Vivid nails it on Critical theory & Cancel Culture

_{kairosfocus

July 21, 2020

Control vs Anarchy, Defending our Civilization, Geo-strategic issues, Lessons of History, rhetoric}

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Longtime UD commenter Vividbleau:

Eugene
“Cancel culture (along with BLM, LGBTQ and other similar activism) is ultimately a creation of some think-tank, payrolled by Davos crowd. “
[Vivid:] Actually it’s Critical Theory and it’s sub theories ( Critical Race Theory, Critical Social Justice Theory, Critical Whiteness Theory, etc) that is responsible for “cancel culture” [–> we can add a long list from law to watermelon environmentalism, and more]

My response:

Vivid, include post modernist deconstruction, targetting our civilisation. Critical theories are culture form marxism, and so called community organisers of the Alinsky Chicago school are literally trained small-c communist agitators playing with the fire of low kinetic 4th generation insurgency war. Those who play with such hell-spawned fire are responsible for the results of civilisational arson. The ghosts of 100 million victims since 1917 jointly moan out: “I am a victim of marxist tyranny and I approve this warning”.

It helps to ponder the problem with our “typical” political spectrum:

. . . and to consider the impact of stirring the repeller pole of anarchic chaos, leading to tumbling into the bloody maw of the vortex of tyranny:

Here is a basic point: yes, there are always serious challenges and things needing reformation in any community. However, once we have any reasonably functional constitutional democracy, there are many means of airing concerns, petitioning for redress and working towards reasonable reforms. There is therefore never a justification to resort to riotous, bullying, intimidatory Red Guard mobs. In fact, that resort undermines the credibility of the case being made. And, enabling such mobs under colour of protest is just as destructive. So, yes, there are serious issues to be discussed and reasonable reforms are in order. Abuses under colour of protest, lawfare and the like are utterly unjustifiable.

This is what I am talking about, in case your education has had “convenient” gaps in it:

Again, those who commit civilisational arson are responsible for the predictable consequences. Radicals unwilling to face the horrific track record of radical revolutions since 1789, with Not only France 1789 on and 1870 but also Russia, Germany and China as chief exhibits, I am looking straight at you.

We need to understand what we are facing, if we are to adequately counter it in defence of our civilisation. END

Comments

Eugene, okay a first point of reference. KFkairosfocus_{July 23, 2020
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To KF@22: >what evidence can you bring to the table that would support the idea of a consensus of powerful elites leading to mainstreaming culture-form marxism in policy, media, law, etc? This paper can be a good starting point: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332182416 Also, another quote from the same author: "It seems that any class which opposes its own destruction is accused of being populated by racist and ignorant folks that can’t see that salvation lies in a carbon-managed and globalized world. It becomes imperative, therefore, to shut down all the venues where such an ‘ignorant lot’ could communicate their views, attempt to organize and thereby threaten the prevailing social order."Eugene_{July 22, 2020
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KF re 25 Agreed Vividvividbleau_{July 22, 2020
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Jerry, yes I know of the papers which I just added to my vaults on HCQ. I am also very aware that the Russian asset narrative has been substantially undermined, you have given a link. On the third, I used DDG -- I have avoided Google for years -- and found this: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/05/heather_mac_donald_america_is_being_ripped_apart_by_lies.html#! I note, there is a current incident of a toddler being pinned down and someone putting a knee on the neck, with a special ed educator egging on with a call to so kill the child for the crime of being white. Of course, the nuance that what some idiot does should not be flung broad brush is trotted out. So, the media talking heads and their editors know how to make relevant distinctions (especially when criminal investigations are in train). That underscores the conclusion that we have had 2 months of 4GW street Red Guard mob tactics media amplified to shift public policy in ways that responsible discussion would not support. It seems there is a failure to understand that if one sows the wind, he should not be astonished to reap the whirlwind. KFkairosfocus_{July 22, 2020
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Vivid, there were people who thought Hitler was an ordinary politician, too and tried the usual game of funding as basis for access. Didn't work. KFkairosfocus_{July 22, 2020
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I think you need to explain and document your three claims.
Easy but the first would take too many references for quick reading. For HCQ, I just posted a link to a white paper that summarizes HCQ on the current RHampton page. The support for my comment is there. But there are hundreds of references showing the denigration of HCQ and hundreds of references showing its value. For, Police malfeasance or lack of it, Read Heather MacDonald. Just google her and there will be several references documenting the claim. She wrote a book 4 years ago and nothing has changed. She has all the statistics. For the greatest of all hoaxes one should read Lee Smith's book. "The Plot against the President." Then just follow the current revelations from the Department of Justice. A good place to start is on John Solomon's site, Just the News https://justthenews.comjerry_{July 22, 2020
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“And somehow my main point was completely lost in all this subsequent discussion about Critical theory and its origins.” Because it’s not Davos that is driving this train. For sure the super rich will use it to its advantage if it can, but they always do. Vividvividbleau_{July 22, 2020
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Eugene, what evidence can you bring to the table that would support the idea of a consensus of powerful elites leading to mainstreaming culture-form marxism in policy, media, law, etc? KFkairosfocus_{July 22, 2020
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Jerry, I think you need to explain and document your three claims. For the first, it seems clear that there was malfeasance on the matter compounded by irresponsible media; but you need to link and summarise. The second seems over-broad. I am aware that there is no credible evidence of a systematic targetting of black men for death by the police, though the police in the US may be, overall, overly aggressive, which would feed into perceptions of targetting given a sad, long history. Of course, that in turn raises the issue of the extent of violence in US society, which seems more to be where discussion should be focused. (My native land is far worse, in such a regard.) On HCQ, I think you should link and summarise key evidence, as you are speaking beyond what many people have been led to imagine is plausible. KFkairosfocus_{July 22, 2020
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And somehow my main point was completely lost in all this subsequent discussion about Critical theory and its origins. The point is that Critical theory and whatever other Marxist indoctrination techniques there are, have now been fully adopted and weaponized by our friendly global Capitalist owners (aka "Davos crowd"). Obviously they employ it in order to achieve some kind of social transformation of their liking, I just doubt that they are interested in creating Socialism. Hence fighting it at the individual level is kinda pointless. It is like fighting the CCP in China by openly arguing its policy to one's coworkers. It is a career suicide for nothing. This can only be thought via political representation, yet there is little to none of it for these people.Eugene_{July 22, 2020
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Three incredible hoaxes believed by most of the people and disseminated by both the press and people in government in the last four years have torn the country apart. First, the Russia conspiracy hoax of the 2016 presidential campaign. Second, Injustice to Black Americans by police action Three, vilification of HCQ as a useful treatment for COVID 19 The latter has led to the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. It is probably the most callous of the three because it has led to unnecessary deaths. But all three have influenced ordinary Americans by creating false perceptions. Nothing good ever comes from a lie and here we have had three major lies that are tearing the country apart. It is by design but the irony is that the ones promulgating the lies will not necessarily benefit in the end. They will most likely end up as fodder.jerry_{July 22, 2020
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Jerry (& attn BR), in looking at the revised spectrum, a domineering ruling oligarchy -- dare I say, deep state? -- is just as dangerous as an autocrat. KFkairosfocus_{July 22, 2020
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Jerry @ 14 Before Hitler there was Woodrow Wilson.BobRyan_{July 22, 2020
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Vivid, yes, a full generation of indoctrination. One expression of the cancel/guilt and disqualify mentality is the stolen land thesis. Especially, in the form, America is stolen land [compounded by slavery etc]. Therefore, of course, it is deserving of the death penalty. (See part of why I have pointed out that radicals and enablers are responsible for reasonably predictable consequences of their actions?) My basic problem there, is that from the founder of river valley civilisation, Nimrod MacCush in Mesopotamia 5500+ years ago to very recently, essentially all land was settled or taken by the sword and was held by the sword. The exceptions were essentially by purchase. So, are we going to "disqualify" essentially all titles to lands across the world as reflecting essentially illegitimate governments? (Or, will we only use this when we can conveniently label the targets as "white nationalists" aka Nazis, or the closely similar? Do you see the telling selectivity at work?) Let me illustrate. Some years ago, it was being pushed that Jamaica's slaves and Maroons were essentially Moorish/Muslim, so by implication, that nation was part of the Ummah held by White conquistadores and their heirs (the current post colonial government) to be retaken. If you know Jihad principles, you know that that claim, made by a Muslim supersedes all claims to the contrary on grounds that non muslims are automatically discredited in testimony. Similarly, it would justify the most extreme forms of jihad. And so the dawah -- strictly, call to surrender [the "equivalent" of Christian missions] -- is an act of mercy. Where, by extension of the associated claim that black africans were moors, the rest of the Caribbean, Brazil and the Southern US fall under the same claim, as do Spain and Portugal. Similar claims extend to much of E Europe and India. (Yes, talk of a Red-Green alliance against Western Civilisation has a point.) The kicker is this: it is precisely democratisation and the principles of the US DoI, unacknowledged, that established a different principle of government: informed consent of the governed. So, we grandfather in the general situation (on pain of opening up a lot more bloodshed) and resolve disputes by negotiations and referenda, etc. This was joined to recognising national identity (the principle of post WW1 settlement) and that after the League of Nations Failed, the UN Charter was established after a war largely fought unknowingly under the nuclear shadow which went nuclear at the end. Let us note where that charter begins:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, AND FOR THESE ENDS to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations . . .
Notice, the echoes of the US DoI, 1776. So, we must recognise that in the 4G war information battlespace, a key issue is that delegitimisation of the target through creating perceived cancellation of legitimacy or innocence is a key step in inducing weakened resistance, surrender and subjugation. To do so, deconstruction techniques are routinely, selectively used. Some remarks at Philosophy Basics dot com are inadvertently revealing:
Deconstructionism (or sometimes just Deconstruction) is a 20th Century school in philosophy initiated by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. It is a theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings. Although Derrida himself denied that it was a method or school or doctrine of philosophy (or indeed anything outside of reading the text itself), the term has been used by others to describe Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism, which involved discovering, recognizing and understanding the underlying assumptions (unspoken and implicit), ideas and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief. Deconstructionism is notoriously difficult to define or summarize, and many attempts to explain it in a straight-forward, understandable way have been academically criticized for being too removed from the original texts, and even contradictory to the concepts of Deconstructionism. Some critics have gone so far as to claim that Deconstruction is a dangerous form of Nihilism, leading to the destruction of Western scientific and ethical values, and it has been seized upon by some conservative and libertarian writers as a central example of what is wrong with modern academia.
Seems to me the critics are right, as we instantly see immediate, deep, inescapable self-referential incoherence so self-falsification by contradiction, confusion and meaninglessness in: It is a theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings. Now, we are a communicative species, and government pivots on texts. So, playing rhetorical games to subvert texts has seriously nihilistic, will to power implications. Especially, when we bring in the inevitable association: they are imposed by power groups we delegitimise. Echoes of what is going on all around us should be instantly familiar. If you doubt this, let's clip IEP on Deconstruction:
Although deconstruction has roots in Martin Heidegger’s concept of Destruktion, to deconstruct is not to destroy. Deconstruction is always a double movement of simultaneous affirmation and undoing. It started out as a way of reading the history of metaphysics in Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, but was soon applied to the interpretation of literary, religious, and legal texts as well as philosophical ones, and was adopted by several French feminist theorists as a way of making clearer the deep male bias embedded in the European intellectual tradition. [--> that is an instant link to culture-form marxist critical theories and subversive agendas. Also, Red Guards and their Culture Revolution backers. Likewise, it is but a step to move from text to voice etc. so one instantly discredits and dismisses the targetted, who thereafter can be conveniently branded and belittled at any desired point.] To deconstruct is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines” created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible . . .
We would therefore be well advised to note the self-refutation and implicit nihilism and set it aside. Texts may have problems that we need to negotiate, but sorry, truth lies in the accurate representation of reality by spoken voice or written text and your own text implies a claim to substantial truth. One that it instantly fails by way of self-reference, incoherence and inextricable contradiction. Again, I point to the first duties of reason:
We can readily identify at least seven inescapable first duties of reason. Inescapable, as they are so antecedent to reasoning that even the objector implicitly appeals to them; i.e. they are self-evident. Duties, to truth, to right reason, to prudence, to sound conscience, to neighbour, so also to fairness and justice etc. Such built in law is not invented by parliaments or courts, nor can these principles and duties be abolished by such. (Cf. Cicero in De Legibus, c. 50 BC.) Indeed, it is on this framework that we can set out to soundly understand and duly balance rights, freedoms and duties; which is justice. The legitimate main task of government, then, is to uphold and defend the civil peace of justice through sound community order reflecting the built in, intelligible law of our nature. Where, as my right implies your duty a true right is a binding moral claim to be respected in life, liberty, honestly aquired property, innocent reputation etc. To so justly claim a right, one must therefore demonstrably be in the right. Thus, too, we may compose sound civil law informed by that built-in law of our responsibly, rationally free morally governed nature; from such, we may identify what is unsound or false thus to be reformed or replaced even though enacted under the colour and solemn ceremonies of law.
Let us re-arm ourselves with sound first principles and the wisdom that derives from a sound understanding of history, especially key advances such as those in the US DoI, 1776. Let us have the courage to stand up for and defend the inevitably flawed but legitimate, rejecting the notion that flaws automatically delegitimise. Let us defend and restore sound civilisation. KFkairosfocus_{July 22, 2020
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UB, yes, Marcuse is one. There is a fairly long list, the report/briefing I linked discusses. KFkairosfocus_{July 22, 2020
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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” it is scary to see the same history being repeated right before my eyes
I told my friends a couple weeks ago it's easy to see how Nazi Germany came about. The only difference is that there is no charismatic leader currently on the left. They agreed.jerry_{July 21, 2020
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F/N: Food for thought report https://unconstrainedanalytics.org/report-re-remembering-the-mis-remembered-left-the-lefts-strategy-and-tactics-to-transform-america/ (& if you dare to be provoked) KFkairosfocus_{July 21, 2020
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UB We have a generation and a half indoctrinated to hate America so its no wonder they are now marching in the streets. Also it’s fascinating to observe that most of the rioters are white! I am currently rereading “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” it is scary to see the same history being repeated right before my eyes. The power of constant propaganda is frightening and of course we get to witness the “ brown shirts” in Portland ,Seattle, Chicago, New York all supported by the progressive left. Vividvividbleau_{July 21, 2020
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When did the cancel culture start? A long time ago. Frank Sinatra tried and with good success canceled Bob Eberly. (Who's Bob Eberly - the top crooner in the country at one time) Let me give you an example from 40 years ago. To understand one has to watch the 1980 movie, The Jazz Singer, starring Neil Diamond. It's a modification of the original Al Jolson first talkie, Jazz Singer from 1927. Diamond does a very credible job as an actor but does the unpardonable sin of singing his song, "Coming to America" at the end. https://bit.ly/3fPWofQ For his performance where he displayed his Jewish heritage he was voted worse actor of the year. This did not silence Neil Diamond but he did not act after this. His music still is popular and "Coming to America" was his favorite song. Sweet Caroline is still sung at weddings and sporting events. (what are sporting events?) But the elites gave it a shot in 1980.jerry_{July 21, 2020
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. Herbert MarcuseUpright BiPed_{July 21, 2020
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Jerry, I see, you mean headings not arcs of rotation or turning. KFkairosfocus_{July 21, 2020
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Vivid, one of the culture form marxists. KFkairosfocus_{July 21, 2020
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Getting back to cancel culture it is my opinion that the Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse can be called the father of cancel culture, Marcuse for instance held to among other things that tolerance of views are repressive. Vividvividbleau_{July 21, 2020
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Jerry “ A third system that was a standard forever is also now under attack. It is the family.“ This is one of the goals of BLM the organization. On their official website “what we believe” they have a lot to say about the family , they want to disrupt the western nuclear family. BLM was founded by Marxists and is not about black lives. Vividvividbleau_{July 21, 2020
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Kf, It’s just an analogy. 355 degrees or 005 degrees on a circle to indicate small changes would be much better than complete abandonment by 180 degrees that a lot of people want.jerry_{July 21, 2020
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Jerry, do you mean, a 5 degree alteration or even tacking upwind? KFkairosfocus_{July 21, 2020
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Kf, There is what I call the 355 vs 180 responses to problems such as injustice or economic inadequacy or uncertainty. There is a successful system but it is not perfect. The two most obvious are free market capitalism and Judeo Christianity. The reactions to each as they got more successful is that they were not perfect. A third system that was a standard forever is also now under attack. It is the family. The reaction to religion in the West where Judeo Capitalism thrived was atheism and with it a weakening for the basis of a moral standard. I never thought about this much till I was at a hagiography for Emily Dickerson and her reaction to religion was being praised by the presenter. While certainly religious people and movements have had many negative aspects there is zero evidence that the 180 is benign. The reaction to free market capitalism by a continual vocal minority was to do away with it entirely and ensure total equality. They have been very successful despite the evidence that the 180 position is disastrous for nearly all. The reaction to the family is the dissolution of the need for marriage and with it the personal responsibility for raising children. As society emphasizes it’s all for the children but ignore what has worked for most forever. This is just random thoughts and observations that a 355 is much much better than 180.jerry_{July 21, 2020
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F/N: If you don't "get" the direct relevance of cancel culture, Red Guardism and the like for ID and the like, ponder what Dr Willie Soon is facing: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/13/bbc-asks-dr-willie-soon-to-respond-to-climate-conspiracy-claims/ KFkairosfocus_{July 21, 2020
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Vivid nails it on Critical theory & Cancel Culturekairosfocus_{July 21, 2020
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