Since our government officials and talking heads taut our system as a civilized representative democracy, voting to change government policy is the only means we have to redress our grievances.
Since the Congress and Legislatures openly admit they do not examine the laws they vote on, as they typically vote on one hundred - 2,000 page laws per day, reality dictates that we, The Citizens, must develop a way to evaluate 200 Thousand pages of law speak per day. And we must clarify who gets to vote and how the vote is counted and what specific impact the sacred vote has at the business end of government.
Right now, the first question is:
# 1. Who gets to vote in the: general election?
a. citizens only - Yes No
b. natural born citizens only - Yes No
c. natural born citizens with four natural born grandparents - Yes No
d. naturalized citizens (legal immigrants) - Yes No
e. legal immigrants not yet naturalized - Yes No
f. anyone with a drivers license – Yes - No
# 2.1 Ages of Voter
g. minimum18 years
h. minimum 21 years
i. minimum 25 years
j. minimum 30 years
k. minimum 33 years
l. minimum 35 years
# 2.2 Sex of Voter
a. Male – Yes - No
b. Female – Yes - No
c. Non – Binanry - Yes - No
d. Transgender - Yes - No
# 2.3 Competence of Voter
e. property owners net value over $50,000 - Yes - No
f. property owners net value over $250,000 - Yes - No
g. tax exempt persons – Yes - No
h. those receiving welfare / food stamps – Yes - No
i. those with unpaid child support obligations - Yes - No
j. those receiving WIC – Yes - No
k. those receiving Section 8 – Yes - No
l. those working for government bureaucracies – Yes - No
m. those that will pay a $5000 poll tax - Yes - No
n. those that have paid a minimum of $5000 per year of tax for their combined jurisdictions in excess of any received via SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ATFWDC - Yes - No
# 2.4 Genetic presence of Voter
a. Male without children – Yes - No
b. Male with children – Yes - No
c. Male with children plural vote – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Female with children plural vote – Yes - No
g. Only married males with children, never divorced can vote. – Yes - No
# 3.0 Who should be trusted with the responsibility and power of Public Office?
a. Only those authorized to vote in the general election - Yes No
b. Male without children – Yes - No
c. Male with children – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Only married males with children, never divorced can hold public office – Yes - No
The question is not "who gets to vote?" Our problem - and not just this election cycle - is who do we get to vote for. The choice this year is between one old man in decline and another old man who's the stooge of a hostile foreign power and the most despicable human being on the public stage. The current mechanism for selecting candidates doesn't offer much of a prospect for improvement.
As always Colin, thanks for the good read. Today I was educating the wife of our local DA while at the dog park what’s going on here in Alabama with WPATH and Levine and the court case. Even here no one knows what’s happening and it blows my mind. Thanks for helping keep me abreast of what’s happening.
When the writers tried to show racism still is a problem and then linked to a Washington Post story alleging racial bias in the justice system I stopped reading. Black Americans are both the victims and perpetrators of crimes at higher rates than any other racial group. That is not racism its called facts.
The premise that racism is present in every interaction is false. Reasoning that starts with a false premise and employs logical arguments results in false conclusions. (Occasionally a true conclusion is reached by accident from a false premise, e.g., as a result of illogical reasoning from the premise). So, there is a part of critical theory that can be shown to be incorrect, which is the quality of reasoning used to reach conclusions.
It is more difficult to evaluate the validity of the premise without having a detailed scientific definition of "racism." Scientific definitions must be based on observable, measurable realities, not on vague undefined abstractions like "racism." Critical theorists cannot define "racism" without using circular definitions, or proposing that the term includes every possible behavior on the part of the "racist." Both of these errors empty all meaning out of the term "racism," because it can't be differentiated from the absence of "racism."
All of the critical theory arguments I have seen rely on undefined abstract terminology. The theorists appear to be incapable of defining what is meant in reality by the abstract symbols they use. Their symbols are detached from any realities, as are the minds that created them. Yet critical theorists insist on forcing changes on the concrete world that are justified by their false abstract premises, invalid reasoning and resulting false conclusions.
I suppose one way of summarising this is that if a critical theorist asserts something, e.g. racism is pervasive or trans people are the most oppressed people on earth, they're not asking you to verify the statement for yourself, they're demanding you agree with them and ideally treat the statement as axiomatic.
This explains their hostility if you dare question them in even the slightest way, for (to them) that is just your privileged preserving epistemic push-back in action and thus a behaviour that needs to be trained out of you.
Thanks for the insightful article. What I find interesting is critical theorists, in their attempt to expose oppression, create an oppressive discourse that is universal in its scope and unfalsifiable. Not completely agreeing with critical theory is wrong to their way of thinking. As punishment for being wrong, you are labeled ignorant, not woke, racists, or phobic and excluded from any further participation in any area where social justice thinking predominates. I see it over and over again that we, as humans, tend to become the very thing we fight against. The oppressed become the oppressors. Victims become the victimizers. I applaud the goal of the social justice movement of creating a more just society where their are no oppressed people, but as long as a binary of us versus them mentality predominates, we will always get oppression. The best attempt on a societal level at irradicating this binary mindset is classic liberalism. Some think that social justice is the next step forward. I find it to be a regressive detour. Hopefully, critical theorists can recognize the limitations of their theory, ease up on their paranoia and recognize that they can fall prey to the very thing they are fighting against. I hope this because I think they have valid things to say. I just don't think they have the whole picture.
The following statement: “Critical Theory is False” - is itself false, and a product of a demonic presence in the wave equation simultaneously discernable and hidden, manifest and latent, a call from Cthulhu through superimposed states. If you don’t agree or understand self-negating statements which have no truth value, then you are possessed. If you agree and can reproduce non-truth-value you are elect to the Illuminati.
Or so I’m told.
Most of progress in knowledge is due to exporting entropy, what we call editing. This nonsense is due in about 15 years for deletion.
For taxonomic purposes, I would suggest that Critical Theory is a conspiratorial worldview, i.e. the conviction that the world is run by powerful hidden forces. Each subsection of Critical Theory (e.g. race, gender, queer) is then the equivalent of an individual conspiracy theory within that worldview (e.g. flat earth, Illuminati, Q)
“Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” A statement made by someone who has never felt strongly motivated by curiosity. Unimaginative projection.
Crit Theory is about understanding the dialectic process itself, it's more than just understanding how knowledge is created, it's how the entire socio-political order of humanity works mechanistically. It's best seen as a Gnostic style mysticism, as James Lindsay has posited in his excellent work on Foucault and others. I would not categorize it as a 'conspiracy theory' per se as it's a totalizing belief system about the nature of reality whereas a conspiracy theory is about one event or phenomenon that is speculated upon with theories that are based on false information and biases. Take the JFK conspiracy theories about the CIA (totally debunked there is actually ZERO evidence of this in case you are not aware). You'll find anarchists, MAGA types, independents, Marxists and Christian conservatives buying into it. Critical Theory is much more than that, it's a metaphysics for Marxists and does not rely on a view of any one given event or phenomena as a conspiracy theory does.
Of course, these terms are used colloquially and imprecisely in our 'discourse' (hehe). It may be useful to see it as a conspiracy theory to understand the false premises its based upon. I was hoping for some deeper treatment than quoting CRT practitioners though.
A question I've longed to ask the folks obsessed with 'oppression' is this: What is the difference between racism and ingroup preference? In all the study of racism and oppression, have we once ever been able to distinguish between the two? One would think if we were going to discuss bigotry, we would axiomatically be discussing how ingroup preferences work, but then again, the actual work on this subject seemed to debunk all the race hucksters, so perhaps that's why?
I'll press on anyway. Ingroup preferences are mostly benefits and advantages we grant to people in our ingroup vs. overt acts of oppression against outgroups. Huh. Let's pause here. How many of you were aware of this distinction? Sorry if I'm being pedantic, but this is a really important phenomena that exists in all social groups. And here's the truth: You will never extinguish ingroup preference. As I type this, you know I'm correct. Blacks and Jews for example exhibit massive ingroup preference, and interestingly, in studies, white people show the least ingroup preference, but it's still there. We all have it.
Shit gets deeper if you will be bound by logic. So, if all groups will have ingroup preferences, and individuals have 'freedom of association', isn't it true that people will always engage in ingroup preference? Isn't this the nature of humanity? Even more profoundly, our social progress/evolution as a species has been and is driven by inter-group competition and selection (read E. O. Wilson's brilliant book The Social Conquest of Earth to understand this, it will change how you see humanity). The entire engine of progress that drove human civilization to where it is today is based on ingroups competing with each other. In other words, to eliminate ingroup preference would be to stop all human progress, lol. Get that.
So, now what are we left with. The authors make a first order error in this article. The posit the sexism and racism and anti-gay bigotry still exist, and that the Crit Theory types are correct to focus on it. No, you Utopian thinkers, that's not possible. People will always have preferences for these things. Christians will never believe homosexuality isn't a sin, that's never going away, there is nothing to be fixed there. We are free to shun it in our personal lives to any degree with care to. Many people also have made the logical decision to excise themselves from dealing with black folks cuz they seem to hate white people, generally. That's a logical decision. They also commit 60% of the violent crime in our society so there is also some logic to it. Be clear, that will never be solved. There will also always be differences between the sexes and ingroup preferences expressed in that way as well. Feminism itself is about seeing women as an ingroup and pressing for privileges and advantages for women vis a vis men. Even worse? All societies have a dominant, majority ingroup, and minorities who have their own ingroups. Successful societies create ways for them to interact and still preserve and underlying, unifying national identity. This is more common than you'd think if you analyze the people's that make up nations.
The idea that we are going to eliminate ingroup preference is a fool's errand. The most we can hope for is to not have govt policies that discriminate based on any ingroup. I do think the idea of public accommodations also works nicely as a social leveler. But it will never eliminate preference. It just enforces a degree of tolerance that is crucial for people of various ingroups to cooperate with each other. The ideal end state is that people work this out among themselves, the govt nor preaching academics (as though scholars are moral paragons and have any standing to preach morality) cannot ever 'fix' it.
The real problem with CRT and all the Crit Theory nonsense is that it starts with a primitive and false idea about human social order. Go ask any Crit Theorist how their ideas account for concepts like 'eusociality' or ingroup preference. The answer is they do not. The entire sociology of the Left is deformed by stupid Marxist victim/oppressor dyads. Don't be confused, this is all just applied Marxism. All Crit Theory does is take Hegel seriously, in a way, just as Marx did...Hegelianism is the core mysticism at the root of both, and actually, the entire field of German Historicism is based on this mystical idea of 'progress' occurring automatically, or as I would put it, magically. It's the 'Deus ex machina' of the Left's belief systems. To tie this together, Fukuyama's ridiculous book, The End of History and the Last Man attempted to reconcile this core belief of Leftist ideology, and really all German historicism based analysis of the world, with reality. And of course, it's idiot speak. I found the book so 'stupid' (brilliant in its own way as only tedious scholars can be) in the sense that it accepted as true ideas that must be rejected. Fukuyama should have debunked Hegel as a starting point. But he instead accepts Hegel and of course, just as with Crit Theory, nonsensical BS is the result.
At the risk of being a dick, I'm hoping for deeper dialog than tediously citing the absolutely anti-intellectual horseshit the likes of Delgado and Bell publish. I tried reading them at one point and just laughed. Do that yourself, then go read say Aristotle or Aquinas or On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and you'll realize todays radical leftist 'theorists' aren't philosophers or scientists at all. They are just Marxist hacks working in the ideological salt mines of Marxism. They will produce more errant nonsense to the degree they are given the power, positions and money to do so. To take any of it seriously as 'scholarship' is a first order error that these authors should correct.
Reality is the only thing that matters.
Since our government officials and talking heads taut our system as a civilized representative democracy, voting to change government policy is the only means we have to redress our grievances.
Since the Congress and Legislatures openly admit they do not examine the laws they vote on, as they typically vote on one hundred - 2,000 page laws per day, reality dictates that we, The Citizens, must develop a way to evaluate 200 Thousand pages of law speak per day. And we must clarify who gets to vote and how the vote is counted and what specific impact the sacred vote has at the business end of government.
Right now, the first question is:
# 1. Who gets to vote in the: general election?
a. citizens only - Yes No
b. natural born citizens only - Yes No
c. natural born citizens with four natural born grandparents - Yes No
d. naturalized citizens (legal immigrants) - Yes No
e. legal immigrants not yet naturalized - Yes No
f. anyone with a drivers license – Yes - No
# 2.1 Ages of Voter
g. minimum18 years
h. minimum 21 years
i. minimum 25 years
j. minimum 30 years
k. minimum 33 years
l. minimum 35 years
# 2.2 Sex of Voter
a. Male – Yes - No
b. Female – Yes - No
c. Non – Binanry - Yes - No
d. Transgender - Yes - No
# 2.3 Competence of Voter
e. property owners net value over $50,000 - Yes - No
f. property owners net value over $250,000 - Yes - No
g. tax exempt persons – Yes - No
h. those receiving welfare / food stamps – Yes - No
i. those with unpaid child support obligations - Yes - No
j. those receiving WIC – Yes - No
k. those receiving Section 8 – Yes - No
l. those working for government bureaucracies – Yes - No
m. those that will pay a $5000 poll tax - Yes - No
n. those that have paid a minimum of $5000 per year of tax for their combined jurisdictions in excess of any received via SS, Medicare, Medicaid, ATFWDC - Yes - No
# 2.4 Genetic presence of Voter
a. Male without children – Yes - No
b. Male with children – Yes - No
c. Male with children plural vote – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Female with children plural vote – Yes - No
g. Only married males with children, never divorced can vote. – Yes - No
# 3.0 Who should be trusted with the responsibility and power of Public Office?
a. Only those authorized to vote in the general election - Yes No
b. Male without children – Yes - No
c. Male with children – Yes - No
d. Female without children – Yes - No
e. Female with children – Yes - No
f. Only married males with children, never divorced can hold public office – Yes - No
g. Depends on the office - Yes - No
The question is not "who gets to vote?" Our problem - and not just this election cycle - is who do we get to vote for. The choice this year is between one old man in decline and another old man who's the stooge of a hostile foreign power and the most despicable human being on the public stage. The current mechanism for selecting candidates doesn't offer much of a prospect for improvement.
As always Colin, thanks for the good read. Today I was educating the wife of our local DA while at the dog park what’s going on here in Alabama with WPATH and Levine and the court case. Even here no one knows what’s happening and it blows my mind. Thanks for helping keep me abreast of what’s happening.
When the writers tried to show racism still is a problem and then linked to a Washington Post story alleging racial bias in the justice system I stopped reading. Black Americans are both the victims and perpetrators of crimes at higher rates than any other racial group. That is not racism its called facts.
The premise that racism is present in every interaction is false. Reasoning that starts with a false premise and employs logical arguments results in false conclusions. (Occasionally a true conclusion is reached by accident from a false premise, e.g., as a result of illogical reasoning from the premise). So, there is a part of critical theory that can be shown to be incorrect, which is the quality of reasoning used to reach conclusions.
It is more difficult to evaluate the validity of the premise without having a detailed scientific definition of "racism." Scientific definitions must be based on observable, measurable realities, not on vague undefined abstractions like "racism." Critical theorists cannot define "racism" without using circular definitions, or proposing that the term includes every possible behavior on the part of the "racist." Both of these errors empty all meaning out of the term "racism," because it can't be differentiated from the absence of "racism."
All of the critical theory arguments I have seen rely on undefined abstract terminology. The theorists appear to be incapable of defining what is meant in reality by the abstract symbols they use. Their symbols are detached from any realities, as are the minds that created them. Yet critical theorists insist on forcing changes on the concrete world that are justified by their false abstract premises, invalid reasoning and resulting false conclusions.
I suppose one way of summarising this is that if a critical theorist asserts something, e.g. racism is pervasive or trans people are the most oppressed people on earth, they're not asking you to verify the statement for yourself, they're demanding you agree with them and ideally treat the statement as axiomatic.
This explains their hostility if you dare question them in even the slightest way, for (to them) that is just your privileged preserving epistemic push-back in action and thus a behaviour that needs to be trained out of you.
Thanks for the insightful article. What I find interesting is critical theorists, in their attempt to expose oppression, create an oppressive discourse that is universal in its scope and unfalsifiable. Not completely agreeing with critical theory is wrong to their way of thinking. As punishment for being wrong, you are labeled ignorant, not woke, racists, or phobic and excluded from any further participation in any area where social justice thinking predominates. I see it over and over again that we, as humans, tend to become the very thing we fight against. The oppressed become the oppressors. Victims become the victimizers. I applaud the goal of the social justice movement of creating a more just society where their are no oppressed people, but as long as a binary of us versus them mentality predominates, we will always get oppression. The best attempt on a societal level at irradicating this binary mindset is classic liberalism. Some think that social justice is the next step forward. I find it to be a regressive detour. Hopefully, critical theorists can recognize the limitations of their theory, ease up on their paranoia and recognize that they can fall prey to the very thing they are fighting against. I hope this because I think they have valid things to say. I just don't think they have the whole picture.
The following statement: “Critical Theory is False” - is itself false, and a product of a demonic presence in the wave equation simultaneously discernable and hidden, manifest and latent, a call from Cthulhu through superimposed states. If you don’t agree or understand self-negating statements which have no truth value, then you are possessed. If you agree and can reproduce non-truth-value you are elect to the Illuminati.
Or so I’m told.
Most of progress in knowledge is due to exporting entropy, what we call editing. This nonsense is due in about 15 years for deletion.
I'd call it a mystery religion. Gnosticism is comparable.
For taxonomic purposes, I would suggest that Critical Theory is a conspiratorial worldview, i.e. the conviction that the world is run by powerful hidden forces. Each subsection of Critical Theory (e.g. race, gender, queer) is then the equivalent of an individual conspiracy theory within that worldview (e.g. flat earth, Illuminati, Q)
“Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” A statement made by someone who has never felt strongly motivated by curiosity. Unimaginative projection.
Crit Theory is about understanding the dialectic process itself, it's more than just understanding how knowledge is created, it's how the entire socio-political order of humanity works mechanistically. It's best seen as a Gnostic style mysticism, as James Lindsay has posited in his excellent work on Foucault and others. I would not categorize it as a 'conspiracy theory' per se as it's a totalizing belief system about the nature of reality whereas a conspiracy theory is about one event or phenomenon that is speculated upon with theories that are based on false information and biases. Take the JFK conspiracy theories about the CIA (totally debunked there is actually ZERO evidence of this in case you are not aware). You'll find anarchists, MAGA types, independents, Marxists and Christian conservatives buying into it. Critical Theory is much more than that, it's a metaphysics for Marxists and does not rely on a view of any one given event or phenomena as a conspiracy theory does.
Of course, these terms are used colloquially and imprecisely in our 'discourse' (hehe). It may be useful to see it as a conspiracy theory to understand the false premises its based upon. I was hoping for some deeper treatment than quoting CRT practitioners though.
A question I've longed to ask the folks obsessed with 'oppression' is this: What is the difference between racism and ingroup preference? In all the study of racism and oppression, have we once ever been able to distinguish between the two? One would think if we were going to discuss bigotry, we would axiomatically be discussing how ingroup preferences work, but then again, the actual work on this subject seemed to debunk all the race hucksters, so perhaps that's why?
I'll press on anyway. Ingroup preferences are mostly benefits and advantages we grant to people in our ingroup vs. overt acts of oppression against outgroups. Huh. Let's pause here. How many of you were aware of this distinction? Sorry if I'm being pedantic, but this is a really important phenomena that exists in all social groups. And here's the truth: You will never extinguish ingroup preference. As I type this, you know I'm correct. Blacks and Jews for example exhibit massive ingroup preference, and interestingly, in studies, white people show the least ingroup preference, but it's still there. We all have it.
Shit gets deeper if you will be bound by logic. So, if all groups will have ingroup preferences, and individuals have 'freedom of association', isn't it true that people will always engage in ingroup preference? Isn't this the nature of humanity? Even more profoundly, our social progress/evolution as a species has been and is driven by inter-group competition and selection (read E. O. Wilson's brilliant book The Social Conquest of Earth to understand this, it will change how you see humanity). The entire engine of progress that drove human civilization to where it is today is based on ingroups competing with each other. In other words, to eliminate ingroup preference would be to stop all human progress, lol. Get that.
So, now what are we left with. The authors make a first order error in this article. The posit the sexism and racism and anti-gay bigotry still exist, and that the Crit Theory types are correct to focus on it. No, you Utopian thinkers, that's not possible. People will always have preferences for these things. Christians will never believe homosexuality isn't a sin, that's never going away, there is nothing to be fixed there. We are free to shun it in our personal lives to any degree with care to. Many people also have made the logical decision to excise themselves from dealing with black folks cuz they seem to hate white people, generally. That's a logical decision. They also commit 60% of the violent crime in our society so there is also some logic to it. Be clear, that will never be solved. There will also always be differences between the sexes and ingroup preferences expressed in that way as well. Feminism itself is about seeing women as an ingroup and pressing for privileges and advantages for women vis a vis men. Even worse? All societies have a dominant, majority ingroup, and minorities who have their own ingroups. Successful societies create ways for them to interact and still preserve and underlying, unifying national identity. This is more common than you'd think if you analyze the people's that make up nations.
The idea that we are going to eliminate ingroup preference is a fool's errand. The most we can hope for is to not have govt policies that discriminate based on any ingroup. I do think the idea of public accommodations also works nicely as a social leveler. But it will never eliminate preference. It just enforces a degree of tolerance that is crucial for people of various ingroups to cooperate with each other. The ideal end state is that people work this out among themselves, the govt nor preaching academics (as though scholars are moral paragons and have any standing to preach morality) cannot ever 'fix' it.
The real problem with CRT and all the Crit Theory nonsense is that it starts with a primitive and false idea about human social order. Go ask any Crit Theorist how their ideas account for concepts like 'eusociality' or ingroup preference. The answer is they do not. The entire sociology of the Left is deformed by stupid Marxist victim/oppressor dyads. Don't be confused, this is all just applied Marxism. All Crit Theory does is take Hegel seriously, in a way, just as Marx did...Hegelianism is the core mysticism at the root of both, and actually, the entire field of German Historicism is based on this mystical idea of 'progress' occurring automatically, or as I would put it, magically. It's the 'Deus ex machina' of the Left's belief systems. To tie this together, Fukuyama's ridiculous book, The End of History and the Last Man attempted to reconcile this core belief of Leftist ideology, and really all German historicism based analysis of the world, with reality. And of course, it's idiot speak. I found the book so 'stupid' (brilliant in its own way as only tedious scholars can be) in the sense that it accepted as true ideas that must be rejected. Fukuyama should have debunked Hegel as a starting point. But he instead accepts Hegel and of course, just as with Crit Theory, nonsensical BS is the result.
At the risk of being a dick, I'm hoping for deeper dialog than tediously citing the absolutely anti-intellectual horseshit the likes of Delgado and Bell publish. I tried reading them at one point and just laughed. Do that yourself, then go read say Aristotle or Aquinas or On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and you'll realize todays radical leftist 'theorists' aren't philosophers or scientists at all. They are just Marxist hacks working in the ideological salt mines of Marxism. They will produce more errant nonsense to the degree they are given the power, positions and money to do so. To take any of it seriously as 'scholarship' is a first order error that these authors should correct.