All Thoughts Being Equal

My scientist friend Jay recently shared a Business Insider article on Facebook. In that, ah, interesting headline style of the late twentyteens, it proclaims: "The US just sent 10 new scientists to Congress, including an ocean expert, a nurse, and a biochemist. Here's the full list." Great, isn't it? And the good news continues into the article body: A record number of women are in the ranks [of the 116th Congress, just convened in 2019] — 127, according to Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics. They include the first Muslim women, the first Somali-American, and the first Native American women. There are more scientists too. Diversity in our representative legislature can be good; our motto is E pluribus unum , after all, and the legislature should be representative of the plurality. Last November, 10 new science-credentialed candidates were elected: one senator and nine members of the House. But now "scientists" have become "sc...

Now that we've seen why Western Washington University decided (and was justified, in my view) to cancel classes for Tuesday, 24 November 2015, in response to racist and threatening comments on the anonymous social media shithole application Yik Yak, let's look at the reaction from the students and the community. Was their response justified? I don't think so. This post is a partial follow-up to: On the rigged-world fallacy and pullback error , Rhetorical imperialism I. Let's get this out of the way first: of the two "camps," so to speak, of students who disagreed with President Bruce Shepard's decision to suspend classes, the ones who thought classes shouldn't have been suspended have a very weak position. Now, there wasn't a lot of publicity of the various posts made, so I can understand why—at the time—some people might have thought the class cancellation was the wrong call. I hope that since those posts have come to light, those peop...

This post is a tangential follow-up to: Rhetorical imperialism I.   I will soon be working on a non-Marxist fix-up of an article from the Harvard Political Review called "On Privilege: A Leftist Critique of the Left":  Let me be clear that my criticism of discussions of privilege is not that they are too radical. My quarrel, to the contrary, is that they are not radical enough. The cultural Marxism of the mid-20 th century gifted the left with a powerful tool by which to understand how oppressive social structures are perpetuated through discourse—the critique of ideology. Ideology critique acknowledges that the status quo is enforced not only through a single, centralized node of authority, but through dispersed and diverse forms of discourse from all points of origin on the social spectrum. It is a peculiar feature of oppression that it is often enforced by those who are, in fact, oppressed. Ideology critique uses the term ideology to denote modes o...