Helen Pluckrose on the Role of Postmodernism in the Construction of Modern Social-Justice Dogmas

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Күн бұрын

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@blackmichael75 2 жыл бұрын

I think Helen has really the best description and analysis of wokeness or social justice or whatever it's called, much more accurate than most other people.

@DEWwords 2 жыл бұрын

Ms. Pluckrose is learned, honest and wise. Thank you.

@stevenlightfoot6479 2 жыл бұрын

I graduated from university in 1988, so I missed all this stuff, Thank God. Unfortunately, I now have to deal with it in real life, as it tries to destroy my society.

@lewreed1871 2 жыл бұрын

Excellent! I've missed hearing from Helen in interviews. She really has mastered this dreadful stuff very thoroughly. Great ally (and her book, 'Cynical Theories', is indispensable as a guided tour of the critical social justice engine room: highly recommended).

@bristolfashion4421 2 жыл бұрын

Really interesting dialogue - thanks ever so to both for presenting these ideas in a calm and understandable manner. I have a better understanding of modern thinking than I did an hour ago !! 🙂

@derekspitz9225 2 жыл бұрын

I've been banging on about postmodernist ideology being at the root of CRT, CSJ, militant identitarianism, the woke cult in general, and also apocalypse-ism and rising climate change hysteria. Remember, postmodernism is a critical theory. And as with all critical theories it should remain in the academy, as a [useful] means to interrogate art and literature. Applied elsewhere in the humanities is problematic. And applied to the sciences it's ludicrous. And the nihilism inherent in postmodernism makes it toxic when applied to the real world, to institutions such as the NHS, the civil service, to political discourse, sex, gender, 'race', history, wider culture, language, and of course through language, ultimately reality itself.

@purdysanchez 2 жыл бұрын

35:00, black feminist criminology? Does every single professor get to make up their own "unique" subject matter nowadays? Like, could I get away with making a course called "black haired, Irish, vegan, libertarian, tall people, literary analysis"?

@kyle88740 2 жыл бұрын

Helen's analysis is always clarifying to listen to. I do wonder how she would explain educators who are clearly very versed in CRT but also cite the need to raise a critical consciousness in students and educators which is already present in CRT but do so through citing Paolo Friere. Friere the Brazilian Marxist educator responsible for Critical Pedagogy also talked about critical consciousness raising (conscientização - concientization) and himself cited Marx, Mão and expecially Gramsci in his works.

@ac27934 2 жыл бұрын

Interview starts at 3:44

@ChollieD 2 жыл бұрын

Helen is the quiet kid who knows the lessons better than the teacher.

@purdysanchez 2 жыл бұрын

As someone with a background in engineering, some of the ideas being critiqued just sound like sophistry. Its feels like a lot of the people Helen is challenging live in this academic fantasy world wherein they and their colleagues all pretend to possess some superpowers of reason.

@ac27934 2 жыл бұрын

They are modern-day Gnostics who believe they have a secret knowledge that others don't. It transcends reason.

@AndyWearsPants 2 жыл бұрын

Why is Quillette no longer available on Google Podcasts? Listening on KZbin is far less convenient!

@nonyadamnbusiness9887 2 жыл бұрын

As something of a futurist, the 21st century has been very disappointing. I'm watching the death of reason. I hope the backlash will be an interest in Stoicism and General Systems Theory, which will move us forward, but I doubt that will be the case. Where ever Helen is, someone should tell her to put an over-stuffed chair and some pillows or plush toys around the room. She sounds like she's in an oil drum.

@dawnemile7499 2 жыл бұрын

It amazes me how large groups of academics read the opinions of one or two writers, become greatly infused with the enthusiasm of these narrow-minded views and make strenuous attempts to force others to agree with what they have become convinced of. They do not realize how inexperienced and narrow-minded they are.

@lewreed1871 2 жыл бұрын

The thing about this stuff - Foucault in particular - is that it is deeply seductive. I was taught it and it blew my mind. It felt truly revolutionary and expansive when I was able to crack it. When I say "crack it", I mean that to understand it necessarily involves a shift in one's conceptual framework and one's whole angle of vision. I can understand why to some people that would feel revelatory and how deeply seductive it is. The narrow-mindedness comes, as Helen points out here, in not realising that Foucault himself would have rejected what's become of critical social justice in the strongest terms. These people seem blind to the fact that they're instituting a new a pretty terrible orthodoxy. Foucault would spit!

@purdysanchez 2 жыл бұрын

I went to college with some students who passionately hated Ayn Rand and would constantly say how evil her books were. None of them had ever opened any of her books. It was just the accepted dogma within their departments that she is to be hated.

@purdysanchez 2 жыл бұрын

@ Lew Reed, if you have to fundamentally change everything about how you think, discern truth, and evaluate ideas to "crack it" with regards to an idea, how is that idea any different from a cult that brainwashes people?

@lewreed1871 2 жыл бұрын

@@purdysanchez Foucault isn't "brainwashing" because he makes no prescription. I suppose what he did was to invent a new way of studying history, providing an original toolkit for doing so. The demand comes from working what he's doing, because he doesn't so much give instructions as provide examples of this method through his own work. As an undergrad who wasn't particularly well-read, it took considerable effort on my part to get it (which I did by spending about three months reading not just Foucault but everything around him too -- understanding Nietzsche's concept of genealogy helped, as did getting a bit of a grasp of Hegel), and when I did get it, it caused a shift in my (fairly ignorant) perception of history as being "just one f***ing thing after another" to something which operates and weighs on us much more heavily and in a more immediate, contemporary way than I had been aware. It was one of my very few 'eureka moments'. Foucault is not to be trifled with. Edward Said took up the method to great effect, but he did so with skill and sensitivity. An example of the same tools in the wrong (inept) hands is Judith Butler. She's just a third-rate, self-promoting pretender and far more trouble than she's worth. Her writing is famously impenetrable and that's not because it's particularly clever or dense but simply because she can't write and her ideas are half-baked. It's perhaps not surprising that her cheap "scholarship" has run through American colleges like wildfire. Studying her satisfies the prurience of dimwits while allowing them to think they're being clever, which just about sums up Queer Theory.

@lewreed1871 2 жыл бұрын

@@purdysanchez I've never read any Ayn Rand. Can't comment.

@EvanWells1 2 жыл бұрын

This is the first critique of postmodern or critical ideology that attempts to trace the actual developments and make crucial distinctions between Foucault, Marx, feminism and other strains without the sloppy hatchet job of just chalking everything up to post-modernism or "cultural Marxism" and then sprinkling in the Frankfurt school or other figure as some boogeyman. I'll have to look into her work and the way she traces things, but this at least has the hallmarks of a worthy, good-faith attempt.

@NM-qc2dh Жыл бұрын

Well I’m delighted that it meets with your approval.

@jamesgeorge2299 Жыл бұрын

Where Helen excels is that she knows deeply the theories she criticizes, and casts a cool eye on Critical Theory and its influences, especially on the early roots of Woke ideology and its sanctification of language and everything being constructed in discourse.

@commonwunder 2 жыл бұрын

Is 'Pluckrose' a pseudonym? Is it some sort of an Othello metaphor... or is it more literal?

@muiresuilgorm3452 Жыл бұрын

An old English family name.

@doliver5447 5 ай бұрын

The common thread among postmodernism and critical theories is rage. In essence, it is intellectualized blind rage, focused on some grievance or other for expression.

@pablorages1241 2 жыл бұрын

I just like her name !

@helenablavatsky9136 2 жыл бұрын

Queer theory is sophistry, I think.

@meisherenow 2 ай бұрын

If critical social justice had the status of other creeds we recognize as religions, it would be much less dangerous, because we could just say "no thank you". SCOTUS?

@jakeundy5962 Ай бұрын

So… does Helen, the Quilette founder and editor in chief, not believe there’s such a thing as power and privilege? Like, at all?

@marieparker3822 2 жыл бұрын

Persecution-appropriation from the struggle of women - for enfranchisement, for example - and the struggle for decriminalisation of male homosexuality by gay men. I'm thinking of 'Trans' particularly, here.

@dawnemile7499 2 жыл бұрын

Gay men were engaging in public and frequent sex in a dangerous way, that's why they were arrested. A private couple was not arrested as the current opinion indicated.

@marieparker3822 2 жыл бұрын

Sometimes they were entrapped by the police. Also, they could be fired from their job, blackmailed, physically attacked and threatened without police protection. Many male homosexuals lived in fear.

@lewreed1871 2 жыл бұрын

Gay men were arrested for being gay, Dawn. That's how the furtive, clandestine gay sex culture came about. It was impossible to just *be* gay and for one's gay-ness to be another facet of one's life.

@MrJm323 2 жыл бұрын

@@lewreed1871 When and where was this? ....Victorian Britain? Texas or Alabama in the 1990s? Present-day Uganda? When you hear of people being arrested in Britain or the US (of the last two or three generations) for engaging in homosexual acts, it was, I think, as Dawn said, USUALLY for engaging in indecent acts in public parks, public toilets, private orgies (which the police were tipped off), etc.. Many homosexual men are attracted to anonymous encounters and hook-ups. The dearth of public bathrooms (unconnected to businesses -- stand alone restrooms in city parks and on street corners) in America, or the phenomenon of still-existing public restrooms in parks which are mysteriously locked up all the time, is caused by the problem of gay men hanging around and attempting to engage in anonymous sex acts in those bathrooms. But, because police efforts to suppress such behavior is increasingly branded as "homophobic", communities just lock up public restrooms. On Christmas Day or Thanksgiving Day, if you have the misfortune of travelling long distances to relatives' homes, you have to take into consideration of the dearth of bathrooms between your homes (Walmarts and fast food restaurants and other businesses are often closed -- and their bathrooms are not available).

@lewreed1871 2 жыл бұрын

@@MrJm323 First of all, what Dawn said ("Gay men were engaging in public and frequent sex in a dangerous way, that's why they were arrested. A private couple was not arrested as the current opinion indicated") bears no relation to anything that was actually said in the podcast. Pluckrose says (10.08): "It [homosexuality] was understood as a heinous sin for centuries, then it was understood as a sexual disorder, now it's just something some people are and everyone else needs to get over it." This was said in the wider context of the impact of Foucault's work on madness and sexuality, the former since the Middle Ages and the latter from the ancient world right through the Victorians. It hardly needs to be said that the persecution of gay men has a very long history and Dawn's comment here just seems like a random blurt of something to do with nothing in particular. The other poster, marie, rightly points out that gay men were often subject to entrapment, blackmail, discrimination at work and in many areas of the law, all of which imposed a life of secrecy, and that is precisely what gave rise to the practice of cottaging (as it's known in the UK). For what it's worth, I haven't heard of anyone being arrested for this in years, and if stories make the news at all, it's usually some married pastor who's been trying it on. Perhaps you could write a strongly worded letter to someone about your toileting problem.

@MrJm323 2 жыл бұрын

@@lewreed1871 Well, OUR toileting problem is the lack of freedom of people in society to set up "conveniences" (for the sake of public sanitation) and then protect their property from those who would abuse or damage it. Another reason why public toilets have largely disappeared from American society is that the feminists complained that it was unfair for PAY toilets to have coinlocks on the doors of toilet stalls when men could just relieve themselves with urinals (assuming they didn't have to "take a crap"). So, at the end of the 1970s many states and municipalities quite literally banned pay toilets. ...I have traveled to Europe and noticed that they are still allowed there. With the added problem of homosexual men using public toilets (the ones in public parks, which were by then being maintained and cleaned entirely at taxpayer expense) for their thrilling anonymous liaisons, and the cops being accused of homophobia whenever they cracked down on this activity, the local authorities have just resolved to lock up these toilets. In all of my life, women and homosexuals and the disabled have been pandered to, to such a degree by nettlesome government officials, that everyday life for us all has been diminished: fewer basic services for all (fewer buses, fewer trains, fewer accommodations -- not only public toilets but even small restaurants and shops; and more classroom disruptions by the mentally ill -- who used to have special and separate learning environments). ...I just find it fascinating that feminists are being pre-empted in concern for their privileges by "transwomen" (men and boys pretending to be women or girls) who can now invade girls' toilets, changing rooms, and take over girls' leagues in sports.