Say that caucasian students in America are brought up in the classroom from First Grade onward to acknowledge and make confessions of their "white privilege." Can this be expected to:
(1) Improve educational outcomes, create better learners/knowers and more thoughtful citizens, etc.
(2) Have deleterious effects on educational outcomes
(3) Have little to no effect either way
"Progressive educators" are in effect staking their reputations on (1). Are these "progressive educators" nearly as bright and morally advanced as they evidently think they are? Why are they pushing this whole "white privilege" narrative on their impressionable captive audience when they could be advancing the no-brainer Philosophy for Children agenda, instead (or at the least in addition to the "white privilege" crap which is a transparent effort by the left to cover for half a century of cultural and policy failings)?
I, for one, would love to see empirical data on the effects of the "white privilege" crap and the whole cluster of related dogmas and associated Newspeak, etc., on educational outcomes. The "educators" should be more than willing to subject their programs to such empirical scrutiny, or else they wouldn't be very honorable or credible, now, would they.
They should also be more than willing to show how all that additional student loan and other taxpayer money being poured into the "education" system to (e.g.) better bureaucratically administer all this crap, leads to outcomes per dollar worth all that extra expense.
Otherwise, aren't they (as I have come increasingly to suspect) basically caught dead to rights parasitically and hubristically sucking off a surplus from the taxpayer in order to promote easily discredited, toxic af, ideologically-inbred leftist crap?
The likes of AOC are not a positive educational outcome, BTW.
Am I missing anything here?
I'm going with (2). Have you seen the shitshow that has resulted from the "educators" doing their thing up until now, much less going forward? If you haven't seen it, have you been in a cave?
[Addendum: on what planet is it to be expected that a recent "cutting edge" measure, the removal of the mural at the George Washington school in San Francisco, will lead to better outcomes, much less avoid worse ones? The only "lesson" I see being imparted to (i.e., indoctrinated into) the students is that it is okay to feel "harmed" by exposure to history and artworks. No, this story isn't satire, unfortunately; these "educators" in all their cult-like moral fervor are actually behaving this fucking stupidly. See the "inbred" link above for more madness in the same vein.]
Showing posts with label comprachicos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comprachicos. Show all posts
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Ideological inbreeding isn't progressive
How far today's most-unimpressive American left has fallen since the days of a true progressive like the philosopher John Stuart Mill. The spectacle today is one of a bunch of hubris-filled folks refusing to take the ideas/arguments of non-lefties seriously, usually because they have a lousy grasp of what the non-lefties advocate. (See the preceding Mill link; as one glaring instance, lefties today are utterly awful and deranged when it comes to accurately depicting the views of Atlas Shrugged's author.) You can't blame the "increasingly business-like models" of the universities as they cater to "woke" customer-students, as anti-market leftists try to rationalize it; since how did those students get "woke" in the first place? Via the non-business-like public schools, run by "educators" with predominantly left-wing ideological frameworks (and this goes also for tenured university professors who aren't so beholden to the universities' bottom lines).
I've written previously about a San Francisco school board choosing to waste $600K on removing a "harmful" mural depicting history. (Should the school fall short by $600K for genuinely educational purposes sometime in the future, they shall elicit no sympathy whatsoever from this commonsense blogger.) To the irredeemable deplorables in flyover country clinging bitterly to their guns and bibles, that sounds pretty idiotic if not bewildering, but it's all too clear that the left-inbreeders don't care what those outsiders think.
Now we get more along the same lines: When the Culture War Comes for the Kids. (Tucker Carlson discussed some main points of this article on his show yesterday, but my attention was drawn to this Atlantic piece by Google News, of which I am a regular user.) This piece details the way in which, since roughly 2014, the "educators" have made a fervent effort to systematically degrade and ultimately destroy the NYC public school system in the name of, you guessed it, "diversity" and its cluster of associated "progressive" values. They have gotten really obnoxious about it, too. For instance, without informing parents, the "educators" removed the "Boys" and "Girls" signs from the bathrooms, leading to unpleasantness for the students who eventually went back to using the bathrooms they used before. (After the parents found out, the school had to come up with a better solution. "After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral." Gee, these progressive woke geniuses charged with "educating" the kids couldn't figure out such a common sense solution on their own?)
This paragraph in particular caught my eye:
If you can't tell the difference between satire and the real thing, that should be cause to reconsider the real thing.
So, how could one tell a satire of today's unhinged American left and Demo rats apart from the real thing? Apart from having knowledge of their histories, how could one tell idiots like AOC apart from a GOP plant?
As a result of ideological inbreeding, many prominent members of the American left today are lightning quick to identify controversial statements as racist. It's not enough to oppose racism; you have to agree with them on what qualifies as racism, and you'd better agree pretty quickly, because, well, that's what they're used to getting after all that inbreeding.
(Case in point: Yet Again, Trump Attacks a Prominent Black Journalist. So who's injecting race into this, and when race is injected into things, isn't that a subtle form of racism? Headlines like this only prove Trump's (and Trump voters') point. Anyone with a clue knows by now that Trump could very well attack anyone who isn't part of his own family. Have you seen how be badmouths numerous former high-level members of his administration? Nevertheless, he is a very stable genius at selecting high-level officials. As for the "prominent black journalist" in question, MSDNC's Joy Ann Reid - someone with an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome - she is symptomatic of the badly degraded opinion-quality standards on that channel.)
As you might suppose, I don't like ideological inbreeding wherever it occurs. I don't like the ideological inbreeding of the George W. Bush years that culminated in the GOP drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid. (How could you tell either way whether Palin was a plant, absent knowledge of her history? The parallels between Palin and AOC are quite strong, are they not.)
Fortunately there is a solution to this problem: philosophical education. Philosophers (the genuine articles, of course, not pseudos) avoid inbreeding by practicing the art of dialectic. Among human cognitive endeavors, philosophy is as progressive and woke as it gets.
I've written previously about a San Francisco school board choosing to waste $600K on removing a "harmful" mural depicting history. (Should the school fall short by $600K for genuinely educational purposes sometime in the future, they shall elicit no sympathy whatsoever from this commonsense blogger.) To the irredeemable deplorables in flyover country clinging bitterly to their guns and bibles, that sounds pretty idiotic if not bewildering, but it's all too clear that the left-inbreeders don't care what those outsiders think.
Now we get more along the same lines: When the Culture War Comes for the Kids. (Tucker Carlson discussed some main points of this article on his show yesterday, but my attention was drawn to this Atlantic piece by Google News, of which I am a regular user.) This piece details the way in which, since roughly 2014, the "educators" have made a fervent effort to systematically degrade and ultimately destroy the NYC public school system in the name of, you guessed it, "diversity" and its cluster of associated "progressive" values. They have gotten really obnoxious about it, too. For instance, without informing parents, the "educators" removed the "Boys" and "Girls" signs from the bathrooms, leading to unpleasantness for the students who eventually went back to using the bathrooms they used before. (After the parents found out, the school had to come up with a better solution. "After six months of stalemate, the Department of Education intervened: One bathroom would be gender-neutral." Gee, these progressive woke geniuses charged with "educating" the kids couldn't figure out such a common sense solution on their own?)
This paragraph in particular caught my eye:
But the country’s politics had changed dramatically during our son’s six years of elementary school. Instead of hope pendants around the necks of teachers, in one middle-school hallway a picture was posted of a card that said, “Uh-oh! Your privilege is showing. You’ve received this card because your privilege just allowed you to make a comment that others cannot agree or relate to. Check your privilege.” The card had boxes to be marked, like a scorecard, next to “White,” “Christian,” “Heterosexual,” “Able-bodied,” “Citizen.” (Our son struck the school off his list.) This language is now not uncommon in the education world. A teacher in Saratoga Springs, New York, found a “privilege-reflection form” online with an elaborate method of scoring, and administered it to high-school students, unaware that the worksheet was evidently created by a right-wing internet troll—it awarded Jews 25 points of privilege and docked Muslims 50.
If you can't tell the difference between satire and the real thing, that should be cause to reconsider the real thing.
So, how could one tell a satire of today's unhinged American left and Demo rats apart from the real thing? Apart from having knowledge of their histories, how could one tell idiots like AOC apart from a GOP plant?
As a result of ideological inbreeding, many prominent members of the American left today are lightning quick to identify controversial statements as racist. It's not enough to oppose racism; you have to agree with them on what qualifies as racism, and you'd better agree pretty quickly, because, well, that's what they're used to getting after all that inbreeding.
(Case in point: Yet Again, Trump Attacks a Prominent Black Journalist. So who's injecting race into this, and when race is injected into things, isn't that a subtle form of racism? Headlines like this only prove Trump's (and Trump voters') point. Anyone with a clue knows by now that Trump could very well attack anyone who isn't part of his own family. Have you seen how be badmouths numerous former high-level members of his administration? Nevertheless, he is a very stable genius at selecting high-level officials. As for the "prominent black journalist" in question, MSDNC's Joy Ann Reid - someone with an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome - she is symptomatic of the badly degraded opinion-quality standards on that channel.)
As you might suppose, I don't like ideological inbreeding wherever it occurs. I don't like the ideological inbreeding of the George W. Bush years that culminated in the GOP drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid. (How could you tell either way whether Palin was a plant, absent knowledge of her history? The parallels between Palin and AOC are quite strong, are they not.)
Fortunately there is a solution to this problem: philosophical education. Philosophers (the genuine articles, of course, not pseudos) avoid inbreeding by practicing the art of dialectic. Among human cognitive endeavors, philosophy is as progressive and woke as it gets.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
The intellectual collapse of the left accelerates further...
As if the massive overwhelming body of evidence of left-wing intellectual collapse accumulating seemingly by the day under my 'democrats' and 'leftist losers' tags wasn't enough, we get this ("Unsafe" 1930s SF school mural to be destroyed). This is "cutting edge San Francisco values," unchecked, undiluted. (The school board voted 6-0; the diversity of viewpoint here . . . I don't know how to finish that sentence.) To borrow wording from my previous post, I believe that, barring some unforeseen (ahem) and revolutionary turn of intellectual events, this collapse is inevitable and irreversible given the widely shared values, assumptions and episteme of left-wingers as they have "evolved" over recent history. Where is the wisdom in any of this stuff? My term for this "development": Slow-mo trainwreck. :(
This mural has been up for decades. Questions: Why only now do the students and/or faculty get around to being "harmed" and "triggered" by the mural? Would it have anything to do with overwrought "social justice" poison being pumped into their minds in recent years? If they're "harmed" and "triggered" by this, how wimpy are these "educators" making the kids and/or themselves? And what powers of "interpretation" are coming into play? Are these powers becoming increasingly deranged and deluded without suitable external check/criticism?
This mural has been up for decades. Questions: Why only now do the students and/or faculty get around to being "harmed" and "triggered" by the mural? Would it have anything to do with overwrought "social justice" poison being pumped into their minds in recent years? If they're "harmed" and "triggered" by this, how wimpy are these "educators" making the kids and/or themselves? And what powers of "interpretation" are coming into play? Are these powers becoming increasingly deranged and deluded without suitable external check/criticism?
I will quote in full from Wesley Yang (more images and links at the link):
Live tweet of meeting of SF school board where they voted 6-0 to paint over a mural painted during 1930’s by Communist depicting George Washington in his capacity as slave owner and Indian fighter. The mural was intended to portray the moral ambiguity of the founding.
The council voted to paint over the mural at a cost of $600,000 because it threatens their “safety.”
SF Board member cites White Fragility theory as justification for disregarding intent of painting by Communist in the 1930’s that portrayed Washington as Indian fighter and slave owner
"Robin DiAngelo and other critical race scholars consistently cite the fact that intent does not mitigate impact. Because we are a product of our times and our socialization, we may do and say things that are horribly racist and not understand why."
But there's a new therapeutic doctrine that has merged with anti-racist progressivism which holds that violent images have the power to induce trauma and must therefore live in a sanitized, expurgated reality.
This is an anti-rational and anti-artistic doctrine that recasts a form of primitive superstition as progress and enlightenment.
But schools of education have trafficked in this form of thinking and it has become the baseline for a generation of educators and administrators.
They are fully immunized against any justification made with reference to the older worldview, and feel that they are acting righteously in eradicating any and all traces of the past that deviate from the new orthodoxy. They cannot be persuaded of the errors of their ways.
This ideology has been around for decades and the cause of countless purges in left-wing spaces.
The SF board of education is what happens when Portlandia or the Park Slope Food Co-op control hundreds of million in funding and the schooling of the next generation.
The basic asymmetry we now confront is that the "worst are filled with passionate intensity." Overwhelming majorities of the public find this ridiculous but passively, while the most energetic actors believe this.
Alongside the worst filled with passionate intensity are those who run interference on behalf of a rise of an anti-rationalist, anti-artistic philistinism by portraying those criticize it as alarmist or hysterical
Just because the tendencies latent within the movement and openly avowed have not fully expressed themselves does not mean we should not say what they are. The guardrails just came off.
You will endlessly encounter people who will acknowledge that every instance of this is stupid without recognizing that it's not mere stupidity: it is action organized by a coherent worldview seeking for hegemony that will not be stopped unless something stops it.
Black students expressed concerns about the murals in 1968, but according to this article from the time, did not seek to destroy the murals but balance them with more positive representations of black people, such as those that made contributions to science
This concern was at least partially addressed in 1974 with the addition of art by a contemporary black painter
Arnautoff was a major artist and the school is an important repository of WPA era art.
...
An English teacher described student who “almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”
The board made clear their justification for acting in a statement
So while it’s true that perennial concerns about representation and sensitivity clothe themselves in the jargon of different eras, the jargon proceeds from ideological tendencies that push toward certain outcomes. Even the radicalism of 1968 didn’t call for destruction of art.
For that, we had to wait until 2019 and the coming to fruition of an ideology that holds that people can’t look at art with critical distance, historical perspective, or aesthetic judgment, and they can’t and shouldn’t be taught to do so.
They should instead be protected from “harm” and their “safety” ensured through the destruction of art that troubles them.
The strongest argument on their side was “this isn’t a museum where people choose to go to be artistically challenged, but a school where kids cannot avoid seeing a vivid mural depicting a dead Indian and black slaves. If we could move it, we would, but we can’t.”
But we should attend closely to the ideas that are being enacted here. The people quoted in the Times piece indicated that most students didn’t want to destroy the painting. A supporter of removal said “the art is not worth saving if even one native student is triggered by that.”
What would in any other setting be seen as a reduction as absurdum is being avowed in earnest as the actual standard. And the truth is that the reality on the ground is likely to be close to that.
The news here is not that some people in a progressive echo chamber have absurd beliefs. That has always been true. The news is that those people have institutional power and are exercising it, and they are just getting started.
The idea that a painting by a major artist from the 1930’s has inherent value that has to be balanced against “even one person triggered” has zero standing. Everyone’s claim to be harmed or endangered is indefeasible and overrides all other values.
The authoritarian potential with which such a belief is charged is obvious; we no longer have to speculate about what those who hold these beliefs are prepared to do: at minimum they will happily force people never to state certain truths and compel them to avow falsehoods
They will also do things like forbid anyone from taking algebra in 8th grade as an ostensible measure against "white supremacy" even though 75 percent of those who take algebra in eighth grade are Asian, as the SF board of ed did a few years back.
With the result that fewer black and Hispanics were able to take calculus in senior years -- producing the exact opposite result to those intended
The SF Chancellor of Schools who led the push to ban 8th grade algebra then went to NYC, where he has mandated implicit bias training as part of the "decolonizing education" push that emerges from the same body of doctrine: [trainwrecky image of "White Supremacy Culture" training]
In April, the board abruptly canceled its school lunch contract over "taste and equity concerns" without a back up plan.
The board was forced reinstate the contract after students addressed the council citing concerns their peers would go hungry.
I don't live in SF or NYC but I've begun following local school board news in both places because they provide a working model of actually-existing progressivism in action -- Portlandia in power. It will only get worse until people organize to put a stop to it.
I mean this quote by an SF board member -- what satirical writer would have the chutzpah to invent such a quote?
[1] WHERE'S THE DATA ON TASTE??!!
[2] "What I'm hearing from a lot of folks is that we should renew the contract because we need to feed kids, and that's not the conversation we should be having."
Monday, June 24, 2019
Comprachicos and the Left
[A bit of context for newbies re my issues with leftism and leftist hubris.]
In 1970, Ayn Rand penned one of her most epic essays, "The Comprachicos" (context) the gist of which is to call out the "educational" establishment for mind-mangling practices. The picture she paints is rather nightmarish and might lead the skeptical to ask whether she is in some delusional late-career stage.
("She was already out there in saying in 1960 that our age is intellectual bankrupt but whoa, she really went way out there after kicking Branden out, calling Kant the most evil man ever, etc. Was anyone around to keep a check on her anymore?" I have the Rand-bashers' number; I know the smears and sneers inside and out....)
But one should have a serious look at what an intellectual shitshow ("nightmare" may be going a tad far...) the Left is today and ask how that came about.
I've been reading through well-known libertarian economist Walter E. Williams' American Contempt for Liberty, a collection of his essays from ca. 2008-2014. (Although he employs neither label, I refer to Williams as a libertarian rather than conservative because peppered throughout the book are explicit appeals to self-ownership and, consequently, to government coercing people into serving others is tantamount to slavery and/or theft.) His commentaries on the sad state of our educational system - especially as it affects black people - are must-reads. The nation's schools certify a huge percentage of students as being high-school-educated, who cannot perform beyond an 8th grade level. (How does that not amount to a form of fraud?) They do this all the while inflation-adjusted spending per pupil goes ever higher. The teachers' unions have a stranglehold on the Democrat Party, with all the rent-capture this entails at the expense of the public's best interests. They fight tooth and nail against reforms that threaten their monopoly position.
Content-wise, the "educators" have systematically abandoned the commitments to freedom and independence from government held by the Founders which are amply documented in Williams' essays. It falls on deaf "progressive" ears when Ben Franklin is quoted as saying that "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." Like the intellectual and moral pigs they are, "progressives" cannot help but to demand ever more from the public trough at which to feed (with all their rationalizations about how it's mandated by "fairness," "equity," "compassion," etc.). IOW, they've come to treat what the Founders considered perverse and destructive as normal and acceptable.
I'm not going to bother providing all the links documenting what a shitshow the academy is becoming these days, especially on politically-related matters (at both private and public universities - meaning it's not a matter merely of a rent-capturing K-12 monopoly but of something more widely explantory: ideology); you're either aware of the extremely-well-documented problem and want to see it fixed, or you're (culpably) unaware and therefore part of the problem. If there's anything "progressives" lack these days, it's self-awareness. (Why else do they adopt the label "progressive" if not to display the sense of their own intellectual and moral superiority, which they certainly haven't earned?)
My thesis is this:
Today's leftists are the most loyal products of 'Comprachico' tactics. Unlike conservative or libertarian students they swallow all too uncritically the anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-freedom stuff peddled by their mostly-leftist university faculty. They're the ones calling most stridently for deplatforming of non-leftist views. They're the ones who couldn't demonstrate a proper grasp of thinkers such as Rand if their life depended on it. They can tell you all about Che Guevara and Michael Harrington and Cornel West and Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky but not be the least bit conversant with socialism's greatest critics (most notably Mises and Hayek, and of course Rand). They are smug ignoramuses who "know" only their own side of the case. AOC (Another Obnoxious Commie) is one famous example of such a Comprachico-ized mind.
They're the ones oblivious to the problem of the lack of intellectual diversity on campuses; after being told about that problem by Haidt and others, they've done nothing to improve (beyond a small percentage of colleges adopting the University of Chicago's statement of free-expression principles). If anything, they've only been getting worse - doubling down on the systematic dishonesty. One can see how leftists operate when they run amok, on such social-media sites as reddit (and twitter). You'd probably have to be immersed awhile in the "default" politics-relevant subreddits (including the philosophy [sic] subreddit) to really get the flavor of the systematically-enforced leftist biases and nastiness toward contrary input (with all the bad-faith mental gymnastics to justify the bias and nastiness, to boot). Many non-leftists have given up in disgust.
The American political scene today - the goings-on in D.C., state capitols, city halls - is an intellectual shitshow but it's the Dems and the "education" establishment they dominate who merit the lion's share of the blame.
The American Bible Belt (the Red States where, e.g., slavery and segregation were the norm until not so long ago) has a well-earned reputation for anti-intellectualism, bigotry, dogmatism, shunning expert opinion, etc. The un-self-aware leftists and "educators" can identify the toxicity there for what it is; so why are they so blind to their own?
And if the Left and the "educators" are so intellectually and morally superior, why do we hear little to nothing from them about the (no-brainer) case for widespread philosophical education?
And, heck, where are the professional philosophers amidst all this intellectual bankruptcy? If the populace could benefit greatly from a philosophical education, don't the philosophers face some kind of moral imperative to promote that solution given mainstream moral criteria, and not just write (narrow-audience) journal articles about moral imperatives and criteria? ffs already (I guess this means a wide-open opportunity for Yours Truly to capitalize upon and show up the competition [Rand notably excepted] so to speak, but it shouldn't have had to come to that. I just want to philosophize, ffs, and the more rational a society of interlocutors to philosophize with, the better....)
[Update 6/25: After sharing this post in my internet circles this video with one John Taylor Gatto was brought to my attention; I surely intend to integrate this material in hopes that it will better enable me to give the hubristic leftist Comprachicos the epic drubbing (updated for the present day, that is) they richly deserve.]
In 1970, Ayn Rand penned one of her most epic essays, "The Comprachicos" (context) the gist of which is to call out the "educational" establishment for mind-mangling practices. The picture she paints is rather nightmarish and might lead the skeptical to ask whether she is in some delusional late-career stage.
("She was already out there in saying in 1960 that our age is intellectual bankrupt but whoa, she really went way out there after kicking Branden out, calling Kant the most evil man ever, etc. Was anyone around to keep a check on her anymore?" I have the Rand-bashers' number; I know the smears and sneers inside and out....)
But one should have a serious look at what an intellectual shitshow ("nightmare" may be going a tad far...) the Left is today and ask how that came about.
I've been reading through well-known libertarian economist Walter E. Williams' American Contempt for Liberty, a collection of his essays from ca. 2008-2014. (Although he employs neither label, I refer to Williams as a libertarian rather than conservative because peppered throughout the book are explicit appeals to self-ownership and, consequently, to government coercing people into serving others is tantamount to slavery and/or theft.) His commentaries on the sad state of our educational system - especially as it affects black people - are must-reads. The nation's schools certify a huge percentage of students as being high-school-educated, who cannot perform beyond an 8th grade level. (How does that not amount to a form of fraud?) They do this all the while inflation-adjusted spending per pupil goes ever higher. The teachers' unions have a stranglehold on the Democrat Party, with all the rent-capture this entails at the expense of the public's best interests. They fight tooth and nail against reforms that threaten their monopoly position.
Content-wise, the "educators" have systematically abandoned the commitments to freedom and independence from government held by the Founders which are amply documented in Williams' essays. It falls on deaf "progressive" ears when Ben Franklin is quoted as saying that "When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." Like the intellectual and moral pigs they are, "progressives" cannot help but to demand ever more from the public trough at which to feed (with all their rationalizations about how it's mandated by "fairness," "equity," "compassion," etc.). IOW, they've come to treat what the Founders considered perverse and destructive as normal and acceptable.
I'm not going to bother providing all the links documenting what a shitshow the academy is becoming these days, especially on politically-related matters (at both private and public universities - meaning it's not a matter merely of a rent-capturing K-12 monopoly but of something more widely explantory: ideology); you're either aware of the extremely-well-documented problem and want to see it fixed, or you're (culpably) unaware and therefore part of the problem. If there's anything "progressives" lack these days, it's self-awareness. (Why else do they adopt the label "progressive" if not to display the sense of their own intellectual and moral superiority, which they certainly haven't earned?)
My thesis is this:
Today's leftists are the most loyal products of 'Comprachico' tactics. Unlike conservative or libertarian students they swallow all too uncritically the anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-freedom stuff peddled by their mostly-leftist university faculty. They're the ones calling most stridently for deplatforming of non-leftist views. They're the ones who couldn't demonstrate a proper grasp of thinkers such as Rand if their life depended on it. They can tell you all about Che Guevara and Michael Harrington and Cornel West and Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky but not be the least bit conversant with socialism's greatest critics (most notably Mises and Hayek, and of course Rand). They are smug ignoramuses who "know" only their own side of the case. AOC (Another Obnoxious Commie) is one famous example of such a Comprachico-ized mind.
They're the ones oblivious to the problem of the lack of intellectual diversity on campuses; after being told about that problem by Haidt and others, they've done nothing to improve (beyond a small percentage of colleges adopting the University of Chicago's statement of free-expression principles). If anything, they've only been getting worse - doubling down on the systematic dishonesty. One can see how leftists operate when they run amok, on such social-media sites as reddit (and twitter). You'd probably have to be immersed awhile in the "default" politics-relevant subreddits (including the philosophy [sic] subreddit) to really get the flavor of the systematically-enforced leftist biases and nastiness toward contrary input (with all the bad-faith mental gymnastics to justify the bias and nastiness, to boot). Many non-leftists have given up in disgust.
The American political scene today - the goings-on in D.C., state capitols, city halls - is an intellectual shitshow but it's the Dems and the "education" establishment they dominate who merit the lion's share of the blame.
The American Bible Belt (the Red States where, e.g., slavery and segregation were the norm until not so long ago) has a well-earned reputation for anti-intellectualism, bigotry, dogmatism, shunning expert opinion, etc. The un-self-aware leftists and "educators" can identify the toxicity there for what it is; so why are they so blind to their own?
And if the Left and the "educators" are so intellectually and morally superior, why do we hear little to nothing from them about the (no-brainer) case for widespread philosophical education?
And, heck, where are the professional philosophers amidst all this intellectual bankruptcy? If the populace could benefit greatly from a philosophical education, don't the philosophers face some kind of moral imperative to promote that solution given mainstream moral criteria, and not just write (narrow-audience) journal articles about moral imperatives and criteria? ffs already (I guess this means a wide-open opportunity for Yours Truly to capitalize upon and show up the competition [Rand notably excepted] so to speak, but it shouldn't have had to come to that. I just want to philosophize, ffs, and the more rational a society of interlocutors to philosophize with, the better....)
[Update 6/25: After sharing this post in my internet circles this video with one John Taylor Gatto was brought to my attention; I surely intend to integrate this material in hopes that it will better enable me to give the hubristic leftist Comprachicos the epic drubbing (updated for the present day, that is) they richly deserve.]
Thursday, February 21, 2013
The "Ayn Rand is for children" meme
It is truer than any of her clueless leftist player-haters could barely begin to realize at this point; they are supremely foolish(ly ignorant) as to the why.
I mean, Kira Peikoff didn't turn out that bad, did she?
Peikoff's Philosophy of Education course (1985, according to the Russian Radical bibliography I have right here, and around the time daughter Kira is born). Integrate with observable concrete outcome of such an approach, 27ish years later. (Additional exercise: integrate Understanding Objectivism and The Romantic Manifesto with observable concrete outcome of the UO and TRM approach, namely: this here blog. Integrate; assign A+ grade, a.k.a.: "Perfective." [Further exercise: Integrate the foregoing with The DIM Hypothesis. Earn perfectivist medal badge. Await further instruction, from self, of course.]) Compare/contrast to the Comprachico alternative, which pretty much exemplifies what the educational Left has to offer to the young - and, in turn, the caliber of minds emerging from our current, non-Jefferstotelian public school system.
Check, and mate.
(About the only thing that the Chicago Bozo and I agree on is the need for a philosophically-educated citizenry and - in generic terms - about the current cultural bankruptcy in America. But I "get" Rand and he clearly doesn't, while I also know when to keep my own yap shut about Nietzsche. The Reginster book (Affirming Life) was quite helpful, BTW, for understanding Nietzsche. Why won't the Chicago Bozo even bother to read secondary Rand literature that has a clue about Rand? It's Salon.com and Alternet.org hit pieces, when it could be Russian Radical, OPAR, Virtuous Egoist, and Gotthelf. Vice of one-sidedness, I declare for all with wisdom-loving ears to hear! My knowledge of Nietzsche could totally kick the ass of his "knowledge" of Rand (which amounts to: jack shit), and my study so far has been secondary literature only - Kaufmann and Reginster - in addition to that Fountainhead intro describing the author's sense-of-life similarities to Nietzsche, which ties in with a Kaufmann editorial footnote to a key aphorism, referencing Aristotle and the noble soul as a lover of self, which sheds crucial light on the egoist character of Rand's perfectivist eudaimonism. All of a sudden, Rand looks like an Aristotelianized post-Nietzschean, which sounds way cooler than what Bozo-Boy evidently has to offer, which reeks of a politicized, Us-vs.-Them, pathologically elitist, mean-spirited, and - worst of all - malevolent-universe-ish mindset. Consider: Is it some kind of effing accident that the American cultural dialectic is evidently converging on Ayn Rand, an avowed neo-Aristotelian? No, it is not. Ayn Rand is for children, and adults, all of whom have a vital need to integrate mentally. I mean, duhhhh! Also, my knowledge of the film canon vastly exceeds the Chicago Bozo's, and aesthetics is central to philosophy (just like Nietzsche would have said, Bozo-Boy). So clearly I'm a vastly superior philosopher than he, at this time. Also, Aristotle is the obvious perfectivist trump card in philosophical debate, and I'm definitely more Aristotelian than he! And also much more capitalist in ethos, as anyone with a clue ought to be. I blog about individualism (and in connection with eudaimonism, a moral theory with uniquely deep meaning-of-life resonance); he does not. Strike three, the Bozo's out!)
Two more months of checkmating guaranteed! And then what? ;-)
-UP
:-p
I mean, Kira Peikoff didn't turn out that bad, did she?
Peikoff's Philosophy of Education course (1985, according to the Russian Radical bibliography I have right here, and around the time daughter Kira is born). Integrate with observable concrete outcome of such an approach, 27ish years later. (Additional exercise: integrate Understanding Objectivism and The Romantic Manifesto with observable concrete outcome of the UO and TRM approach, namely: this here blog. Integrate; assign A+ grade, a.k.a.: "Perfective." [Further exercise: Integrate the foregoing with The DIM Hypothesis. Earn perfectivist medal badge. Await further instruction, from self, of course.]) Compare/contrast to the Comprachico alternative, which pretty much exemplifies what the educational Left has to offer to the young - and, in turn, the caliber of minds emerging from our current, non-Jefferstotelian public school system.
Check, and mate.
(About the only thing that the Chicago Bozo and I agree on is the need for a philosophically-educated citizenry and - in generic terms - about the current cultural bankruptcy in America. But I "get" Rand and he clearly doesn't, while I also know when to keep my own yap shut about Nietzsche. The Reginster book (Affirming Life) was quite helpful, BTW, for understanding Nietzsche. Why won't the Chicago Bozo even bother to read secondary Rand literature that has a clue about Rand? It's Salon.com and Alternet.org hit pieces, when it could be Russian Radical, OPAR, Virtuous Egoist, and Gotthelf. Vice of one-sidedness, I declare for all with wisdom-loving ears to hear! My knowledge of Nietzsche could totally kick the ass of his "knowledge" of Rand (which amounts to: jack shit), and my study so far has been secondary literature only - Kaufmann and Reginster - in addition to that Fountainhead intro describing the author's sense-of-life similarities to Nietzsche, which ties in with a Kaufmann editorial footnote to a key aphorism, referencing Aristotle and the noble soul as a lover of self, which sheds crucial light on the egoist character of Rand's perfectivist eudaimonism. All of a sudden, Rand looks like an Aristotelianized post-Nietzschean, which sounds way cooler than what Bozo-Boy evidently has to offer, which reeks of a politicized, Us-vs.-Them, pathologically elitist, mean-spirited, and - worst of all - malevolent-universe-ish mindset. Consider: Is it some kind of effing accident that the American cultural dialectic is evidently converging on Ayn Rand, an avowed neo-Aristotelian? No, it is not. Ayn Rand is for children, and adults, all of whom have a vital need to integrate mentally. I mean, duhhhh! Also, my knowledge of the film canon vastly exceeds the Chicago Bozo's, and aesthetics is central to philosophy (just like Nietzsche would have said, Bozo-Boy). So clearly I'm a vastly superior philosopher than he, at this time. Also, Aristotle is the obvious perfectivist trump card in philosophical debate, and I'm definitely more Aristotelian than he! And also much more capitalist in ethos, as anyone with a clue ought to be. I blog about individualism (and in connection with eudaimonism, a moral theory with uniquely deep meaning-of-life resonance); he does not. Strike three, the Bozo's out!)
 |
| "Checkmate, asshole." |
Two more months of checkmating guaranteed! And then what? ;-)
-UP
:-p
 |
| A Real-Life Heroine, in Perfectivist Terms |
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
What would Jefferson think?
What might be the cause of the intellectual corruption that leads to the culture of corruption discussed here?
Some antidote to that.
Were he around today, I think that the one-time president of the American Philosophical Society would be a big Ayn Rand fan. Actually, I'm certain of it.
Why the fuck does no one else get this (or so it would seem)?
Thanks a lot, professional "educators"....
(Here's the spawn of the professional "educators," with the standard primacy-of-politics orientation we UP blog regulars have naturally come to be disgusted by; it's philistine-level crap. Isn't a primacy-of-politics mentality the sort of thing that got us into the situation where the U.S. government can torture innocent people without accountability, all the while being brazenly hypocritical about it? Well? Being that philosophy is more all-encompassing cognitively than politics, wouldn't getting our nation's philosophical shit together generate more all-encompassing solutions to whatever problems that afflict it, than trying to fix its hierarchically-derivative political shit atop a crumbling foundation? [Are you listening, "bleeding heart libertarians"?] What would Jefferson think about all this? I mean, like, duhhh!)
More antidote.
Some antidote to that.
Were he around today, I think that the one-time president of the American Philosophical Society would be a big Ayn Rand fan. Actually, I'm certain of it.
Why the fuck does no one else get this (or so it would seem)?
Thanks a lot, professional "educators"....
(Here's the spawn of the professional "educators," with the standard primacy-of-politics orientation we UP blog regulars have naturally come to be disgusted by; it's philistine-level crap. Isn't a primacy-of-politics mentality the sort of thing that got us into the situation where the U.S. government can torture innocent people without accountability, all the while being brazenly hypocritical about it? Well? Being that philosophy is more all-encompassing cognitively than politics, wouldn't getting our nation's philosophical shit together generate more all-encompassing solutions to whatever problems that afflict it, than trying to fix its hierarchically-derivative political shit atop a crumbling foundation? [Are you listening, "bleeding heart libertarians"?] What would Jefferson think about all this? I mean, like, duhhh!)
More antidote.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Establishment Philosophy vs. individualism
An exercise in the spiral:
If one googles 'individualism philosophy' one finds the same state of things, essentially, as what I pointed out nearly two years ago - a near-complete lack of interest among academic moral and political philosophers in individualism (and especially among the most "elite" of them - e.g., Oxford/NYU/Harvard's Derek Parfit, who also - mind-bogglingly - neglects Aristotle, eudaimonia, and virtue-ethics in his "state of the art," Oxford-published "magnus opus" on ethics). This is a widespread corruption in the Intellectual Establishment, constituting an intellectual and moral betrayal of the American people and of the nation's founding ideals. My observations remain as spot-on accurate now as they did then; spiral progression in the two years since has only further enhanced and solidified these findings.
I think the American people would like to know why this near-complete neglect of individualism is taking place in the Academic Establishment, wouldn't they?
There is an ominous parallel here to a culture- and polity-wide corruption in the Establishment - not in the universities (in this particular case) but in media and in government - when it comes to Noam Chomsky's near-complete absence from political discourse and exposure in (American) mass-media venues (outside of the internet, that is).
What I observe here are cultures of evasion, in which truth and justice are unpopular and inconvenient with regard to the status quo.
I don't think the Framers would stand for this status quo for one fucking second.
Do you?
As Walter Sobchak might very well have said, there's no reason - there's no FUCKing reason - for the national situation to be this way, or to stay this way. One need only look at the complete failure of intellectual, moral, and political leadership in our nation's Legislative and Executive branches at doing the obviously-right fucking thing on cannabis legalization, to know our polity is a broken one. I know it, you know it, and the American People (should damn well) know it. Here we have overwhelming evidence and reasons for why cannabis should be legalized yesterday; we have a majority of the People showing support for its legalization according to polls; all logic, right, truth, and justice point in that direction; the de facto racist nature of the War on Drugs should sting at the conscience of everyone; the prison-industrial complex built up around this vicious War should likewise sting at everyone's consciousness; and, yet, no action from our national leaders. The Democrat Establishment is no less corrupt in its ongoing support of this President despite the obviously-racist effects of the Drug Policies which he enforces (or does he?) and - worse - remains dubiously silent about in the face of all the evidence.
All this, no thanks to the Intellectual Class, and its culture of evasion and stagnation. As the Intellectuals go, so goes the country - just as Rand said.
Do these Intellectuals even begin to wonder why even the leading one of their own, MIT's Prof. Chomsky, is nearly absent from America's public discourse?
It's their own fault, after all, having made philosophy almost totally irrelevant to ordinary citizens.
It so happens that Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom would be of more interest in meaning-of-life terms to the ordinary people, than would Quine's "Two Dogmas" article. That's just a fact. While that should (of course) not be construed to denigrate what Quine et al have been doing, it is a severe problem when meaning-of-life issues are neglected by the Philosophical Establishment in the process. (The Existentialists and Rand were addressing fundamental meaning-of-life questions well over half a century ago, at a time that Academic Philosophy was going out of its way to be as irrelevant as ever to the People and is only now catching up in the meaning-of-life area - a task which can't even be addressed all that well as long as Rand and individualism remain largely neglected. That's just a fact.)
Perhaps it's high (ahem) time that someone, somewhere, founded an alternate Academy, as individual philosophers did way back in the day - only perhaps the term "academy" should be dropped altogether given the disrepute that has been brought upon that term by institutional insiders, and replaced with something along the lines of "lyceum". Just a hunch.
Am I wrong?
(Why does taking on an entire Philosophical Establishment feel like shooting fish in a barrel? Is it supposed to feel that way? Is that how Rand - who was decades ahead of her time in the virtue-ethics department - felt, too? Is that why so many in the Establishment hate Rand? A frightfully high number of these entities don't seem to give a shit what Gotthelf and the Ayn Rand Society have to say about her, either. These aren't worthy fucking adversaries. [A notable exception is one John M. Cooper of Princeton, a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy and chair of a recent Ayn Rand Society program, "Ayn Rand as Aristotelian" (2005). Perhaps the ancients had more noble ideas about how to carry out philosophical discourse and make it relevant to people's lives?])
P.S. Aw, fuck it; spiraling back to this subject, I'll go ahead and perfectively fortify my observations as follows: Prof. Leiter is a vicious piece of shit. That motherfucker had better retract and apologize for his appalling treatement of Rand and Rand-scholars, or else. (See item #9 here.) One might think a simple concern about one's long-term intellectual and moral credibility would lead to such a retraction and apology, irrespective of my threat to go on strike beginning 4/20, because his (and his vile little cronies') credibility will be ruined long-term - whatever happens - if they don't. Whatever his academic accomplishment, the man is a disgrace. Maybe some of his colleagues could light a fire under his rotund posterior and improve their own reputations in the process. The American People are not going to take kindly to this unbelievable shit once they find out what their most vocal intellectuals have been saying and doing these past years and decades to stonewall progress. Once again: as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation. (A recent Leiter entry has him whining about capitalism, yet again, whereas the solution to our nation's economic and existential problems lies in an Aristotelian eudaimonist intellectual perfection. Why the fuck doesn't he at least advocate that? [Of course, that would mean getting cornered like a rat for his treatment of Rand, all the same. Maybe that's why?] He complains all the goddamn time about America's intellectual and cultural dysfunction, but then shits all over Rand and capitalism without providing any real alternative answers. Fuck 'em!)
P.P.S. reddit's /r/philosophy and I have a date Wednesday (tomorrow), baby! Woo!!!
If one googles 'individualism philosophy' one finds the same state of things, essentially, as what I pointed out nearly two years ago - a near-complete lack of interest among academic moral and political philosophers in individualism (and especially among the most "elite" of them - e.g., Oxford/NYU/Harvard's Derek Parfit, who also - mind-bogglingly - neglects Aristotle, eudaimonia, and virtue-ethics in his "state of the art," Oxford-published "magnus opus" on ethics). This is a widespread corruption in the Intellectual Establishment, constituting an intellectual and moral betrayal of the American people and of the nation's founding ideals. My observations remain as spot-on accurate now as they did then; spiral progression in the two years since has only further enhanced and solidified these findings.
I think the American people would like to know why this near-complete neglect of individualism is taking place in the Academic Establishment, wouldn't they?
There is an ominous parallel here to a culture- and polity-wide corruption in the Establishment - not in the universities (in this particular case) but in media and in government - when it comes to Noam Chomsky's near-complete absence from political discourse and exposure in (American) mass-media venues (outside of the internet, that is).
What I observe here are cultures of evasion, in which truth and justice are unpopular and inconvenient with regard to the status quo.
I don't think the Framers would stand for this status quo for one fucking second.
Do you?
As Walter Sobchak might very well have said, there's no reason - there's no FUCKing reason - for the national situation to be this way, or to stay this way. One need only look at the complete failure of intellectual, moral, and political leadership in our nation's Legislative and Executive branches at doing the obviously-right fucking thing on cannabis legalization, to know our polity is a broken one. I know it, you know it, and the American People (should damn well) know it. Here we have overwhelming evidence and reasons for why cannabis should be legalized yesterday; we have a majority of the People showing support for its legalization according to polls; all logic, right, truth, and justice point in that direction; the de facto racist nature of the War on Drugs should sting at the conscience of everyone; the prison-industrial complex built up around this vicious War should likewise sting at everyone's consciousness; and, yet, no action from our national leaders. The Democrat Establishment is no less corrupt in its ongoing support of this President despite the obviously-racist effects of the Drug Policies which he enforces (or does he?) and - worse - remains dubiously silent about in the face of all the evidence.
All this, no thanks to the Intellectual Class, and its culture of evasion and stagnation. As the Intellectuals go, so goes the country - just as Rand said.
Do these Intellectuals even begin to wonder why even the leading one of their own, MIT's Prof. Chomsky, is nearly absent from America's public discourse?
It's their own fault, after all, having made philosophy almost totally irrelevant to ordinary citizens.
It so happens that Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom would be of more interest in meaning-of-life terms to the ordinary people, than would Quine's "Two Dogmas" article. That's just a fact. While that should (of course) not be construed to denigrate what Quine et al have been doing, it is a severe problem when meaning-of-life issues are neglected by the Philosophical Establishment in the process. (The Existentialists and Rand were addressing fundamental meaning-of-life questions well over half a century ago, at a time that Academic Philosophy was going out of its way to be as irrelevant as ever to the People and is only now catching up in the meaning-of-life area - a task which can't even be addressed all that well as long as Rand and individualism remain largely neglected. That's just a fact.)
Perhaps it's high (ahem) time that someone, somewhere, founded an alternate Academy, as individual philosophers did way back in the day - only perhaps the term "academy" should be dropped altogether given the disrepute that has been brought upon that term by institutional insiders, and replaced with something along the lines of "lyceum". Just a hunch.
Am I wrong?
(Why does taking on an entire Philosophical Establishment feel like shooting fish in a barrel? Is it supposed to feel that way? Is that how Rand - who was decades ahead of her time in the virtue-ethics department - felt, too? Is that why so many in the Establishment hate Rand? A frightfully high number of these entities don't seem to give a shit what Gotthelf and the Ayn Rand Society have to say about her, either. These aren't worthy fucking adversaries. [A notable exception is one John M. Cooper of Princeton, a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy and chair of a recent Ayn Rand Society program, "Ayn Rand as Aristotelian" (2005). Perhaps the ancients had more noble ideas about how to carry out philosophical discourse and make it relevant to people's lives?])
P.S. Aw, fuck it; spiraling back to this subject, I'll go ahead and perfectively fortify my observations as follows: Prof. Leiter is a vicious piece of shit. That motherfucker had better retract and apologize for his appalling treatement of Rand and Rand-scholars, or else. (See item #9 here.) One might think a simple concern about one's long-term intellectual and moral credibility would lead to such a retraction and apology, irrespective of my threat to go on strike beginning 4/20, because his (and his vile little cronies') credibility will be ruined long-term - whatever happens - if they don't. Whatever his academic accomplishment, the man is a disgrace. Maybe some of his colleagues could light a fire under his rotund posterior and improve their own reputations in the process. The American People are not going to take kindly to this unbelievable shit once they find out what their most vocal intellectuals have been saying and doing these past years and decades to stonewall progress. Once again: as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation. (A recent Leiter entry has him whining about capitalism, yet again, whereas the solution to our nation's economic and existential problems lies in an Aristotelian eudaimonist intellectual perfection. Why the fuck doesn't he at least advocate that? [Of course, that would mean getting cornered like a rat for his treatment of Rand, all the same. Maybe that's why?] He complains all the goddamn time about America's intellectual and cultural dysfunction, but then shits all over Rand and capitalism without providing any real alternative answers. Fuck 'em!)
P.P.S. reddit's /r/philosophy and I have a date Wednesday (tomorrow), baby! Woo!!!
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
The Nature of the "Educators"
From the interview with author, educator and psychotherapist Larry Cole, in 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, p. 468:
Zons of Beetches!
Not even the courtesy of a response? The only time they didn't ever respond?
I'm past the point where this sort of corruption surprises me any longer. (If I were steaped in pragmatism, like the "educators" are, I'd devolve quite naturally into cynicism, pessimism, defeatism, and stagnation, just like they have done, and just as they've fostered it in their victims. This is why Rand, Aristotelianism and Perfectivism will win, and why they will lose (or come to the winning side by necessity). It's just a matter of time.)
It's one thing to reject the arguments in Miss Rand's article and explain why; it's another not to even address it and to pretend it doesn't exist.
I have a pretty good idea as to why they did not bother to address it: She's absolutely right-on in her masterful identification of the naked essence of what Aristotelians are up against in this country, and they have no way to refute her. This is a recurring pattern with Ayn Rand's ideas, and there's no denying it. The light comes on, and the cockroaches scatter. It's like clockwork at this juncture.
Good thing that the butchers' days are numbered, 'cause I for one am sick of 'em.
The honorable educators, whoever they might be, they can stay. But definitely not the cockroaches.
(Rand's recommended alternative.)
I read [Ayn Rand's essay] "The Comprachicos" during the time we were in the middle of a totally chaotic educational fiasco in this country, and it nearly brought me to tears. They were partly tears of recognition, especially her translation of the segment from Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs. I told Ayn that I promptly sent it to all my radical educator friends, trying to stir up dialogue. They were all the big names in education. I sent them the article with little notes on it saying, "I think you should read this, and we should talk." It was the only time they did not respond, none of them, ever.
Zons of Beetches!
Not even the courtesy of a response? The only time they didn't ever respond?
I'm past the point where this sort of corruption surprises me any longer. (If I were steaped in pragmatism, like the "educators" are, I'd devolve quite naturally into cynicism, pessimism, defeatism, and stagnation, just like they have done, and just as they've fostered it in their victims. This is why Rand, Aristotelianism and Perfectivism will win, and why they will lose (or come to the winning side by necessity). It's just a matter of time.)
It's one thing to reject the arguments in Miss Rand's article and explain why; it's another not to even address it and to pretend it doesn't exist.
I have a pretty good idea as to why they did not bother to address it: She's absolutely right-on in her masterful identification of the naked essence of what Aristotelians are up against in this country, and they have no way to refute her. This is a recurring pattern with Ayn Rand's ideas, and there's no denying it. The light comes on, and the cockroaches scatter. It's like clockwork at this juncture.
Good thing that the butchers' days are numbered, 'cause I for one am sick of 'em.
The honorable educators, whoever they might be, they can stay. But definitely not the cockroaches.
(Rand's recommended alternative.)
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