Political Correctness Then And Now: (a) Sokal; (b) Boghossian/Pluckrose/Lindsay
Neo-PC is more powerful, radical and dangerous than paleo-PC was.
Sokal was and still is treated as something of a hero; Boghossian is about to be punished by PSU. Punished for doing the same thing Sokal did: exposing academic bullshit.
Most more-or-less liberals of my acquaintance are still basically just going along with this nonsense. I don't think it would be excessively harsh or inaccurate to call it silently supporting progressive anti-liberalism and anti-rationalism...though I tend to be suspicious of such accusations. There's normally a difference between not opposing x and supporting x. Still...when something's bad enough and obvious enough and you're still not opposing it... Well, I don't know how to end that sentence.
The NPCs have the internet now; they're must more unified than the PPCs were. They have made it clear that they will punish anyone with the temerity to challenge or even question their dogma. And what they aim for is legal prohibitions against it.
To illustrate the movement leftward, I like to point to the case of what we might call hyper-consentualism about sex. One of the things that helped topple PPC was the "Antioch rules": intrusive rules dictating how students at Antioch College--one of the leftiest schools in the country--had to act during sex: specifically, asking for permission/consent at every escalation of the action. The rules were rightly ridiculed as sexual totalitarianism. But what was a reductio of PC lunacy in the early '90s is orthodoxy today--at universities, at any rate. How long will it be before such rules are imposed upon the non-college population? Depends on how long it takes the left to gain such power outside universities. Wherever the left can impose its dogma, it will impose its dogma. There is no good reason to have different rules for universities and elsewhere. The only difference in the two cases is that the left rules the former, but not--yet--the latter. Not that it makes sense to tolerate such totalitarianism at universities...but we seem to have simply come to accept it. [Incidentally here's some drooling NPC nonsense praising the Antioch rules as ahead of their time.]
Sokal was a hero; Boghossian et al. are punished. PC just keeps winning, pushing the Overton window further and further leftward.
But oh well...I mean, orange man bad and all...
Sokal was and still is treated as something of a hero; Boghossian is about to be punished by PSU. Punished for doing the same thing Sokal did: exposing academic bullshit.
Most more-or-less liberals of my acquaintance are still basically just going along with this nonsense. I don't think it would be excessively harsh or inaccurate to call it silently supporting progressive anti-liberalism and anti-rationalism...though I tend to be suspicious of such accusations. There's normally a difference between not opposing x and supporting x. Still...when something's bad enough and obvious enough and you're still not opposing it... Well, I don't know how to end that sentence.
The NPCs have the internet now; they're must more unified than the PPCs were. They have made it clear that they will punish anyone with the temerity to challenge or even question their dogma. And what they aim for is legal prohibitions against it.
To illustrate the movement leftward, I like to point to the case of what we might call hyper-consentualism about sex. One of the things that helped topple PPC was the "Antioch rules": intrusive rules dictating how students at Antioch College--one of the leftiest schools in the country--had to act during sex: specifically, asking for permission/consent at every escalation of the action. The rules were rightly ridiculed as sexual totalitarianism. But what was a reductio of PC lunacy in the early '90s is orthodoxy today--at universities, at any rate. How long will it be before such rules are imposed upon the non-college population? Depends on how long it takes the left to gain such power outside universities. Wherever the left can impose its dogma, it will impose its dogma. There is no good reason to have different rules for universities and elsewhere. The only difference in the two cases is that the left rules the former, but not--yet--the latter. Not that it makes sense to tolerate such totalitarianism at universities...but we seem to have simply come to accept it. [Incidentally here's some drooling NPC nonsense praising the Antioch rules as ahead of their time.]
Sokal was a hero; Boghossian et al. are punished. PC just keeps winning, pushing the Overton window further and further leftward.
But oh well...I mean, orange man bad and all...
posted by Winston Smith at
10:47 AM
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