Post-Modernism - Or How 3 French Cunts Fucked Up the West

[Secret Asshole]

I doubt that people who don't know that the Earth orbits the Sun, even know the word "post-modernism".

People don't even know the basic tenants of science or the scientific method. By the way, every STEM experiment is basically looking to disprove itself. When an experiment is successful, we state that the null hypothesis (opposite to what we're looking for) was disproved. We DON'T say we found what we were looking for, because we can never know that for certain. We can only know what is false, and that is the null hypothesis. I mean, this goes intensely to the rationale and philosophy of science. Science is not absolute truth, it is human truth. It is always evolving and changing. We know what is false. We cannot 100% know what is true.

What's misunderstood about this is that science has a very, very rigorous way to test for this. Its not something where you sit on your ass and think about it. You have to go out and show you disproved the opposition to your argument. This requires data, evidence, rigorous statistics and experimentation. Scientific truth is designed to be malleable, to an extent. Basically, its true until you disprove it. But you BETTER have data, evidence and statistics.

Post-Modernism rejects any sort of truth, even scientific truth. The problem is that science is fundamentally opposed to this. You can't just 'reject' scientific truths offhand. Blood, sweat and tears has gone into it. For example, the biological differences between men and women is rejected completely out of hand by many intersectionalists, which is post-modern by its definition. This has become ingrained and is no longer politically correct to say, even though it is a hard fact of truth that hasn't been disproved in the least. Even when people go looking to disprove men and women are different neurologically, they find this notion disproved by their own work. Post-modernism cannot work in a scientific context, though the notion it can has been forced on the general public through culture. Mainly through shit-bag journalists, ivory tower academics who wouldn't know research if it fucked them in the ass and overpaid children known as actors and actresses, many of whom barely graduated college. And if they did, they never took anything but drama or acting courses.

Science is hard, difficult to understand, sometimes contradictory and requires a lot of critical thinking to interpret correctly. Critical thinking has been labeled by ivory tower academics and journalists as white supremacy (not joking, there've been multiple articles on this). So even if people don't know what post-modernism is or even care about science, inter-sectionalism has hijacked scientific evidence and discarded it. In terms of culture, not in the field itself. Otherwise we'd be fucked as a society. The sciences have generally been resistant to intersectionalism because its fucking hard, requires work and evidence. And most people who support post-modernisim and intersectionality are really, really fucking objectively stupid.

Also, scientists have very easily infiltrated cultural studies and proved how fucking stupid they really are, while their entry into the sciences haven't been touched.

The War On Science, Anti-Intellectualism, And ‘Alternative Ways Of Knowing’ In 21st-Century America



"The postmodern assault on science and its relativism has left us vulnerable to the absurdities of the defenders of supernaturalism, the deception of quacks, and the fanaticism of religious fascists and would-be dictators. History teaches that whenever and wherever irrationalism and relativism have acquired political force, human suffering, violence, oppression, and loss of life have inevitably followed. The example of Nazi Germany will suffice here. Welcome to the postmodern world(?)."

Boy, I sure do love dipshit fear-mongering.

The article is fear-mogering, but its conclusions are really hyperbolic. Post-modern infiltration into science will undoubtedly cause suffering and societal dysfunction, at least for a time. For example, the feminist paradox is that in the most feminist countries, women fall back into gender roles and reject the massive amounts of money being poured at them to go into STEM fields. Why? Post-Modernisim and culture will not allow us to ask this question, as ideology and feelings trump empirical evidence.

Transexual children has gone up 1,000% in the UK. Most US Teens identify as Trans. In 2016, 0.3-0.6% of the US identified as Trans. Less than a percent. So why? These numbers don't match. What's with the rise? We can't ask these questions scientifically, because truth is now subjective. Emotion has overcome any and all search for the truth, no matter how uncomfortable. We on the farms know the answer, because we can logically deduce it. Its because being trans allows you to be untouchable. Its trendy. You get massive amounts of attention. The problem is that this truth clashes with the intersectional and post-modernist 'truth' that trans people are oppressed. Who would want to be trans? Apparently a lot of people, way more than those in the past. But they'll take extremely trivial things (public restrooms, which are basically liked by no one) and make it a massive issue to 'prove' oppression. They also will not look into trans suicides after SRS, which means this issue will not be solved. Ever. If emotion trumps objective truth, it is impossible to do anything without offense.

Answers that make people uncomfortable have become unacceptable. So hard questions cannot be asked, which means societal problems cannot be solved, which leads to suffering and societal dysfunction. Its a logical progression and we see it every day. You're not allowed to think about certain things or ask certain questions or think about them objectively. You're suppose to 'think' with your feelings. Basically, surrender to emotion and remove your thinking skills. Ignore what's been happening at the border has been there for years. Don't think about it. Don't look into it. Go with the mob. Give in to your delusion. That's really what's happening. Post-Modernisim is ok when its in an ivory tower. But when it hits the real world, there are some objective truths. You need to think critically. That's why we find ourselves living in this clown world where people try to rectify this way of thinking, but can't because there's massive cognitive dissonance that clashes with what is truth.

Emotions without thinking critically leads to delusion and fantasy. And then that fantasy becomes someone's reality. That's when they start throwing molotovs at ICE facilities and get gunned down, thinking they're a revolutionary. Reality does not go well with delusion. Just think. Hordes of so-called communists are defending multi-billion dollar corporations who are controlling them and submit to them because they think they're on their side because they hold the same ideals. Its pure delusion. Its a fantasy land enabled by this garbage ideology. In reality, Google should be investigated for treason the fucking instant it was developing a censorship engine for China. The national guard should have been sent in and arrested the entire fucking executive board. But we can't well do that, because Google is a nice progressive company. Even though we know that to be bullshit. The so-called defenders of the working class buy Apple phones where workers jump off roofs to kill themselves.

What we've got right now is a world ruled by insanity, because of the cognitive dissonance created by emotional 'truth' rather than empirical truth. I'm not saying society should be a technocracy. But right now its just pure insanity. Ignoring hard reality for the sake of someone's feelings. In a sense, this only empowers the wealthiest and most powerful. Because the failure and lack of thinking critically means you are blinded to who is really controlling you.

 

[Y2K Baby]

The article is fear-mogering, but its conclusions are really hyperbolic

Yeah. Agreed.

 

[TerribleIdeas™]

I thought a big part of Foucault was to dismantle the notion of mental illness, and by extension psychology and medicine. We should count our blessing that his idea has so far made no headway into serious, clinical practice; the bastard field of "sociology of medicine" or "public health" is another matter.

Derrida would have laughed at anything nonetheless.

Derrida was convinced that any and all binary phenomenon were illegitimate, had to be deconstructed, and then reconstructed as a non-binary phenomenon. Don't ask me to explain phenomenology, because I don't think anyone fucking understands it.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Derrida was convinced that any and all binary phenomenon were illegitimate, had to be deconstructed, and then reconstructed as a non-binary phenomenon. Don't ask me to explain phenomenology, because I don't think anyone fucking understands it.

Whenever I read about what he thought and his philosophy, my eyes just glaze over and I just come to the conclusion he had his head up his own ass and was a French fucking troll.

 

[Positron]

Irrationalist philosophers in the United States, such as Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, also contributed to the postmodern antiscience program. In his highly acclaimed book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), Kuhn asserted that scientific truths depend upon agreement among scientists operating under a guiding intellectual umbrella, or paradigm, built around a core of ideas based on irrational cultural and sociopolitical factors. A paradigm persists for a while until mounting anomalies it cannot address result in a “scientific revolution” and the establishment of a new paradigm built upon new conventions linked to a different set of sociopolitical factors. According to Kuhn, the solution to questions are relative to a paradigm rather than empirical evidence. For this reason, paradigms are incommensurable, and there is no real growth of scientific knowledge.

I don't think this is a fair representation of Kuhn, who after all is merely describing how Science actually works (as opposed to Popper, who stipulates how Science should work). Science is a human activity; egos get in the way, and compromises happen. And Science exists in a wider social sphere -- the Funding and Ethical committees, for example, are not made up entirely of scientists -- hence it is completely unrealistic that every single step is guided by pure rationality. The only faith we have -- and this is only a faith -- is that Science has a self-correcting mechanism that prevents it from straying too far.

I also don't understand where did the author get the idea that Kuhn said "there is no real growth of scientific knowledge", because the accumulation of empirical findings is growth. Likewise, the new paradigms, set out to explain a wider range of empirical phenomena, are the very fruits of growth. Indeed, incommensurability between old and new paradigms is the very sign that growth has occurred: just like a 6-year-old child can't stuff his body into clothes he wore at the age of 4 so he needs new clothes.

What Kuhn said is that the development of Science is not teleological; there is no pre-set goals other than accumulation and accommodation of more data. In other words, Sciences doesn't promise to "make the world a better place". It doesn't even promise we can understand "the world as it is" in the metaphysical sense.

 

[Trilby]

People don't even know the basic tenants of science or the scientific method. By the way, every STEM experiment is basically looking to disprove itself. When an experiment is successful, we state that the null hypothesis (opposite to what we're looking for) was disproved. We DON'T say we found what we were looking for, because we can never know that for certain. We can only know what is false, and that is the null hypothesis. I mean, this goes intensely to the rationale and philosophy of science. Science is not absolute truth, it is human truth. It is always evolving and changing. We know what is false. We cannot 100% know what is true.

What's misunderstood about this is that science has a very, very rigorous way to test for this. Its not something where you sit on your ass and think about it. You have to go out and show you disproved the opposition to your argument. This requires data, evidence, rigorous statistics and experimentation. Scientific truth is designed to be malleable, to an extent. Basically, its true until you disprove it. But you BETTER have data, evidence and statistics.

Post-Modernism rejects any sort of truth, even scientific truth. The problem is that science is fundamentally opposed to this. You can't just 'reject' scientific truths offhand. Blood, sweat and tears has gone into it. For example, the biological differences between men and women is rejected completely out of hand by many intersectionalists, which is post-modern by its definition. This has become ingrained and is no longer politically correct to say, even though it is a hard fact of truth that hasn't been disproved in the least. Even when people go looking to disprove men and women are different neurologically, they find this notion disproved by their own work. Post-modernism cannot work in a scientific context, though the notion it can has been forced on the general public through culture. Mainly through shit-bag journalists, ivory tower academics who wouldn't know research if it fucked them in the ass and overpaid children known as actors and actresses, many of whom barely graduated college. And if they did, they never took anything but drama or acting courses.

Science is hard, difficult to understand, sometimes contradictory and requires a lot of critical thinking to interpret correctly. Critical thinking has been labeled by ivory tower academics and journalists as white supremacy (not joking, there've been multiple articles on this). So even if people don't know what post-modernism is or even care about science, inter-sectionalism has hijacked scientific evidence and discarded it. In terms of culture, not in the field itself. Otherwise we'd be fucked as a society. The sciences have generally been resistant to intersectionalism because its fucking hard, requires work and evidence. And most people who support post-modernisim and intersectionality are really, really fucking objectively stupid.

Also, scientists have very easily infiltrated cultural studies and proved how fucking stupid they really are, while their entry into the sciences haven't been touched.






The article is fear-mogering, but its conclusions are really hyperbolic. Post-modern infiltration into science will undoubtedly cause suffering and societal dysfunction, at least for a time. For example, the feminist paradox is that in the most feminist countries, women fall back into gender roles and reject the massive amounts of money being poured at them to go into STEM fields. Why? Post-Modernisim and culture will not allow us to ask this question, as ideology and feelings trump empirical evidence.

Transexual children has gone up 1,000% in the UK. Most US Teens identify as Trans. In 2016, 0.3-0.6% of the US identified as Trans. Less than a percent. So why? These numbers don't match. What's with the rise? We can't ask these questions scientifically, because truth is now subjective. Emotion has overcome any and all search for the truth, no matter how uncomfortable. We on the farms know the answer, because we can logically deduce it. Its because being trans allows you to be untouchable. Its trendy. You get massive amounts of attention. The problem is that this truth clashes with the intersectional and post-modernist 'truth' that trans people are oppressed. Who would want to be trans? Apparently a lot of people, way more than those in the past. But they'll take extremely trivial things (public restrooms, which are basically liked by no one) and make it a massive issue to 'prove' oppression. They also will not look into trans suicides after SRS, which means this issue will not be solved. Ever. If emotion trumps objective truth, it is impossible to do anything without offense.

Answers that make people uncomfortable have become unacceptable. So hard questions cannot be asked, which means societal problems cannot be solved, which leads to suffering and societal dysfunction. Its a logical progression and we see it every day. You're not allowed to think about certain things or ask certain questions or think about them objectively. You're suppose to 'think' with your feelings. Basically, surrender to emotion and remove your thinking skills. Ignore what's been happening at the border has been there for years. Don't think about it. Don't look into it. Go with the mob. Give in to your delusion. That's really what's happening. Post-Modernisim is ok when its in an ivory tower. But when it hits the real world, there are some objective truths. You need to think critically. That's why we find ourselves living in this clown world where people try to rectify this way of thinking, but can't because there's massive cognitive dissonance that clashes with what is truth.

Emotions without thinking critically leads to delusion and fantasy. And then that fantasy becomes someone's reality. That's when they start throwing molotovs at ICE facilities and get gunned down, thinking they're a revolutionary. Reality does not go well with delusion. Just think. Hordes of so-called communists are defending multi-billion dollar corporations who are controlling them and submit to them because they think they're on their side because they hold the same ideals. Its pure delusion. Its a fantasy land enabled by this garbage ideology. In reality, Google should be investigated for treason the fucking instant it was developing a censorship engine for China. The national guard should have been sent in and arrested the entire fucking executive board. But we can't well do that, because Google is a nice progressive company. Even though we know that to be bullshit. The so-called defenders of the working class buy Apple phones where workers jump off roofs to kill themselves.

What we've got right now is a world ruled by insanity, because of the cognitive dissonance created by emotional 'truth' rather than empirical truth. I'm not saying society should be a technocracy. But right now its just pure insanity. Ignoring hard reality for the sake of someone's feelings. In a sense, this only empowers the wealthiest and most powerful. Because the failure and lack of thinking critically means you are blinded to who is really controlling you.

And this is the world I fear.

 

[The best and greatest]

Ladies and gents, might I introduce to the conversation (if not brought up already) The magic of Meta-modernism!

So imagine Modernism was Coke Classic and Post-Modernism was New-coke. Meta-modernism is like Old-New-Coke that aims to reconcile the good intentions and optimism of Modernism with the absurdities and ironic cynicism of Post-Modernism. How successful might this be is anyone's guess but its worth a read I think.

 

[Lemmingwise]

Whenever I read about what he thought and his philosophy, my eyes just glaze over and I just come to the conclusion he had his head up his own ass and was a French fucking troll.

I don't think of Derrida as French.

Not genetically:

Nor religiously:

Sovereign or Beast?

Born Jackie Derrida in a Jewish suburb of Algiers, the philosopher was a survivor of anti-Semitism and was devoted to Yiddishkeit. Benjamin Ivry writes that even readers who do not see Derrida as a sovereign of thought will be fascinated by a new biography that responds to some of his harshest...

www.forward.com

http://archive.is/dF8gk

 

[Secret Asshole]

What a shocker that is. He still has his head up his own fucking ass he may as well be French.

I don't think this is a fair representation of Kuhn, who after all is merely describing how Science actually works (as opposed to Popper, who stipulates how Science should work). Science is a human activity; egos get in the way, and compromises happen. And Science exists in a wider social sphere -- the Funding and Ethical committees, for example, are not made up entirely of scientists -- hence it is completely unrealistic that every single step is guided by pure rationality. The only faith we have -- and this is only a faith -- is that Science has a self-correcting mechanism that prevents it from straying too far.

I also don't understand where did the author get the idea that Kuhn said "there is no real growth of scientific knowledge", because the accumulation of empirical findings is growth. Likewise, the new paradigms, set out to explain a wider range of empirical phenomena, are the very fruits of growth. Indeed, incommensurability between old and new paradigms is the very sign that growth has occurred: just like a 6-year-old child can't stuff his body into clothes he wore at the age of 4 so he needs new clothes.

What Kuhn said is that the development of Science is not teleological; there is no pre-set goals other than accumulation and accommodation of more data. In other words, Sciences doesn't promise to "make the world a better place". It doesn't even promise we can understand "the world as it is" in the metaphysical sense.

Science only promises a human understanding of the world. Which means an inherently flawed view. Science cannot promise to understand everything, and in many cases it cannot. For example, some things can only be measured indirectly. There are extremely damaging atoms called free radicals. The thing is that they react so quickly they're nearly impossible to detect. We have to determine indirect ways to measure for these and just by that nature it is going to be imperfect.

Science has two branches: Basic and Applied. Basic science is what you hear all the time people complaining about: Why are we researching how a shrimp runs on a little treadmill? WASTE OF MONEY. Then you have applied science, which then looks at the biomechanics of that shrimp running on that treadmill and uses it to make artificial limbs. Basic science isn't sexy, but its the foundation for all applied science. So in essence, Science collects data that may or may not be useful. Things found out now might be useful in 10, 20, 50 or even 100 years. We simply have no way of knowing.

That's why science marches forward. And its basically untrue that there's no real growth of scientific knowledge, it grows every day. We look into things simply to look. Its human curiosity to understand that drives it forward. All science is built on the backs of giants. Databases, neural networks and the like allow us to process the huge amount of basic science that's done to filter it for applied methods. But you're right. The only real goal of science is just data that we may or may not be able to apply

And this is the world I fear.

We're already there. Now we get to see what damage it does.

Ladies and gents, might I introduce to the conversation (if not brought up already) The magic of Meta-modernism!

So imagine Modernism was Coke Classic and Post-Modernism was New-coke. Meta-modernism is like Old-New-Coke that aims to reconcile the good intentions and optimism of Modernism with the absurdities and ironic cynicism of Post-Modernism. How successful might this be is anyone's guess but its worth a read I think.

The problem is that post-modernism is almost in academia's subconcious at this point. They're addicted to the heroin that there's no absolute truth and they can say or do whatever they want based on their emotions or simply their view of the world. Its too attractive. The only thing in my opinon that breaks the spell is the collapse of the academic pyramid, de-funding anything not STEM related, harsh economic realities, corporatists shifting their politics to be more in line with the general populace.

The thing is, like I explained before, we have this subset of the population that is hit so hard with cognitive dissonance that it drives them into delusion. They cry everything is racist, from dogs to science to math to air conditioning and expect people to believe it when they say the President is. There's a fundamental lack of thought here, that in the quest for their 'progressivisim' they've put themselves into these isolated bubbles, where they self-reinforce. You see this all the time, especially with the media, college students and 'progressive' companies. They force this narrative so strongly and that's all they're exposed to. They reject friends, family, lovers that disagree, because its simpler for them. The problem is when they're confronted by realities that don't budge. Massive debt, most people disagreeing with you (which they can't fathom because that's not what they see everyday), minorities disagreeing which then leads them to the very racist comments they so disparage. They begin to get more and more emotional, because they're under a delusion and reject the reality that they're presented with. Ironically, the stronger the reality, the stronger the delusion is reinforced, which leads to intense anger, hate and malice. This inevitably leads to violence, like that ANTIFA that was gunned down.

His delusion that he was a revolutionary was so strong, it made it impossible for him to look at who his fellow revolutionaries were, understand that they're basically content with beating elderly Republicans and people who attend free speech rallies, that most of the working class would be AGAINST him. He still thought he was some sort of guerrilla fighter fighting for the proletariat. The thing is, for people who have lived in the delusion for so long, its actually more comfortable to get gunned down by a Fed than actually face the cold hard reality around you. And that's what most of these people do. They reinforce this cognitive dissonant view, where nothing snaps them from it. Since most of these people are insulated from economic ruination and the consequences of reality, they live in a fantasy. Which gets more and more violent as the reality conflicts with it, creating this emotional firestorm.

I don't think it will end in civil war, but I do think it will end with a lot more death and a lot more increased and hateful rhetoric. Until the media itself and pop culture is broke because capitalism dictates that basically no one wants what they're selling, the storm has to be ridden out. Because they reject any sort of argument or debate that will conflict with their delusional fantasies, they cannot be reasoned with or treated like a normal person. Which is why people are saying civil war because they refuse to confront the abject reality of their situation in favor of their own truth, which conflicts with everything presented before them.

 

[UQ 770]

I was under the impression acknowledging that the world is inherently filtered through human perception and thus we could be mistaken about anything no matter how much evidence we gather for was already like, elementary existentialism, potentially crossing into nihilism. The overwhelming majority of people I've mentioned this idea to over the years barely understood such a simple sentence.

Post-Modernism is not destroying society you dipshits. In addition to it being a bunch of crap shilled by hucksters, the average person can't process enough of it to even repeat it or form much of a judgment on it in the first place. There is indeed a larger trend of people freaking out about racism, sexism, discrimination, LGBT rights, etc. But guess what, the origins of those trends are not an obscure and highly conjectural philosophical interpretation of human perception. The origins of that are simple, emotional impulses and the fear of making life harder for other people. Depression and anxiety are your problems. Not some overpaid dementia-addled college professor who nobody can fucking understand anyway.

Those kids you see nodding their heads along and saying "Wow, so insightful!" are just lying. They don't understand any of this, they cannot repeat it, and it slides straight out of their head the minute they go home and start slugging back tumblers full of cheap hipster wine. They'll pick up a few buzzwords and stock phrases here and there, and they'll repeat a few dumb metaphors, but they are not being assimilated by this philosophy. They're identical to Jordan Peterson fans. Guess what, I am familar with Post-Modernist theory, and all you need to do is spend less than two minutes talking with any of these people for them to immediately admit "I guess you know more about it than I do bro." and withdraw from the arguement. If they keep it up and just keep repeating themselves or calling you a bigot, they are psychotic. They have much bigger problems than believeing in a crackpot philosophical theory. Do not engage with them. If they're a family member you can't cut loose, get them medicated.

More often than not, you'll find that people just mindlessly repeat things they hear or read about without putting any thought into it. I have had many disappointing conversations where I get excited and think someone is willing to talk philosophy only for them to drop the act the minute they determine I actually know more about the subject than they do. Buying into their attempts to look smart and big-brained is just going to make you as psychotic as they are when you start believeing that these huge philosophical conditions are somehow monolithic when they are beyond most people's mental capacity and for the rest of the smart people are too busy doing useful things to bicker about human perception constantly.

Its scary to see an otherwise influential person talk about this stuff, but influential people say dumb shit all the time. I will eat my fucking hat if civilization is brought to its knees by three French assholes smoking a little too much weed and drinking a little too much absinthe. How fragile do you think society is, seriously? And people give me shit for being a doomer, god.

 

[2 litre soda]

Derrida was convinced that any and all binary phenomenon were illegitimate, had to be deconstructed, and then reconstructed as a non-binary phenomenon. Don't ask me to explain phenomenology, because I don't think anyone fucking understands it.

Not quite.

Any binary phenomenon inherently privileges one of the sides over the other: men over women, light over dark, white over black, etc. The problem is, that a lot of these dichotomies don't hold if you actually look at them with any sort of rigor, and the idea that there's only one perspective that is True and Correct is really kind of narrow-minded and silly.

What Derrida proposes to do is flip the binary and consider what would happen if it were the other way around, to look at the situation rigorously from all angles, and see if such a relationship is really necessary: should we really retain an apartheid state in South Africa because whites are superior to blacks? Should we really keep women at home as housewives permanently given that they often prove just as capable as men at working and learning? Sometimes, the situation is such that the thing which is "on top" contains a number of weird aspects that, when looked at from certain points of view, point to it actually not being very superior at all, and vice versa with that which is below.

Take, for example, Lord of the Rings, in which a rich guy and his manservant band together with a bunch of noblemen to destroy a rapidly industrializing nation made up of minorities. Take the story, flip it on its head, and consider it from another angle. What if the Orcs were the protagonists of LotR? What if they were evil in the same way that, say, the citizens of North Korea were in George W. Bush's eyes? You can probably see why deconstruction has such an appeal to people who study literature, because of the kinds of papers and talks you can create using the technique.

Extra importantly, just because you've looked at this relationship doesn't mean that there isn't a reason why the power imbalance is in place and should remain so: teachers should retain power over their students, parents should retain power over their children, etc.

Any attempt to fussy deconstruction up and make it more significant or complicated than that is just jacking off. It's like Othello: simple game with simple rules, complex outcomes and strategies, but not as difficult as, like, Chess or Go or something.

Derrida, also importantly, doesn't deny the validity of science (he makes this very explicit in the afterword of Limited, Inc), he just doesn't see it as the only way to interpret the world: what is the scientific method for being a good friend? a good parent? Can one construct a scientific method of ending racism? Every attempt so far has been laughably autistic and impractical.

 

[TerribleIdeas™]

Not quite.

Any binary phenomenon inherently privileges one of the sides over the other: men over women, light over dark, white over black, etc. The problem is, that a lot of these dichotomies don't hold if you actually look at them with any sort of rigor, and the idea that there's only one perspective that is True and Correct is really kind of narrow-minded and silly.

What Derrida proposes to do is flip the binary and consider what would happen if it were the other way around, to look at the situation rigorously from all angles, and see if such a relationship is really necessary: should we really retain an apartheid state in South Africa because whites are superior to blacks? Should we really keep women at home as housewives permanently given that they often prove just as capable as men at working and learning? Sometimes, the situation is such that the thing which is "on top" contains a number of weird aspects that, when looked at from certain points of view, point to it actually not being very superior at all, and vice versa with that which is below.

Take, for example, Lord of the Rings, in which a rich guy and his manservant band together with a bunch of noblemen to destroy a rapidly industrializing nation made up of minorities. Take the story, flip it on its head, and consider it from another angle. What if the Orcs were the protagonists of LotR? What if they were evil in the same way that, say, the citizens of North Korea were in George W. Bush's eyes? You can probably see why deconstruction has such an appeal to people who study literature, because of the kinds of papers and talks you can create using the technique.

Extra importantly, just because you've looked at this relationship doesn't mean that there isn't a reason why the power imbalance is in place and should remain so: teachers should retain power over their students, parents should retain power over their children, etc.

Any attempt to fussy deconstruction up and make it more significant or complicated than that is just jacking off. It's like Othello: simple game with simple rules, complex outcomes and strategies, but not as difficult as, like, Chess or Go or something.

Derrida, also importantly, doesn't deny the validity of science (he makes this very explicit in the afterword of Limited, Inc), he just doesn't see it as the only way to interpret the world: what is the scientific method for being a good friend? a good parent? Can one construct a scientific method of ending racism? Every attempt so far has been laughably autistic and impractical.

You're more of a faggot than OP.

 

[2 litre soda]

You're more of a faggot than OP.

 

[TerribleIdeas™]

View attachment 847463

Please stop posting proof that the left can't meme.

 

[Terrorist]

Stub my toe? Postmodernism. Lasagna burnt? Postmodernism. Failure to self actualize the ennui of one's human animal in an uncaring substrate? It's post fucking modernism.

fwah fwah fwah i vant le room to be dirtie, hon hon hon do not be like le lobstere, drink le soy instead mon ami!

 

[2 litre soda]

Please stop posting proof that the left can't meme.

Please stop pretending understanding simple ideas is hard.

 

[TerribleIdeas™]

Please stop pretending understanding simple ideas is hard.

Please look at your preceding post.

 

[Positron]

Derrida was convinced that any and all binary phenomenon were illegitimate, had to be deconstructed, and then reconstructed as a non-binary phenomenon. Don't ask me to explain phenomenology, because I don't think anyone fucking understands it.

Derrida is not a phenomenologist, who studies subjective experiences. The closest description of Derrida is a hermeneutician, who pores over texts looking for things.

I was under the impression acknowledging that the world is inherently filtered through human perception and thus we could be mistaken about anything no matter how much evidence we gather.

Yes, this is a standard charge against science, that it is ultimately based on human senses (even though our senses have been greatly augmented by technology, so that we can nowadays "see" x-rays and microwave radiation, and can track the flightpaths of subatomic particles that, for all intent and purposes, are dimensionless points, whatever empirical information has to pass through the gate of human sensorium before it can be registered as a piece of data) and because human senses 1) cannot be guaranteed to obtain all possible information about the world and 2) are often faulty, it follows that Science is both incomplete and unreliable, and thus has no right to have the final say about Truth. But may I ask, can Philosophy, especially Postmodern Philosophy, do better? Can it lay claim to the Truth when Science fails? The answer is an emphatic No.

To see why, let's compare how Science and Philosophy deal with the world. As I said, Science engages the world through the human sensorium. Philosophy engages world through text. Among the chief instigators of Pomo, Foucault was a historian. Derrida was, as I said, a hermeneutician. Lyotard was a mixture of various types of humanities; Barthes.... I don't even know what he was, except he got a "scientific" grant studying fashion magazines. Is engaging with the world through text better than through sensorium? Obviously not: to grapple with a text, a human must make use of his sense in the first place, hence all the problems with sensory experience, all the problems Science is saddled with, applies too with text-mode engagement with the world. If Science is at one remove from reality, Humanities (Philosophy, History, Cultural Studies) are at least at two removes from it.

The thing is, like I explained before, we have this subset of the population that is hit so hard with cognitive dissonance that it drives them into delusion. They cry everything is racist, from dogs to science to math to air conditioning and expect people to believe it when they say the President is.

The dog park thing is a hoax, but the ruckus about air conditioning etc illustrates a big problem with the postmodern mode of interpreting the world: treating every single phenomenon as a "text" in need of exegesis. Academics, like TV Tropers, fail to see that the World operates differently from fiction. In a novel, there is an author responsible for everything that happens, so it is reasonable to speculate the author's intent, bias, psychological hangups, etc. In real life we don't have an author; we don't usually see a single person, or even a small group of people, having complete control over everything. The thermostat setting of an office might be determined by, for example, the make and model of the AC units (which the firm that hired the premise usually has no control over), or the need of temperature-sensitive equipment like servers. If someone has no control over certain things, then he cannot be held morally responsible for it, and laying charges such as "sexism" (to whom really?) because the thermostat cannot be adjusted upwards is damn ridiculous.

 

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The thermostat setting of an office might be determined by, for example, the make and model of the AC units (which the firm that hired the premise usually has no control over), or the need of temperature-sensitive equipment like servers. If someone has no control over certain things, then he cannot be held morally responsible for it, and laying charges such as "sexism" (to whom really?) because the thermostat cannot be adjusted upwards is damn ridiculous.

I'm getting really tired of this being brought up since its total horseshit. This is a confirmed hoax article as well. It gets repeated every few years and last I checked it dates back to like 2009. On top of that, I have never in my life set foot in an office building where the thermostat actually functions properly. Either its utterly frigid, or, more likely, its burning hot and the air is thick with fiberglass dust from the shitty drop ceilings that were installed 40 years ago when the building was new. Generally if you've ever had the misfortune to work an office job, you'll find plenty of smaller dudes (usually fresh graduates or interns) complaining that the office is too cold as well. I could tell the shill who invented that article must have been a supervisor.

 

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Please stop posting proof that the left can't meme.

People say this as if most memes weren't terrible and shit to begin with.