Sunday, October 22, 2017

Penn Grad Student Calls On Students In Class In An Order Determined By The Students' Race And Sex

You really can't make up this kind of crackpottery.
   Or...well...somebody made it up, obviously...but...you know what I mean.
   Stephanie McKellop openly admits that, when multiple students raise their hands, she calls on them in an order determined by their relative status on the PC left--blacks before whites, women before men (gays before straights? Gays then bisexuals then straights? How does she know? Made-up gender-whatsises and toaster-kin before ordinary folks? God knows.)
   She apparently thinks that black men come before white women in the hierarchy. I've never been clear who won that particular heat in the oppression Olympics...so it's good to at least have that cleared up, I suppose.
   In case you haven't noticed, these people can never, ever, ever be allowed to get anywhere near real power. Last time they did, it was the Gulag for people like you and me, fellow thoughtcriminal.
   The real low point of the article isn't even really what's-her-name the grad student, though. It gets worse. [sigh]  Of course it does:
   Nolan L. Cabrera, an associate professor of educational-policy studies and practice at the University of Arizona, offered The Chronicle of Higher Education an explanation of 'progressive slacking.' [lol sic]
   He said: 'In college classrooms, it's very common for people of privileged social identities to dominate conversations.' [citation needed]
   Utilized during the Occupy movement, the move isn't used often in an academic setting, according to the professor.
   In a classroom, ideally, a professor would ask a question and students would raise their hand, contributing to the 'stack'.
   Mr. Cabrera added that normally, professors would call on students that they see raised their hands first.
   But what the tactic may actually do, is allow the teacher to choose students from marginalized groups first.
   There is a lot of confusion surrounding the usage of progressive slacking. [again, sic]
   Many, incorrectly, assume that students from privileged groups will therefore be discriminated against when wanting to participate.
   Others, also think that it will cause the teacher to choose marginalized students who did not raise their hands, which is also not the case.
   '[It's] an acknowledgment that traditional pedagogical techniques have silenced marginal voices.'
   It is rather similar to the already practiced method of teachers calling on students who do not get the chance to contribute as much.
   What a mess. It's hard to sort out how much of that is bad journalism and how much is obfuscation by Cabrera. But the argument is roughly: here's a racist, sexist procedure for determining whom to call on first in class. But there's a lot of confusion about it! Many incorrectly assume that it is slightly more racist and sexist than it actually is--but it isn't! It's only as racist/sexist as it actually is.
   This is not really so much like calling on students who don't talk much in class. See, as the teacher, you know who talks in class and who doesn't. So it's easy to actually break ties in favor of those who actually speak less. Suppose student A is one of those students who talks way too much in class, despite having no idea what's going on. Suppose that student B is one of those who's on top of everything, but never talks. Suppose they raise their hands at the same time. Suppose B is a white male and A is a non-white female. McKellop's method says: call on A over B--every time. The non-idiotic method says: give preference to calling on B in such cases.
   Things would be different if McKellop had said that, in case of a tie between two students who talk about the same amount in class, she breaks the tie on the basis of race and/or sex. That would still be questionable to say the least--but I don't think it would be inexcusably loathsome. But what she says is that she always uses race and sex to make the call, and that she only calls on white males if necessary. What this actually shows shouldn't surprise anyone: it's that the real motives here are anti-white and anti-male racism and sexism. That's what's at the heart of a great deal of political correctness, and it's what's at the heart of this matter. If we were talking about someone who reluctantly used such criteria on the basis of a genuine belief that it was fair, if distasteful...that might be one thing. But that's obviously not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a person who smugly bragged about employing this method. She's proud of it. She put it up on the interwebs in the expectation of raising her status as a right-thinking lefty. (In fact, that'd be her best defense, IMO: to claim she was lying for leftypoints.)
   One more general point: I hear stuff from the right all the time that makes me think: that might be racist / sexist. But it's basically only the hard left that openly, proudly embraces racist / sexist theories and policies as a matter of principle. And I'm talking about those who aren't entirely and immediately shunned in polite society--obviously the Klan is completely open about being crazy. But they're not part of the mainstream discussion. The hard left openly says things like all whites are racist, kill all white people, all men should STFU...but they aren't treated as morally analogous to the Klan. And...in some ways they aren't...but in certain obvious respects, they are. One would think that people with such views would be booted out of the mainstream conversation...uh...wouldn't one?

15 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The thing is, PCs have been screaming that they want to do this garbage for as long as I remember. If a good will liberal hasn't come to admit this yet, I can't think they are anything better than negligent. And even more sharply, PCs are drooling mad if they go out in public on their own terms. They absolutely need a dedicated cadre of political cannon fodder to launder their message in a way that is socially acceptable, and that is the role mainstream liberals have played for decades now (transgender issues are a great example, see your last discussion on this topic). I don't think those liberals are actually bad on their own of course, but they are at best hopelessly naive, and at this point dangerously negligent, and they need to wake the f*** up to the role they are playing in this game.

And as far as why the neo-Marxist left still retains some acceptable status in American life but people like the clan do not, this is unforgivable in my mind. Look, there is no possible world in which the KKK gets anywhere near the death toll of hard Leftism implemented in any major country. The only way you can square this is by saying you'd rather kill miillions of people and be on the Left than be a klansman. It's absurd, and the only principled way out is to allow both a begrudged seat in the discussion (and promptly destroy their ideas as they objectively deserve), or ban both. But this playing footsie with monsters on the Left while pretending the real monsters are only on the Right needs to stop.

12:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This racism/sexism is correcting historical *injustices!* Because it is corrective and never retributive it is obviously correct. It's a brute moral fact. In fact it is so brute it doesn't even need to be argued.

12:59 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

What The Fuck, Anonymous? No way the KKK gets anywhere near the death toll?
First, they killed tens of thousands, either directly or via imprisonment for made up crimes (The founder of the KKK was a slave trader before the war, and hired out prison labot after.) Second, the KKK itself never was in charge of the US. The violent right is bad, bad news. (This is not to defend Stalin or Mao, though to be sure the Chinese certainly learned the right lesson after the starvation of the Cultural Revolution: just look at historical life expectancy there.) Nazis and the British Raj were roughly as bad.

1:38 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

I think Anon is right, PM.

It's rather an outlier, but reputable people put the death toll from communism at 100 million.

The Klan sucks, obviously...but they rank way down low in the hierarchy of mass-murdering psychos.

3:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"
I think Anon is right, PM.

It's rather an outlier, but reputable people put the death toll from communism at 100 million.

The Klan sucks, obviously...but they rank way down low in the hierarchy of mass-murdering psychos."

Exactly, and I don't think people truly comprehend how unbelievably cruel a belief system has to be to rack up that death toll. Look, there were like 15 million Jews in Hitler's day. Give the guy omnipotence, and he is still an order of magnitude less devastating that Mao + Stalin. The KKK were brutal, but they were never as ruthlessly at war with humanity itself to come anywhere near the brutality of the highest profile Leftist regimes.

5:06 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

Hitler only had a few years to really do his thing before he was beaten. Stalin had decades. And Hitler didn't remotely kill only Jews. And it's a bullshit comparison going by numbers alone. And Hitler's whole thing was 'Lebensraum'. He was certainly intending to wipe out a whole lot more than he actually got away with. I also suspect your estimations of comparative numbers are way off. But this isn't the real issue here. We *know* that the forerunners of the plan killed in the hundreds of thousands at least, and we're certainly willing to kill more. We also *know* that the Klan and it's proxies and fellow travelers have killed thousands directly (via lynching and 'race riots, etc.) I don't understand how the comparison to Mao or Stalin holds up, because (a) their intentions are different and (b) their capabilities are different. If I can't reasonably compare the Klan to Hitler, you can't compare campus left-wingers to Stalin any more reasonably.
Like I said: What The Fuck.

6:50 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

One more thing: bringing up Mao and Stalin whenever you want to criticize socialism just isn't very convincing. Socialism TODAY looks more like Sweden, which to be sure is a notorious hellhole, but hasn't actually killed of huge fractions of its population.

6:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The comparison is based on whether certain ideologies deserve to be given a presumption of good faith. The idea is that giving it to Nazis or Klansmen carries far too much tail risk to tolerate. But given that historically the hard left has orders of magnitude greater realized tail risk, I simply cannot consider this to be a very well-reasoned view. This isn't really that hard to piece together.

Like it or not allowing the hard left free reign objectively carries with it the risk of hundreds of millions dead. No other ideology has that on their baseball card.

So there are two non-absurd possibilities. You allow all comers to the table despite history, and trust the market of ideas to be efficient, or you want to regulate in which case the Left needs to be restricted, because it clearly bears massive risk.

Also, this is so lame:

" Socialism TODAY looks more like Sweden, which to be sure is a notorious hellhole, but hasn't actually killed of huge fractions of its population."

You could totally see a variant of the hard right which is in a family resemblence to Klanism or Nazism without a hundredth of the brutality due to historical circumstance or just basic adaptation (it's not hard to understand murder is not a winning poltiical strategy long-term). Some societies run by them very well might thrive. The issue is tail risk, and the Left is worse by something like > 10x.

7:32 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Is Sweden even socialist?

7:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Is Sweden even socialist?"

Not at all, it's a market economy with a ton of redistributive programs. Basically FDR on nitrous. It even has a hereditary monarchy still. If I remember correctly, it was a bit more socialist before a financial crisis in the 90's at which point they liberalized a bit more to great results.

But regardless it does bear a family resemblance to leftism, which is true. But it is entirely useless when judging risk posed by those family of ideologies.

8:03 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

Anonymous: as for lame: YOU are the one who went big and compared today's PC world to Lenin (ROTFLMAO.) I don't like those bastard either, but Lenin, they ain't. Then Winston chimes in and says Lenin is an order of magnitude worse than Hitler and, well: I don't even.

DUDES: THESE ANALOGIES ARE BASED ON MULTIPLE FALLACIES.

8:04 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

EVERYBODY CALM DONW OR DONT IDC

8:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Anonymous: as for lame: YOU are the one who went big and compared today's PC world to Lenin (ROTFLMAO.) I don't like those bastard either, but Lenin, they ain't. Then Winston chimes in and says Lenin is an order of magnitude worse than Hitler and, well: I don't even."

I was responding to Winston's initial point that it does not make sense that PC types like this nutcase in the article, who are essentially neo-Marxists, are allowed in mainstream discussion but the Klan is not. I made the entirely cogent point that on a risk-based analysis that is entirely inconsistent, based on the horrifically bloody history of the Left, while the exclusion of the Klan is also based on a (much less) bloody history, even under a ton of reasonable counterfactuals. A simple corrollary is that some non-risk based (purely deontological) factor is at play to maintain those two positions, and that people who maintain this grant it the same moral weight as basically preventing genocide, which again seems really absurd on its own terms.

I'm sorry, but none of that is fallacious. It's not even unsound.

8:46 PM  
Blogger Pete Mack said...

The 'horrifically bloody history of the left.' WHICH history do you mean? When you jumped to Marxism, I assumed Lenin/Stalin. Do you mean the SDS? (Who didn't actually kill remotely at the same level as the KKK.) Some other group?
I don't think we should be 'mainstreaming' the nuttier PC stuff either. But going all in on 'horrifically bloody' didn't make a lot of sense as an analogy.
On the other hand Breitbart was playing footsies with various white nativist groups...and he was an advisor to the President. Surely that's a comparable level of 'mainstreaming'?

5:59 PM  
Blogger The Mystic said...

No offense intended, but this is one hell of an imprecise mess of confusions, if you ask me. I think it kinda started here, in comment 1:

"And as far as why the neo-Marxist left still retains some acceptable status in American life but people like the clan do not, this is unforgivable in my mind. Look, there is no possible world in which the KKK gets anywhere near the death toll of hard Leftism implemented in any major country. The only way you can square this is by saying you'd rather kill miillions of people and be on the Left than be a klansman."

I would ask:

1) To what extent is the current PC movement related to either the "neo-Marxist left" or "hard Leftism implemented in any major country"?

2) Is there really a significant accepted presence of "neo-Marxism" in American politics?


I do agree that we have to recognize there are extreme dangers on either end of the political spectrum, and I do agree that the likes of Stalin and Mao are consequentially far worse than the KKK (something to which I'm not sure I understand why you object, Pete), but I can't help but think it's quite a leap to associate either of those two and their politics with the American SJWs, repugnant though they are.

It's not that there aren't any similarities, of course, it's just that they aren't sufficient to make them members of the same category of political thought, I don't suspect.

Honestly, I have read quite a bit of Marx's work and some of the subsequent permutations of schools' work, and it is to me one of the most widely and thoroughly sloppily discussed topics in American political discourse. Marx's own internal confusions, misleading idiosyncrasies, and the variety and strangeness of subsequent schools claiming relation to his thought don't aid the matter, but it's really difficult to group entities like Stalin and Mao as communists in any sense other than by-name-only. Basically, they are both grouped best as totalitarians, in my estimation; they just take the name of communism for the sake of not calling themselves totalitarians. They relate very poorly to the principles laid out in, say, Marx's Communist Manifesto.

For example:

1) Neither China nor Russia actually implemented the incredibly steep progressive taxation scheme designed to prevent mass accumulation of wealth. On the contrary, they forcibly maintained their resemblance to feudal lords which they decried of capitalist nations' leaders.
2) Neither China nor Russia abolished inheritance
3) Neither China nor Russia had means of production which could be said in any sense to be directly governed by the workers in a free association of producers
4) Both China and Russia subjected their populations to extreme censorship and pubishment for thoughtcrime, which is explicitly declared unacceptable throughout Marx's work.

Basically, both Mao and Lenin stipulated pursuit of Marx's Communism's long-term goals, but their modification was: it will require an intermediate state determined by us.

And that intermediate state of totalitarian chaos and depravity is all they ever were.

None of this means that Communism, as Marx or anyone else envisions it, would actually work, but it does segregate Communism meaningfully from "hard Leftist" implementations in the past.

1:45 PM  

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