Wheels coming off the wagon

[Kantastic]

So James Lindsay has trolled the Woke into arguing that 2+2=5.

He's being insufferably smug about it but honestly I think the smugness is earned here.

twitter.com/conceptualjames

Note that the logic of "trans women are women" is identical to the logic of 2+2=5, that has been admitted too.

twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1289939130898505730/photo/1

This strikes me as a great step forward in Discourse. Genuinely. It's all hanging out there now, it's going to get increasingly hard for people who want to be seen as Serious to defend this shit.

Posie should use 2+2=4 as her next poster.

Yes, I can see that.

I was fortunate, I went to a grammar school in the 60's and we did philosophy and part of it was critical thought, University just nicely built understanding. Your stuff would have been better but nevertheless I had some early instruction for which I'm grateful. It stood me in good stead but brain a little raddled now so I tend to soak stuff up and cogitate (takes a while sometimes)

There was something on here, a link with someone talking about how adulthood was now delayed. I am really staggered by this, these young people are even more susceptible to woke/cult stuff than were previously. This would have been gradually happening, over decades I suspect.

They knock on doors and stand on street corners with their literature, which is all written with this perspective in mind

One thing which is missing from your excellent discussion, FloralBunting, I think is how a religious mindset makes you read things in a particular way that makes different sense than if it is read in a different mindset.

Like the phrase ‘only women have a cervix’. Depending on the mindset of the person reading it, it either makes perfect sense, or is very offensive. You either read it as a fact, or you read it as the insinuation that people who don’t have a cervix aren’t women because only women have a cervix which goes against your belief that TW are W. Also by extension, any woman who has her cervix removed is no longer a woman.

It’s like the difference between reading the Bible as someone who believes it is the word of God and therefore sees all sorts of meaning and revelation therein compared to someone who is reading the Bible as a historical document and seeing an interesting evolution of a myth. Same document, different arguable conclusions because of the different starting points.

I will also mention something else as well.

I do wonder whether part of the problem is that Generation X became a partly nomad generation because of the recession in their early 90s and the dotcom bubble burst in the early 00s.

A lot of Gen X lost jobs in their 20s and simply couldn't find work, or they couldn't find work to start with in the 90s and 00s. And they reacted to this by buggering off. Of the people I knew when I graduated, I'd say that 70 percent of them no longer live in Britain or they have spent substantial years of their lives in other countries.

What this did was create a generational gap in British society. And I see it today. I'm very involved in politics and governance, and there's pretty much no-one in their 40s around. It's as though loads of people born in the 70s have just disappeared. I mean, it was a low birth-rate in the 70s anyway, but it's noticeable that you have the older groups (all people in their 60s and 70s) and the woke crowd (all people in their 20s and early 30s) but there's hardly anyone in-between.

I see it in all areas of culture: even the Gen X thinkers that were reaching some kind of popularity in the late 90s and 00s have almost entirely retreated.

In my view, we got a missing generation that, by all previous patterns, would have been the majority cultural and political voice and influence today. Instead, because nature abhors a vacuum, this heap of woke juvenilia has rushed into the void, ten or twenty years before its time, and utterly untempered by a decade or so of life experience and consideration.

Children are taught critical thinking skills in KS1 and 2. We do work in literature and science that covers this. Eg, the lock ness monster, do aliens exist. There are texts and comprehension exercises that children will do for their KS2 SATs where they have to identify a point of view and express why they believe it is not a fact. These are not skills that only university teaches. I have had great discussions with very small children about what is true and how we know, usually based on stories eg can you really fly to the Moon in a cardboard box? No, but you can go in a rocket. This 'woke' mindset is a meme and it is being deliberately pushed into our young people.

Belief in gender ideology should be classed as a religion, and therefore should have no place exerting its theology over public discourse, public policy and public institutions.

I think you will find that 2+2=5 if we are counting tomatoes, and one of said tomatoes has a strategically placed one-sided mirror before them in which to admire their own reflection.

my favourite was the two full machines and the parts of half a machine plus two full machines and the parts of the other half make 5 machines therefore 2+2=5. Even my 10 year old could figure out all they’d shown was 2.5+2.5=5

We’ve been here before though. Sokal in his hoax paper said ‘the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity’. And the publishers failed to notice that that is obvious bullshit.

I know what deconstructionism is but I had no idea math teachers were literally arguing this and teaching it to students. Turns out StandUpStraight's short film link is a documentary:

twitter.com/wokal_distance/status/1290479330477240320

I had no idea math teachers were literally arguing this and teaching it to students

Not on my maths edutwitter they’re not. Although look out for something called Ethnomathematics.

@noblegiraffe

They knock on doors and stand on street corners with their literature, which is all written with this perspective in mind

One thing which is missing from your excellent discussion, FloralBunting, I think is how a religious mindset makes you read things in a particular way that makes different sense than if it is read in a different mindset.

Like the phrase ‘only women have a cervix’. Depending on the mindset of the person reading it, it either makes perfect sense, or is very offensive. You either read it as a fact, or you read it as the insinuation that people who don’t have a cervix aren’t women because only women have a cervix which goes against your belief that TW are W. Also by extension, any woman who has her cervix removed is no longer a woman.

It’s like the difference between reading the Bible as someone who believes it is the word of God and therefore sees all sorts of meaning and revelation therein compared to someone who is reading the Bible as a historical document and seeing an interesting evolution of a myth. Same document, different arguable conclusions because of the different starting points.

Excellent point. I used to be highly involved in the work of a Christian apologist (An apologist, for those unaware, is not someone saying sorry a lot, but someone who spends a lot of time making the case for some particular position) who took what is known as the presuppositional position, which, without getting bogged down in specifics, means that you start from the position that the Bible is literally true and all Christian claims of it being the word of God are true, and argue your point from there.

It shouldn't be too difficult to see that if you've set it up like that, then the whole thing will be slanted and not even slightly objective. I mean, it works, from the position of the closed system and all it's interanl logic, but it will disappear in a puff of smoke if those suppositions are rejected - but the presuppositionalist will not be moved from that presupposition because it is an article of faith and to even seriously entertain the idea that the Bible is not the word of God is an act of unbelief and therefore a sin.

Which is exactly the mindset of Wokery, that even to entertain the idea that the faith position TWAW is not true, even just for the purpose of debate, is an act of unbelief that would cause manifold harm and is therefore a 'sin'.

The factory machines ones made me laugh too. My DH works in project management for a group of factories so this is literally his every day. I asked him how many machines existed in this scenario - he said 6 (total number of machines, working and broken) minus 1 (the one they broke up to salvage parts from) equals 5.

6-1=5.

Anyone in his job who tried to pretend they had magicked up a 5th machine, rather than admit they had discarded the 6th because it was unfixable would get very short shrift from the accounting department, apparently 😂

The factory one made me laugh as well.

My experience as an engineer in a factory is that you’d need at least 50 broken machines to cobble together enough parts to make 1 working one.

Anyone who thinks machines work like that has clearly worked in engineering.

It’s a bit like going into a VW garage and having enough spare parts to make a whole car.

I listened to as much as I could stand of the Evergreen recording. Is this really supposed to be an educational institution? Incoherence, temper tantrums, and swearing? I am truly shocked.

FloralBunting - you should write a book! Excellent explanation of the mindset that rules all kinds of systems for control, whether religious, political or social.

It's all going to be explained to us when Bergdorf publishes the "manifesto".

Thanks, Floral
I've read lots about how woke ideology can be compared to a cult but your explanation is really clear. Especially the bit about using the correct language. I'm absolutely holding the line on language, I am even more determined. The trans person I'm trying to help is way smarter than I am. Knowing this has made me wonder if my thinking it's all bullshit is just a failure to grasp a complicated concept from her point of view. I mean I know it's bullshit but if I could just figure out how she got there, maybe I'd be able to finally get her to see. It's clear to me now that there's no logic involved, it's all based on faith. She's clearly seeking comfort rather than power. Not surprising for a female person.

Thanks also, TheRealMcKenna that's more food for thought. Interestingly she's very contemptuous of SJW types. Were she in that class at Evergreen, she would have been cringing and uncomfortable. So close and yet so far. I haven't watched the whole video yet, I'd really like to get in that professor's face, asshole!

I can't find it now but my favorite tweet was the one about the cost of latte.

Floral I need to read the book that you must certainly write!

Stellwagen, James Lindsay has a (long) podcast on his New Discourses YouTube channel on how not to be made crazy by all of this. His point is essentially that once you realise that they are not playing the knowledge game - that they are in fact playing an entirely different game so logic and knowledge aren’t effective to counter the arguments - you can start to understand how the theory works and from that point, it stops making you demented.

I am not going to say anything about the foundation of western mathematics and science standing on the work of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Arabs ... cos, you know, they are all dead white guys.

Not to mention Indians...
theconversation.com/five-ways-ancient-india-changed-the-world-with-maths-84332
It should come as no surprise that the first recorded use of the number zero, recently discovered to be made as early as the 3rd or 4th century, happened in India. Mathematics on the Indian subcontinent has a rich history going back over 3,000 years and thrived for centuries before similar advances were made in Europe, with its influence meanwhile spreading to China and the Middle East.

As well as giving us the concept of zero, Indian mathematicians made seminal contributions to the study of trigonometry, algebra, arithmetic and negative numbers among other areas. Perhaps most significantly, the decimal system that we still employ worldwide today was first seen in India.

it's almost the opposite of education, because it quite deliberately strips you of any firm points of reference with which to evaluate or increase knowledge and understanding. Calling it 'education' is just a label, like calling things 'feminism' or 'socialism' that bear no relation to what those words actually mean.

It's been twenty years, and I have never before managed to see the parallel between what i was being taught at art school and the controlling relationship I was in at the time. Gaslighting from two directions at once. No wonder I was broken. Clumsily applied postmodernish ideas alongside dv. Like living in a sort of soup of vague dread where the only thing that was certain was that I was wrong, always.

Apologies for the merail, but I wanted to say thank you, Floral. Again. Please write that book.

This guy is very much of the Corbynite left but a bit more rational than many of them. He can see the tactics are damaging the left and suspect many others are coming to this realisation as well.

twitter.com/michaeljswalker/status/1286608208682000384

If ‘woke’ is a religion, then what is Antifa the historical equivalent of?

twitter.com/antifascistf12/status/1290856667773534208?s=21

I meant to ask what the historical equivalent of Antifa was, but never mind.

One question about that Jehovah's witness analogy - presumably there are people at the top of JW who know quite well they are manipulating everyone else - is wokeism a collective delusion or are there people at the top using it to hold onto power? If so, who are they?

I think the 2+2=4 guy demonstrates that these things take on a life of their own. Dawkins original idea of memes.

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