Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left For Political Correctness
Politically speaking, I am an "old school" conservative - ( the kind of traditional conservative who admires the thought of Edmund Burke :nerd: !) - and my personal view of political correctness is that it is essentially a weapon of cultural Marxism and its growing prevalence in the West ( the US, in particular) represents a clear and dangerous threat freedom of speech/expression, the principle of ( liberal democratic) political freedom and indeed reason itself (!) in modern Western societies.
I was absolutely delighted, therefore, to hear the famed, and highly respected Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, recently ( just last month) argue ,during a televised interview at Harvard, that the rise of political correctness on American university campuses and in the reputable mainstream media ( CNN, the "New YorK Times", "The Washington Post", etc;) had back-fired on the left and seen it do its own cause an "enormous disservice" by inadvertently stoking the fires of angry dissent among the members (and potential members) of so-called "Alt-Right" political groups in the United States. (Many of whom were, Pinker stressed, "highly literate, highly intelligent, media and internet savvy individuals".)
By suppressing basic truths, placing taboos upon the discussion of certain important topics and refusing to allow people to speak objective facts, the culture of politically correctness in modern schools, universities and the mass media had, Pinker said, rendered people vulnerable to become angry and radicalised into adopting extreme explanations and conclusions to account the facts they had been hitherto denied when they did, inevitably, come to learn what the truth actually was regarding certain important, basic social and political realities.
Here is what Pinker had to say with respect to four incontrovertible facts that the politically correct left have rendered more or less taboo and unmentionable: (I have quoted Pinker verbatim in the italicized paragraphs below).
(1) The Superiority of Capitalism over Communism/Socialism.
"Here's a fact that gonna sound ragingly controversial but is not, and that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones. If you doubt it, then just ask yourself the question, would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea ? Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany in the 1960s ? I submit that this is actually not a controversial statement, but in university campuses, it would be considered flamingly radical".
(2) The Myth of Gender Equality
"Here's another one. Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests. This is not controversial to anyone who has even glanced at the data. The kind of vocational interest tests of the kind your high school guidance counsellor gave you were given to millions of people, and men and women give different answers to what they wanna do for a living, and how much time they wanna allocate to family versus career and so on. But you can't say it. A very famous person on this campus (Harvard) did say it, and we all know what happened to him. He's no longer, well he's on this campus, but he's not in the same office".
(3) Race and Violent Crime
"Here's a third fact that is just not controversial, but it sounds controversial, and that is that different ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates. You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Look it up on their website. The homicide rate among African-American is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European Americans".
(4) Islamic Terrorism
"And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist data base, and you find that worldwide the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist attacks are committed by Islamic extremist groups".
The fact that Pinker had the guts to say these things immediately led the left to attack him wholesale, thus proving his point ! P. Meyers a well-known leftist intellectual wrote, " I am shocked that a Harvard Professor would promote such ignorance and falsehoods". But, of course, none of the facts Pinker states are rebuttable and Myers make no attempt to do so, he's just schoolmarming Pinker for having the balls to speak the truth in public.
Steve Pinker is well known for his liberal/ progressive political views, but on the issue of political correctness he is repeating Trump's strident exhortation of 2017 almost verbatim, namely:"We have to stop being so politically correct in this country !"
I agree and I am thankful to academics like Steve Pinker and Jordan Peterson for having the courage to literally put everything on the line ( their reputations, their livelihoods, their careers) and speak out against the wicked tyranny of political correctness and the other intellectual descendents of Cultural Marxism in the postmodern era that are blighting American schools and universities and being broadcast by the mainstream mass media in: deconstructivism, multiculturalism, gender feminism, egalitarian social engineering and so on.
Regards
Dachshund
I was absolutely delighted, therefore, to hear the famed, and highly respected Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, recently ( just last month) argue ,during a televised interview at Harvard, that the rise of political correctness on American university campuses and in the reputable mainstream media ( CNN, the "New YorK Times", "The Washington Post", etc;) had back-fired on the left and seen it do its own cause an "enormous disservice" by inadvertently stoking the fires of angry dissent among the members (and potential members) of so-called "Alt-Right" political groups in the United States. (Many of whom were, Pinker stressed, "highly literate, highly intelligent, media and internet savvy individuals".)
By suppressing basic truths, placing taboos upon the discussion of certain important topics and refusing to allow people to speak objective facts, the culture of politically correctness in modern schools, universities and the mass media had, Pinker said, rendered people vulnerable to become angry and radicalised into adopting extreme explanations and conclusions to account the facts they had been hitherto denied when they did, inevitably, come to learn what the truth actually was regarding certain important, basic social and political realities.
Here is what Pinker had to say with respect to four incontrovertible facts that the politically correct left have rendered more or less taboo and unmentionable: (I have quoted Pinker verbatim in the italicized paragraphs below).
(1) The Superiority of Capitalism over Communism/Socialism.
"Here's a fact that gonna sound ragingly controversial but is not, and that is that capitalist societies are better than communist ones. If you doubt it, then just ask yourself the question, would I rather live in South Korea or North Korea ? Would I rather live in West Germany in the 1970s or East Germany in the 1960s ? I submit that this is actually not a controversial statement, but in university campuses, it would be considered flamingly radical".
(2) The Myth of Gender Equality
"Here's another one. Men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests. This is not controversial to anyone who has even glanced at the data. The kind of vocational interest tests of the kind your high school guidance counsellor gave you were given to millions of people, and men and women give different answers to what they wanna do for a living, and how much time they wanna allocate to family versus career and so on. But you can't say it. A very famous person on this campus (Harvard) did say it, and we all know what happened to him. He's no longer, well he's on this campus, but he's not in the same office".
(3) Race and Violent Crime
"Here's a third fact that is just not controversial, but it sounds controversial, and that is that different ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates. You can go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Look it up on their website. The homicide rate among African-American is about seven or eight times higher than it is among European Americans".
(4) Islamic Terrorism
"And terrorism, go to the Global Terrorist data base, and you find that worldwide the overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist attacks are committed by Islamic extremist groups".
The fact that Pinker had the guts to say these things immediately led the left to attack him wholesale, thus proving his point ! P. Meyers a well-known leftist intellectual wrote, " I am shocked that a Harvard Professor would promote such ignorance and falsehoods". But, of course, none of the facts Pinker states are rebuttable and Myers make no attempt to do so, he's just schoolmarming Pinker for having the balls to speak the truth in public.
Steve Pinker is well known for his liberal/ progressive political views, but on the issue of political correctness he is repeating Trump's strident exhortation of 2017 almost verbatim, namely:"We have to stop being so politically correct in this country !"
I agree and I am thankful to academics like Steve Pinker and Jordan Peterson for having the courage to literally put everything on the line ( their reputations, their livelihoods, their careers) and speak out against the wicked tyranny of political correctness and the other intellectual descendents of Cultural Marxism in the postmodern era that are blighting American schools and universities and being broadcast by the mainstream mass media in: deconstructivism, multiculturalism, gender feminism, egalitarian social engineering and so on.
Regards
Dachshund
Comments (156)
I am of course not allowed to say what I just said, and anyone who disagrees with me is proving me right.
But in my case I don't have a book to sell.
Where has "the left" "rendered [this] more or less taboo and unmentionable"?
Gender equality refers to the principle that people shouldn't be discriminated against based on their gender, not that there aren't differences between men and women.
The problem is when you use any statistic that shows that "different ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates" or that "the majority of suicide terrorist attacks are committed by Islamic extremist groups" as grounds to treat different ethnic groups or Muslims unfairly. It would be akin to using some statistic that shows that men are more violent than women as grounds to persecute men.
So it seems to me that these are all straw men accusations.
C U L T U R A L M A R X I S M
Here's a pretty good book review that came out recently:
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2018/02/20/4806696.htm
[I]The Language Instinct[/I], as I recall, combines Chomsky's linguistics with evolutionary psychology.
I suspect it's the latter and I suggest it's bad strategy to shout people down, shame, or otherwise silence them pre-emptively.
The issue, as I explained here, is that his claims don't actually address the issues that "the left" are raising. They're strawmen.
The claims aren't addressing those concerns. They're being made to suggest/demonstrate we're not able to have intellectually honest dialogue about serious, complicated, difficult topics. It's become a big problem.
I agree, I don't find talking in terms of left and right very useful. The definitions shift over time. Better to be as specific as possible and not treat problems as some other group's affliction.
No, all the capitalist societies that we currently have are more favourable places to currently live than any of the communist societies we have ever had.
See the important difference between stating "incontrovertible facts" and making a political sales pitch.
As Michael says, no one on the left is claiming that North Korea is better than South Korea.
What they are (sometimes) saying is that capitalism is unsustainable, and a more socialist society may be required for long term survival. That it is possible to have a socialist society without becoming North Korea. That historical and political factors have been as much responsible for the state of current communist societies as the ideals of communism.
As ever, what polemicists like Pinker paint as "incontrovertible truths" turn out to be a lot more complicated when you take away the blatant politics.
Let's try another one.
The tests being referred to here are done in late teenage years. Again, no one on the left is saying that men and women have homogeneous priorities at that age. Those who do make gender equality claims, claim that they are born equal but are so treated by society as to end up different. No one is disputing that a difference exists by teenage-hood.
A weird sheep-like looking cunt at that.
Quoting Michael
I don't know exactly, but what I do know is it has ( as Pinker suggests) become fashionable for students at many American universities to hoist Soviet era "Hammer and Sickle" banners on campus and paste or paint up revolutionary slogans from Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book". Why on earth would young people in the West do something as offensive and mindless as this? Where would American college kids get hold of such repulsive and deplorable political ideas , I wonder ?
What do you think?
Why is skin color relevant to the problem of starvation if you don't mind me asking?
You also get students being all neo-Nazi like. I don't think it right to judge an entire political spectrum because of a vocal minority of idiots. For all the jokes I tend to make, I don't actually think that conservatives are racist, selfish, greedy arseholes.
The per capita consumption of mozzarella cheese over the last decade matches almost exactly the rise in the number of civil engineering doctorates awarded. Why? Is it because cheese makes people cleverer? Or is it, just possibly, because engineering is becoming more popular as more opportunities open up to working class students, as does eating imported goods like mozzarella?
Again, who on the left is denying that crime in neighbourhoods with a high African American population is a problem. What they're denying is that this is in any way linked to race. The data that Pinker finds so "incontrovertible" does not say anything about cause, only correlation.
2. This is too vague to be taken seriously. There is an occupational pay gap, which may be due to gender discrimination, lack of opportunity, societal factors, etc., but it exists nevertheless. Otherwise, no one is claiming that men and women, in aggregate, should 1:1 have the same interests, tastes, life priorities etc. There is however, nothing inherently wrong with a "bread-winner wife", or "stay-at-home dad".
3. Even assuming that those statistics are correct, they are due to a long long (continued) history of social exclusion, appropriation, discrimination etc. This has been well studied, researched, and understood. Are you suggesting that black Americans are inherently (i.e. biologically) prone to violence?
4. I don't know about the Worldwide statistics, but in America, you are more likely to to be killed by someone with a right-wing affiliation than an "Islamic Terrorist". What about killings from "Alt-Right Terrorists"? Even if the worldwide statistics are true, this doesn't entail that Muslims are inherently dangerous, or that Islam is any more dangerous than other monotheistic religions.
It seems that in nearly each case here, there is an attempt to transform statistics into an "essentialism".
Pinker is one of those intellectuals who feel it necessary to provide an opinion on everything outside his main area of work, which, as a result, are usually jejune, uninteresting, or just plain wrong.
Pinker is not the only public academic to express concern at the magnitude and extent of hard (old school) left pro-communist student sentiment on American campuses. Jordan Peterson, for example, finds it very disturbing as well. It clearly seems, at present, to be a bigger,more worrisome phenomenon than the presence of a small minority of students who are affiliated with hard right , neo-nazi, white nationalist/supremacist type organizations .
No, go to the Global Terrorist database and search over a specific time frame, for a specific type of terrorist attack and you will find more attacks from a group which favour that specific type of attack and have become popular over the specific time frame you're interested in. It's hardly surprising given that the data had been filtered for those very criteria.
Why, because Jordan Peterson (a known capitalist supporter) says it is? Shall we see what butchers think of the rise of vegetarianism next?
Yes, and when he does ( which is not all THAT often) his political position is typically a very measured and moderate - "centre left" -kind of liberal progressivism. This is precisely why I find his recent attack against the liberal-left political orthodoxy/establishment in America today so very interesting
...pass :vomit:
I live in England, so I am unable to see for myself if students on American campuses are, in fact, somehow being "radicalised" into displaying communist symbols from the former USSR or Chinese Cultural Revolution on their campuses. If Pinker says that they are, and that it is a concern, then I tend to believe him, as he has never shown himself to be a fool in any of his previous forays into the public domain in the US/West. In any case, it is a well known fact that many of today's social science and humanities/liberal arts academics are themselves children of a postmodern educational establishment whose teachers and curricula were heavily influenced by the Marxist critical theory of the hard left ( e.g. Marcuse) which was very fashionable on American campuses during the 1960s, 1970s, 80s and 90s.
To cut to the chase. In my own opinion, whoever is responsible - and SOMEONE - IT WOULD SEEM - MUST BE - for the fact that bright, young people in the West are glorifying the kind of Marxist ideology that grounded the Soviet Union under Stalin and the Chinese Cultural Revolution ( not to mention that "charming" little Marxist, Pol Pot, in Cambodia) last century, should be hunted down immediately and then publicly "strung up by the balls" asap. The very idea of American/Western kids literally hoisting the Red Flag at their schools makes me really angry, in precisely the same way that child abuse does.
:up:
The dachshund photo is cool, and yes I do own a miniature, smooth red Dachshund ( called "Tory" in line with my world-view). :halo: AS for the dead dinosaur, political conservatism, is far from dead, I can assure you, Charleton! You should read some of Edmund Burke's work, he was one of England's greatest political theorists ( that's not merely my opinion BTW, rather that of the entire Western academy to this day) and not a bad philosopher either ! ( had a great influence on Kant's aesthetics, for ex).
I figure you are a young guy Charleton ? So , if I am right ,let me tell you that one can only really appreciate classical conservative political theory when they have gathered a fair bit of wisdom and experience walking around on this funny old planet called Earth - that is why young people so often lack the ability to REALLY connect with a thinker like Edmund Burke. Burke's thought, like that another great old conservative, Cardinal Newman,is is like a fine, old, vintage wine - totally wasted on today's youth ( who might as well be given a glass of "Coca Cola") :lol:
PS: Edmund Burke was not a nasty man - great sense of humour - so you should associate Burkian conservatism with the image of a dachshund who is snarling in a nasty, angry manner ! !
The fact that he is such an extremely popular public intellectual in the US tends to contract your view of him as "jejune" and "uninteresting", Darth ?
You say there is a troubling, pervasive "pro-communist" sentiment on American campuses. Do you have any research, statistics, any substantive evidence to offer to support this claim? Across America, are college students really flying the Soviet flag, reading Mao's Little Red Book, and smoking Cuban cigars?
Like I said, if you even bothered to read my post above, I am English and living in England, so I cannot, therefore, gather any first-hand evidence for myself. I have no option but to trust the claims of certain persons ( American public figures) whom I generally regard to be reputable, responsible and honest individuals. Like I said, if Pinker nd Peterson suggest that the glorification of 20th century Marxist icons is a worrisome issue on US university campuses today, (and in American youth culture more generally), I tend to listen and I tend to take them at their word.
You do not, BTW, see students at universities in this country vandalising their campuses with the noisome sayings of Mao Zedong or the lofting of "Hammer and Sickle" ensigns! I think if you were a youngster caught carrying on like that at a respectable college here in Oxford or Cambridge or London, you would be swiftly apprehended by the local police, then bought before a local magistrate to defend a public order charge the next day.
If you think I am THAT stupid, that I would pay one atom of serious attention to the conclusions of any kind of "professional" research studies conducted in any the modern social sciences, esp in the US, let me assure you that I am not.
I did "bother" to read your post above, and I asked for hard evidence, not anecdotal insight from individuals you consider to be above questioning. As far as I am aware, neither Pinker nor Peterson have provided any type of statistical evidence of "pro-communist" sentiment raging across American campuses. Pinker works at Harvard, and whatever anecdotal evidence he claims is (if even true, again, there doesn't seem to be stats here) nevertheless isolated to an elite Ivy League institution. Not remotely similar to experiences most college students in America would have. If you cannot provide evidence, why should I, or anyone, believe you?
You are a shining example of the problem, as I said above, with public intellectuals who sermonize opinions across specialized fields. People, such as yourself, gravitate towards them through the pull of their authority and "trustworthiness". A gleeful appeal to a single authority who feeds to you what you wish to hear. Ironically, one can see some vague parallels between this, and the 'cult of personality' of Communist leaders.
OK. Say ,for example, regarding Pinker's Claim #2, I wanted to provide evidence that gender feminism in the US, is, and always was - as a "celebrity" academic like Jordan Peterson observes - sheer madness that has, over the past 50 or so years, bought an unspeakable universe of grief and suffering to bear on countless millions of American individuals and families. There is SO MUCH hard , official, high-quality, objective, empirical ( you name it) evidence of this fact that to be perfectly honest with you, I would scarcely know where to begin in setting it out!
My problem with the whole "anti"-political correctness crowd is that, well, they're often responsible of the same sort of stuff that they accuse others of doing. Being called "politically correct" or an "SJW" is just as much a shut-down tactic as being called "racist" and "sexist" is. I can't help but feel that if the current trends of the times favored their ideologies over those of their opponents, then they would be doing the same sort of thing they accuse others of doing- shutting down discussions on topics before they even began.
Political-correctness is merely just another way of shutting down conversations. I'm not sure if it's even inherently bad. I mean, I don't think there is really anything wrong with public backlash and social condemnation if someone posted "Hitler did nothing wrong," on the internet. If the KKK wants to do a demonstration in town, they are legally allowed to do so, but when the general public decides to show that the KKK are not welcome in the town, then I see nothing wrong with it. If an intellectual said he was a Holocaust denier, I'm not going to get angry when a bunch of other intellectuals social condemn and ostracize them. The very hyper focus on mudslinging distracts us from actual discussions, both on what topics ought to be treated with social taboos and from genuine people seeking to have actual discussions about the necessary and relevant topics of today.
Thomas Paine owned his arse.
@Maw is asking for actual evidence (not anecdotal) that there is widespread communist sentiment across college campuses in the US. I mean, if anecdotal evidence counts, I can dismiss the claim, as I didn't get that vibe from college I went to. Yeah, we had Marxists, but I don't recall them going around with hammer and sickles. There were people who were very pro-capitalist. Maybe the college was left-leaning, but whatever; it's not like none of the professors leans towards the right. The students didn't seem all that Marxist- some were, but some were vocally not.
You could make the argument that it is more left-leaning, but I don't think it reaches pro-Stalin, pro-Mao levels and that I think it mostly suffers from selective reporting. In my local news, a college let a group (I assume one of the Christian churches in the area) to go protest LGBT stuff on their campus. Some of the students went out and said that they didn't like them. One of college officials said that the college supports free speech, so the group was allowed to speak on campus, but that the campus community overall welcomed everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation. It didn't make headline news nationally because, well, it really wasn't that remarkable of an occurrence. When a professor goes off and publishes a book that gets national attention for being radical, there are bunch more college professors who don't care.
It's a fact; now as an honourable conservative liberal truth admitting liberal, you do not want to deny the fact. As a postmodern neo-marxist degenerate, I might think that there are structural social explanations for the conjunction. But such social explanations are anathema to the pcgm brigade, so it can only be a racial difference.
What's the "pcgm" brigade ?
Oh, if you mean the problem of people starving, food is the solution. And food is readily available if we are prepared to countenance some redistribution.
Gender feminism is a TOTALLY different ball of wax to the so-called" first wave" of EQUITY ( or LIBERAL) FEMINISM that eventually enabled people like your mother to work in banks and realised the 19th Amendment in the US in 1920 (though personally I agree with Kant that allowing womens' suffrage was an act of sheer madness). GF is A TOTALLY different beast, so don't conflate the two movements.
Are you referring to the biblical God ?
I have no clue what a night-porter is, but okay.
Quoting unenlightened
Doesn't sound like much of a plan. That's what happens with many on the left on these issues - if you ask what's the plan, there usually isn't any. People just shrug, go protest a little bit on the street, and little happens.
Yes. There you have it.
Well you might well say so, but that is something that deserves it's own thread. I guess your plan is 'get rich, get powerful, then implement a practical plan.' My position is that that plan is what got us here in the first place. But if you want to discuss that let's go somewhere more congenial than this Pinker v pinko thread.
Yeeeeeeeeees, how did you guess so well? :smirk:
Quoting unenlightened
Ok, take me there kind Sir.
[i] It intended to depict someone who is "ever so 'umble, M'Lud", in the cunning, slippery, disingenuous way that Dicken's immortal character, Uriah Heep, did in the novel "David Copperfield". (Thoroughly reprehensible).
Yes, it's a classic (post)-modern era Marxist's sleight of hand; and if the "night-porter" schtick is true, you can throw in a very healthy dose of the invidia that the decalogue TWICE warns us against; in this case, the kind of bitter class envy - or rather, the kind of vicious class jealously the french call ressentiment that always ends in grief.
I very much doubt that unenlightened always was a night-porter. He may have been a night-porter at some time, but my guess is that unenlightened is much better off than he makes it show over here.
I am not remotely humble. I put my life where my ideology is. I am the downwardly mobile son of an architect, and exile from the middle classes. But feel free to resort to ad homs in your attempt to sustain the unsustainable. It's about all you've got.
Yeah, but you're too intelligent for what you let on. I'm not using this to attack you in any way, contrary to what you seem to think. I'm just stating what I think. Your intelligence makes me think that either (1) you are a very capable person yourself (much more capable than you let on), and/or (2) you come from a relatively well to do family which gave you access and time to become so educated (not necessarily rich, but you know, at least upper middle class let's say). Granted that you say your father was an architect back in the day (or your grandmother! worked in the bank), I don't think that's far off.
Real mature and devoid of an argument again.
So it pains me to say that I think many of his criticisms of leftism in political and academic life are quite well-founded. Given that, I also think many of the so-called ‘AltRight’ are equally mendacious and arguably more vicious. The ‘left’ might be hosting up hammer and sickle banners, but at least some of the Alt Right are displaying Hitler memorabilia. I don’t know which is worse, but they’re both pretty awful.
I agree with some elements of traditional conservatism, but I also note that many American conservatives are appalled by Trump and the speakers at the recent CPAC conference (for example). Trump is not actually conservative or even Republican, but a political opportunist who the GOP has fallen cravingly in behind.)
But in respect of the OP, Pinker is depressingly correct in some ways. You can’t voice conservative views of sexuality and gender without being depicted as a reactionary. Legendary Australian tennis player Margaret Court was a vocal critic of ‘gay marrriage’, for which she was pilloried by Fairfax media as ‘a racist and a bigot’.
Margaret Court was a psychiatrically disordered feminist LESBIAN - a thoroughly bitter and twisted, abnormally hateful and spiteful "victim".
Fate worse than death?
Or worse than being depicted as "a psychiatrically disordered feminist LESBIAN - a thoroughly bitter and twisted, abnormal individual."?
The fact that he is a popular public intellectual in the United States already qualifies him as a suspect jejune, in my opinion. Popularity in a (failing) country that elected Donald Trump isn't a good standard.
What irks and frustrates me so much about the postmodern left ( or whatever you label you apply to that Confederacy of Dunces, be it neo- Marxist or post - Marxist or whatever) is that it wasthey who were directly responsible for creating the ultra-conservative backlash - the "Alt-Right"spring - that is happening right now in America. It's not rocket science, it's simply what happens when YOU LIE to people about basic human facts; when, for example, you shove absurd madness like "2nd and 3rd wave" gender feminism down the throat of the public, or say that there is no problem at all with the rates of violent black crime across the United States relative to white European crime rates.
Sooner or later people see through the lies of the mass media and the mouthpieces of the liberal political establishment and then it doesn't take much - just a gentle a nudge or two - to get them REALLY pissed off and up[ in arms;THEN you've got trouble - real trouble on your hands ! It's always been the same old story with radical "Enlightenment" egalitarian political theories and ideologies, be the Jacobin reign of Terror during the French Revolution 1783-84 when 40,000 last their heads to Madam Guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, or the death of untold millions of Russian citizens in Stalin's Gulag Archipelago, or in Mao's Red China or Pol Pot's killing fields of Cambodia - these projects to create social/communist "heavens on Earth" always go "pear-shaped" and history shows that they do so relatively rapidly; and, when the S**T does hit the fan on a big scale there is always a dreadful piper to pay in the form of devastation and human suffering along the way and in the clean -up that must take place in the aftermath.
When will people ever learn that ideologies like Unenlightened's "neo-Marxism" ( neo - BU*LSH*T) are simply unworkable - and not just unworkable, but absolutely unnatural, decadent and innatelyevil? These grand egalitarian utopist ideologies always fail, and when they do there is, as we have seen in the UK and the US in 2016/ 2017 always a ferocious, reactionary right-wing backlash after the fall !
I did not say just like Uriah lol :lol: But it was a funny remark.
Quoting unenlightened
Who has chosen and could afford to make that choice too, no? What was your reason for choosing that? Was it something that came to you instinctually so to speak, or was it consciously planned?
Would I be correct in presuming that your political sympathies lie towards the "socialist " Left of centre ? If so, I declare that you are a [redacted]
:rofl:
And he actually ADMITS this ??!! :gasp:
My God- you're right, he does !! :yikes: I ... I simply don't know what to say ?! I've never been confronted with this degree of idiocy before !
Let me get this right, Thorongil, you, a socialist, ( which is synonymous with communist for all reasonable intents and purposes) are saying that I a ( conservative in the mould of Edmund Burke) who, like Burke himself, was a gentleman who never hurt a fly and who firmly believes in leaving people free to live their own lives in peace without the intervention of oppressive, psychopathic, totalitarian big governmentsis odd, but Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Castro and Kruschev were not odd, just nice, normal, everyday, run- of -the -mill , Marxist torturers , mass murderers and evil tyrants?
Thorongil is a post-structuralist Trostskyite. This often puts him at odds with Agustino who is more of a Derridean structural-Marxist.
Thanks
I certainly approve but... Benkei didn't even get to finish his popcorn!
Good call.
Saw that coming.
Largely because the Soviet Union flag and Mao's Little Red Book are sufficiently antiquated that they have become graphics which can be associated with "resistance' or 'rebellion" whether the connection makes any sense or not.
Just by way of a footnote to this thread:
Quoting Dachshund
The entry on 'cultural marxism' in Rational Wiki begins as follows:
Evidence? What percentage of students? Studies? Surveys?
You've got it backwards. As a civil engineer, I can assure we're the least intelligent of the engineers (other than industrial). I think you may have proven that mozzarella makes people less clever.
Evidence?
Evidence?
I went back and looked. Is there anywhere you or anyone has defined what "gender feminism" is.
Doesn't leave much more to say, does it? I'm a bit shocked he would write it out loud. Now we can crucify him for being politically incorrect.
Your closet socialism is safe with us. ;)
Boy. He kinda flipped out on us, didn't he. I kept thinking to myself after he said women shouldn't vote - how come Baden hasn't banned his ass yet. I came late to this party and missed all the fun.
Someone else took care of his ass for me. :point: :fire:
Yeah, but, to me, you personify all that is good, all that is evil, about moderating.
:halo: :naughty:
Imported? What do you think all those cheese plants in Wisconsin are for?
Sorry, I'm from England, we would never do anything as impolite as making somebody else's cheese! And now I hear () that engineers aren't that smart after all. This mystery just gets deeper and deeper. I'm beginning to suspect the Lizard-men at the centre of the earth.
Actually I want to say something in defence of Pinker. I basically agree with his optimism with regards to the ability of science and rational economic thinking to tackle the world’s problems. I only disagree with him in that this doesn’t really amount to a philosophy, except for in the sense that an accounting or engineering firm has ‘a philosophy’. I think he’s entirely deaf to the depths of philosophy. But at the same time, the world does need optimism that science and technological know-how is needed. We really need to believe that now more than ever - Spaceship Earth will not keep sailing on without good flight engineers. Pinker is one pole in the dialectic, so to speak, but an important one, and one that needs to be heard.
My dear, departed father was an eminent man, a world-renowned professor of obstetric medicine and a vocal advocate for birth control. He served on the board of WHO and advised the Indian Government. And he was convinced that by now, the world would be in the grips of an appalling famine (having read the Club of Rome reports). Didn’t used to go on about it, but that was his view. He died in 1992 - but I think what has happened has actually been much better than he could have imagined. Look at India - they’ve gone from impoverished agrarian society to (still impoverished) technological powerhouse. OK, still enormous problems, but literally hundreds of millions of people lifted out of subsistence economics.
There are heaps of problems, enormous problems, nobody can ever doubt that. But we also ought not to simply disregard human ingenuity and the ability to solve problems. Western liberal economics and advanced technology are an intrinsic part of that, there’s no future without them. So in that sense, I think Pinker’s is one important voice, even though I completely disagree with him in many regards.
If a man is poor and he obtains a huge loan to be replayed a 400% interest in 100 year's time, is he now rich?
New York Times review:
I suppose that's not surprising; he is after all a convinced materialist.
The Frankfurt school doesn't really fit, at least as self-defined. Not sure I know anyone who would call the Frankfurt school "cultural Marxists' who is in any way sympathetic to their writing.
Quoting Benkei
For a really depressing read, try Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation or The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century James Howard Kunstler.
Kunstler writes both fiction (A World Made By Hand series) and books about the environment and urban design (The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape is a book written in 1993 by James Howard Kunstler exploring the effects of suburban sprawl, civil planning and the automobile on American society). He is, essentially, a journalist, lecturer, and gadfly (an honorific in my opinion).
Kunstler's thesis in Too Much Magic and The Long Emergency is simple to state, complex to explicate:
We passed Peak Oil in 2006, the result of which is a long-term decline in oil production. The absolute end of oil will be when it takes more energy to extract oil from the ground than is in the oil itself. At the same time, the world population continues to grow, global warming continues, and many consequences flow from those three trends.
All of this is economically, politically, socially, and environmentally destabilizing.
COAL, OIL, and GAS have no replacements, and the world built and maintained since the industrial revolution until now can not be maintained without abundant supplies of these three fuels, particularly petroleum. Further, the would-be substitutes like solar and wind are most economically feasible when oil is relatively inexpensive and rare earths (Lanthanum, Yttrium, Scandium, Neodymium, Praseodymium, Cerium, Samarium, Promethium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Erbium, Thulium, Holmium, Ytterbium, Lutetium) are on hand. The rare earths are also necessary for mathematics professor Tom Lehrer's Elements song. [see below]
It isn't that the rare earths are necessarily as rare as hen's teeth; some of them are not common; they just aren't everywhere; they often occur in combination; they are hard to separate out, and so on. The properties of rare earths are critical to a lot of our stuff -- the magnets in windmill generators, solar panels, all sorts of communication equipment, cancer medications, big batteries, etc.
The message of Too Much Magic is that our high tech culture requires cheap energy and petrochemicals to build it, operate it, and then replace it with more.
High tech will be the least of our worries when food and fresh water become scarce, which will happen whether we run short of cheap petroleum or not. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11... billion people can not be sustained, and human population will crash at some point.
I pretty much agree with Kunstler's scenario, though I find his timeline a bit too short and his estimations overly pessimistic, mostly because of the short timeline.
Kunstler dismisses renewable energy out of hand. That despite some states generating a significant portion of their electricity (15% to 30%) from wind, solar, and hydro 4 years after he published Too Much Magic. On one particular sunny, windy day Germany produced 85% of its energy from wind and solar, at least for a few hours. After that happy day there was a month of clouds and still cold air and half the country froze to death.
:monkey:
I believed in ‘peak oil’ back then, but i think the predictions have been shown to be false; the world is not going to run short of oil, but the environmental problems caused by burning oil will nevertheless be catastrophic. And for sure, I fear there will be a global catastrophe and/or economic collapse. It’s obvious that the planet cannot support the human populations that are predicted. So maybe I’m just responding to the optimism that Pinker expresses as a way of ‘grasping at straws’. I hope not, though.
Yes, this is a bit tricky. For one thing, oil production is driven by price, and the price-production relationship can be chaotic, with big peaks and valleys in price/production. But then peak oil doesn't mean no oil, it just means that the maximum amount of oil identified isn't continuing to increase. As far as I know, there are no huge new oil fields which haven't been identified.
The other thing is that when prices are high, it makes sense to pursue marginal oil fields, like the fields over the Bakken formation in North Dakota. It takes fracking, which is expensive, but if oil is selling at $140 a barrel, it's worth it. At $50 a barrel, it isn't. Also, wells like those in North Dakota and gas wells in Pennsylvania and New York tend to be exhausted fairly quickly, barely repaying the cost of drilling and fracking.
It takes a lot of energy to get at deep oil, deep under the oceans especially. It takes a lot of energy to move oil from the well head to storage and refineries; it takes a lot of energy to refine oil (heat, pressure), and some of the rare earths are used to catalyze gasoline out of heavier fluids. Then it takes more energy to move refined oil to the end user. What Kunstler sees is a downward feedback spiral of costs, decreased supply, decreased economic activity, etc. which makes expensive oil unaffordable, and so on.
Like I said, his timeline is too compressed, and he expects disaster to be fully unfolding by 2020. A disaster is unfolding, no doubt, just slower than he describes. Let's say 2035, instead of 2020.
I also agree with Kunstler that everybody in the oil business, and everybody who wants things to continue on as they have been will be EXTREMELY reluctant to explore in public what it will mean to run out of cheap abundant oil.
And yes, if running out of oil doesn't get us, global warming will, or both.
I'm grateful for being 71 and not 21. With any luck cancer, a heart attack, stroke, or a fast large truck will happen before things get way too bad.
I truly hope not - the one hope that I have is that there are people in the world economic system that understand these threats and are working to mitigate them. But with the likes of Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA......
Civil engineers!
Clearly they should be fathering the next generation of children.
For what it's worth, my good friend's 25 year old daughter got her bachelors in fine arts, worked for a year, and then went to a 6-month computer coding program. She made $85,000 to start. Now, a year later, she makes $115 thousand. She is very, very smart. Again - for what that's worth.
And oil is the critical resource that will be, one fine day, depleted. Oil powers agriculture; gas fertilizes agriculture; oil powers mining ["If it isn't grown, it's probably mined."]; oil powers transportation in trains, trucks, barges, ships and planes; oil and gas power a significant share of electrical generation; oil lubricates all gears, pistons, and shafts; it is the resource without which there are not too many other resources to be had (given the industrial revolution).
There is an oil empty well in the middle of the intersection of environmental disaster, over-population and resource depletion.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, Kunstler discusses that very thing at considerable length. Credit is borrowed, and is meant to be repaid in the future -- somehow. Most enterprises, whether for profit, non-profit, or governmental operate on at least short-term credit. Credit is also a lubricant of economic activity and is slicker than oil. Credit is great until the debtors ability to repay sinks beneath the surface like a stone. Then the boom is lowered on the debtors, and they are bankrupted.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly -- a topic Kunstler returns to repeatedly.
Quoting Wayfarer
Abandon hope ye who see that our desired growth curves are unsustainable. Abandon hope ye who recognize the Troika of Apocalypse: environmental disaster, over-population and resource depletion. Abandon hope ye who can see the black magic of capitalism's scheme of endless growth. Eyes that have observed these things can not un-see them.
He has loaded up the cannon with the grape-shot of His wrath
He is poised to set the charge off and smash us up like glass...
Actually, I know someone who made the same kind of money at an earlier age as a software developer. When I went to university I met this computer scientist guy whose family was quite well connected (to say the least) and on placement, right after he finished first year of university, he was making £60,000 per year, working in London for one of the big banks in IT.
Though I have to tell you that I have great disrespect for people who make a lot of money working a job and taking no risks.
You're wrong.
I've been doing it for 7 years and I ain't earning that much. :confused:
That is £61k in real money. Since an average house is between £450k and £1.2M
Lets break that down a little.
£61k per year
With a student loan tax and NI this will leave you with £3300 per month
Rent in London £1000 + for something basic.
Rates, and basics £800
Leaving £1500 to spend.
Is good, but not unbelievable.
It is in New York City, so there is an expensive cost of living.
"it" is the mother of all confusion.
In Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay, “What is Enlightenment,” he wrote that it is man’s “emergence from his self-incurred immaturity” through the “public use of reason at every point.” Only through free inquiry and disputation, according to Kant, could humans flee the darkness of ignorant conformity to the light of true knowledge and wisdom. Recently, several prominent intellectuals have argued that this vision, the vision of the Enlightenment, needs a vigorous defense from increasingly dangerous Counter-Enlightenment forces, including an apathetic public, a hostile academy, and a censorious intelligentsia that is too quick to replace rational dispute with accusations of moral treachery. Steven Pinker’s newly released Enlightenment Now represents perhaps the culmination of this movement: It is an unapologetic embrace of Enlightenment values and a persuasive rebuttal to those who assail them. Unsurprisingly, it has already attracted lavish praise (from Bill Gates!) and provoked furious debate.
Steven Pinker as a culmination of Immanuel Kant??!? WTF???
The main two problems with the article is that it 1) falls into the same trap as Pinker does by homogenizing 'The Enlightenment' (despite first acknowledging its inner intellectual tensions and ideological heterogeneity), thus providing an inadequate explanans to the explanadum: how did social, economic, and scientific progress from the early 19th century to present day, and 2) incoherently argues that there is a rising new scientist intelligentsia, who are "quasi-religious" in their political correctness, to the detriment of scientific fact. Here, the two authors argue that this new coterie systemically denounce any scientist or scientific writers who promote any science that could be considered sexist or racist. As examples, they mention Google engineer, James Damore, who wrote the Google Memo on diversity and was subsequently fired for it, and ex-New York Times' science writer, Nicholas Wade, who wrote A Troublesome Inheritance in 2004, which was critically panned by the relevant scientific community. Despite the fact that neither Damore or Wade are biological scientists, or the fact that the scientists who authored the studies/research that Damore and Wade reference stated that they misunderstood or were simple inaccurate, the article's authors nevertheless claim that it was actually due to moral opprobrium, instead of scientific illiteracy that requires correcting.
Of course that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Yeah, I noticed that too. And then how the author stated his own personal favourite approach to the problem was through the lenses of psychedelics and occultism... which is at the very least a bit of a random comment given how it wasn't further expanded upon?
Painting Damore as a martyr is one sure-fire way to show your bias. Why don't conservatives and right-winger decries the use of company ressources to push down a social agenda in a way that completely show disregard to company authority or assigned duties?
I'm reading now Star's Reach: A Novel Of The Deindustrial Future which is very good post post-apocalyptic fiction. I'm not recommending this, unless you have nothing better to do with your time.
I think writers like Kunstler and Greer take one of their tasks as convincing people that the multidimensional crises we face are very real. People who already know this don't need to be reminded every 15 minutes; maybe just once every other day is enough.
I find a great deal of hope in Kunstler's and Greer's depictions "after the eco-apocalypse" life styles which are basically those of the 19th century. Their solutions are, of course, post apocalypse. We aren't going to be feeding 9 billion people with kitchen gardens and home canning. Naturally, people who enjoyed pre-apocalypse life aren't going to much like post-apocalypse life much, at first anyway. It will be mostly hard work to eke out a living.
Another post-apocalypse book I liked very much, and which is hope-filled (a plague wiped out 99.99% of the earth's human population) is Earth Abides by George Stewart, I especially liked it because many of the appurtenances of our lives (TV, cell phones, computers, freeways, etc.) are absent. The main character drives across the US to see if other people survived the plague aside from the handful he knows about (just a few). He takes Route 66. At first I thought it odd he would opt for an old highway, then I remembered--oh, right - the book was published in 1949: no freeways yet.
"Going off the grid" is an interesting project. There is a short-of-post-collapse, or pre-collapse study group -- can't remember its name, there's a bunch of them scattered around the country. Many in the groups (the groups aren't actually big enough to have many anything) are planning on going off the grid to "survive".
I'm not a big fan of individual families going out on their own to survive the collapse. Very, very few families would have enough talents among them to succeed at really living off the grid, especially once it was no longer an option. For instance, if I killed a deer, I don't know how to preserve it (off the grid) so that we all wouldn't drop dead of food poisoning. I don't know how to turn a deer skin into a usable piece of hide. I don't know how to can (again, the food poisoning problem) assuming I had heat, a pressure cooker, glass jars, lids, rings, and lots of canning vegetables and fruits. My mechanical skills are poor to non-existent. Rig up a windmill to pump water or grind corn? I can theoretically imagine what that might look like; building it would be out of the question for me, even with all the power tools and metal one would need.
I could learn some of the skills, of course, but I'm hoping too be dead just in time to miss going off the grid. If not, I'll be very disappointed.
Even living off the grid with a truck full of supplies that doesn't get looted out from under one... don't lose the can opener.
Low-grade post-apocalyptic writers assume that people will revert to cannibalism 15 minutes after they discover the Internet is gone for good. They exaggerate. I hope. I think there is a fairly good chance, though, that a few people who were well supplied for 6 months and scattered around the countryside, would become objects of pretty intense begging and forced benevolent giving.
Better, I think, is to follow a community approach and band together to have more talent to pool, and a better chance of surviving. One would need a mix of ages (old people with more experience and young people with more energy. One would need a wide selection (and multiples) of hand tools. Forget about medication. If somebody is insulin dependent, they are just not going to make it. Ditto for all the other meds for chronic and acute (like infection) conditions. Need antidepressants? Anti-anxiety meds? Anti-psychotics? Fear not. The stress of the apocalypse with either kill you in short order, or it will cure you.
Most people in Europe and North America are going to have to learn to get along without caffeine and chocolate, bananas, pineapple, guavas, mangos, oranges, grapefruit, coconut, palm oil, olives and olive oil, cinnamon, cloves, black and white pepper, nutmeg, and the like. Cocaine, and other popular recreational drugs too will disappear, though opium poppies and marijuana can be grown even in Minnesota, so... might be a supply. Hallucinogens can be grown. So your post-apocalypse can be at least a little trippy.
Bigotry is risky business, for sure.
Quoting Dachshund
Just because bringing up children with certain gender-coloured expectations, which naturally affects their answers as adults on poorly constructed polls like this one , it doesn't mean that there is some kind of DNA-predetermined inclination for one gender to desire and aspirate to certain things in life over the other.
Quoting Dachshund
Depends on how far back you wanna go. The crusades were extreme form of religious terrorism committed by Christians.