Originally posted by Bruno
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Lobster Boy (was: This Jordan Peterson Guy)
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Originally posted by Fussbudget View PostFrench culture is insular, but I find it hard to believe that it's any more insular than US culture. For one thing, all French people learn a second language at school, and they're constantly exposed to US culture (as well as a fair bit of other foreign cultures) whether they seek it or not, whereas I very much doubt the reverse is true.
US culture is generally insular, because, for most of us, everywhere else is so far away.
American philosophy is dominated by analytic and philosophy of science, but there’s also a lot of critical race theory and deconstruction and all that, as well as loads of people, like Chomsky, who think all of that is bullshit.
And, a lot of it is bullshit. In a system that cranks out PhDs and insists that they publish or perish, it’s inevitable that a lot of what gets generated just isn’t very good. This isn’t really new, however. The medieval universities cranked out commentaries on religious tracts etc by the building-full and nobody read those either. That wasn’t the point.
The system needs reforming, but the generation of reems of bullshit is an inevitable byproduct of progress. As Thomas Edison said, he didn’t fail to invent the light bulb 100 times, he just found 100 ways not to do it.
But all of that is pretty marginal. The big money is still in STEM and business schools, and those are, if anything, increasingly controlled by right-wing villains like the Koch’s.
The idea, pushed by Peterson and Fox News etc that American universities have been taken over by deconstructionist-Marxist-lesbians bent on destroying western culture isn’t remotely true even though it might actually be preferable to what is happening.
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Oh yeah. 24 carat fraud with his 10000 hours theory of genius and the likes. Cool hair though, bra.Last edited by Lang Spoon; 19-03-2018, 05:57.
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Originally posted by Hot Pepsi View PostGladwell is, I’m starting to suspect, also a fraud.
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I’m no saying Chomsky is a hack, but his quoters sure are a bore. Bet Paul Mason was always turning on the Chomsky at hot and heavy student discussions.
That’s not his fault, but let’s say he’s better value at linguistics than his Michael Moore with more words deconstruction of The System, Man.
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Originally posted by BrunoPeterson and Fox aren't wrong that the universities have been taken over by the left. Anyone can see that, and the question is how troubled one should be by it, and how relatively troubling it is compared to the right, which controls the corporate world.
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The people running universities are self-defined liberals ≠ academia has been taken over by the left
People have been able to utilise the self-regard from self-describing as liberal to enable them to do more completely wanky things that don't form the basis of any left program(me). Their behaviour isn't redeemed because they toss out some identity politics bones every now and again.
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"t I think it'd be wrong to minimize the influence of left-wing academia, especially when you have Fox News hammering the idea of how influential it is."
So what exactly do you consider is the correct response when a racist right wing broadcaster is lying about the influence of the left in academia?
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Chomsky at least writes and speaks clearly and has contributed a lot to his academic field - which I don’t know much about - aside from his activism.
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Originally posted by Nefertiti2 View Post"Academia is overwhelmingly left-wing. "
with what data do you support this anecdotal assertion? Jordan Peterson's latest video?
The question, I think, since political views are increasingly defined by education levels, is whether or not academia is disproportionately left/liberal/whatever after you hold levels of education constant.
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Are we saying "academia is left wing" when we really mean "the philosophy and politics (and maybe history) departments in academia tend to be left wing"? I've not noticed any particular lefty tendencies in the science and engineering departments I've ended up in. I can't imagine that the lawyers or medics are, either. I suspect there's something of a super-compressed worldview of academics in the humanities fields who don't even noticed the other fields, because those other fields don't try and describe politics.
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Ah! I just got the Bruno's post a couple up where he basically says exactly that - sorry for getting ahead of it. But I think it's crucially important to make that distinction. If Peterson, and Fox, and all those nutters, keep talking about how Universities have been taken over by left-wing thought, that gives them a line of attack on everything coming out of academia, not just waffly philosophy bullshit from the likes of Peterson and Chomsky and Derrida - who have literally no influence on the actual world.
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Law in the US depends a lot on the school, with a general lean left (in US, not international, terms) at most of the "elite" universities, largely reflecting the fact that law students at those schools are largely drawn from the humanities departments of "elite" universities.
Places like Chicago and (especially) George Mason attract a right/libertarian student body.
It's also important to keep in mind that public universities in many states are dependent on highly reactionary state legislatures for funding.Last edited by ursus arctos; 19-03-2018, 14:34.
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If the left has taken over universities (which of course we haven't), we're doing a terrible job of using these institutions to remake society. It almost seems like we're not even trying.
According to Wikipedia, these are Petersen's "12 rules" to fight the chaos of postmodernism, and I'm having trouble believing such hokey pabulum could really be what all the fuss is about:
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
Be precise in your speech
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
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If the right is not well represented in universities, it's their fault. For the past forty years at least the Republican Party and its followers have committed themselves ever more fully to anti-intellectualism. It's not the left barring them from the gates, it's that most conservatives have no interest in science, the humanities, or rational inquiry or critical thinking in general. If anything, they're hostile to them.
As for "PC culture," most of it just seems to come down to etiquette. I find a lot of it tedious, but it's hard for me to see it as a bigger threat to freedom of expression than say, the consolidation of media companies or the voiding of net neutrality.
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How often do "regular folk" encounter it, though, outside of in hysterical media pieces about the out-of-control campus left? I'm not an academic and I work at a pretty regular job in Texas and it just never comes up.
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Interview today with Cathy Newman. Shame the interviewer doesn't push her harder on that shameful mosque lie but at least it actually gets mentioned https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...with-an-agenda
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Someone on another board posted this passage from Peterson and, well, yeah...
I know how to stand up to a man who’s unfairly trespassing against me. And the reason I know that is because the parameters for my resistance are quite well defined, which is: we talk, we argue, we push, and then it becomes physical. If we move beyond the boundaries of civil discourse, we know what the next step is. That’s forbidden in discourse with women. And so I don’t think that men can control crazy women. I really don’t believe it. I think they have to throw their hands up in. . . In what? It’s not even disbelief. It’s that the cultural. . . There’s no step forward that you can take under those circumstances, because if the man is offensive enough and crazy enough, the reaction becomes physical right away. Or at least the threat is there. And when men are talking to each other in any serious manner, that underlying threat of physicality is always there, especially if it’s a real conversation. It keeps the thing civilized to some degree. If you’re talking to a man who wouldn’t fight with you under any circumstances whatsoever, then you’re talking to someone [for] whom you have absolutely no respect. But I can’t see any way… For example there’s a woman in Toronto who’s been organizing this movement, let’s say, against me and some other people who are going to do a free speech event. And she managed to organize quite effectively, and she’s quite offensive, you might say. She compared us to Nazis, for example, publicly, using the Swastika, which wasn’t something I was all that fond of. But I’m defenseless against that kind of female insanity, because the techniques that I would use against a man who was employing those tactics are forbidden to me. So I don’t know. . . It seems to me that it isn’t men who have to stand up and say, ‘Enough of this.’ Even though that is what they should do, it seems to me that it’s sane women who have to stand up against their crazy sisters and say, ‘Look, enough of that. Enough man-hating. Enough pathology. Enough bringing disgrace on us as a gender.’
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Originally posted by Bruno
PC culture seems fine to courteous enlightened folk but it would be foolish to underestimate how alienating it is for other folk, especially given how it's often packaged. For example, calling people fascists who aren't fascists.
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Originally posted by Renart View PostIf the left has taken over universities (which of course we haven't), we're doing a terrible job of using these institutions to remake society. It almost seems like we're not even trying.
According to Wikipedia, these are Petersen's "12 rules" to fight the chaos of postmodernism, and I'm having trouble believing such hokey pabulum could really be what all the fuss is about:
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
Be precise in your speech
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
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