A devastating critique of postmodernism

This is a must watch video. In just 15 minutes Jordan Peterson passionately and convincingly rips postmodernism and Marxism to shreds:

BLM insanity afflicts Catholic University

The DePaul University president has banned campus pro-life messaging while promoting the more fashionable Black Lives Matter politics:

The president of the largest Roman Catholic University in America refused a conservative student group's request to post pro-life posters because it would constitute "bigotry ... under the cover of free speech."

Despite the fact that "Black Lives Matter" posters hang on the very windows of the administrative offices at Chicago-based DePaul University, President Reverend Dennis H. Holtschneider banned posters reading "Unborn Lives Matter," a message much more in keeping with Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death. ...

When po-mo, pc identity politics start infecting the thinking at Catholic universities you know the culture war is being lost.  President Holtshneider has defected to the enemy's side.  Though it would appear that this has been happening for some time.  And considering some of Pope Francis's rhetoric on global warming and capitalism, the entire Catholic Church is lurching in that direction.

Universities - "Day care for millenials"

HOBOsexuality studies at UVic (just for example):



University 'liberal arts' faculties (and increasingly K-12) are institutions of indoctrination that produce graduates who are dumber and lower in productive potential than when they entered. Who in their right mind would knowingly pay big bucks to put their offspring into day care like that?

Also: Blazing Cat Fur, Powerline and a poem.

The low moral and intellectual state of the left

Dennis Prager recently wrote a column in the Jewish Journal expressing his concerns:

"... about the Torah and the current unprecedented attempt to blur male-female distinction in biology and society."

It ignited a firestorm of hatemail from the Jewish left.

To which Prager responded "The hate is all in one direction":

... Virtually every one of them is shameful. If you care about the moral nature and intellectual viability of American Jewish life, they are actually frightening.

... I am accused of cruelty, intolerance, bigotry, hate, publicly humiliating someone, ignorance and more.  Yet, there is not a hint of any one of these things in my column.

... Other letters and comments accuse me of intolerance, bigotry, ignorance, transphobia, maligning, defamation, slander, xenophobia, foolishness, mean-spiritedness, inflicting “spiritual violence,” lacking compassion, anti-knowledge and more — all without providing a single example.

... It is these letters and comments that are filled with hate; it is these writers who intend to humiliate; it is these people who are intolerant of any view but their own.

And, yesterday he followed up with: "The moral and intellectual state of the Jewish left."

First, the low intellectual state. ... Bret Stephens ... succinctly put it recently in his Wall Street Journal column, “American academia is, by and large, idiotic.”

... characteristic No. 2: Instead of intellectual discourse, what we have is the dismissal of the decency of the left’s opponents. If you oppose the left, you are rarely debated. Instead you are dismissed as sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted and spewing hatred.

Third, and finally, there is a willingness to make up falsehoods in the service of progressive ideals.

Of course this isn't a problem just with the American Jewish left on the issue of male-female blurring, but with the left throughout the entire West over a wide range of issues.


[Via Blazing Cat Fur]

Radical feminism at Simon Fraser University (just for example)

David Thompson "And Yet They Want to Teach Us":

Janice Fiamengo pokes through the mental wreckage of some standard feminist boilerplate, in which facts are either absent or inverted, questions are begged at a rate of knots, and criticism of feminist assumptions is equated with both racism and “co-ordinated campaigns of terror.”

Professor Fiamengo discusses the feminist inability to understand and avoid the logical fallacies while 
promoting hatred of men at Simon Fraser University (SFU)

White, privileged hypocrites

Dinesh D'Souza schools an Amherst College student on his hypocrisy [via]:



And here's the full event:

Study: Don't be judgemental towards self-identifying vampires

Rachel Dolezal, a purely white woman, self identifies as a black woman.  What's next?

How about self-identifying as a vampire:

Research led by D.J. Williams, director of social work at Idaho State University, indicated that people who identify themselves as “real” vampires ... would not disclose their practices to those in the helping professions and risk reactions like ridicule, disgust and possible diagnosis of a mental illness.  [Yah think?!]

The paper, published in the latest issue of Critical Social Work, a peer-reviewed journal based in Canada, found that authentic vampires ...  might be stereotyped by clinicians whose fields discourage biases ... [concluding]:

... social workers and helping professionals should learn more about alternative identities and communities, listen and learn from clients, strive to become more aware of our own potential biases and stereotypes, and interrogate and challenge common social discourses that pathologize and demonize.

... Clinicians should continually work to infuse core professional values and ethical standards and principles, including social justice, dignity, and worth of the person, the importance of human relationships, competence, social diversity, and client self-determination [hitting nearly every po-mo, pc buzzword in the social "science" lexicon].

It may be politically incorrect, but I think I'll file this under "batshit crazy".

"White privilege" theory - academia a waste of time and money, and worse

Rex Murphy:

I’ve seen the captious phrase “white privilege” — a camp neologism by my reading — very often lately. It emerges from the intellectual marshes of social justice “educators,” a typical pseudo-concept from that roiling pastiche of academic pursuit.

... The obsession of seeing everything in race-coloured terms is itself racist. Anti-racism pursed by zealots transforms itself into the very vice it deplores. This is the cost of identity politics, and its close bedmate, victimology enterprises. ...

... It is to the great shame of modern universities that they have debased themselves to the pursuit of these follies ...

The radical academics who push this po-mo nonsense should be run off our campuses, and the faculties from which they push it should be shut down.  They are clearly a horrendous waste of taxpayers' money, but, much worse, they are polluting the minds of gullible young students and damaging society at large.

"It is difficult to conceive a more retrograde idea ..."

Rex Murphy:

.... it is with more grief than anger that I caught the story of an Ottawa “vigil” this week, held after a Missouri grand jury said it would not charge police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Ferguson teenager Michael Brown. Organizers of the rally asked “white/non-black allies” to “refrain from taking up space” and “never be the centre of anything.” 

That last phase “never be at the centre of anything” is particularly troubling. It is so defiantly categorical and universally — “anything” — dismissive.

The phrase and the other gibberish attending it should serve as a motto for every meeting and seminar dedicated to diversity as the governing motto for how not to engage with social issues, how not to bridge the real differences that can exist between people. ...

Rex's column is a very thoughtful take on a good example of what our universities are churning out these days.  Humanities faculties at virtually every university, against all logic, embrace  hare-brained, radical, po-mo social theories as if they were established scientific fact.  It has become what most "progressives" accept unquestioningly as mainstream thought.  The damage done to students' brains, society at large and to tax payers' wallets is enormous.

Subverting the "education" system

This story in today's Post is yet another indicator of how widely and deeply radical social and political thinking has infiltrated the education system:

... an alternative public school ... “based on the principles of participatory democracy and social equity,” as the school advertised itself.  ... Eitan, then 17 years old ...  said, ‘Ima [Hebrew for mother], the walls of the school are plastered with posters saying Israel: Apartheid State,’ ” ... referring to flyers mounted by a pro-Palestinian student club.

... In one of its teaching guides, the B.C. Department of Education says social justice “extends beyond the protection of rights” and aims for a “just and equitable society.”

... In its 2010 Social Justice Action Plan, the Toronto District School Board defines social justice ...

... In New Brunswick, one Grade 4 teacher drew ire ...

... In Ontario, one school sent Grade 1 students home with day-planners that highlighted an “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” and “International Day of Zero-Tolerance on Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting.”

... another Ontario school sent Grade 7 students to a protest hosted by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, a notoriously confrontational activist group that advocates militantly for economic equality.

... In Quebec, one eco-friendly elementary school excluded a six-year-old boy from a teddy-bear contest because his lunch box contained a plastic bag rather than a reusable container.

This guy has it right:

“That’s an illegitimate use of the school’s authority,” said British sociologist Frank Furedi. “It’s not up to the schools to determine the behaviour and values of the family. A child’s education should not be confused with politicization, nor is it about internalizing the values of their teachers.”

This story should set off alarm bells for parents who haven’t been paying attention. It’s clear that the "education" system has become saturated with the highly dubious, radically toxic ideologies of postmodernist moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism and so-called "social justice".  Check out the web-sites of the teachers’ unions and university departments of education and see how far they’ve gone and plan to go to perpetuate these claptrap social(ist) theories by brazenly indoctrinating children and students from K through U.

Parents, should be loudly protesting! Schools are failing at their primary job which is to educate, to provide children with the basic tools and competence needed to advance and to prepare them to think for themselves. Instead, they are wasting valuable time doing the opposite - indoctrinating impressionable kids in dubious social and political thinking while neglecting their primary responsibilities. It leads nowhere good.

Child abuse

Another shocking case of parents abusing their child to test radical social theory:

A couple who concealed the sex of their child and raised it as ‘gender neutral’ for five years have finally revealed - it’s a boy. ...

It's not as if there isn't plenty of evidence of  huge biological differences between the sexes: 

... Reflecting the fashionable idea that male and female roles have been "socially constructed," most commentators speak of gender instead of sex. ...

... There's only one problem with this beguiling vision of androgyny. Whatever we might like to believe ... sex distinctions remain a deeply rooted part of human nature. ... a wealth of scientific evidence showing that these differences are "hardwired" into our biology.

What are the odds that "Sasha" won't be deeply psychologically scarred? There oughta' be a law.

[Via Blazingcatfur]

BC's radical sex-ed agenda

We've heard a lot lately about Ontario's controversial sex-ed program.  Now BlazingCatFur highlights a similarly radical agenda being pushed in BC. (See also.)

It's part of a broader program of social engineering/indoctrination in public schools and beyond as is made obvious by the BCTF's "Social Justice" web page:

... an organization of professionals, we accept and act on our broad responsibility to be involved in the social development of the communities and the province we live in, and we do this in the interests of the children we teach. ["... broad responsibility ..."? According to who?]

... The social justice initiatives of the Federation focus on poverty, child and youth issues, race relations, gender equity, homophobia and heterosexism, bullying, environmental issues, globalization, and violence prevention. In addition, the Federation has an advisory committee on Aboriginal education. [They haven't left out many of the social activists' favourite buzz words.]

This can lead nowhere good. Parents - Rise Up!

Leftist indoctrination in engineering

We know that leftists have thoroughly infiltrated academia in the humanities, education and the soft sciences with their destructive pc, PoMo, multiculti ideologies;  and we know that they have been, for decades, making similar inroads in our schools brainwashing children from K thru 12.

Lubos Motl gives us an example of how it's also happening even in engineering faculties: 

The left-wing indoctrination that has overtaken a significant portion of the Western college education is often being discussed but every new example of this phenomenon disappoints us again. It's really bad.

Penn State University is the place that openly harbors the father of the infamous hockey stick graph. And you bet that it's not just one defective researcher who happens to be employed by a random school: the whole atmosphere at that college has been rebuilt to match Michael Mann.

Political correctness - a blight on liberty

Here's Dr. Srdja Trifkovic comparing Western postmodern politically correct society with the post-Stalin Soviet bloc and Yugo under Tito.  It doesn't compare well:





[Shamelessly ripped off from Xanthippa]

Muslims distort history, subvert education

In yesterday's New York Post:

State testmakers played favorites when quizzing high-schoolers on world religions -- giving Islam and Buddhism the kid-gloves treatment while socking it to Christianity, critics say.

Teachers complain that the reading selections from the Regents exam in global history and geography given last week featured glowing passages pertaining to Muslim society but much more critical essay excerpts on the subject of Christianity.

The Muslim reading:

* “Wherever they went, the Moslems [sic] brought with them their love of art, beauty and learning. From about the eighth to the eleventh century, their culture was superior in many ways to that of western Christendom.

* “Some of the finest centers of Moslem life were established in Spain. In Cordova, the streets were solidly paved, while at the same time in Paris people waded ankle-deep in mud after a rain. Cordovan public lamps lighted roads for as far as ten miles; yet seven hundred years later there was still not a single public lamp in London!”

The Christian reading:

Common Procedures used by Friars in Converting Areas in Spanish America:

* “Idols, temples and other material evidences of paganism destroyed.”

* “Christian buildings often constructed on sites of destroyed native temples in order to symbolize and emphasize the substitution of one religion by the other.”

* “Indians supplied construction labor without receiving payment.”

David Barton speaking on the Glenn Beck show attributed these distortions, in part, to the subversive activities of the Council on Islamic Education:

The Council has been accused of "pressuring American textbook publishers to revise their respective curricula to promote an extremist and revisionist view of Islam."

Critics have called the Council "a content gatekeeper with virtually unchecked power over publishers" and allege that "as a result, history textbooks accommodate Islam on terms that Islamists demand."

A report of the American Textbook Council calls the Council "an agent of contemporary censorship," and accuses it of being "in fact a political advocacy organization" that seeks to present an "Islamist" version of history.

Subversion and distortion by Islamists is par for the course. What's extremely hard to accept is that the po-mo, leftist useful idiots who infest the education system and publishing industry are permitted to let them get away with this disgusting crap.

Margaret Atwood's "fictional drivel"

Barbara Kay nails it! She concludes:

The Handmaid's Tale is a nasty, anti-American trifecta of bigotry: a cheap thrust at men, conservatives and religious Christians.

... merely a tale told by a feminist, and like so many other such heavy-handed ideological screeds, it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Exactly! The Handmaid's Tale was set in the country least likely to implement her dystopian "vision". And worse, po-mo feminists like Atwood have been shamefully silent when women in certain Muslim societies like Saudia Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban are actually treated as breeder chattel.

The Pope’s Galileo

Pope Benedict was recently prevented from delivering an address at La Sapienza University by Leftist faculty and student protests. They were upset that he was going to deliver an address supposedly defending the Catholic Church’s trial and conviction of Galileo.

David Warren writes about this linking it to "witch-hunting spirit of "political correctness"" prevalent at universities as well as to "Human rights" ... kangaroo courts, free speech, ....

It’s an excellent read. What I found most interesting, though, was Mr. Warren’s update telling readers that the Pope’s address to La Sapienza is now available in English - and it "does not even mention Galileo."

I, & most of the rest of the world media, fell for the imaginings of the
people I compare to "howler monkeys" ...

Of course this doesn’t alter the validity of Mr. Warren’s arguments a bit. And the upside of the whole sad episode of the Pope's being hounded off the campus is that it helps expose the university for the illiberal, post-modern, rat’s nest that it is; and, the Pope’s address will be far more widely read than it would have otherwise.

Update: From Doug Newton in the comments another take from Edward Michael George.

Postmodernist multiculti folly

Yesterday, the National Post published the po-mo musings of a pair of U of T academics regarding the Aqsa Parvez honour killing in Toronto.

I’ll address one, professor Emon, who opined:

“... we have an issue of multiculturalism that we need to recognize cuts both ways -- i.e. how do "we" Canada accommodate the "other," and how does the "other" accommodate "our" Canadian values....”

If it is “an issue of multiculturalism”, that’s an unfortunate consequence of our cultural elites’ having promoted multi-culti folly for decades. And if it does “cut both ways” - “our” Canadian part was done when “they” immigrated.

This is how mutual accommodation should happen (adopting Emon’s po-mo manner of expression):

“We” Canada accommodate the “other” by welcoming “them” to Canada thereby affording “them” the opportunity to better “their” lives in “our” free society.

The “other” accommodates Canadian values by observing Canadian laws, official languages, customs and practices and by making a sincere and vigorous effort to assimilate productively.

At the same time, however, since “ours” is a free society, “they” are free to use their ethnic languages, customs and practices so long as they do not violate “our” laws. The same rules, naturally, apply to “us”.

“We” Canada should not be helping “them” to maintain “their” ethnic traditions. That is a private matter. And “we” Canada certainly should not be assimilating to “them”.

Any support that “we” Canada give “them” should be strictly to help them adapt to Canada, foster national unity and bolster “their” identity as Canadians and their loyalty to Canada.

Official ‘government’ policy should be to promote, not multiculturalism, but a unified Canadian identity - a single dynamic, evolving Canadian ‘culture’.

[h/t five-foot-fury]

Allied bombing campaign - war museum controversy

By now everybody and his dog has weighed in on the National War Museum exhibit’s implicit hand-wringing over the allied bombing campaign during WWII. U of T professor Randall Hansen thinks the museum was mistaken in acceding to veterans’ demands that the exhibit be altered.

Naturally, as a right-wing war monger, I’m with the vets. This letter from a WWII RAF bomber pilot makes some excellent points much better than I ever could:

Letter published: Saturday, September 01, 2007
Re: The War Museum's Great Mistake, Randall Hansen, Aug. 31.

From his comfortable chair at the University of Toronto, Randall Hansen declares that objection to the objectionable plaque in the Canadian War Museum is "a national embarrassment."

He laments the fate of Dresden, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Hanover, Darmstadt, Pforzheim and other German cities bombed during the Second World War, and raises the inflammatory spectre of women, children and old men being burned, boiled and asphyxiated while cowering in cellars.

Prof. Hansen's should know that the rules for aerial bombardment were laid down by Hitler, when the Luftwaffe savaged Warsaw in the war's early days. In May, 1940, long before the 1945 attack on Dresden, Rotterdam felt the brunt of the German's aerial assault. Next, London was set ablaze, Coventry was reduced to rubble, along with Birmingham, Newcastle, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Bournemouth. The list goes on.

We simply followed the rules that the Germans themselves had established, but in the end, we did it more effectively. Had we not, the campus at U of T would now be patrolled by the Gestapo. They would no doubt be applauding Randall Hensen's distorted view of history, but some among us consider it a national disgrace.

Les Morrison, Lancaster bomber pilot, Burlington, Ont.

Thank you Mr. Morrison! PoMo moralizers and hand-wringers like Randall Hansen and his ilk at the War Museum should drop dead. Churchill and the other leaders did what they thought at the time was necessary to defeat unarguably evil and brutal enemies. Trying to second-guess and pass moral judgement on their decisions sixty years after the fact is, at best, a waste of time.

A Canadian “radical cyberfeminist”

"Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics: The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory"

Thanks to David Thompson in "Peddling Stupidity" we learn that the above string of characters is the title of the doctoral dissertation written and presumably defended by Carolyn Guertin to earn her PhD at the University of Alberta. Dr. Guertin is now a Senior McLuhan Fellow at the University of Toronto.

Her thesis is an outstanding example of the kind of postmodernist nonsense passed off as serious scholarship in humanities faculties in universities across the western world. A few representative samples of the verbal mayhem:

From the Overview: "Evolving out of the evocative echoes between three countercultural discourses, hypertext, cyberfeminist theory and the Canadian feminist school of writing known as fiction-theory, my dissertation undertakes a study of the function of memory in digital narrative.......Quantum feminist mnemotechnics incorporate the archival nature of the database into the text's structure and interface, privileging self-reflexive narrative and the spatio-temporal elements of postmodernism."
[...]
From Chapter 1: "The digital archive is a model well suited to our times and to a cyberfeminist agenda precisely because it is an efficient tool for inclusive dealings with large quantities of disparate information. The archive, as defined by Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever , is born equally of the compulsion to remember and of fears of forgetting. .....
.......Cyberfeminist embodiment, as a 'database of intensities', is an exploration of the senses and of hybridity (as opposed to simple dualisms or binary oppositions) in the suspended present moment, which engender a new awareness of the body--not a loss of body boundaries as Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" advocates."
[...]
From Chapter 2: "These are what I call quantum feminisms. Quantum feminisms are the new visual perspectives--or, more accurately, orientations--of the age of the matrix."
[...]
And in Conclusion (this is good): "The whole concept of reaching a conclusion or drawing conclusions is, of course, antithetical to the nature of this kind of literature as much as to my aims in this work as a whole. However, it is perhaps appropriate to tuck in some of the loose threads and tie together all of this as some kind of a patchworked piece.........
.........I have explored matrices, folds, knots, all of them, perhaps only adding to their complexity rather than managing to unravel them. The only way to truly unsnarl irreconcilables of course is to twing, as Óh-T'bee demonstrates. I have twinged? Twung? Twisted? Danced as hard as I could through raising arguments, shapes and states--probes, McLuhan would have called them--that cut across and through these constructions in space and time: the quantum, browsing, becoming, agency, noise, flow, différance , interface, objects, events, duration, intervallic space, topology, complexity, ecstasy, incorporation, inscription, translation, heterotopic space, hierophanies, hysteria, hybridity, chora, translation, transformance, interference, entanglement, chaos, Hilbert space, speed, resonance, rupture, rapture, wanderlust, subjectivities, all kinds of systems, including the circulatory one of the body itself.....
.............In mnemonic space, there is no past or future, only intertwined intervals. The twing, however, is irreducible. Transformance is the only door out."

Aarrrgghhh! Guertin’s dissertation consists of over 120,000 words of sustained bafflegab. It’s densely packed with loopy jargon; names are dropped by the dozen, and; there are many vague references to mathematical and physical concepts such as Hilbert space, fractals and, of course, quantum physics and relativity - all with little or no discernable justification.

There’s much more in David Thompson’s post. It’s a great critique with additional insights in the many comments and in this follow-up post.

What I find absolutely fascinating is the utter brazenness. Preparing and presenting such gibberish requires extraordinary "chutzpah" (to quote Mr. Thompson). There’s not much doubt Guertin is an intelligent woman; and it’s unlikely she’s completely deluded (nuts). So perhaps her intelligence resembles that of a sophisticated con-artist, passing off (successfully in her own radical milieu) incomprehensible drivel as genuine scholarship. It must take monumental nerve (and a six-figure salary doesn't hurt) to do this with a straight face year in and year out - to her students, her colleagues and her conference audiences. It’s really quite an astounding phenomenon!

But Carolyn Guertin and many thousands like her have been taught to think and express themselves this way. They submit their doctoral dissertations for review and earnestly defend them to win their PhDs (ie other PoMo flakes nod their agreement). They are hired to teach and fill prestigious scholarly positions. Entire faculties in nearly every university in North America and Europe are dedicated to spreading their postmodernist pathology as far and wide as possible.

You do have to wonder how this loony business got started and how and why it continues. As David Thompson observed:

"There are simply too many incompetents, ideologues and charlatans in the PoMo humanities to dismiss them as anomalies. That so many of them survive, even flourish, suggests a dysfunction of the academic environment they inhabit."

At best it’s a fraudulent waste of time and billions of taxpayer dollars. At worst it’s a kind of intellectual anarchy that does serious harm - to young student minds and in the longer run to society in general.