Reply With QuoteThaddeus is one of the examples people tend to use as a post modernist educator (despite the fact his bg is in history IIRC). Pretty sure post modernist is just the new communist.
This Mishima kills fascists
*googles thaddeus russell*
Uh, what's this chode got to do with it?
I found the Peterson interview that professor references. He really does say the academy wants to destroy western civilization. He says Derrida started it.
Derrida talks about stuff like how binary opposites inform the meaning of words and how his cat is both always naked and never naked. For a guy who allegedly hates western culture, be sure did dedicate his entire life to western philosophy and art. Not hard to see why Petersonites have batpoop ideas about what "postmodernism," a term that hasn't been relevant in 15 years for anyone but this dude, means.
Last edited by A Robot Bit Me; 27 Mar 2018 at 12:07 AM.
i drink it up!
Thaddeus is one of the examples people tend to use as a post modernist educator (despite the fact his bg is in history IIRC). Pretty sure post modernist is just the new communist.
Originally Posted by rezo
We’ve been past post-modernism for awhile now, amusingly. It’s kind of considered outmoded and like...very peak Gen X.
/oh derp ARBM said that already basically. Posted before I read the whole thing!
The problem with post modernism and all this shut people bundle under it is that it preaches that their is no absolute truth. That there are only relationships between actors and objects. Social progress shot also implies that relationships should be more.fair (or maybe that is moral baggage that students bring in. I don't know. But it's hard to believe any class that talks about a disadvantaged group isn't also implying we should try to make it more fair)
And kids don't like that. At least stupid ones dont. Not everyone can be an ubermench that gives meaning to their own lives by the strength of their own will and intelligence. Many hunger for something with concrete answers beyond themselves. And hopefully that something will also resolve the issues of guilt from being members of the current group that has historically caused the world's inequality.
Shit, they want answers. And they aren't strong or smart enough to create them and the world of post modernism they inhereded will not either.
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People create inequality by doing well for themselves. Attaching guilt to that is about as counterproductive as you can get.
"How dare you build a bigger hut than mine! It's not fair! We must all have tiny huts!"
What they should be angry about is exploitation.
Well, most super wealth these days is built by taking a cut from a system. It's not that different from the rounding error in office space. You own a company that makes widgets and you keep 1%. In 2018 it's all about micro transactions.
Some people argue that is exploitation. Others argue it is compensation for taking a greater risk than the laborer.
This Mishima kills fascists
1. Nobody has been a postmodernist since 1995, so anyone complaining about postmodernism corrupting the academy might as well argue Rock and Roll Music is corrupting kids. Critical theory has long since recognized that saying everything is constructed discursively/culturally insufficiently attends to actual human bodies, so it made a turn and made everything about "the body." Holy lord the ink spilled on "the body" in the '00s. Then it fatigued that and moved on when it realized making everything about "the body" insufficiently attended to material stuff that isn't human (or even living) which is kinda where it is now, two epochs and forty years past "postmodernism" and "everything is a construct." Peterson's idea that humanities departments never got over or are uncritical of Foucault is hilarious.
2. Moral relativism wasn't invented in 1980. The ancient Greeks were working out the idea that truths were culturally produced and they probably weren't the first. Modernists wouldn't have liked Lobster Biology = Truth either. Look at a Picasso painting. Does that look like something that espouses the capacity to access and render absolute truth?
3. "BIOLOGY AND SCIENCE ARE TRUTH" is not going to save you. Science is a discourse. Instruments used to measure a thing mark and alter the thing. You can't even measure the speed of a car with a radar gun without the radar gun altering the particles of the car; the thing the gun measures isn't the thing it was before it was measured.
And what about the measurement or representation of the measured thing itself? Do these people think what's writhing around in a womb actually looks like what's on that ultrasound monitor? No, the instruments that produce and represent what's in there emphasize and distort so we can see what we want to see better. They make what's in there look more human because we, and by extension the measurements and tools we make, are interested in the status of that thing as human. You think there's no chance those emphases and distortions the ultrasound machine makes affect and are affected by culture? No chance an apparatus that represents parts of the female body as empty space to throw into relief the body of the fetus informs and is informed by culture? No chance these emphases and distortions affect and are affected by discourse about pregnancy and abortion? No chance they might affect their own values about these things? That science is so insulated and absolute?
Petersonites think biology will reveal two genders and kill the "gender is a construct" boogeyman? Wait until they find out people can have XXY chromosomes. Or that people with XX chromosomes can have testicles instead of ovaries. Or that the conclusion of every biological test thrown at Olympian track and field runner Caster Semenya was, quote, "She is a woman, but maybe not 100%."
Biology is going to get us past social constructs? Biology can't even prove that the point where we distinguish a living thing from a non-living thing isn't socially constructed. Is a virus alive or not? You dunno? You can't show me how LIVING and NOT LIVING, the most fundamental ontological distinction in biology, isn't discursively and arbitrarily made? You're going to abandon the idea of social constructs, burn all the Jameson and de Beauvoir, defund the humanities, and put all your faith in the science that studies life and admits it can't tell you what life is? You're going to tell me biology is absolute, non-relative truth when it's an -ology that has to concede, "Well, what counts as 'bio-' depends on who ya ask." You're going to insist on the existence of culturally independent truths when you can't show me how life, LIFE isn't a relative, cultural construct?
Godspeed, y'all. Tell the lobsters I said hi.
Nobody is gonna read this but that felt good sorry I needed this sorry.
No more Peterson posts for at least a month, promise.
Last edited by A Robot Bit Me; 27 Mar 2018 at 02:38 PM.
I read it.
I’m going to read it again.
.
I mean, you buy an oven that can only bake gingerbread, nobody is going to fault you for baking gingerbread sometimes.
Your mom espouses the capacity to access.
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