Anyone up to speed with the Lindsay Shepherd case (the Canadian TA)?

speakingwoman
he says: "In a University, all perspectives are valid."
he answers:
"That's not necessarily true."
sums it up really. I hope she is ok.

Actually, I agree with the lecturer. There are things that are basically no debate: climate change, evolution and the Holocaust being three. You can talk in general terms I suppose about other 'theories' but to present them as serious alternatives on an undergraduate course seems unprofessional to me.

However, to juxtapose these things with the gender debate is where the lecturers appear to have gone off course. The gender debate is not the closed case they insist it is. If it were, they would be in the right to insist her teachings reflected the reality, just like a TA presenting creation theories of evolution in the Biology dept would be taken in hand.

Being someone who takes a disdainful position on J Peterson, I am nonetheless surprised by the degree to which the lecturers despised him. To relegate JP to the level of he alt-right and Hitler is not only unwarranted, it is willful ignorance. JP is just an academic with a youtube presence, a shrink who likes to wave his hands and talk about chimps and lobsters. Overblown, yes. Hitler, no.

Sorry I misunderstood due to my skimming!

Group dynamics mainly...

I went to a fundraising dinner where OJ was the speaker a few years ago. He made his speech re landlords. I had been grumbling about what I felt were failings in his analysis; lack of scrutiny re govt incentives to rely on property ownership rather than social security, the practices of banks and insurance brokers and characterisation of landlords as ‘the baddie’ for a while by that point and a couple of the people I went to the dinner with had been agreeing with me.

At the end of the same speech, we had all heard a million times before, OJ got a standing ovation.

I was the only person (I didn’t see anyone else sitting anyway) who didn’t stand up so I asked the two who I knew agreed re the gaps in his analysis why they stood. They said they felt uncomfortable not standing because everyone else was.

I just went up to OJ afterwards and said that I had been thinking about his analysis and I’d really enjoy a chance to have a discussion with him about it at some point if he had time.

He never did. He spent the rest of the evening surrounded by a group of fawning young girls TBH.

Fine, fair enough, he doesn’t have to be ‘on’ all the time and he’s allowed to relax but I found the whole thing interesting for many reasons.

Oh yes back but what I am contending is these ‘identities’ are socially constructed modern mythologies.

I have a passing acquaintance with the official life stories of the two. Owen Jones: Mum lecturer, Dad was activist and union official. Jordan Peterson had educated parents (schoolteacher and librarian) but grew up in a small, out of the way place with a cross section of mates. Their backgrounds aren't so madly far apart on a worldwide scale.

They were both able to access higher education. Both had books published but one gets massive media exposure that I for one am very bored with but he has a massive following online so what do I know. The other self publishes appearances on YouYube which I can avoid far more easily.

I don't get the pp's perceived gulf.

Completely agree Offred. And the shrillest and most "offended" voices from a marginalised group will be supported because of tiptoeing around them respectfully. Like how we mustn't critique the hijab even though women in Iran are struggling against it. I was on a thread the other day where someone had heard that the didgeridoo was "sacred" and mustn't be used except by Aboriginal men. She thought I was an awful racist. But actually lots of people play the didge here, it's integrated into lots of musical styles. People go to schools and all the kids are encouraged to have a turn and learn it. It's an idea of this "mystical native" stuff imported from America which I think is essentialising and Orientalist. But none of the intersectional feminists seem to give a fuck about postcolonial theories so there you go...

It’s the Mitchell and Webb sketch about the skulls; ‘do you think we are the baddies?’

And back to Lindsay... some of her comments on interview about her understanding of JP’s ideas and whether she stands by the comment she made i the recorded disciplinary interview suggest she had recognised JP as a ‘wrongthinker’ because of leftwing culture and she had not really engaged with his ideas prior to this debacle.

She had shown that clip based on the politics of the identities of the participants...

A ‘baddie’ and a ‘goodie’...

So is it unsurprising that due to dehumanising behaviour from her peers and supportive behaviour from JP she is now seemingly shifting her views?

Well no! Not really, her original view was based on immersion in a culture that rewarded her for right think and she got the practice of rightthink wrong once and was made an example of...

Yy nauticant. That’s what joe klein’s short video was about.

I wonder if that’s what is motivating investment in centrism in part (a reaction to polarisation) but actually even that has become about being in a ‘moderate centrist’ tribe... about having that as your identity and your identity being scrutinised by the identity police.

I have really appreciated your posts on this thread Offred.

One of the most worrying things I see these days is people, on both the left and the right, being corralled into spaces approved for their tribe. This has always happened but now with social media the polarisation is much more risky.

The main tool for enforcing the polarisation is language and social media enables many terms to act as short cuts to bypass thinking and act simply as empty signifiers to signal to fellow tribe members.

OJ is working class/gay/a leftie, JP is a professor/middle class/white man etc etc... this is not about contextualising anymore, it’s about legitimisation based on having ‘the right’ or ‘the wrong’ identity as a prerequisite to discussion of ideas.

So please don’t think I’m making an argument against the use of the term ‘cultural marxism’ (or other terms) I don’t think the right way to unpick this stuff is to say ‘oh that term shouldn’t be used because x’. I just usually like to clarify with the person using it what their meaning is and since we are all subject to this culture I understand everyone falls into this kind of shorthand signalling stuff based on ideology.

Part of that is it makes it hard to use terms usefully with meaning because the culture has made them into insults to identity.

Even the phrase ‘using x term in that way devalues the meaning of x term’ has been hijacked for social signalling purposes rather than meaning...

It makes it very difficult to have a discussion about ideas...

It’s still not really a discussion of ideas... it’s often an attempt to signal that you ‘rightthink’ to your group by using buzzwords, and to condemn ‘wrongthinkers’ without ever actually setting out your own ideas or tackling those of the ‘wrongthinker’.

And don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming that it is ‘a problem’ with ‘the right’. I’m trying to say that the discussion of ideas by everyone is being suppressed by this identity based tribalism by the culture in the mainstream.

People now feel they have to preface with ‘As a uni lecturer/mum of two/nhs doctor’ everytime they make a point because ‘lived experience’. People now have to ‘talk to someone from x group’, people now have to qualify discussions where the meaning is clear that they ‘dont support xyz’....

In all these things there are, at heart, some sound ideas; knowing what you are talking about, being careful about being the ‘good person who stands by’ but the way in which it is expected is centring identity in such that it never actually achieves the legitimate aims but actually just suppresses ideas.

People seem to be reading my mentioning of communism on this thread without the condemnation that is designed to signal I am not promoting it, as me needing an education about ‘how bad communism is’. Those are the rules now, unless you make the required ‘Stalin is evil, people under communist states suffered hugely’ then mentioning the existence of communism justifies suspicion of ‘wrong think’, sometimes it justifies sanctions for wrongthink.

If I then discuss Obama’s peace prize and Trump’s progress with North Korea without making the required statements of ‘being totally opposed to awful trump’ then people will follow a similar process of suspecting I have revealed myself as a trump supporter and therefore a wrong thinker and therefore responsible for xyz...

On the other hand I have never met a single person who subscribes to any ideology in totality. Real people’s real views are much more nuanced than that. This focus on identity is therefore, IMO, likely to be about highly superficial social signalling re belonging.

The effect I think on people’s lives because of it I think is appalling and it has almost completely eradicated the ability to discuss ideas.

Offred I saw it explained by some right-winger as someone who heartily embraced the aspect of Marxism that destroys family life and family roles, inherent ones like woman=mother (SAHM) etc. So the accusation of "cultural Marxist" is perhaps quite apt for transgender ideology in that it claims to be leftwing but it's not interested in any of the economically liberatory aspects of socialist revolution. Instead it (in cahoots with the GAYS) destroys the Christian fabric or whatever.
I would call it Cultural Maoism, really, as Marxism became totalitarian in practice but it was never Marx's intention.

I would argue that ‘cultural marxist’ is and example of how identity politics bullshit is obfuscating meaning.

MRA, I did say that re academia and left wing population (this is particularly in humanities). Specifically in relation to Lindsay Shepherd this is an example of the left’s version of it. The point I was trying to make is that the narrative that it is specifically a problem with the left, it’s ‘cultural marxism’, SJWs etc is, IMO, the right’s version of the same crap. This identity politics personalisation stuff has become the model.

We've discussed before here how identity politics is actually a manifestation of neoliberalism. I doubt those pomo Laurier academics would describe themselves as any kind of Marxist in a million years. "Cultural Marxist" is an invention of the right.
Orthodox Marxists I know privately tell me identity politics is a load of old shite. But they keep their heads down about it for the same reason the rest of us do - they're afraid of witch hunting, and that they're trying to recruit from the rest of the left so need to appear hip and up to date.
It's all such a mess.

The difference is the right don’t have quite the stranglehold on academia that the left does currently, so I think it’s an apples and oranges comparison. That isn’t to say that the right would behave any differently were they to embody the current cultural zeitgeist, but they aren’t the current clear and present danger. I believe many years ago a physicist submitted a paper that argued the laws of physic were sexist contstructs of the patriarchy in a deliberate parody. As he predicted it got peer reviewed and approved. Which just goes to show how far back the rot goes.

I’m not suggesting anyone does.

I am not a communist. I am not aligned ideologically with communism. I am not suggesting communism is the best system. I am not advancing any arguments in favour of communism.

Mentioning the existence of something, discussing it, does not amount to promotion of it...

That’s the same approach that is being applied to Lindsay.

There are particular standards re what ideas are acceptable and what ideas are not and if the existence of unacceptable ideas is made known and people don’t roundly condemn them then they are to be re-educated re right and wrong views.

I’m not putting forth arguments in favour of communism.

Your own personal position regarding how states are best run, as you have explained it here, seems entirely logical, coherent and consistent (IMO anyway ).

It also is a real person’s real position.

The identity politics stuff, which I find so problematic is the stuff you’ve felt compelled to defend yourself against when you made the qualifying statement re crony capitalism and when I felt I needed to qualify that I am not aligned with communism or making arguments in favour of it. When people are having to defend themselves against accusations of ‘wrongthink’ because one incident of perceived ‘wrongthink’ can result in their lives being ruined by a mob then it’s a bad state of affairs for ideas.

And we’ve all been guilty of ‘oh so you’re that kind of person’, we’ve all been guilty of crossing the boundary between observational judgement and value judgement and in getting caught up in an argument but this is something materially different.

Identity politics has become the actual ideal. It has been used to bastardise and distort many many things and to turn them into things they never were... that’s the Orwellian part...

It is combined in academia with ‘the language of authority’ (I call it ‘bullshit with confidence’) and this is why academic institutions have become so problematic, but simply because there is more left wing crap in universities does not mean the right wing crap is any less problematic IMO.

Given that whenever we’ve tried that experiment every time it goes down in spectacular flames with countless dead, less actual equality and more poverty you’ll forgive me for fighting against it tooth and nail every step of the way? In the same way I’d fight against collectivist far right extremist systems, just to be clear.

I’m willing to swing a bit to the left on health and education, everything else I’ll be a free market capitalist thank you very much, although not I might add because the ideology gives me the warm and fuzzies, but simply because it’s track record is far less bloody and actually allows for more liberty relative to everything else.

Caveat I think the current state sponsored crony capitalism is pretty ridiculous, and I’m not as learned as you obvs are but Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminism isn’t just compatible to classical liberalism it’s essential to it, as was Thomas Paine’s arguments for the emancipation of and enfranchisement of slaves.

If we should tinker with any system to make it fairer and better it should be liberalism (classic).

Oh yes, it is clearly true that the examples of communist states have employed totalitarianism. A discussion regarding the relationship of communism to totalitarianism in practice and theory regarding whether communism can be separated from totalitarianism in practice is not quite the same discussion as communism being inherently totalitarian or making a criticism of communism as a belief based on the totalitarianism of communist regimes.

My ideology is not communist btw.

I don’t think that it is as simple as the left having a pass and the right having to constantly justify. People have higher expectations re the left than the right. The reality is there is a level of scrutiny and sanction being applied across society to everyone’s identity characteristics that is proportional to how much in the public eye they are. I suspect everyone feels scrutinised TBH.

I also don’t like this ‘pressure to condemn’ stuff either, it’s identity politics. What would be the purpose in forcing corbyn to condemn Venezuela? Wouldn’t you rather it was possible for him to speak honestly about what he thinks so that in our democratic system people could base votes on reality rather than compliance with orthodox thought?

John McDonell is an idiot but he is one person, not ‘the left’ and he is not ‘far left’ either. People who really are ‘far left’ would never join the Labour Party which is a socialist Democratic Party.

Behaviour in the commons is culturally problematic IMO.

I think it is interesting that the Labour Party has been made responsible for doing right by all the many equalities issues. The women thing I find particularly strange since the labour movement has historically been a men’s rights movement.