Getting Critical about Critical Theory/White Fragility/BLM/etc.

[Lex Luthier]

To go back a bit further, Critical Theory comes from the infamous Frankfurt school: a group of disaffected Marxist intellectuals that sought to continue the struggle Marx promulgated. Thus the post modern left was formed. They went from Frankfurt to Columbia university. From there the philosophy expanded to other ivy leagues, Berkeley, and then virtually every university in existence.
In simple terms the philosophy and movement was to move beyond and transcend the Marxist goals of purely economic struggle. They new aim was to crush hierarchies of oppression. Instead of proletariat vs bourgeoisie, workers vs capitalists, it is oppressors vs oppressed. The philosophy gained huge traction in media, culture, and higher academia. Now we are living with it as formal policy.

There are some good youtube videos explaining the thinking based on Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Marcuse if you care to go down a real rabbit hole. Forewarning this stuff is real mental vomit. Its astonishing how anyone buys into this as any sort of reasoning.

I might select Marcuse as my using-time-machine-go-back-to-strangle-evil-in-the-cradle candidate.

[Baldanders]

To go back a bit further, Critical Theory comes from the infamous Frankfurt school: a group of disaffected Marxist intellectuals that sought to continue the struggle Marx promulgated. Thus the post modern left was formed. They went from Frankfurt to Columbia university. From there the philosophy expanded to other ivy leagues, Berkeley, and then virtually every university in existence.
In simple terms the philosophy and movement was to move beyond and transcend the Marxist goals of purely economic struggle. They new aim was to crush hierarchies of oppression. Instead of proletariat vs bourgeoisie, workers vs capitalists, it is oppressors vs oppressed. The philosophy gained huge traction in media, culture, and higher academia. Now we are living with it as formal policy.

There are some good youtube videos explaining the thinking based on Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, Marcuse if you care to go down a real rabbit hole. Forewarning this stuff is real mental vomit. Its astonishing how anyone buys into this as any sort of reasoning.

Try reading them. 😅 I had some exposure in college. I actually thought Baudrillard was interesting. Postmodernism has some valid tools for analysis , IMO, but it doesn't really have much to do with forming coherent solutions, much like Marxism.

Both the Alt-Right and Critical Race Theory advocates are good examples of applied Postmodernism.

[peterb]

Which is pretty much the core of the liberal agenda. To them, I’m the racist for insisting that everyone is responsible for their own life and that anyone can make anything of themselves, albeit possibly having to overcome their own struggles that may revolve around race, gender, orientation, religion, health, hair color... whatever. They, however, are the heroes of the world and totally “woke” because they assume that no black, gay, or female human could ever succeed or get ahead without the help (or off the back of) of the white, straight, Christian, man.

I don't have to be "woke" to realize that as a white middle-class male I had a lot of advantages over a poor black city kid.

[rob_s]

so here's the counterpoint to all of that....

Sucks to be the guy left back on the line, absolutely. He'll have to work harder, absolutely.

But if not doing the same thing to his kids that his parents did to him (which is about 90% of the shit the announcer is listing) isn't motivation enough to at least *try* and live a better life, there's nothing any government can do to help that person.

Said another way, while everything on that list can be an excuse to never even try to succeed, it can also be a motivator to guarantee success. and no president, congressperson, mayor, councilman, county commissioner, school board member, or Kiwanis Club president can change that.

With one exception: fund and de-politicize education (and feed them while they're there)

that's the only way I'm aware of to take a kid that has a shit lot, handed them by their fucked up parents that probably shouldn't have ever had kids, and have any hope of turning them around.

[Joe in PNG]

The idea of a locus of control is a big piece of the book "The Coddling of the American Mind" that I won't shut up about. They argue that the environment cultivated on college campuses is making students feel as if they are not in control, something which they learn when the campus nanny squad constantly intervenes on their behalf to 'protect them' from 'dangerous speech' (but not actual violence because we need to #DefundCampusSecurity ).

On a related note, here's a message I got from my former college professor when I asked him how things had changed on campus.... keep in mind this was from 2016 (I graduated in '10), so things can only have gotten worse:

"Increased medical exceptions, anxiety attacks, inability to turn in work, flakiness on important tasks (the [Junior qualifying exam] is a nightmare, at least a quarter can't even turn stuff in on time), lowered threshold of being offended, appealing to authority to resolve disputes rather than working it out themselves, etc. Could also be admissions changes, a shift in population, students who previously wouldn't have made it to college without meds and diagnoses, or any number of other things."

If you reward a behavior, you'll get more of it. Being a fragile special snowflake who can't even gets rewarded.

[Joe in PNG]

so here's the counterpoint to all of that....

Sucks to be the guy left back on the line, absolutely. He'll have to work harder, absolutely.

But if not doing the same thing to his kids that his parents did to him (which is about 90% of the shit the announcer is listing) isn't motivation enough to at least *try* and live a better life, there's nothing any government can do to help that person.

Said another way, while everything on that list can be an excuse to never even try to succeed, it can also be a motivator to guarantee success. and no president, congressperson, mayor, councilman, county commissioner, school board member, or Kiwanis Club president can change that.

With one exception: fund and de-politicize education (and feed them while they're there)

that's the only way I'm aware of to take a kid that has a shit lot, handed them by their fucked up parents that probably shouldn't have ever had kids, and have any hope of turning them around.

Which is kind of ironic. The behaviors, attitudes, and so on that move people up or down the line are denounced as "white culture" and somehow bad and evil and oppressive and mean. Any attempt to teach those behaviors and attitudes that contribute to success is somehow "cultural imperialism" and doubleplus ungoodthink.

And thus again to my point of "wokeness is believing white supremacist correct, but that's a bad thing".

[blues]

So to make things better...you parents out there need to divorce, stop feeding and clothing your kid, show no interest in his or her education, tell them to sink or swim on their own, and completely abandon them when they get mouthy about it.

That should restore utopia and equal footing across the board. Besides, the state will do a great job feeding and clothing them in any one or more of various institutions.

Problem solved.

[peterb]

so here's the counterpoint to all of that....

Sucks to be the guy left back on the line, absolutely. He'll have to work harder, absolutely.

But if not doing the same thing to his kids that his parents did to him (which is about 90% of the shit the announcer is listing) isn't motivation enough to at least *try* and live a better life, there's nothing any government can do to help that person.

Said another way, while everything on that list can be an excuse to never even try to succeed, it can also be a motivator to guarantee success. and no president, congressperson, mayor, councilman, county commissioner, school board member, or Kiwanis Club president can change that.

With one exception: fund and de-politicize education (and feed them while they're there)

that's the only way I'm aware of to take a kid that has a shit lot, handed them by their fucked up parents that probably shouldn't have ever had kids, and have any hope of turning them around.

I agree. You can't help people who don't want to be helped.

It does bother me when folks turn "everyone's got an opportunity to better themselves" (true) into "everyone's got the same opportunity to better themselves." It's a LOT harder if you're starting from the back row. I don't see a problem with trying to even up the starting line.

Interesting tool for looking at outcomes: https://www.opportunityatlas.org/

[rob_s]

I don't see a problem with trying to even up the starting line.

I see *potential* problems with that.

do you know why Catholic priests can't get married? it's to remove the incentive they might otherwise have to abuse their position to become financially successful beyond their own means. if you don't have other mouths to feed, or a legacy to leave behind, or a status to flaunt by showing off how well you've done for your immediate family, you're less likely to want to achieve financial success, and people that *do* want to achieve financial success are less likely to go into the profession. When you're clergy, achieving financial success is pretty much always the result of scumbaggery. So they stopped letting priests get married. Now they diddle kids instead, but at least the motivation for financial scumbaggery is reduced.

The reverse is also true. For many people, the relative comfort and safety, and future comfort and safety, of their progeny is a HUGE motivator. One case in point, I've got a guy that's worked for me for nearly a decade. He's always been a slacker. He bought a house and had a kid (with his wife who he is still married to and who lives with him, just to be clear) all in the last year, and in the last six months I've seen a measurable change in his drive.

Without going into details (some here already know them) I can tell you that in my life I've had nobody but myself, then I've had a family, then I've lost that family, and I now have a new one. I can track the ebbs and flows of my career around those life events to a large degree.

Do we want to take that away? Do we want to remove that incentive to succeed? To innovate? To work hard?

do we want to reward those that refuse? Sucks for their kids, sure, but so what then we "even up the starting line" for that kid because his parents suck?

And what do we do if it turns out that there's a lot more "nature" than "nurture" in these flaws? I'm not talking about racial (we all know white shitheads too that are horrendous parents) issues but more basic genetic issues. Are we to hold back the children of the folks who's entire reason for hard work and success was to make a better life for their kids, only to find out that the kids of shitheads often turn out to be shitheads no matter how much you try and help them?

If you tell me "no matter how hard you work, we're going to just take all the marbles when you die and distribute them equally to all the kids who are the same age as your kids" then that's going to drastically affect my motivation.

The only line I think we can or should try and move is the OPPORTUNITY line (and even then we need to be very, very careful). Which is why I'm so strongly in favor of increasing funding for public education, providing free meals for those kids that need it, and taking the politics out of the public school system.

[Guerrero]

I agree. You can't help people who don't want to be helped.

It does bother me when folks turn "everyone's got an opportunity to better themselves" (true) into "everyone's got the same opportunity to better themselves." It's a LOT harder if you're starting from the back row. I don't see a problem with trying to even up the starting line.

Interesting tool for looking at outcomes: https://www.opportunityatlas.org/

Granted.

At the same time, taking away from someone who has done no inherent wrong is not the way to proceed.

Unless you define having more as inherently wrong.