Postmodernism

I listened to the whole thing this morning. The Boyce guy grates, but I came away really liking Pluckrose (fwiw).

I’d be interested to know if others here agree with Pluckrose when she said (paraphrasing) that postmodernist thought came about when the push for civil rights (after winning almost all legal battles) ran into diminishing returns in 1969, went mostly dark in the 1970s, and in the 1980s morphed into a new movement to change attitudes instead. Identity politics is the equivalent of the Kalashnikov rifle, an old but tried and true political weapon employed to that end - forcing societal attitudes to change - ever since (my metaphor, not Pluckrose’s).

You would have an easier time telling me @rowland is “classical far left”. I’m completely serious. If you want to throw around that label, at least look where you’re throwing it.

If you meant classical far left as in caring more about economics than about identity politics, it’s still a ridiculous statement because the actual classical far left organizations that still exist in the US don’t even consider him a socialist.

I’m not convinced the video will contain anything of substance I haven’t heard before, but I’ll watch it anyway when I have an hour to kill.

I don’t know why you keep bringing up Bernie Sanders, its got nothing to do with him or left wing economics. You want to get into a technical discussion of where Bernie Sanders is with relates to left wing economics, its irrelevant.

I might as well have said it has nothing to do with Tom and Jerry or Disney and you want to get into a back and forth about Warner and Disney. It’s all irrelevant, none of them have anything to do with the discussion.

I could ask you the same question. :yin_yang:

I’d love to know what JP thinks of them. :slight_smile:


He of all people should know how the Streisand effect works! :smile:

In discussing a video Tempo posted, what exactly is the far left came up. Traditionally (and I agree) far left has been thought of in terms of economic redistribution between the rich and poor. That is not what is being discussed in the video.

What is being discussed is a fracturing of philosophical thought in the left into two groups. One which is more traditional that I am completely comfortable with and another which we will call post modern, that lacks a foundation and validates itself as a theory by referencing other papers using the same post modern terminology as themselves.

Now, if you want to discuss the actual video, go watch it. Or don’t, in which case instead of replying to me I suggest joining an A&E thread about some movie you haven’t watched and tell everybody in that thread how much more you know about a movie you haven’t watched and I’m sure they will love you tremendously, no doubt they will stand in awe how insightful you are, Im sure they won’t be annoyed at all.

52 posts were split to a new topic: Islam and censorship

Just to humor @Mick, I listened to the whole “Curb your postmodernism” discussion. It wasn’t too dull, but overall I found it a bit silly. :2cents:

And then she basically says everything is fine as long as evidence triumphs over faith.

Could it be, perhaps, that the Enlightenment project was a step in the right direction but really only a baby step, because humans just aren’t as smart as they think they are? (No offense to y’all…)

I think she gives too much credit to the “sort of rule”. Humans have been coming up with rules for a long time, without changing their nature very much. What’s become unsettled is to a large extent what was under the surface the whole time.

They go on to say that this type of thinking (uncovering power imbalances and so on) causes the exact opposite of its goal (fairness). They don’t quite use the word inevitable, but he says,

Absolutist much? :hushed:

Around 20:30, she says people on “the far left” don’t want to be seen as anti-this or anti-that ergo they don’t address problematic thinking about this or that.

That is apparently what Mick wanted me to listen to before responding to his characterization of Mr. Sanders as “classical far left”. It’s not that the guest on the show said it. And there is nothing in the whole discussion to explain how Mr. Sanders would supposedly fit in with classical Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, KR, etc. (compared to which the Scandinavian model is basically centrist). For (I hope) the last time: he’s far left by current mainstream American standards, and he’s classical left by current mainstream American standards, but classical far left is something else, even in America.

Around 24:00, he (I mean the guy on the show — sorry I didn’t catch their names) describes the phenomenon as a “mind virus”, “cult-like” and “religious in a negative sense”, and people who are caught up in it can’t be persuaded through face to face conversations but rather need to be “deprogrammed”, be “thrown out of the cult” or “hit a brick wall” before they can rejoin the world of the sane. Gosh, that sounds familiar. (And yes, I know some identity politics people are exactly like that…)

“But maybe there are other ways of going about that.” She responds that people who can’t be reached through conversation “are a much smaller proportion of society than we perceive them to be”. She then cites a survey in which 8% of respondents

She then explains that liberals need to label social justice supporters as “extremists” in order to save liberalism.

My first problem with this is, if a survey asks you whether or not you support “identity politics approaches”, how is that supposed to measure your level of extremism without presuming that identity politics can only exist in an extremist form?

My second problem with it is, if anything that sounds vaguely like “identity politics” is presumed to be “extremist”, people who understand that intersectional analysis can be used in non-extremist ways – as an analytical tool rather than an ideology – need to go into the closet and have no way of overtly supporting the non-extremist use of these ideas.

Example: Acme Corp. wants the state to spend a pile of tax money and/or authorize the violation of private property rights and/or some other thing that Acme can’t do on its own simply through “free market forces”. (This type of state action would normally be labeled “socialism” by anti-big-government types, but if it’s being requested by a large corporation, maybe it’s not so bad. :wink:) Acme promises to “create 1000 jobs for the benefit of economically marginalized people” or some such promise.

The state has a reasonable obligation — morally if not legally — to analyze that promise instead of accepting it at face value. A simple analysis would say, “Oh gee, we need jobs here, yeah, let’s do this!” An intersectional analysis would try to predict the extent to which the economically marginalized would actually benefit. Are these full-time, permanent jobs? Do they require the creation of “man camps” in remote communities without any appropriate planning for the effects those camps will have on the communities? Will they pollute land and water that aboriginals depend on for both economic reasons and the survival of their culture? And so on…

The more people associate those questions with “extremism”, the harder it will be for anyone to find the courage to ask them.

Note that this is not the ideology of equality of outcome. It’s not about requiring corporations to hire 1:1 male to female or sending people to pronoun gulags. It’s about economic planning – which the state is going to do anyway, one way or another – based on the actual needs of the population.

They have these words that are quickly becoming meaningless, identity politics, far left, extremist, you know…

…how to do that without being called extremists…

Around 32:30, she says humans don’t need an alien invasion to bring them together. That’s a relief! :grinning: :peace_symbol:

Around 40:00, they talk about making the left “respectable” again to win back swing voters. She says,

Who is actually saying to swing voters, “you’re dead to us”? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

I think she overestimates the significance of identity politics in mainstream discourse and underestimates the general crappiness of… mainstream discourse. I mean, imagine identity politics not being a thing, in mainstream terms, in the past decade. Would the leftish parties not still have plenty of crappiness to deter people from voting for them? Would the swing voters who said, “I know how bad Trump is, but Hillary’s worse. It’s that simple. It’s that simple!” not still have said that?

She seems to be British, and I’m thinking mostly of the situation in the US and Canada. Maybe she overestimates the effect of postmodernism in the mainstream because she’s an academic herself. :idunno:

Today’s substitution drill: replace “epistemology by identity” with your favorite echo chamber concept. :slight_smile:


That reminds of something that happened recently in the Open forum. In a discussion of Martin Scorsese’s films, a member known for his outspokenness described the man as “one of the most OVERRATED directors of all time”.

I took exception to that, even though (I now confess) I haven’t seen all of the films that created the context in which the comment was made. I have seen Casino, and I stand by my characterization of it as a ~3 hour film that never gets boring. Strangely, despite his outspokenness, Gain didn’t respond to me. :idunno:


Wow, I haven’t heard that one for a while. I also haven’t hung out with any Scientologists for a while. Maybe that’s got nothing to do with you, but I can’t think of anywhere else I’ve ever heard that.


That claim keeps coming up. The problem is that the individuals and groups who do make those “calls” don’t get much attention in the MSM, because why would they?


If you really want to explain Islam to us, would you mind taking JP’s advice and getting your own stuff in order first? You can start by clarifying your definition of Protestant (or protestant?) to something intellectually consistent. :slight_smile:

Mandate of heaven, divine right of kings, Dieu et mon droit, nation-religion-monarchy… the name changes, but the concept stays basically the same. You’re talking about real world results here, not pure theology, so please explain the cause and effect to me, from your Christian perspective. :slight_smile:

A post was merged into an existing topic: Islam and censorship

Well jolly good, thank you for humoring me. To be fair, I didn’t think you would agree with the discussion (I did), because we have already disagreed about the intellectual application of post modern identity politics (for want of a better description) so I thought you might not agree with the underlying philosophical argument underlying being unsound.

I’m not quoting everything because there is much I agree with or doesn’t need to be commented on. But a couple which add to clarification, or raise a question themselves.

Sure, or if you would have preferred to use “classical Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, Maoists, Trotskyists, KR, etc.” as your example of a classical left instead that’s fine, more generally the point being made was the discussion was not about that.

This is kind of what was being discussed in a going back and forth with @Taiwan_Netizen, identity politics can be quite mainstream and not at all extremist, it can also be extremely extremist if you look at the like of ISIS, Bosnians, Myanmar, Uighur Muslims. Obviously post modern identity politics is nothing as extreme as that, but is more extreme than what we have been used to. does that make it far left in ideology, I accept the proposition it might not be, even though I have said it was and others too.

We don’t need to look at imaginary scenarios with Acme Corp. when we have a real one with Amazon who were preparing to open a distribution center which would have employed 20,000 people and what they wanted (without looking up the exact numbers) a 1/10th of their first tax revenues they would be paying over 15 years to be tax exempt, a figure that was roughly the amount they would be required to invest in the project. AOC if you recall led to a protest over this because she saw it as overly greedy. Amazon subsequently pulled the project in it’s entirety.

That’s the flip side indeed. I would argue it’s also a chicken and egg type of argument. Ilhar Omar recently made anti semitic comments, the push back arguably was over the top hence her supporters quickly made claims of racism, sexism and Islamophobia.

This is perhaps due to perspective. There could be an entire thread on this topic alone.

Fair enough if that is your opinion, but I might also suggest you might be underestimating the significance. I agree with your point on plenty of people just not voting for Hillary because she was worse.

Certainly the effects are most apparent in the Universities and I agree more so in the UK and Canada than in the US. As to if she is underestimating the effect, again this one of those debatable points.

The reason I thought this was worth a watch, even knowing that you would likely disagree or find it silly is because so often when a disagreement arises between those who agree with this post modern identity political mindset is the claim the person must be Alt-Right. They skip right over the moderate left, moderate (or swing voters), moderate right and go with exteme right. For a difference of opinion on this you don’t need to go very far at all, it exists within the left itself regardless of what the right might think.

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There’s actually nothing imaginary about it except for the name and the exact number of jobs. I know people who do that sort of work for a living, and as far as I’ve seen, they’re not extremists.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at. She thought a corporation was being greedy (asking for too big a concession from the state), so she led a protest. What’s postmodern or extremist about that?

Let me rephrase that. Basically, the way I see it is, if you have a political establishment that’s corrupt, incompetent, and complacent even though it can’t manage to defeat a shockingly unpopular opponent, then you have a lot of work to do, and if the best you can come up with is (to paraphrase the lady in the discussion) “we need to condemn identity politics”, then I think you should go back to the drawing board. Sure, some swing voters just want to be reassured that they won’t get sent to pronoun gulags if they vote for X, but I think most of the people who stay up at night worrying about that are not swing voters.


I try not to tout easy answers to complex problems, but if I need to boil it down, I would say education, information, and determination. By education I mean not so much facts as understanding (critical thinking, analysis, problem solving). By information I mean getting people out of their chambers – something they would be likely to do anyway if they had learned about the chambers back in school. By determination I mean giving a :banana:, aka the opposite of apathy.

Are you really? :astonished:

@discobot fortune

:crystal_ball: You may rely on it

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Welcome, Tom! :bowing:

No! :rage:

An awful lot of people think the state is too greedy.

So let them protest too. It’s a democracy, innit?

That’s a discussion for the Free Speech and Punching thread. This is more about economic consequences.

Actually, this thread is supposed to be about Jordan Peterson. But the most interesting thing about him is the enemies he makes.

Postmodernist Leaders are very thoughtful and kind
image

You lost me on this one

Apologise …sarcasm. He is about the least Postmodern leader , in terms of allowing the opinions of others to help define policy and a willingness to step down and let others have a go when he gets it wrong . If you know what I mean?

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I don’t know much about him! The whole thing he said seems like common sense, pretty much. Maybe not oozing with sensitivity.

Right on time

“Post-modern conservatives claim to hate identity politics and the victimization they associate with it, but continuously demand change by claiming victim status for their aggrieved identity.”

  • A dismissal of rational standards for interpreting facts and values
  • Appeal to a traditionally powerful identity as a source for truth and a narrative of victimization and resentment demanding its return to the top of the social hierarchy
  • A contradictory and reactionary political ideology
  • Despite being reactionaries, post-modern conservatives deploy hyper-modern media to promulgate their political ideology
  • Once in power, post-modern conservatives actively crack down on other identity groups. Uniquely, this includes those who hold other epistemic and meta-ethical standards in order to preserve the hollow integrity of the victim narrative and its consequent political ideology. This leads to the perpetuation of the post-modern culture which birthed them in the first place. It is also coupled with calls for the effacement of traditional institutional and ideological barriers to the realization of the post-modern conservative political program.

“Post-modern conservatives claim to hate identity politics and the victimization they associate with it, but continuously demand change by claiming victim status for their aggrieved identity.”

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