The argument is that they don't allow any messages on shirts, and therefore they are not favoring a single viewpoint.

It's like the prayer in schools/board meetings/town councils, etc. If they allow prayer, then they have to allow everyone an opportunity. But that means even atheists. So rather than allow atheists to give the opening benediction, they cancel the whole practice.

It's legally allowed. It makes the public howl like crazy on how the evil atheists are ruining everything by insisting that they have equal opportunity, but zorching the whole thing is better than allowing that.

This is the idea behind 'cancel culture', it comes from a video which used to be on YouTube, it was a response to a video that had was subsequently deleted.



I have a copy of the response video which is no longer on YouTube. The person quoted was a Canadian university student.




(Emphasis mine.)

Trying to have any kind of meaningful debate with you is an exercise in unending frustration. You have to be spoon-fed everything, and led baby-step by baby-step through every stage of the most basic, fundamental reasoning, so basic that a 4th grader would have no difficulty in grasping. But OK, I will humour you... for the last time.

Premise: You believe Thing A is bad!

Step 1: Write a paper explaining why you believe Thing A is bad

The End!

How hard was that? If you can't understand something that simple, there is nothing I can do or say that will help.

Absurd is right. The chronology here is dishonest. The Marketplace people are taking the initiative to pre-empt critics? Well, that's horse-****. The mob usually forms first.

It's also amusing that on this construction the Marketplace supporter says an anti-fascist "CAN'T" boycott. So they're not even going to say, "You can go to the mattresses over this, but... you really shouldn't."

Conservative Jonah Goldberg criticizes environmentalists for allegedly being predisposed to masochism. For example, he acknowledges climate change is "a real problem," but says we do not necessarily have to "suffer" by limiting consumption and regulating industry; the free market can unleash technological solutions that are win-win. You know, like how we cut taxes for rich people and then treasury revenues surge. Win-win.

Certainly there are some cases where one has to bite the bullet, and other cases that are win-win-win-win -- so much winning that you're tired of all the winning. It could be a flawed heuristic, but I'm consciously inclined toward the former precisely because I know sub-consciously there are powerful evolutionary mechanisms inclining me toward self-deception-for-material-advantage. Motivated reasoning.

Similarly, when it comes to the culture war stuff, almost all of the incentives push people in the direction of tribal allegiance. Humans want to please their team. A "virtue signaling" defense of free inquiry, especially when it's for increasingly marginalized scumbags who are not in, shall we say, cultural ascent, is probably, all other things being equal, more principled than the position held by a typical person. This should be rather... obvious. For some strange reason, people do not often want to be associated with unpopular figures or opinions.

It's about realizing we have a responsibility to the rest of society and our planet itself, and that takes precedence over what is easy or comfortable.

There is no win-win when it comes to climate change; we need to take radical actions now. I recently bought an EV because I am trying to keep my carbon footprint as small as possible. And while I love my new car and will never go back to traditional ICE vehicles, there are sacrifices that I have to make to put up with the lack of range and slow charge times. But the tech will continue to improve and EVs are at the point of viability now.

I have no problem making sacrifices in my life for the good of others, and that's what really separates us and is part of what the 'culture war' is all about. Selfishness, greed, and apathy got us to the point we are at today. These are traits that need to be purged from society.

And we will win the war. :)

That's appalling.

"empirical results" [emoji14]

Emily's Cat asked a question, you are dodging the answer.

Not unexpected!

She asked a yes or no question, which you wordfully dodged answering.

DON'T TELL LIES!!

1. It was not a yes or no question (the words "yes" and "no" do not appear in the question)

2. Her question was "Do you trust the other academics who publish post-modern nonsense in journals that can't tell the difference between post-modern nonsense and completely and utter nonsense that uses post-modern jargon? "

3. I ANSWERED THAT QUESTION DIRECTLY IN THE VERY FIRST ******* LINE OF MY ANSWER - "I wouldn't trust an academic who attempts to publish a fake paper...."

And then, unlike what you do, I justified my answer!

Why do you find it necessary to lie about what has been posted when you disagree with it, and can't come up with a rebuttal? Do you not understand that everyone else here can read, and can tell that you are lying?

(that is not a yes or no question by the way)

EC wasn't asking about people who publish "fake papers," though.

Allow me to demonstrate how to answer her yes/no question.

EC: Do you trust the other academics who publish post-modern nonsense in journals that can't tell the difference between post-modern nonsense and completely and utter nonsense that uses post-modern jargon?

Damion: No. I don't trust the academics who publish in those journals because they are not advancing knowledge in a replicable and verifiable manner, so far as I can tell.

THERE WAS NO "YES" OR "NO" IN THE QUESTION!!

STOP ******* WELL LYING!!!!!!!!

And FYI... I regard "Do you trust the other academics who publish post-modern nonsense in journals that can't tell the difference between post-modern nonsense and completely and utter nonsense that uses post-modern jargon? " is just a wordy way of saying "Do you trust the other academics who publish fake papers"

Its all the same to me... I do not trust dishonest *****!

Please click the link, it explains what kind of questions I'm talking about.

I clicked the link, and I totally disagree with what it says

If you want to ask me a question that limits me to a yes or no answer, precede the question with "yes or no" I will not answer such questions because they are preloaded in an attempt to trap the target into giving the response the asker wants.

I refuse to be limited by preloaded questions. If you don't like that.. tough!

I'll leave it to EC to clarify whether she was asking (1) for an affirmative/negative response and (2) about fake papers.

Good night all [emoji287]

Witnesses don't count, unless they're police or fascists, remember?
:rolleyes:

The silence from the Usual Suspects in this thread is noticeable.
:rolleyes:

I note that yesterday was the 85th anniversary of this great act of "cancel culture".

Out of curiosity, how does your view toward postmodern wankery play into your views on CRT, antiracism, and gender ideology?

This is disingenuous nonsense. The witness could've been:

1) Affirming that "Go back to your hood." was a substantively accurate paraphrase of "Go back to Long Island City."

2) Answering a leading question in a way that makes him look morally righteous.

3) Simply mistaken. (As we know eyewitnesses often are.)

Other possibilities may well exist, aside from the wholly unskeptical idea that this bystander must've been correctly affirming a literal exact quote, which is the sort of credulity I'd expect from Biblical apologists.

Sturgeon's Law: "90 percent of everything is crap."

A typically valid retort any time a particular genre, field of study, or area of interest is said to be dominated by poor quality. It holds true here, as well.

I've often held that the worst thing that can possibly happen to a niche interest is for it to become popular and mainstream.

I'm glad you asked. I have very radical views on this for which I make no apologies whatsoever...

CRT wouldn't even be a thing if history were taught properly in schools, and from early enough... and by properly, I mean the warts and all facts about history. No pretending certain things didn't happen - nothing gets left out. In the case of the US, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the Founding Fathers, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the whole shebang. Teach history as a series of facts, causes and effects, in a dispassionate way, and you don't even get to CRT. Anti-racism has nothing to do post modern wankery. Again, teach civics in schools right from the get go, and keep religion and politics completely out of schools (with politics maybe only being taught in the last two years). Teach that ALL people are equal regardless of race, ethnicity or skin colour, and keep teaching it and indoctrinating it for the entire length of kids time in schools, so that they live it and breathe it. If you want to eliminate racism, make life for the racists a living hell. Gender Ideology has nothing with that wankery either. Let people be who they are and stop making a big deal about it. The biggest barrier to allowing people to be who they are is religion, so ban it from being taught in schools. Any teachers that don't comply, fire them! Any school that doesn't comply, close it. Any private school that doesn't comply, withdraw all their funding, and if they are able to get private funding to continue operating, withdraw recognition of all qualification of academic achievement the school provides.

Well, you asked!

Its time to stop playing nice with racists & bigots - postmodern wankery has enabled them by legitimising them - it has achieved absolutely nothing towards a more diverse and harmonious society - all it has done is allowed a bunch of asshat, so-called "professors" to pontificate on BS, and to build reputations among all the other asshat, so-called "professors". It has wasted millions of hours of classroom time, and billions of dollars of University resources that could have been spent on useful things such as medical, environmental and other "hard" scientific research.

The most useful thing Universities could do to advance the human race is to permanently close all their "super-soft subject" departments; Art and art history, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Photography, Religious Studies, Psychology, Sociology. and just stick the the core subjects that produce students who will be useful to society - Biology, Chemistry, Medicine, History, Maths and Physics etc.

I fully expect to be labelled a philistine or a cretin for these views. I will proudly wear that label as a badge of honour!

All of which is pure, idle speculation on your part, and for which you have not a single scrap of evidence in support.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda. What has been given is at hand - it stands undisputed as fact, and it remains that way unless, and until you can prove it is not.

Stipulating that this is true, it would mean it's simply not necessary to say "postmodern gender studies". There's no other kind.

The unreliability of eyewitnesses is certainly not speculative on my part, I got those ideas from an expert in the field who spoke at TAM.

That aside, I am curious to know why you have concluded that the unnamed witness is affirming an exact quote rather than a substantively correct paraphrase of what the canceled woman actually said. I've seen no reason to assume one or the other scenario is the correct one.

Sure? I didn't say that, so I'm not sure if you're arguing with me or just making a general statement?

I didn't claim you said it.

I'm saying that postmodernism, as people tend to use it here, doesn't have much meaning beyond signaling disapproval.

Reactionaries are trying to get teachers and librarians arrested for stocking the shelves with books that mention sex or the existence of gay people.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside...-as-child-porn

I think absolutely nobody should be persuaded either way by B,L and P. The reason is because the different studies went to differenr journals of presumably differing quality and their may have been differing ways in which they were accepted.

Take the dog park one. On the face of it, there is nothing obviously absurd about writing a paper which observes the behaviour of dog owners and seeing when they intervene to stop their male dog raping another male dog or allow their male dog to rape a female dog or intervene to stop fights etc... What dog owners permit and dissuade could say something about a culture. What makes this more pernicious, in my opinion, and not to the hoaxers' credit, is that they included "results" of data which they in fact wholly fabricated. So what apparently makes this paper ludicrous? Mostly the fact that there is heavy reference to feminist and queer theory. But this becomes question-begging. They already thought that such literature was ridiculous so getting it published in a journal related to field says nothing at all. This is not like the Sokal hoax, because B, L and P already admit that, unlike the Conceptual Penis hoax, they actually read and studied the relevant literature rather than, say, went to the postmodernism generator and copied and pasted the results. (They even say that they had initially tried to submit papers that did this but they all got rejected!!! That seems an important point that their cheerleaders overlook). So, I am not impressed by that particular hoax paper.

Similarly, I am not impressed by the one that was apparently based on Meine Kampf. They seem to think it is self-evidently ridiculous that a journal would publish a work from Hitler that has a feminist spin. However, as this Hitler scholar in Haaretz points out, it is utterly dishonest because they used a chapter from Meine Kampf that was about organizing a party and of course B, L and P had to remove so much to make it unrecognizable from its "source material" that this is what was left:

Now apparently Lindsay has responded in some hour and a half long podcast episode on "New Discourses", where he thinks he has discovered some trick by his critic of using the name "NSDAP" and then declares to his audience that he looked up NSDAP and discovered it meant "Nazi Party" (I'm not kidding, he really thought this was a gotcha!), and he reads out the meaning, claiming not to know what "Arbeiter" means. Hmmm... I begin to wonder if Lindsay is pretending to be as ignorant as he sounds.

So, honestly, a paper accepted by a journal that just basically talks about what a feminist movement should look like, isn't really that impressive either.

It's pretty obvious that this was a sensationalist stunt with so much dishonesty thrown in, that, like I said, I ended up perversely feeling a grudging admission that no, gender studies journals DON'T just publish any old tripe.

And really, the bottom of the barrel journals they picked exist in pretty much any field. This is how academics keep their jobs. It is known as "publish or perish". And most of these journals in special interests are read by almost nobody and are peer reviewed by volunteers who spend their unpaid time trying to be helpful to authors who are often not very good at writing (hence there is a lot of feedback that B, L and P gleefully cackled at in their videos).

This is why pretty much all fields are plagued with bad scholarship. But maybe you need to see some actual data rather than this kind of anecdotal "study" which you can do, if you like, by going to Retraction Watch and plugging in any subject and seeing how many papers have ended up retracted for problems with data:

Link

And, to beat a dead horse, just look at how many papers in the medical field are turning out to be costing people's lives. Look at the studies of ivermectin that turn out to be out and out fraud, yet Boghossian's buddies the Weinsteins happily trot them out to send their viewers galloping off to buy horse paste.

But no, the real moral panic is to do with some obscure unread publications like Fat Studies which are apparently taking over the universities (hasn't this left-wing take-over been happening since the 1960s?). So Boghossian runs off to cry on the shoulders of Glenn Beck and Dave Rubin because nobody takes his grievance studies thing seriously and because what he did was unethical and because he RESIGNED and hee wasn't cancelled, while Lindsay is busy tweeting anti-semitic, conspiracy theorizing, anti-vaxx, pro-crazy-loons-at-parents-meetings propaganda. Helen Pluckrose, I imagine, is probably wondering if she has joined a weird cult of nasty reactionary lunatics by mistake.

I regard witnesses the same way as courts to - a witness is accepted as being truthful and accurate unless shown to be otherwise. I will assume the claim, as backed up by the witness, is valid, until such time as I am shown evidence to the contrary. I have always done things this way, and I always will.

I have the facts on my side here, you, on the other hand, are Vroomfondel.

And of course, from the Usual Suspects here... there will be crickets!

I regard "witnesses" the same way skeptics do: The null hypothesis holds until they provide evidence for their claims.

Yeah, I think I may have said initially "right-wingers' characterization of what post-modernism is", but after a while it gets tedious typing all of that out.

If post-modernism is anything, I suppose the fundamental idea is a kind of self-defeating premise that there is no such thing as objective truth. It should be obvious why that is self-defeating, but then it becomes part of a two-step process of then arguing that whatever a "post-modernist" says is on an even footing with, say, the hard sciences. I think that this was the main target for Sokal, when critics of scientific objectivity tried to argue that science is no better at understanding the world than, say, critical theory. Julia Kristeva, for example, I believe that said E=MC² was a sexed equation.

I think Sokal's point was perfectly well-made with his hoax, so I support it. However, these days, if you are trying to find someone arguing that there is objective scientific truth, and then there are some other, different important truths that may not actually be true, but are still true in an important sense, then who would be the poster child for this? Jordan Peterson of course. Nobody writes more like the right-wing reactionary idea of a post-modernist than he does. He blathers long and hard about Jung and Nietzsche and creates these incredible intellectual towers of ********, and the right-wingers, the reactionaries can't get enough of his total and utter drivel.

An in this case, the "null hypothesis" is that what was reported to have happened, actually happened until and unless it can be shown that it didn't.

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/09...-attack-video/

This Karen is a racist. She got called out for her racism, and her boss fired her for it. Cancelled! Karma's a bitch!

Stupid people. That's just plain dumb!

If you have video evidence, why on earth are you appealing to eyewitness testimony?

Wait… are we supposed to be anti-anti-racist now?

Assuming this random bystander was under oath and facing the possibility of perjury, then I'll accept your comparison to a courtroom. That said, everyone might should have a look at the Elizabeth Loftus book I linked earlier about how unreliable eyewitnesses can be, even under fairly ideal courtroom circumstances.

I'm still unclear on why you're ruling out the following hypothetical exchange: In such a scenario, the bystander is telling the truth, that is, the cancellee requested that FJ stay in his own neighborhood.

Nah. Just don't be a racist. Nothing more is required. Being "antiracist" is equivalent to being "antitheist" instead of just being an atheist.

Also, recognize offensive, infantilizing, patronizing ******** when you see it ;)

Ha! Funny coincidence. In this latest episode of Very Bad Wizards, Tamler and David talk for the first five minutes about Helen Pluckrose’s “support group” for academics besieged by “woke” ideology. They laugh about it and point out that this whole thing is “coddling for you but not for me” and they laugh about how of course the coddling is okay for them because in their case it is important, and remark about how obvious it is to everyone. Hmmm…. Apparently not that obvious.

I have to say they put my thoughts into words better than I can:

https://www.verybadwizards.com/222

I think they might argue that “just not being racist” is quietist.

Postmodernism isn't really anything beyond a label that gets applied to ideas that challenge the modernist project--it's not a single cohesive school of thought at all. I don't think you need commit yourself to the idea that there's no such thing as objective truth in order to be called a postmodernist. I don't even see someone like Foucault as necessarily rejecting the existence of truth--he might be just critiquing the idea that we can get at it in an impartial way. I don't know; I don't have the patience to read him.

When people reject postmodernism out of hand, it reads to me like dogmatism--it implies that the modernist project is necessarily beyond reproach. That's a weird stance to take, and one that's fundamentally at odds with the aims of modernism, where dogma is meant to be anathema.

I think that was Luce Irigaray, not that I can tell you the difference. But yeah, "fashionable nonsense" pretty much covers it.

I think so too, but I don't think Sokal ever claimed to have demolished postmodernism, because he obviously didn't. We do probably owe him a debt for putting some of the obscurantists in a corner.

As for Peterson, you don't need to look further than his account of truth, which is half-baked nonsense. And yes, he looks awfully like postmodernist when attempting to elucidate it. But for that guy, everything is culture war, hence the weirdo conspiracy theories about "postmodern neo-Marxists" trying to undermine western civilization.

Of course, Neil deGrasse Tyson also has a completely boneheaded account of truth, and he's supposed to be one of the good guys.

Yeah, it is all lumped together to be sure.

Besides, Marxism which also gets lumped in there is probably about as far away from post-modernism as you can get. He's up there with the most hardlined proponents of objective truth and sees almost everything as determined by economic (not cultural FFS!) factors.


Ah! Thanks for the correction. And yes, Sokal was arguing that that form of post-modernism - at least as far as it intruded on areas that he knew well - was nothing but jargon-laden incoherent nonsense. Bearing that in mind, it is hard to see how it can be the driving ideology of anything. This is why I don't trust B,L and P. They are making claims that don't seem to be borne out from their hoax.


Yeah, my take on that - if you are referring to a video I have seen - was that he was just riffing on the theme and making things up as he went. He should stick to science communication as he is really good at that.

My grandparents and grand uncles got rid of a lot of Fascist when they were young. It was called World War 2....

Dorian Abbot canceled from MIT:
https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/st...38353845489664

Happy ending for Princeton, though.
https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/st...08465744191507

If you had read the article, you wouldn't need to ask such a dumb question.

Read this next bit very carefully.

I did not rule it out, I just place no weight on it because, as I said previously it was just "pure, idle speculation on your part, and for which you have not a single scrap of evidence in support".

Maybe the woman was an alien from the Zeta Reticuli star system and didn't understand English. Of course, this is pure speculation, I would place the same weight on it as I place on your speculation.... None . Without . Supporting . Evidence!

Sokal we can regard as an honest liar. I don't know that we can say the same about these guys. An honest liar probably would have said "Well, this didn't go to plan."

The trouble is he's done it more than once, and he's still doing it as far as I can tell. One of the hits for this is his "masterclass" video. He's actively promoting this silliness as wisdom.

My take is that there's a lineage of physicists who are overtly hostile to philosophy, who probably owe this hostility to Richard Feynman. Like Feynman, they nevertheless end up doing philosophy, because it's indispensable. But because they reject the whole discipline, they make 101 errors.

He hasn't found a sophistry he doesn't like yet if he thinks it sounds clever.

Not that I find that some kind of thing to cancel him over. Could you imagine? Unless that criticism alone is canelling him.

Oh, yeah. That's really worked well for the last 250 years hasn't it?

Ignoring them, won't make them go away. A lack of consequences for being a racist will encourage and embolden them!