Thursday, April 27, 2017

Learning Is Overrated

This is a follow-on to yesterday's sewer dive color commentary.
Race is comparatively trivial. A few cherry-picked stats showing your race is being mistreated and voila!, you've got an argument that can't be beat, so long as race is your differentiating factor. Depart from that and you might need to learn something.
In an NYT opinion piece, written by some professor whose head is filled with puffed rice cereal, lurks these tidbits.
During the 1980s and ’90s, a shift occurred in American culture; personal experience and testimony, especially of suffering and oppression, began to challenge the primacy of argument...Widespread caricatures of students as overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled “snowflakes” fail to acknowledge the philosophical work that was carried out, especially in the 1980s and ’90s, to legitimate experience — especially traumatic experience — which had been dismissed for decades as unreliable, untrustworthy and inaccessible to understanding...The philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, best known for his prescient analysis in “The Postmodern Condition” of how public discourse discards the categories of true/false and just/unjust in favor of valuing the mere fact that something is being communicated, examined the tension between experience and argument in a different way.
There's a fig leaf of mumbling about finding a balance between feelz and logic, but it's all hogwash in the end as feelz must win out, otherwise what's the point? If you're going to listen to someone kvetch and then go with logic and knowledge, then the kvetching will have been dismissed as, well, "overly sensitive, vulnerable and entitled."

Giving traumatic experience the power to trump logic devalues knowledge, That's the beauty of our obsession with race and gender whether you're a black, lesbian Social Justice Warrior or some shaven, white ape longing for the Reich. You win the day when your side can muster more decibels of complaining than the other. At no point in time do you need to read, discuss or think. Meanwhile, Professor Puffed Wheat nods his head and talks about new directions in philosophical thought valuing "traumatic experience" more than ever before.

If that's the way things are going to go, it might be a good time to ditch the books and stock up on self-defense tools. Victory through yelling is just a hop, skip and a jump away from victory through gang fights.

On the plus side, less reading will give us more time for enjoying video games, weed and porn after we, err, resolve our differences.

9 comments:

Ilíon said...

Are we supposed to be outraged by that image?

K T Cat said...

Not particularly. If I recall, the progressives have declared speech equal to violence. Using the reciprocal property of equality, it looks to me like the young man is simply communicating with the fascist girl.

Ilíon said...

... in response to her prior communication with him.

Ilíon said...

... so, it seems that there is a real open dialogue going on there.

Foxfier said...

That specific woman publicly bragged of premeditated assault, and that glove she's wearing is a deadly weapon-- it's filled with lead, a "knuckleduster." Same theory as brass knuckles, harder to identify.

I believe that's the same protest where the cops disarmed the (lawful, non-antifa) protesters and then left so the "counter protest" could assault them.
Picture shows how that worked.

Ilíon said...

AS I always say, if there is ever a coup d'etat in America, it will be the police, not the military, supplying the muscle to enforce it.

K T Cat said...

Hmm. I thought she had maced the dude. Whatever. It seems to me like this was what she wanted, although maybe not being on the receiving end. I love how violent people always necessarily end up surprised that they don't get the last word. Or last punch.

Ilíon said...

It was my understanding that she dialogued with his throat ... and he replied to her forehead.

Foxfier said...

She may have, I know using "defense spray" as an assault weapon is popular, I just remember the knuckle dusters because it ruined her attempt to file assault charges on the guy she attacked.