If you crash into a telephone pole because you failed to hit the breaks, that isn't a failure of the brakes.
Idaho and Critical Race Theory
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The first one, considering that shitty regulations killing millions of people worldwide cannot be justified by cultural differences.
But both would be examples of looking at power structures critically, which is the point I'm making to tstorm, who apparently wants us to blame the unthinking glob of acids and proteins for our global predicament instead.
That one's okay, though if we're talking about the legacy of foreign imperialism on China, then we can't really apply a summary that excludes the Japanese Empire, the most consistent and direct imperial antagonist in the region.
And a very conscious decision has been made by the oligarchs of the ruling party: not to redress the resource privation and mass poverty, but to concentrate it and profiteer. In that sense they're very much the latest in a long line, inheriting the exploitative, quasi-feudalist work of the Kuomintang, the British Empire, the Japanese Empire, and the Qing Dynasty.
And if the car doesn't have functional breaks, we should look at the car manufacturer and the regulations that allowed it to get onto the market.
Not just blame the individual driver for failing to notice, and then letting the same model stay in production.
The problem being, critical race theory is purely deconstructive in nature and offers, at worst, destructive non-solutions to legacies of asymmetric power structures between regions, states, or peoples, and due to its deconstructivity is often at direct odds with itself, let alone with competing social, economic, or political theories. At best, it offers only sociopolitical paralysis and mass gaslighting.
Which is why neoliberal shits have so thoroughly coopted it for the sake of subverting solidarity, and consciously perpetuate it as a vehicle for maintenance of global status quos, while useful idiots love it for its capacity to feel ethically and morally superior over others whilst utterly refusing to engage in the very introspection critical theory mandates by default. Keep people arguing about who should be at the front of the progressive stack, and they're not organizing to collectively seek redress against the very harms they share in common.
That's not even a point we can -- or should -- localize to China. Lest we forget about the panoply of hemorrhagic fevers (of which the various strains of ebola are only a few), HIV/AIDS, lepto, cholera, typhoid, even anthrax and bubonic plague that have all been causally or indirectly linked to wet market activity across the global south. It's not even a point that can or should be compartmentalized to public health, being it's inextricably linked to the rise and failure of ISI across the global south.
Really?
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Alright, but I wasn't talking to tstorm about critical race theory, but critical theory in general.
I'm not much inclined to discuss critical race theory with you because I suspect you'll fly off the handle.
Well, you could make an argument for the Qing Empire itself instead.
I believe I made my opinion of critical race theory, and whether it should be taught in school, clear enough comparing it to intelligent design, thank you.
Or perhaps we could make an argument for the two centuries' worth of illicit opium trade by the British empire for the express purpose of weakening and fracturing the Qing dynasty, and the wars the British empire fought to protect its illicit opium trade in China, in the name of better tea prices.
You did. But I thought for a moment you might have wanted to discuss it.
Anyway, none of it's relevant to what I was talking to tstorm about.
You could do. But the toll in China from the Opium Wars was around 7,000+ killed or wounded in the first, and 2 - 3,000+ in the second.
Whereas the toll for the First Sino-Japanese War was 35,000+ killed or wounded, and ~14 million at the very least, 10 million of them civilians, for the second-- as well as the devastation of the Second Sino-Japanese War to agriculture and infrastructure, on a scale unmatched by any other foreign engagement in China's history.
Congratulations, you discovered that victorious powers in a conflict are the ones whose death counts, based upon circumstances of choice, get canonized in the record books. AKA, how we got to a quarter million dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined but "only" a hundred thousand dead in the firebombing of Tokyo, and how that all sounds totally reasonable until one actually looks into how the dead were counted. Particularly when one compares and contrasts which types of bombs the US had a vested interest in overstating their lethality in the name of the cold war, and which ones have been employed liberally in every armed conflict in which the US has been a belligerent since.
Funny how there's never been even an attempt to estimate the number of Chinese dead from two hundred years' worth of illicit opium trade before, between, and after those two wars. Or. y'know, linkages argued between the various rebellions, civil wars, famines, and strife to the decline and fall of the Qing, that the British caused in the first place.
Remind me, how many people died in the Taiping rebellion?
EDIT: And while we're at it, remind me how many of those dead in the two Sino-Japanese wars were thanks to atrocities committed by Chinese forces as scorched-earth or area denial tactics to halt Japanese advances, like for example deliberately flooding the Yellow River basin?
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Is this a very long-winded way of saying you believe the estimates of the dead from the Opium Wars (in which, combined, fewer than 500,000 soldiers took part) has a death toll that's been underrestimated by 13.5 million at least?
On a side-note, Japan was the victorious power in the first Sino-Japanese War, but the death/wounded toll of 35,000 in China appears to have snuck into the canon somehow.
Yep, that'd be a point in favour of counting the Chinese government (Qing and Kuomintang) as the greater aggressors. [EDITED]
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No, I'm saying you're transparently full of it trying to frame the conversation around exclusively the opium wars to suit your own objectives in this conversation, when you're ignoring my point was that British empire was responsible for two centuries' worth of societal chaos and mass death in China in which the two opium wars were a single part.
An estimated 20-30 million died in the Taiping rebellion, by the way. Just so third parties here know the numbers we actually get into when talking about armed conflict in China. I'm sure 14 million sounds impressive and all with italics, but those are rookie numbers when you're talking about shit going down in China. Especially for the fact the Chinese probably killed more Chinese than the Japanese by incident, and the Japanese were the ones trying to ethnically cleanse China.
I was unaware the Qing empire still existed as of 1938 when the Yellow River was deliberately flooded to halt the Japanese advance in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Thanks for pointing that out!
Looks paywalled up.
That's what we get for not having a pocket billionaire, I guess
Medium length story short: school and legislature get complaint from Non-Student Activist saying he saw a video on a friend's phone of their friend being berated for being white. School immediately shuts down classes it thinks might've been the ones despite no class being identified.
Idaho legislature does it's stupid thing, including having the school put together an American propaganda department. School hires law firm to investigate video and classes. Non-Student Activist doesn't have copy of the video and won't identify friend with the video. Law firm interviews a few dozen students, nobody has any idea what they're talking about. School releases email for anybody with any information to contact, gets zero hits.
Basically, it's a Veritas/Acorn situation only they skipped the bit with the fake video.
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Ah. How're you tallying that up, then? It'd have to be some very impressive tallying to make the case you seem to want to make.
(Also... you know, it was your post which questioned the death tolls in the wars. Seems a little odd to make a point specifically focusing on the wars' death tolls, and then complain because the response talks about the... wars' death tolls).
I fail to see how this makes any sort of point in your favour, unless your argument is as hollow as "worse stuff also happened".
*sigh*
You said "in the two Sino-Japanese Wars". The Qing authorities perpetrated atrocities against their own people in the first. If it makes you feel better, to satisfy the example you gave, I'll amend it to "Chinese government (Qing and Kuomintang)".
I mean, thankfully you've provided another good example of the Qing Empire acting as the greater aggressor during the Taiping Rebellion, so there's more than enough. I just fail to see how this makes the case that the British had a more devastating impact than the Japanese or Qing Empires in the area...
Is that the one you've just provided, the one from the Wikipedia article or the one from the Standford Encylopedia? Which of those definitions is the one you are using?
I've already provided you that answer.
I list them all together because they are people you might teach in a critical theory class. They are all theorists whose work is based in critique. They all draw on that intellectual legacy of critical philosophy and German idealism. They aren't doing the same thing, they don't even remotely agree with each other, often they are intellectual rivals or represent competing schools of thought that are completely irreconcilable, but the method they use to arrive at the conclusions they do is nonetheless similar, so for the purposes of pedagogy we group them together.
I mean, sure, the beetles themselves aren't really part of a human power structure, (even there some people might disagree, but let's ignore that for now) but everyone else involved in this situation is. What are the various interests involved with this beetle problem? Is it a purely environmental problem? Are there economic interests bound up in it? Have people suffered financial losses? If so, have they been offered compensation and what interests informed that decision? What are the possible solutions, and who is responsible for making the decisions? How is that decision making process being made. Is the decision making process appropriate, does it accurately reflect the range of interests involved?
I could go on, but you see what I'm saying right. For something to be a problem needing a solution, it kind of has to be a problem that affects people, and if it affects people, then societal power structures are still relevant.
Would you have said that to Jewish people during the holocaust?
And before you dismiss this as a silly example, remember that the Frankfurt school were mostly Jewish, and that they lived through the holocaust. Their criticisms of the society they lived in are generally not abstract, many of them would spend their lives trying to understand the mechanism by which a democratic society became a totalitarian society dedicated to murdering people like them. That's certainly the most common context in which I've encountered the work of members of the Frankfurt school.
Regardless, this isn't an argument about critical theory. It's an argument that goes back to the very origins of liberalism and absolutism, and in particular to Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes also lived through a shitty event, the English civil war, and what he took away from his life experience is that human beings are awful and cannot exist without destroying each other unless there is a strong, authoritarian society to keep them in line. For Hobbes, being part of a society means you've already opted out of the right to make any demands. Even if the king or the government is bad, you should just accept it because doing anything to change your situation is morally wrong. That said, even Hobbes also understood that morality and politics were not the same thing, that a king abusing their power was also morally wrong.
But do you think Hobbes was right? Does a person have a moral responsibility to simply accept the hierarchy they live in? Is trying to change an authoritarian system that is harmful to you the same thing as not wanting to live in a society at all?
Obviously not, it's a comical position which made sense 400 years ago, and even then wasn't as weird as you're trying to make it now. Even Hobbes understood the right to criticize power, he just didn't that that criticism should ever be allowed to have political consequences. Personally, I'm not really cool with the idea of being ruled by an absolute monarch, so I'm okay with the idea of political criticism of existing power structures. Maybe I'm just weird like that.
Is the definition of critical theory that you're using not something that has been retrospectively assigned? Again, you're not using Horkheimer's definition any more, so what are you using? Are you using the same definition of critical theory that self-described critical theorists use?
Foucault didn't describe himself as a "critical theorist", but like Horkheimer he did provide us with a very comprehensive definition of what it means to be "critical". His work is absolutely critical, it's just that being critical doesn't actually mean what you seem to think it means. But again, the elephant in the room here is that you're not being honest about what your definition of critical theory actually is.
In academia, we don't generally categorize things in terms of their adherence to fixed "doctrines" or ideological cults. We categorize them in terms of their influences, their role in human knowledge and in terms of what we think is the best way to teach them.
Why are those two interpretations mutually exclusive?
For all that you're trying to define critical theory as necessarily extreme and dogmatic, but it seems like your position is the one that is dogmatic. In particular, it seems to be dogmatically opposed to certain modes of thought even if those modes of thought turn out to be true or useful. It should be extremely obvious to everyone that the a bridge has a relationship to the people who build and use it, and if the bridge has been neglected, then the reasons are likely human, but you, for some reason, seem to find it morally and emotionally upsetting that we would even think about the bridge in terms of its relationship to a society, and should instead blindly and unquestioningly confine ourselves to focusing on the technical details of how to repair it. It's a position of wilful and deliberate blindness and thoughtlessness.
Also, in a very revealing twist on this metaphor, you've already decided that the bridge being in disrepair is a problem, but maybe it isn't a problem. Maybe the bridge being in disrepair isn't actually a problem at all. Maybe the society that built it no longer needs it. Maybe it's so old that repairing it has simply become too costly. Maybe the bridge has a deeper significance and people want to leave it as it is rather than try and return it to use. We can't know these things without knowing the relationship between the bridge and the people.
Again, you need to go away and examine your own conspiratorial thinking, and I think you need to genuinely ask yourself why you are so obsessed with this group of people who you know almost nothing about and who have very little relationship to each other. Why have you created this bizarre and self-consciously evil ideology, and then assigned it to a group of people whose "crime", in reality, is thinking about things on a different level to you. What exactly is your stake and your problem here?
Considering the Qing were a Jurchen based dynasty, shouldn't we consider them conquerers of China itself in the first place ? It is not as if they didn't have a lot of cultural acceptance problems in the beginning and didn't enact laws of cultural suppression, most infamously the braid thing.
So you picked a group of people that you think belong grouped together, and then decided my concept of critical theory is laughable because I would group those people together. You should have dropped this line of argument and moved on, it's inherently self-defeating.
And everyone who has ever done critique is a critical theorist? I understand that's what you think, you have yet to provide a source where literally anyone other than you uses that understanding of the words.
Relevant for proposed solutions, not necessarily relevant as the cause. Unless you want to say that power structures influence the perspective on what is a problem, therefore without their influence the same set of circumstances might not be seen as problematic, which is again a perspective to leads to suicidal recommendations to kill the power structures to get rid of the problems they're trying to solve.
Yes. I'm not like you. The truth to me does not vary based on who is saying it or who is listening. In a practical sense, I doubt this particular discussion would have come up in Auschwitz, so I likely wouldn't have reason to say that, but presuming the circumstances happened to pop up, yes, I would say the same thing to anyone.
I don't think Hobbes would tell people to "simply accept the hierarchy they live in". Hobbes would certainly advise against overthrowing the hierarchy you live in, that anything is preferable to anarchy, but that's not "simply accept it".
The comical thing is that you don't realize I have more philosophical commonality with Thomas Hobbes than I do with you. In what way am I trying to make out Hobbes as weird? In what way have I suggested that criticism of existing power structures isn't ok. I've been very clear, not every criticism of power structures is critical theory, and there are definitely occasions where criticism of power structures is warranted and I'd say necessary.
You, again, are just neglecting what I have stated a bunch of times is the necessary aspect of critical theory: it has to, in all circumstances, be an assault on the structures of society. Sometimes, such an assault is justified, and critical theory will lead to accurate conclusions. The problem is all the times that isn't justified, and those assaults are not serving to find truth but rather just serving as ammunition to tear down society. The issue I take is teaching children an intellectual process that is one step beyond even a fallacy, as a fallacy is at least an attempt at truth based on faulty reasoning, and a critical theory is an attempt at criticism regardless of the truth value.
Edit: circling back to the requirement of having a practical solution. It would be fine to say a critical analysis of power structures is reasonable in all situations without that requirement, it would be fine to spend all day everyday critiquing societal power structures if you were allowed to reach the conclusion that those power structures aren't at fault or perhaps that the problem wasn't that problematic. Your suggestion that maybe the bridge being in disrepair isn't a problem is actually a fantastic example of a possible critique that 100% fails Horkheimer's definition of critical theory because you've offered no actionable suggestion as a result of your critical analysis.
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I've already explained, in far too much detail, why I would group those people together. I don't really mind that you disagree with me on that, disagreement is a pretty normal part of academic life. Frankly, I was willing to accept any consistent definition you wanted just for the sake of argument. But what's laughable about your concept of critical theory is that it's not consistent, it has no coherent explanation and it vacillates between appealing to authority and ignoring the same authority. If you were just rigidly committed to a definition you read on wikipedia, I'd be happy to accept that and play along with you, but if you're then going to drop that definition and keep rambling about power structures and how everything is secretly the same because you say it is, then it becomes pretty rude, and I'm not here for it.
You're talking as if you have actually provided any sources to substantiate your understanding of the words.
Anyway.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrs5j
Cards on the table, I don't agree with everything written there, but hopefully this is enough to help you understand that there's a wider intellectual critical tradition here beyond the Frankfurt school, and that it's pretty normal to refer to that tradition as critical theory.
Isn't that incredibly obvious?
Of course "power structures" (I'm just going to put that in quotation marks from now on) can influence the perception of what is and isn't a problem. I'm really baffled as to how you could believe that statement is in any way controversial.
What would "killing the power structures" even mean?
Do you actually think that's what the Frankfurt school were talking about? Do you think that's what critical race theory is? For the record, "killing the power structures" is kind of a hilariously bad phrase. It's like something Johnny Silverhand would say in Cyberpunk 2077 before his dong glitched out and popped through his clothes. It's the kind of pseudo-rebellious trash sentiment you might hear from one of those bros who are really into Fight Club but are also really in denial about the fact the author is gay. It's such an awful phrase that one of the actual members of the Frankfurt school came up with a term for sentiments like it. The term is "repressive desublimation". It's a statement that tricks people into thinking it implies an oppositional or critical stance, but actually doesn't signify anything because it allows for no meaningful point of opposition. It's empty rebellion that is set up to serve the status quo by failing to stand for anything.
But replace the word "kill" with the word "change", or perhaps the word "loosen", and see what happens.
And once again, we're back at the core issue. What is your actual problem with critical theory? Because if this is it, I don't need any "power structures" to tell me this isn't a real problem.
So you'd tell people who are literally in the process of being mass-murdered that they shouldn't criticize the authorities responsible because criticizing "power structures" too much will somehow cause society to collapse?
Once again, you've missed the point. The point was about your objection to any kind of criticism of authority, and the idea that "power structures" are always justified by the necessity of "power structures". Now that it's clear how deeply confused you are about the objectives of any kind of critical project, it's becoming more obvious that you just don't know what you're talking about, and were somehow operating under the delusion that critical theory was just a bunch of people talking about wanting to destroy the world for absolutely no reason, but it's still pretty fucking weird that you can't see how authoritarian it is to equate anti-authoritarianism with suicide.
As someone who has read Leviathan (even the weird stuff about witchcraft). No, he's pretty specific on that.
Again, what does this mean? Because it is worryingly close to arguments used by actual fascists. What exactly counts as an "assault on the structure of society"? Who gets to decide when society has been assaulted? Who gets to decide when criticism crosses the line? Who gets to choose what is sacred and can't be criticized for fear of unleashing anarchy? If the answer is you, then why? If the answer is "the authorities", then that's literally fascism. If the answer is "the majority", then that's a tacit acceptance of inequality.
If society cannot endure criticism, then does it deserve to exist?
Societies have been "torn down" hundreds of times. Somehow, the human race survived. Somehow, Hobbes war of all against all never materialised. Our society is in the process of being constantly torn down and rebuilt, that's literally part of what it means to be a modern society. Pointing out that our society is still built primary around the interests and needs of white people isn't going to be the thing that ushers in the apocalypse. It might feel like the apocalypse for you if you had staked your whole identity on the fact that you live in a completely fair society (although that does raise the obvious question of why the fuck you would do that in the first place) but whatever "power structures" would be destroyed by someone pointing that out probably deserved to be destroyed, and whatever takes its place will probably be better.
Anyway, I'm going to bow out. This thread has been a fucking trip, but I think I'm done with it and I doubt there's much more to say without going round in circles.
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Finally, you did it, you found a single source to vaguely but not completely agree with you!
That's not what they're trying to ban from schools though, so it's still kind of irrelevant. Good to know you aren't just making things up though.
I cannot say what form that's supposed to actually take, because I don't think such a thing is possible, but the answer to your question, in a word, is communism. The ideal of a stateless, classless society, devoid of any structures by which one might exert power over another. Don't expect me to defend that idea, I'm quite against it.
No, I wouldn't say that sentence to anyone.
I've never objected to "any kind of criticism of authority". I've objected to critical theory, and stated explicitly that not all criticism of power structures is critical theory. You are the one equivocating those statements.
Feel free, thanks for the fun.