Random Discussion - NO POLITICS, NO RELIGION

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Stig O'Hara said:
So after the string of failed long term relationships, (4 of them did the same thing, met, married within 6 months of breaking up and 3 years later 2 kids), and the obligatory marriage fail, when you start to re-connect with one of them, is that weird?

Friends.

It’s confusing.
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Yeah, kinda weird. But some of the best things in life are.
 
Stig O'Hara said:
So after the string of failed long term relationships, (4 of them did the same thing, met, married within 6 months of breaking up and 3 years later 2 kids), and the obligatory marriage fail, when you start to re-connect with one of them, is that weird?

Friends.

It’s confusing.
Click to expand...

Stuff happens
 
ShanDog said:
The timing on this was perfect lol



I understand postmodernism. Well, as much as postmodernism can be understood given its inherent contradictory nature and incoherence. It has its use, but in my estimation, that use is far short of forming a basis for serious scholarship and - as described by the Sokal Squared trio - the basis of the grievance studies' legitimacy.

Peterson has walked back his comments about defunding the humanities as too reactionary and extreme. Which is good, because that's what it was IMO.

I think a lot of people see gender studies, sociology and other subjects as a hive of left wing radicalism because they are. Left-wing academics absolutely dominate the fields - this is known and accepted reality. The fields and their foundational philosophies are irreversibly tied to power and identity, and it's certainly not right-wing ideas being investigated through that lens (unless it's to be critical). Hence these studies feed the left-wing activism and movements. That's not to paint them all with the same brush of "wrong" or pointless at all - some are very useful and IMO correct. My study area was cultural studies (one of those named in the hoax as part of the grievance studies) and I thought much of the same as I was learning. There was useful stuff, some fluff and then a small but noticable element of crazy.

We certainly should be more grateful for what we have. Some people tend to forget or be ignorant to just how good so many people have it, and see the existence of those on the margins as proof that the structures we have don't work and need to be torn down, so to speak. Useful progressivism is about positive and incremental change. You don't get many positive outcomes going all-in to flip society on its head - we've seen that plenty.

My final thought on this - narratives don't build bridges that last. And I mean literal bridges. Not everything is therefore a narrative held by the dominant power group - some things are just right and wrong.
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Yeah, that Twitter thread is hilarious. At least they know what they’re doing. They even agree that postmodern approaches are useful for undermining power structures. That’s the whole point. There isn’t much else to say about postmodernism. It can’t ever really become the kind of boogie man the right wants it to be because, really, it’s just an attitude or approach. How bad can it really be if they’re prepared to use those approaches themselves? Peterson wants us to believe that it’s some evil left wing conspiracy, which is pure fearmongering. Again, another favorite tactic of right wing politics and another reason why the alt-right love him.

As for the supposed left-wing infestation at universities — I don’t really see it. What I see is people looking at evidence and drawing evidence-based conclusions. Is climate change science a left-wing conspiracy? Of course not. It’s a consensus of thought based on overwhelming evidence. You would feel uncomfortable working in a climate science department if you rejected all the evidence as left-wing radicalism. Your colleagues would correctly think you are an ideologue who isn’t interested in scholarship. That’s not a left and right issue — it’s just good intellectual practice.

It’s the same in the humanities. The evidence around things like white privilege, structural racism and sexism, and postcolonialism is overwhelming. No serious scholar can pretend otherwise. You would look like a climate change denier and have about as much credibility.

So, are our universities a hive of left-wing radicalism or are our teachings just the result of a consensus of thought based on evidence? From what I can see, it’s all evidence driven. My colleagues vote Liberal as much as they vote Labour. They’re all wealthy, you have to remember. And unionisation is pretty low in universities in Australia. They’re corporate entities now, with corporate workforces. We have performance benchmarks and codes of conduct. We can’t afford to be radical. We have to have data for the arguments we make.

The right will always hate any theories that require a change in the way things are done, because dealing with it means change in the current power structures. No one wants to give up power. The trouble for people like Peterson is they need to argue against a body of evidence that is huge, coherent, and convincing. They simply can’t do it, for the same reason that climate change deniers can’t do it. No one takes them seriously. Power is slowly being taken from them, based on evidence, and they hate it.

Good thing for Peterson, then, that we have traditions in the humanities like postmodernism, which exist precisely to question and undercut the big orthodoxies of the day. He should probably take some pages from the playbook of the Sokal people. He’d probably make more of an impression that way. Trouble is, his base wouldn’t understand what he was trying to do. So he has to couch his rhetoric in terms they do understand — ‘conspiracy’ and ‘evil’ and ‘radicalism’ and ‘left-wing’ and ‘Marxist’ and so on. Boogie men, in other words. Monsters under the bed.
 
Stig O'Hara said:
So after the string of failed long term relationships, (4 of them did the same thing, met, married within 6 months of breaking up and 3 years later 2 kids), and the obligatory marriage fail, when you start to re-connect with one of them, is that weird?

Friends.

It’s confusing.
Click to expand...
If they make you happy, good.

No reward without the risk.
 

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Dear residents of Melbum - perhaps you might consider doing something like going to what you sad residents of the long grey and short summer rarely do and that is go for a swim at what passes for a 'beach' ( hahahahhahhah) in sunny Vic?

 
42 here Saturday and today. 44 tomorrow and 46 on Wednesday, dropping back to a mild 40 on Thursday. Winter woollies required for cricket on Saturday, forecast is for a chilly 30.
 
JustaBattler said:
Dear residents of Melbum - perhaps you might consider doing something like going to what you sad residents of the long grey and short summer rarely do and that is go for a swim at what passes for a 'beach' ( hahahahhahhah) in sunny Vic?

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What beach is that JaB?
 
ShanDog said:
The negative outcomes are associated with the ideal. Our culture - that is the mish-mash of western legal, ethical and moral tradition - is based on the individual as holding value above and before all other considerations in almost all circumstances. It's why we have a presumption of innocence before guilt, it's why the death penalty is scorned by so many, it's why responsibility for your actions is fundamentally yours etc. We argue all the time that you can't be chosen who you are born as - and rightfully so. We no more choose to be born as gay, black, poor or unintelligent as we do straight, white, affluent or intelligent. And that same argue we use to contest forms of discrimination and prejudice, yet there are people out there who are happy to dispense with that ideal and the value of the individual in order to justify their (I believe) guilt or jealousy at being either privileged or underprivileged by agitating for social change that allows the group to steamroll the individual. That's all well and good until you're that individual. People from marginalised and previously oppressed groupa can attest very clearly to that. But for some reason we think that taking the problem and flipping it on its head will be a solution. But in reality, it's just another form of the same insidious idea.

This whole time I have been talking about the principles, because they are what comes first. I haven't used any examples that I can recall, but there are plenty out there. I'd suggest that if you asked an asian-american who was recently denied entry to Harvard University because they were Asian and are overrepresented whether they were ok with that despite their meritorious entry testing, they'd tell you it doesn't feel so good to be discriminated against. Perhaps all those women who rallied to conduct a march in the US a couple of days ago in order to display a want for change would feel pretty angry that the event was cancelled due to a decision about the organisers not being diverse enough. Being defined by your (perhaps even perceived) group identity and affected by that isn't nice. It wasn't when we were treating the indigenous here like s**t, and there's no reason to believe that it will suddenly become a nice thing if we could flip it totally against those we define as privileged.
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Shan, apologies for delayed response; I've been away.

We live in social groups. The pragmatic benefit to the individual, for the most part, is that he/she has some of his/her fundamental needs met by virtue of group rules/laws; such as the need for personal safety, amongst others. The presumption of innocence, underpinned by the rule of law, didn't come about by virtue of an emphasis of an ungrouped individual, but rather by virtue of the exploitation of a group of individuals (the governed) by other groups of individuals (the governors); or to use your expressions the privileged and the unprivileged. That has permeated other social rules; the notion of undue influence which makes certain transactions, in instances where there is such an imbalance of power as to make a weaker party a mere conduit for the will of a stronger party, unenforceable. An example of this has been the realisation that women had been the conduit of the will of their husbands; you would have to have been living on another planet if you think that has not been the case.

Many of the examples advancing Petersons argument appear to focus on the university system. Some have described it as an instrument of the left. I've never worked or studied in America, but have never noticed a leaning to the left in my own personal experience at university in Australia. Rather what I've noticed resembles Shklar's theory on the judicial approach to achieving unbiased impartiality. In its attempt to maintain neutral impartiality, it seeks the middle ground. That middle ground is set by society itself. I see many similarities between the judiciary and universities. I think universities in general seek the middle ground on controversial public issues. Consequently, if the middle ground is a reflection of an underlying swell of social attitude, which I believe it is, then a demand for a change in that balance is a demand for universities to be more biased.
 
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