M Kelly on Triggernometry :
https://youtu.be/l7zemtYf0Vw
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Showing posts from December, 2020
A quote by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks:
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From his book “Morality” : “Advertising is constantly inflaming our discontents. Advertising is the organised creation of dissatisfaction. Happiness is good for us, but it is bad for business. Hence we have to be induced to see it as always lying around the next corner, immediately after the next product we buy. A consumer society, in short, encourages us to spend money we don’t have, on products we don’t need, for a happiness that won’t last.”
Some notes:
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How we know what is true - epistemology. Ideas based on evidence and reason. What does it mean to be liberal ? In the USA being liberal is taken to mean being leftist but being liberal can mean or can be better understood by looking at what most mean with the word illiberal - ie: illiberal means being unfair and unjust and opposing freedom and equal opportunities...... The Woke hard Left is often illiberal.... Authoritarian idea of language creating reality......we have to regulate what people can and can’t say because language and discourse, ie: how we talk about things, constructs reality. Liberal = being in favour of free speech.... Woke worldview = all on the Right and even all who politically centrist must be racist and homophobic etc..... Wokeism = alternative ways of knowing, “The sane centre” / Woke Left........Far Right. Different approaches to achieving social justice. The Woke worldview is wrong because it takes to extreme lengths things that are in fact of...
Perhaps the best YouTube clip so far - JL at Sovereign Nations.
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By someone who does not hate Derrida and deconstruction...
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By someone who does not hate Foucault and his philosophy.....
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Farber and Sherry on Postmodernism:
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Daniel A Farber and Suzanna Sherry criticised postmodernism for reducing the complexity of the modern world to an expression of power and for undermining truth and reason : “If the modern era begins with the European Enlightenment, the postmodern era that captivates the radical multiculturalists begins with its rejection. According to the new radicals, the Enlightenment-inspired ideas that have previously structured our world, especially the legal and academic parts of it, are a fraud perpetuated by white males to consolidate their own power. Those who disagree are not only blind but bigoted. The Enlightenment’s goal of an objective and reasoned basis for knowledge, merit, truth, justice etc is an impossibility: ‘objectivity’, in the sense of standards of judgment that transcend individual perspectives, does not exist. Reason is just another code word for the views of the privileged. The Enlightenment itself merely replaced one socially constructed view of reality with another, mi...
Taylor Marshall on the 2020 Vatican nativity display......
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Some key points in this whole thing:
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Dominant forms of knowledge have been constructed largely from the experiences of the most powerful, ie: those straight, white, western males who historically have had the most access to systems of education and communication. One can and must identify the discourses (how we talk about things) that support and maintain white supremacy and patriarchy... Power and knowledge is inextricably linked. We still have language and discourses upholding unjust power structures. Oppressors (usually, and especially, straight, wealthy, western, white males) still perpetuate their privilege and “power-knowledge” through discourse. There is really only one objective reality: ie- systems of power and privilege exist. Almost everything else is a social, cultural and linguistic construct. Women, people of colour and LGBT persons often have unwritten, untold and subordinated truths, which can be a source of knowledge in pursuit of social justice. Those who are most oppressed have access to a de...
Some more from “Cynical Theories” :
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- the moral imperative is to protect marginalised people from the non obvious forms of harm contained in attitudes and discourses (ie how we talk about things)..... - systemic bigotry is present in all institutions; it is always lurking beneath the surface in need of exposure... - the ideas of SJW scholars and activists often look good on paper. On paper they seem to say good things ie: let’s get to the bottom of bigotry, oppression, marginalisation and injustice and heal the world!......but it isn’t going to work. SJW Theory cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative. Nevertheless, metanarratives can sound convincing and obtain sufficient support to significantly influence society and the way it thinks about knowledge, power and language. Why? Partly because we humans aren’t as smart as we think we are, partly because most of us are idealists on at least some le...
From “Cynical Theories” continued:
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- Social Justice scholarship and SJW activists do not merely present the postmodern knowledge principle - that objective truth does not exist and knowledge is socially constructed and a product of culture - and the postmodern political principle - society is constructed through knowledge by language and discourses, designed to keep the dominant in power over the oppressed - they treat them as The Truth, and tolerate no dissent, and expect everyone to agree or be “cancelled”...... - they believe in the overwhelming power of language, which must constantly be scrutinised and cleansed... - Social Justice scholars and SJW activists teach students and people in general to be sceptical of science, reason and evidence; to regard knowledge as tied to identify; to read oppressive power dynamics into every interaction; to politicise every facet of life; and to apply ethical principles unevenly, in accordance with identity..... - the fight to redress imbalances in society is actually undermi...
Some summary notes on “Cynical Theories” :
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- it is profoundly ironic that a movement claiming to problematise all sources of privilege is led by highly educated, upper middle class scholars and activists who are so oblivious to their status as privileged members of society. - they want to include the lived experiences, emotions, and cultural traditions of minority groups and consider them “knowledges”, and privilege them over reason and evidence-based knowledge, which they claim is unfairly dominant. - the postmodern knowledge principle that knowledges flow from identity... - they believe that everything important is socially constructed... - there is also the assumption that “oppressed people” all have the same experiential knowledge, presumably defined by their identities.... - one’s relative position within a social power dictates what one can and cannot know: thus the privileged are blinded by their privilege and the oppressed possess a kind of double sight, in that they understand both the dominant position and the ex...
Helen Pluckrose on “Wokeness”....etc...
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“Wokeness comes from a mixture of postmodern scholarship and leftist activism......at the centre is a postmodern conception of knowledge, power and language. In short, there is the belief that knowledge is a construct dependent on dominant ways of talking. The powerful get to say what knowledge is and dictate how things are spoken about legitimately. Everybody on all levels of society speaks into this and perpetuates the power imbalance. These invisible systems of power are known as things like patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism and cis-normativity etc...these are all understood to be omnipresent below the surface, and to reveal themselves in the way people speak about things. Therefore, there is a need to interrogate speech and pick it apart and find the problematic biases behind it. That is the basic philosophy underlying it all.... These ideas arose in the late 1960s, when people from different disciplines suddenly starting saying they were sceptical of meta-narratives (e...
Some quotes and notes from “Cynical Theories”.
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“Postmodernism is defined by a radical skepticism about the accessibility of objective truth. Rather than seeing objective truth as something that exists and can be provisionally known (or approximated) through processes such as experimentation, falsification and defeasibility - as Enlightenment, modernist and scientific thought would have it - postmodern approaches to knowledge inflate a small, almost banal kernel of truth - that we are limited in our ability to know and must express knowledge through language, concepts and categories- to insist that ALL claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture.” “THEORY assumes that objective reality cannot be known, ‘truth’ is socially constructed through language and ‘language games’ and is local to a particular culture, and knowledge functions to protect and advance the interests of the privileged.”
The following books:
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The following books are books I am going to reread over the next 2 years (and take notes from these same books - AND record those notes on this blog) : The Bible. The Penguin History of the World by J M Roberts. The Great Philosophers by Bryan Magee. The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey. A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson. Empire by Niall Ferguson. God’s Funeral by A N Wilson. The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray. Stalin - Breaker of Nations by Robert Conquest. What is History? by E H Carr. Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Paul - a Biography by N T Wright. How the French Think by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Helen Pluckrose again. What a great mind this woman has !
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Helen Pluckrose is brilliant !!
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Helen Pluckrose wrote the following in an article in the online Areo magazine: “Critical Social Justice has some intellectual underpinnings in ‘critical’ neo-Marxism, but it is mostly grounded in postmodern notions of power, knowledge and language, which view society as constructed of oppressive systems of power and privilege that legitimise some forms of knowledge over others, which then creates ways of speaking about things - discourses - that perpetuate the oppressive power structures. Most people, it argues, are blithely unaware of these oppressive discourses and need theorists and activists to reveal them to us.” What a great summary !! She goes on to write: “CSJ manifests in current scholarship as postcolonial and decolonial theory, Critical Race Theory, intersectional feminism, disability and fat studies or simply as (Critical) Social Justice Scholarship. It appears in activism as a drive to decolonize everything, sees whiteness and white fragility everywhere and scrutinise...