Has political correctness actually gone mad?

SwansonsTache said:
In Sweden they no longer use "he" and "she" but a gender neutral word which is "hen" (combination of han \ henne which is him \ her in Scandinavian).

I don't even think there is a translation for "hen" into English.

Fecking Swedes.
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Who are they?
 
Meh! feck them. I don't use "hen" Why should I. My son is a han and my daughters is hon.
 
SwansonsTache said:
In Sweden they no longer use "he" and "she" but a gender neutral word which is "hen" (combination of han \ henne which is him \ her in Scandinavian).

I don't even think there is a translation for "hen" into English.

Fecking Swedes.
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Wrong. He or she is used. Hen is added for practical reasons, i.e. when you don't know the gender. "The doctor is coming. Hope "hen" is good." So much more practical than saying "hope he or she is good", and less gender stereotyping than guessing the doctor's a he and the nurse a she, which quite often isn't the case anymore.

A gender neutral pronoun is common in many languages in the world. About time Swedish had one.
 
Very interesting article

Currently the subject of a major Twitter storm, Nick Pell’s article for The Irish Times’ website “The Alt-right: everything you need to know” omitted the main thing you need to know about the alt right – that its central concern is race.

Richard Spencer, a movement leader named in the article, who popularised the term Alt-right, couldn’t be clearer or more explicit about his goal, which is to create a white racial consciousness in America. Some of the more ambitious aims discussed exhaustively in Alt-right circles include the creation of a white ethno-state in America and later a pan-national white European consciousness, uniting North America, Russia and Europe in a bloc or Empire.

Spencer is in the strict dictionary definition of the term, a racist. He claims “race is something between a breed and an actual species” and believes non-white Americans should leave in a “peaceful ethnic cleansing”. He believes the Alt-right will infiltrate mainstream American culture and politics, starting with deporting undocumented immigrants under Trump. Spencer’s Alt-right takes influence from the French New Right who were often called “Gramscians of the Right” applying the theories of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, arguing that political goals would best be achieved through changing the culture and media from which formal politics would follow. And so far, it seems to be working.

The strictest definition of the Alt-right includes other overtly racial thinkers like Jared Taylor who calls himself a “race realist”, Steve Sailer who writes about “human biodiversity” – a pretty transparent euphemism – and Nick Land who explores the idea of the “Dark Enlightenment”. All of these are to varying degrees preoccupied with racial IQ, the Bell Curve, Western civilisational decline due to increased racial impurity, cultural decadence, cultural Marxism and Islamification.

Social media celebrities
In its broader milieu, there is the “alt-lite” made up of charismatic social media celebrities like Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopolous and VICE founder Gavin McInnes, mentioned in Pell’s piece. The alt-lite don’t share the hard alt right’s racial politics, despite the constant conflations of liberal media hyperbole – real Alt-righters regularly remind Milo he’s a “kike faggot” – but all these groups have emerged online around the same time, and interact and promote each other, sharing many of the same hatreds of political correctness, feminism, immigration, the welfare state and the cultural left. They also share the same aesthetic sensibility that emerged from the anarchy of 4chan, the anonymous site that popularised the Pepe the frog memes, which proliferated during the Trump campaign.


But let’s put some of this in perspective. While Alt-right leaders like Spencer are deadly serious and irony-free, it would be absurd to suggest that there has suddenly been a mass explosion of popular and sincerely-held white separatism in the US – a fevered liberal fantasy now mockingly associated with the expression “literally Hitler”. There are many in the Pepe-meme-sharing, Alt-right online world who probably aren’t that political but like the transgression and subcultural subversiveness.

No matter how familiar you are with the Alt-right, and I’ve watched them closely for many years, “explaining” the Alt-right’ to a general audience will always make you sound like an overwhelmed grandparent trying to figure out how to work the internet, in part because of their slippery use of irony. Stylistically the Alt-right is like the music subcultures of past decades, with its hip elitism that rolls its eyes at normies who don’t understand its conventions and argot – even though they are of course designed to be opaque to outsiders so as to resist easy interpretation.

The online culture wars of recent years have become ugly beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The seemingly sociopathic levels of amoral cruelty found in comment threads wherever Pepe memes lurk suggests an unpleasant answer to the question posed long ago by Plato’s Ring of Gyges – would we behave morally if we could be invisible and thus consequence free?

New generation
And this doesn’t apply exclusively to the Alt-right. A new generation of liberal left-identitarians display chilling levels of pack pleasure when conducting career-ending, life-destroying hate campaigns against people for minor infringements against the liberal moral code such as off-colour jokes. Some examples were chronicled in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. I think what has led so many young white men in the US in particular to openly flirt with the Alt-right online is a sense that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. Why grovel when you can join an anonymous army of trolls to fight back with pure offensiveness. This is what the Alt-right offers.

But like the US socialist writer Shuja Haider recently argued: “It should go without saying that left-liberal identity politics and Alt-right white nationalism are not comparable. The problem is that they are compatible.” Tumblr needs 4chan just as neo-masculinist misogynists need a perpetual supply of listicles about man-splaining, and the Alt-right needs finger wagging “Dear white people” liberal commentary to denigrate ordinary white people at every opportunity. None of them would make sense without the other. While Spencer’s plans are unlikely to catch on any time soon, the emergence of the Alt-right should warn us of a now imminent nightmare vision of what the coming years might hold – a public arena emptied of any civility, universalist ideas or openly competing political visions beyond a zero-sum tribal antagonism of identity groups, in which the boundaries of acceptable thought will shrink further while the purged will amass in the fetid forums of the Alt-right.
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That Irish Times article caused a massive Twitterstorm in Ireland. The guy who wrote it seems like a dick but the content was only moderately offensive. All the people piling on the IT for publishing it only gave more fuel to alt-right tossers who moan about free speech. Depressing.
 
  • University of London college students have demanded figures like Kant and Plato be dropped because they are white
  • Student union at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) insists the majority of philosophers on the course should be from Africa or Asia
  • *********** Sir Roger Scruton lambasted the demand saying it was ignorant

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...to-Descartes-dropped-university-syllabus.html
 
Ha. Amazing. I'm sure the reality is a bit less outrageous than the headlines (that is the Daily Mail after all - and I'm refusing to clickthrough) but it is hilarious the sort of stuff you read about at universities these days.

As per the Irish Times article above, the two extremes are as bad as each other. And need each other to exist. So many silly people in the world today.
 
Just don't touch physics, please. It's gonna be a bit strange without the white guys.
 
Adebesi said:
It is SOAS, seems reasonable that the focus should be on African and Asian figures.
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Depends on the course, surely? Although I'll admit to having no idea if all the curricula at SOAS are supposed to have an African/Asian slant. My only exposure to the place was intermittently going to their student bar to score weed in the late 90s.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Depends on the course, surely? Although I'll admit to having no idea if all the curricula at SOAS are supposed to have an African/Asian slant. My only exposure to the place was intermittently going to their student bar to score weed in the late 90s.
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Im not an expert but my assumption was always that it did have such a slant. Obviously its going to be skewed leaving out big European figures but of course if you want to learn about those people (typed guys, then deleted it) there are hundreds of other universities you could go to. I always thought the whole point of SOAS was to give you a different perspective on things like history and literature or whatever and learn about some interesting figures who wouldnt get a look in on a more mainstream kind of course.
 
Adebesi said:
Im not an expert but my assumption was always that it did have such a slant. Obviously its going to be skewed leaving out big European figures but of course if you want to learn about those people (typed guys, then deleted it) there are hundreds of other universities you could go to. I always thought the whole point of SOAS was to give you a different perspective on things like history and literature or whatever and learn about some interesting figures who wouldnt get a look in on a more mainstream kind of course.
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Gah. You made me click the link, damn you. The head of the department seems to think the request is daft and she will know the curriculum better than anyone.

The head of SOAS’s Religions and Philosophies department Erica Hunter said the union’s viewpoint was ‘rather ridiculous’, adding: ‘I would firmly resist dropping philosophers or historians just because it was fashionable.’
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Of course, this being the Mail, there's a reasonable chance the truth is being deliberately distorted.
 
I decided to go the other way and look at the SOAS website.

About SOAS University of London
SOAS University of London is the only Higher Education institution in Europe specialising in the study of Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East.

SOAS is a remarkable institution. Uniquely combining language scholarship, disciplinary expertise and regional focus, it has the largest concentration in Europe of academic staff concerned with Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

On the one hand, this means that SOAS scholars grapple with pressing issues - democracy, development, human rights, identity, legal systems, poverty, religion, social change - confronting two-thirds of humankind while at the same time remaining guardians of specialised knowledge in languages and periods and regions not available anywhere else in the UK.
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Looking at that I would maintain my position that this move sounds justified.

But I agree the head of the department probably has a valid POV as well.
 
Adebesi said:
I decided to go the other way and look at the SOAS website.



Looking at that I would maintain my position that this move sounds justified.

But I agree the head of the department probably has a valid POV as well.
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I'd guess it would be more difficult to place the African and Asian philosophers in a suitable context if you take out some of the most influential philosophers. Of course I don't know a lot about philosophy, but seeing the broader picture is surely an objective of a given university degree.
 
They ought to do what author & professor Camille Paglia did in her classes*: juxtapose the two strains of philosophical/cultural thought, and so open up the similarities and contrasts for student-discussion.

*In Paglia's case, the subjects were Western, and Eastern, art and culture.
 
Maagge said:
I'd guess it would be more difficult to place the African and Asian philosophers in a suitable context if you take out some of the most influential philosophers. Of course I don't know a lot about philosophy, but seeing the broader picture is surely an objective of a given university degree.
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Like you I know little about philosophy, to be honest I dont have a strong opinion on this Im thinking out loud. But surely the likes of Kant and Plato have influenced thinkers in African and Asia, so you could learn about those figures indirectly?

I just googled African philosophers influenced by Plato to see if there was an example I could use. It brought up a blog that said Greek philosophy was all stolen from Egypt anyway. Its on the internet so it must be true. So I have now gone all in with the SOAS SU.
 
One thing's for sure, the Mail is definitely being misleading. Even if they adhere to the student's (alleged) request and ensure that the majority of ***********'s studied are of African/Asian descent, heavy-weights like Kant and Plato are clearly still going to make the cut as part of the "white ***********" list.

That said, I'm more than willing to believe that one or more of the students have lost the run of themselves on some sort of righteous crusade. That's kind of what students do.
 
Adebesi said:
Like you I know little about philosophy, to be honest I dont have a strong opinion on this Im thinking out loud. But surely the likes of Kant and Plato have influenced thinkers in African and Asia, so you could learn about those figures indirectly?

I just googled African philosophers influenced by Plato to see if there was an example I could use. It brought up a blog that said Greek philosophy was all stolen from Egypt anyway. Its on the internet so it must be true. So I have now gone all in with the SOAS SU.
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Yeah I'm thinking out loud as well to be honest. My gut feeling, and what I was trying to imply, is just that in order to appreciate the Africans and Asians fully you'd have to study the others ones more than just indirectly. Of course this could be completely wrong.
 
Maagge said:
Yeah I'm thinking out loud as well to be honest. My gut feeling, and what I was trying to imply, is just that in order to appreciate the Africans and Asians fully you'd have to study the others ones more than just indirectly. Of course this could be completely wrong.
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Your flagrant hostility is stressing me out, Im going to my safe space.
 
The Firestarter said:
  • University of London college students have demanded figures like Kant and Plato be dropped because they are white
  • Student union at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) insists the majority of philosophers on the course should be from Africa or Asia
  • *********** Sir Roger Scruton lambasted the demand saying it was ignorant
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...to-Descartes-dropped-university-syllabus.html
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It kind of ties in to this, by the sound of it.

Universities will be forced to pander to the demands of "snowflake" students if controversial changes to the ranking system are approved, education leaders have warned.

The Government faces a cross-party revolt in the Lords this week over proposed reforms to higher education, which include placing student satisfaction at the heart of a new ranking system.

It is feared that this will lead to a "fantastically dangerous" culture where authorities will give in to student demands, however unreasonable they may be.
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Iit goes on to quote a King's College professor's warning about it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/08/universities-warned-snowflake-student-demands/
 
Err, don't ranking systems already take student satisfaction into account? Been a good while since I had to look at them, but usually they list course employability, grade achievement and student satisfaction, and give a combined score.
 
Jaysus, the Torygraph couldn't be more transparent with its political agenda. Hilarious the way that allowing students to rate the service provided by their Uni is The Worst Thing Ever yet when the Tories insisted on similar legislation for people to rate their GPs it was a great day for the empowerment of patients.
 
Pogue Mahone said:
Jaysus, the Torygraph couldn't be more transparent with its political agenda. Hilarious the way that allowing students to rate the service provided by their Uni is The Worst Thing Ever yet when the Tories insisted on similar legislation for people to rate their GPs it was a great day for the empowerment of patients.
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It's just the daily mail with fewer celebrity stories.
 
Here is the demand from SOAS student union in full:

Decolonising SOAS is a campaign that aims to address the structural and epistemological legacy of colonialism within our university. We believe that SOAS should take a lead on such questions given its unique history within British colonialism. In light of the centenary and SOAS’ aims of curating a vision for itself for the next 100 years, this conversation is pivotal for its future direction.

Our aims are a continuation of the campaign last year:



  1. To hold events that will engage in a wider discussion about expressions of racial and economic inequality at the university, focussing on SOAS.
  2. To address histories of erasure prevalent in the curriculum with a particular focus on SOAS’ colonial origins and present alternative ways of knowing.
  3. To interrogate SOAS’ self-image as progressive and diverse.
  4. To use the centenary year as a point of intervention to discuss how the university must move forward and demand that we, as students of colour, are involved in the curriculum review process.
  5. To review 10 first year courses, working with academics to discuss points of revamp, reform and in some cases overhaul.
  6. To make sure that the majority of the philosophers on our courses are from the Global South or it’s diaspora. SOAS’s focus is on Asia and Africa and therefore the foundations of its theories should be presented by Asian or African philosophers (or the diaspora).
  7. If white philosophers are required, then to teach their work from a critical standpoint. For example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so called “Enlightenment” philosophers wrote within.
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taken from: https://soasunion.org/education/educationalpriorities/


@Pogue Mahone @Adebesi @Silva @Maagge
 
I disagree with the last demand, that the lens must compulsarily be critical; the rest of it is perfectly reasonable for a school focusing on Asia and Africa.
 
Maybe I'm showing my ignorance of philosophy as a subject but why are you looking at anybody if not from a critical standpoint? Isn't that the point of university courses?
 
Also what do they mean regarding the colonial aspect of those philosophers?

I mean we are talking so far back in an area which is notoriously volitile. I love history so would be interested to know more because I'm not sure how colonialism in the more traditional sense comes into play.
 
I'm guessing they mean the assumptions those philosophers held must be borne in mind and readily acknowledged whilst discussing their work. Similar to how the prose of Joseph Conrad can't, ideally, be discussed without a post-colonial reading of Heart of Darkness and other works after Achebe's An Image of Africa.
 
Snowjoe said:
Also what do they mean regarding the colonial aspect of those philosophers?

I mean we are talking so far back in an area which is notoriously volitile. I love history so would be interested to know more because I'm not sure how colonialism in the more traditional sense comes into play.
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The thing is, they didn't mention the Greeks at all, that was the Mail. They specifically talked about Enlightenment figures for whom colonialism is more relevant.
 
berbatrick said:
I disagree with the last demand, that the lens must compulsarily be critical; the rest of it is perfectly reasonable for a school focusing on Asia and Africa.
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I think 6 is slightly problematic as well, though given the rest it would probably work out that way anyway. But the idea that a highly qualified expert in African philosophy might not get the job explicitly because he's white doesn't sit right. If a white European had taken the time to study a relevant subject they should be considered on a level playing field.

For me it's about the course, and as I said before it seems to me a focus on a predominantly African and Asian syllabus seems entirely appropriate for SOAS.
 
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