5 ms·
The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- LexAckson 9y agoMuch better article on postmodernism in USA. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...
- ebola1717 9y agoRichard Spencer held a rally at UF last week, and they had to arrest 3 of his supporters for firing shots at protesters. I don’t have much sympathy for this “college kids are overreacting” argument these days.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoSpencer and his ilk are just going where they know they'll get attention and reactions. They feed off each other.
- anonmoose123 9y agoIt's the "brownshirts vs the redshirts" all over again. Yes, one side are literally waving Nazi flags and that's terrible. The other side are literally waving Socialist flags and the only reason that's not just as terrible if not worse is that for some reason the intellectual left got away with going to ground rather than admitting defeat. And if you think that's hyperbole because of Bush-Jr-era nonsense, I refer you to Christopher Hitchens who used to lead labor strikes and visit glorious people's work camps in South America before he finally realized the horrors of all the socialist regimes he'd been supporting. You're also ignoring the times that went against your mantra, like when the liberal antifa supporter was handing out bike locks and brained a kid on camera. Antifa have also regularly been tossing explosives into crowds, beating people, lighting property and police on fire, etc. It's a wonder more haven't been injured. I don't have any sympathy at all for Nazis. I also don't have any sympathy at all for Socialists. Not having any sympathy for Socialists, doesn't make me a supporter of Nazis. Not having sympathy for either side, doesn't mean I support the other side. I'd like for us to go back to rationality and working together. That starts by reforming education. And yes, education is that bad. One quick example from my own time back at college a few years ago is that I had a professor teaching the university-required ethics course who taught ethics only through the lens of Feminist Care Ethics. If you wrote a paper dealing only with the issues at hand (Locke and Hobbes mostly), you failed. If you wrote a paper attacking white men and denying rationality as a positive basis for morality, you got an A. I just discovered my papers a few days ago, and yes it's all in there. On the other hand, I also had a conservative department chair professor who taught me that white people only started to accept black people after slavery because black people were so good at entertainment and sports... so I'm all for generalized reform, and not just in this one politicized direction.
- alexanderstears 9y agoOnly one of his supporters fired shots at the protesters, and many of those protesters are people who support preemptive self defense, shooting at them is valid and defensible by their own logic.
- gtoast 9y agoLol. “I heard some progressives support preemptive self defense so I should be allowed to fire into any crowd of people I think may be progressives”. I hope that is their defense.
- alexanderstears 9y agoThe dissident right holds that this is a good thing - we can't get segregation and a very comprehensive freedom of association from Constitutional conservatives, but progressive leftists are more than happy to do the legwork to erode protections around the 'protected classes'. But it's something we see playing out across the anglo world - left learning "right thinkers" break down some boundry and hand the keys to people who lean right. Obama took the imperial Presidency to new heights and now Trump gets to reap the rewards. Trump really wouldn't have been possible without Obama. The sad irony is that leftists need the rule of law and impartial justice much more than right wingers.
- zimpenfish 9y ago> Obama took the imperial Presidency to new heights By what criteria?
- alexanderstears 9y agohttp://www.nationalreview.com/corner/443799/obamas-imperial-presidency http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/443799/obamas-imperial-...
- zimpenfish 9y agoMy fault; I should have said "by what quantifiable critera as compared to previous presidents". Woolly opinion pieces mean nothing.
- samcodes 9y agoOk but... While reading that, did you at any point wonder the ethnicity, gender and approximate age of the author? Because I was less than surprised when I saw him at the end of the article.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoThe sum of identity politics: ignore valid points because of who said them. Sounds like prejudice, which you are probably against.
- Apocryphon 9y agoOn one hand you're right, ad hominem filtering on the basis of demography is self-limiting. On the other, it's ironic because the author is a specifically controversial character: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer#Accusations_of_sexual_misconduct https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer#Accusations_of...
- vormalpg 9y agoIf you're the kind of person who dismisses anything coming from Breibart or fox news as unreliable, it's absurd to turn around and use the likes of rational wiki as a source for any kind of serious argument. It's a pure propaganda website with no editorial standard.
- samcodes 9y agoI didn't say to ignore his "valid points." I intentionally didn't mention the content. I was trying to point out that, if, as you read the piece, you correctly inferred metadata about the author, (a) it's funny because (b) it means there might be more to the theories he is dissmissing out of hand.
- brad0 9y agoCan I ask why you were thinking about what race/gender/ethnicity etc. he was while reading the article?
- kingkawn 9y agoPerformative criticism of the devoted humanitarians for the sake of social flagging oneself as a centrist is the problem.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoDevoted humanitarians don't commit acts of violence or intimidate other people through it.
- Apocryphon 9y agoPerhaps they're humanitarians in the sense that they're in the humanities; humanitarianism may or may not be orthogonal.
- kingkawn 9y agoI think they do those exact things when up against fascists. The people they’re fighting are those who espouse racial superiorities and commit acts of cultural and physical violence to intimidate the populations of people they’ve chosen to see as inferior. Appeals to the centrist middle are only meaningful insofar as that same center is willing to act to protect the people being targeted by hate speech. If the center is frozen by its own obsolete sense of propriety in the face of this socially destabilizing hatred then I think it is not unreasonable to see a small group take the call to action on themselves.
- Theizestooke 9y ago"Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted, including their own professors, most of whom are liberals or progressives devoted to fighting these social ills." What's the source for this? Why should I take this article more seriously than a random screed on social media?
- Apocryphon 9y agoIt's pretty alarming and sad that Scientific American is publishing politicized op-eds these days.
- purplezooey 9y agoIt is?
- jdauriemma 9y agoExactly. The article starts out fairly well-supported, citing other works and building an argument. Then it all unravels with that outlandish, unsupported statement.
- mizzack 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars#Postmodernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars#Postmodernism
- gedy 9y agoAlso: https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy
- anonmoose123 9y agoA good book on the subject is "Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science" by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. Summary: With the emergence of "cultural studies" and the blurring of once-clear academic boundaries, scholars are turning to subjects far outside their traditional disciplines and areas of expertise. In Higher Superstition scientists Paul Gross and Norman Levitt raise serious questions about the growing criticism of science by humanists and social scientists on the "academic left."
- brad0 9y agoI find myself thinking how much technology has had an influence on polarisation of viewpoints, particularly political ones (conservative vs liberal). There is a correlation between young adults coming of age in the era of "Recommended for you" playlists and "People who bought this also bought" recommendations. I feel that these algorithms followed for long enough cause you to end up in one extreme or another. We have young students who are exposed to a single viewpoint for such a long time that it becomes part of their identity. Either for the right or the left. Now at university these two sides sometimes clash. Neither side is willing to hear the other argument as listening to them will invalidate a core part of their identity. This all seems to be a side effect of technology companies trying to maximise profit. The longer a user stays on the site the more money they make (ads, products, etc). As techies, how can we be socially responsible while also profiting? Is it possible as a public company?
- ebola1717 9y agoEh, conservatives have been making this complaint for ages. It’s really not new. Take the Vietnam war and civil rights protests of the 60s and 70s for example. Tech has changed some dynamics, but in this case, it hasn’t introduced something completely new.
- festidious 9y agoThe author should tread carefully... I think the crisis of irreproducibility and the publishing bubble extends to the heart of scientific disciplines as well. Like a lot of things in life, reality is probably more complex than the postmodern humanities scholars or the realist scientific scholars would suggest. There is some level of reality underlying discourse, but it's also filtered through social processes at every step.
- sandworm101 9y ago"In response, an angry mob of 50 students disrupted his biology class, surrounded him, called him a racist and insisted that he resign." Students have been doing that for thousands of years. This isn't about racism or post-modernism. This is about longstanding mob dynamics. Communists in pre-revolution Russia and asia. Religious zealots in Scotland. Romans in their ancient senate. This is simply a group of young people storming an office to shout down an established member of an older generation. Once discovered, this power feeds upon itself. It may be how revolutions start but more often than not the young people get older/bored or things burn out as the movement grows and internal power structures destroy themselves. You cannot stop the movement by arguing its politics because those politics are beside the point. You stop them by redirecting their energy towards something new, something more cool than yesterday's politics.
- alexanderstears 9y agoThis is why we have to ban welfare for anyone with any sort of post-secondary education. Nothing deradicalizes someone like a job and nothing radicalizes someone like too much free time.
- gtoast 9y agoThis is a fine opinion piece but for learning anything substantive on this subject it’s absolutely devoid of any facts or sourcing for any of its claims. Also seems woefully, out of touch given recent profiles on Milo Yiannopoulos and the arrest of three white supremacists on attempted murder charges for firing guns on student protesters following a campus speech. It’s possible the situation is slightly more nuanced then “college students hate facts/white people”.
- mintplant 9y ago> Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy Oh brother. Here we go again with another rant that cherry-picks a few instances and pads them out with Orwell quotes and shrill claims like this. I'm a current college student, and compared to my experience and the experiences of my peers, the author is describing another reality. Very "kids these days, get off my lawn".
- cjjuice 9y agoCan someone explain to me why this was flagged?
- grzm 9y agoThere are two levels to answering questions like this. The purely mechanical is that enough HN members clicked the "flag" link to cross the "[flagged]" tag threshold. The second level answer is to speculate why those members chose to click "flag". That's tougher, though in my experience one of the reasons is because some members observe that unfortunately some topics are difficult to constructively discuss on HN, regardless of the importance of the topic. I think the current discussion is a pretty good example of that, in generating more heat than light. Note that this doesn't mean these topics shouldn't be discussed, just that there are likely better places (both online and off) to do so.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]