertible truth. Bloggers will cite these things as though they're fact, with no evidence or even some basic reasoning to back it up. It's just opinion framed as fact. Even worse, some progressives hold their worldview as just the next step in the progression of society toward enlightenment, rather than... just another worldview. As though society simply progresses along a straight line, and they're two steps ahead. They'll go so far as implying that progressive ideas (like cultural relativism and multikulti) aren't just ideas but axiomatically good ideas, which to me is no different than die-hard conservatives saying homosexuality is just bad, for example.

My pet hypothesis for why this is that social sciences are relative newcomers in academia and don't have the same pedigree of intellectual discipline that other areas have. Historians, for example, don't even call themselves a science but every observation or inference they make is completely hedged with "maybes" and "possiblys", and thoroughly supported with physical evidence whenever possible.

Personally I'm very liberal but I just can't stand listening to other liberals, especially young, academic ones. These zealous progressives just make me smh tbh fampai

 

[a_majoor]

Then you will just love this. I wasn't sure if it should be put in a humour thread instead:

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/03/07/the-most-grotesquely-comical-academic-paper-ever-published/?singlepage=true

The Most Grotesquely Comical Academic Paper Ever Published
By Rick MoranMarch 7, 2016

The following is not an example of academic hijinks, but a serious academic attempt to feminize glaciers.

I bet you didn't know that glaciers were sexist. Well, maybe they're not. But they definitely lack the feminist touch as it relates to "epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge." Or...whatever.

Yes, it's gender theory meets climate change in a clash of two of the titanic irrelevancies of the age. And the results are as banal as you would expect them to be. The paper was vomited forth by a group of University of Oregon historians -- obviously the perfect candidates to write a paper on climate change. And they spared no liberal shibboleth in the making of this mish mash of hash.

Hit and Run:

The recently published, utterly incomprehensible paper was co-authored by a team of historians at the University of Oregon, and funded via a grant from the National Science Foundation. I hope American taxpayers feel like they got their money's worth. From the abstract:


Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.


You are probably wondering whether I am trolling you. You might be checking the date to make sure this isn't an April Fool's joke. Surely a satirist who set out to write a deliberate parody of left-wing papers using the jargon of the earnest social justice warrior could not have done a better job than a paper on "just and equitable human-ice interactions."

But the paper is real—very real. The University of Oregon, in fact, put out a glowing press release touting its existence.


"Just and equitable human-ice interactions"? I would like to see them write a paper on "human-rock interactions." After all, if Dr. Doolittle could talk to the animals, these University of Oregon moonbats should be able to interact with all sorts of inanimate things.


"What I'm trying to do in my research is provide more of a human story about how shrinking glaciers, warming temperatures, changing precipitation, how that plays out for different people," said lead author Mark Carey, an associate dean of Oregon's history department, in a interview accompanying the press release.

I'm sure Carey is well-intentioned, but if his goal was to put a human face on climate change, he failed. The paper is simply impossible to read with a straight face. It employs liberal buzzwords—colonialism, marginalization, masculinist discourses, etc.—with such frequency that the entire thing comes off like a joke. Just try to follow along with this paragraph:

Feminist and postcolonial theories enrich and complement each other by showing how gender and colonialism are co-constituted, as well as how both women and indigenous peoples have been marginalized historically (Schnabel, 2014). Feminist glaciology builds from feminist postcolonial science studies, analyzing not only gender dynamics and situated knowledges, but also alternative knowledges and folk glaciologies that are generally marginalized through colonialism, imperialism, inequality, unequal power relations, patriarchy, and the domination of Western science (Harding, 2009).

Note that the paper "builds on" something they call " feminist postcolonial science studies." This is interesting because by balkanizing science, they are aping the Nazis, who introduced "German physics," "German chemistry," and "German engineering" to the science curricula of universities.  The Nazis were ostensibly trying to rid German science of Jewish influence. The radical feminists at U of Oregon want to rid their science of what they see as "patriarchal" and "racist" influences.

Of course, it doesn't get much more unscientific than that, but servicing the cause of feminism sometimes requires sacrificing reality on the altar of political correctness.

Real science asks if a theory is true or false. Feminist science asks if a theory is sufficiently anti-male and anti-colonialist. Which do you suppose yields more useful information?

Outside of the well deserved scorn and mockery, I would be having serious questions if I were a parent who's child was enrolled in any program in that university.

 

[Flavus101]

The real question is how much money they received in grants for this rubbish.

 

[Kilo_302]

This thread is a hilarious echo chamber, seeing as how it's the conservative pro-market policies of cutting taxes, cutting spending, attacking intellectual "elites" and militarism that is getting the US a potential Donald Trump presidency.

Instead of crying about how Canada isn't an unregulated third world nightmare, just go live in a country that closer resembles what you want. Like the US. Or one of those Eastern European "miracles" with flat taxes. See how your quality of life decreases and report back.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

How about NZ?

They went broke in the 1990s and were forced to slash or reform every government program.

I found the country to be refreshingly entrepreneurial and not at all over governed. Yet, it was still not tooth and claw capitalism. It seemed "small c" conservative economically, while also "small l" liberal socially.

In many respects, I preferred it to Canada.

 

[big.guy.for.you]

A strong welfare system isn't mutually exclusive of lightly-regulated businesses encouraging entrepreneurism. It's a hard balance to strike though.

 

[Kilo_302]

How about NZ?

They went broke in the 1990s and were forced to slash or reform every government program.

I found the country to be refreshingly entrepreneurial and not at all over governed. Yet, it was still not tooth and claw capitalism. It seemed "small c" conservative economically, while also "small l" liberal socially.

In many respects, I preferred it to Canada.

NZ in many respects also has far more progressive policies than Canada. Marylin Waring, a very successful feminist politician (who is also famous for her academic work on how the domestic labour of women, while being essential to any society is not counted in national GDP) was an MP in NZ and quite radical by most standards.

Now the above nonsense on glaciers from a feminist perspective is nonsense. There are very real disagreements amongst progressives as to the virtue of identity politics. I happen to think they distract from structural economic issues, but then I am also a white male. To pretend that being a visible minority or a female or both doesn't affect many aspects of one's life is delusional.

The point is, we could just as easily have a thread about "regressive thought." Progressives and progressive thinking is what ended slavery for example. Or gave us a five day work week with over time if necessary.

At one time (I know, hard to believe) the wealthy and the poor got very different treatment in the eyes of the law. That never really changed, but we HAVE made PROGRESS, as much as conservative movements the world over have tried to turn the clock back.

Are Thucydides et al against these progressive ideas? What is the cut off date for acceptable progressive thinking?

The tragedy (or farce) of it is that unless you're quite wealthy, conservative policies and ideas hurt you. They reduce your quality of life, and make it harder for you to get ahead. Does anyone believe those bible quoting Republicans that trickle down actually works? Or is it more likely they focus on the bible and nebulous ideas around morality and hard work to draw attention away from the fact that their economic policies consist mainly of graft and legislation for their corporate buddies?

Progressive thought is what saved the masses from a miserable existence at the hands of tyrants in a feudal system. It's really that simple. And I for one believe we still have a ways to go. That is, unless we really believe that the poor are poor because they're lazy.

This thread is hogwash, and will only become more obviously so as we continue to see greater concrentrstion of wealth in fewer hands, the continued dominance of corporate power in politics, more casino economics that destroy the lives of the poor while befitting speculators, and the rise of neo-fascism as a result of the sheer hopelessness many people feel in the face of market economics. We need progressive thought now more than ever.

 

[vonGarvin]

This thread is a hilarious echo chamber, seeing as how it's the conservative pro-market policies of cutting taxes, cutting spending, attacking intellectual "elites" and militarism that is getting the US a potential Donald Trump presidency.

If you think that Mr. Trump's popularity is because of the above, you're just not paying attention.  He's sold himself as an outsider, the epitome of the American Dream.  He's the result of cronyism that sees Hilary Trump running for president, getting the establishment vote in terms of the Super Delegates (instead of her being in jail), and any number of other establishment types on both sides of the spectrum.

Instead of crying about how Canada isn't an unregulated third world nightmare, just go live in a country that closer resembles what you want. Like the US. Or one of those Eastern European "miracles" with flat taxes. See how your quality of life decreases and report back.

I live in the US.  My quality of life is amazing.  I'm reporting back. 

 

[Good2Golf]

Kilo, you do know the difference between a liberal and a libertarian, right? Don't mistake what Thucydides is, he's actually been quite clear on his position.

:2c:

G2G

 

[Kilo_302]

If you think that Mr. Trump's popularity is because of the above, you're just not paying attention.  He's sold himself as an outsider, the epitome of the American Dream.  He's the result of cronyism that sees Hilary Trump running for president, getting the establishment vote in terms of the Super Delegates (instead of her being in jail), and any number of other establishment types on both sides of the spectrum.
I live in the US.  My quality of life is amazing.  I'm reporting back. 

Right, but Trump's popularity is a reaction to the fact that these policies, contrary to popular myth foisted on us by conservatives around the world, simply don't work. They don't deliver for anyone but the wealthy. Clinton is almost as bad as the Republican establishment on this count, but instead of hiding behind a bible she hides behind flowery language like "love and kindness" to appeal to progressives who aren't quite at the point of understanding the structural economic issues behind the problems. Cronyism is certainly part of it, but what are the results of the cronyism? The result is governing on behalf of corporate interests.

As I've been saying on this forum for years, the scales have clearly tipped in favour of capital over labour, and this results in a destabilization of the system. Trump isn't an answer, he's the first of what could be several US politicians with neo-fascist tendencies. The only alternative is a critical look at the structural issues facing the US.

Overall, I would say the US is like the canary in the coal mine in this regard. They never instituted universal healthcare, they're far less regulated than most advanced countries, so capital had less work to do when it came to rolling back progress made since world war 2. Consequently we're seeing this lean to the far right. But neo-liberal economics are the priority for many other Western governments too. Continue down the path of privatization and deregulation and other nations will see the destruction of the middle class and a similar destabilization.

"Progressive thought", properly executed in the form of progressive taxes, more social spending, and an emphasis on a fair living wage is the only way to avoid this.

What we are seeing is conservative economics, the gospel of privatization and deregulation, the myth of trickle down,being exposed for the fraud that it is.

Libertarianism is just another form of government designed to help the already wealthy. Forgetting for the moment that it is simply unworkable, a libertarian country would result in leaders far worse than Trump. If you think people don't feel like they have a voice now, imagine how they will feel in a society where corporations have even more sway and more freedom because of an utter lack of regulation. Libertarianism leads to feudalism, which of course leads to despots.

 

[biernini]

This thread is a hilarious echo chamber, seeing as how it's the conservative pro-market policies of cutting taxes, cutting spending, attacking intellectual "elites" and militarism that is getting the US a potential Donald Trump presidency.

Not to mention ironic seeing as Canadian and American military personnel enjoy some of the most socialist and progressive policies of any institution in the world. Perhaps we should extend this rugged individualism onto the military as well. We should have them emulate something like the warlord model; armies financed wholly or in part by opportunism and racketeering, with members equipped and trained only as well as they are individually able to procure for themselves, and battles fought according to the highest bidder mercenary-style. We merely have to look for inspiration with the French Foreign Legion, the DPRK, ISIS and other banana-republic "generals" in Africa and our militaries can be just as ideologically pure as our resident libertarians deserve.

As usual with libertariarns and conservatives, good enough for me but not for thee. I'm reminded yet again of one of Canada's most famous exports, John Kenneth Galbraith, who said, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."