Sunday, June 04, 2017

Remember: There's No Such Thing As Political Correctness

It's a "right wing myth":

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I so badly want to explain the students' behavior by appealing to various psychological complexes and the fact that they probably don't get laid...but I won't *winky face*

Seriously though, these kids are so far gone in the sense that they can't/don't even realize that Weinstein is making a genuine attempt to understand their position(s).

Here's a chicken and egg question: which comes first, a penchant for dogmatic political views or poor analytical skills?

2:59 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Yeah, it's tempting to psychologize. As with so many crazy people, it's hard to say how much is faultless defect, how much is intellectual vice, and how much is having the bad fortune of having been convinced of a bad theory...

As for your second point: *they don't CARE*that Weinstein is trying to understand them. As a radical student once told a friend of one of my profs in the '70's: I don't care about that stuff--that's *your* liberal hangup.

LOL good question...I've often wondered about a similar one: which comes first, a penchant for dogmatism or political extremism?

3:05 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...


>As for your second point: *they don't CARE*that Weinstein is trying to understand them. As a radical student once told a friend of one of my profs in the '70's: I don't care about that stuff--that's *your* liberal hangup.

But you see, this is what throws me when analyzing these people. I’m not entirely sure as to what the student in your anecdote had in mind when he or she uttered the phrase “liberal hangup;” I am sure that there was a stew of things floating around in his or her head, but one specification that I think can be made (and what I think is the relevant one here) is that it is a liberal holdup to place a prominent value on things like striving for clarity of thought, the principle of charity, argumentative rigor, and so on. That is, adhering to rational principles as one’s guide to performing inquiry. It seems strange to me to say that someone can deliberately adopt an anti-rational bent. Is it not a feature of deliberation that one must be or strive to be self-critical— to be aware of his errors and ready to correct them in the presence of new evidence?

Does it make sense to say that one can consciously or self-critically adopts a bent that tends to produce modes of thinking that do not include those features? While I am not too quick to come down hard with the psychological explanations, they don’t seem like such a horrible route to me.

5:54 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

A mob of very angry people reacts to some perceived transgression by, of course, storming in somewhere and demanding "justice" in some immediate and extreme form? Here in the south, we used to call that a lynch mob. It was kind of our 'thing' for a while...

Wait, did the old Confederacy just get culturally appropriated by a bunch of SJWs?

11:07 PM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home