Idaho and Critical Race Theory
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That's a bit of a non sequitur.
I think in that case reactionary is reasonably appropriate, actually.
There are lots of right-wing people I disagree with, which is why I'm so picky about the terms. I understand how dumb it is when someone, in the fashion of Rush Limbaugh, does the "Democrats are liberals are socialists are communists" song and dance, and I try to use the right words in the right places. I appreciate those who do the same, and don't do the "Republicans are conservatives are reactionaries are fascist" song and dance.
Then why are you rejecting the conservative label here, they were definitely conservatives and they're definitely a bigger threat than any communist, even for people who want to try and equate the groups as stilly as that is.
Why were they definitely conservatives? What was the threat? You're making statements, but I genuinely don't know what you mean to say.
Strictly speaking, he used to be, once upon a time. Specifically 2001-2009. He was also briefly Reform and independent.
All things must be about Trump, forever forward. It's like that certain other event we're specifically not allowed to talk about on this forum that nearly a decade later is still occasionally named as responsible for various recent occurrences - it's become a sort of folk devil, as Trump surely will once he's been dead for a bit.
I'm pretty sure he's referring to Trump's faithful and the threat being the Capitol riot which had they been better coordinated and persisted might potentially have tried to forcibly overturn the election and maybe kill a few members of Congress and a VP. You know, trying to install Trump as head of state despite election results.
But tstorm said the only thing unifying them was a hatred of democrats! Were they secretly there to depose Trump, and just hid it really well? I've heard more tenuous mental gymnastics, to be sure.
I'm sure. But yes, the people Trump told to overthrow the government tried to overthrow the government. Incompetently, but still. A massive conservative movement of people broke into the capital. Conservatives are the most likely to be terrorists according to the FBI as well.
In a sense Trump transcends conventional party affiliations, by which I mean he has no meaningful ideological politics, just a monomania for self-aggrandisement such that his party affiliation is nothing but a convenience for what he deems most beneficial for himself.
He was a Democrat because New York State and City tended to elect Democrats and the New York elites he mixed with tended to be Democrat: it greased his social life (and thus his business, because so much of business is networking). However, he was savvy enough to realise if he wanted to move onto the national stage, he would more easily win over Republicans than Democrats.
Why would you think that truth leads to good results?
It sounds like you're the one who has thrown epistemology out the window.
What does "better actions" mean?
Let me explain why I don't care about the Frankfurt school. I don't care about the Frankfurt school because it is marginal in the field of critical theory, and in particular has basically nothing to do with critical race theory beyond the fact that they're both part of right wing conspiracy theories. That's really the only connection. I've never met anyone working in critical race theory who has actually cited or mentioned a member of the Frankfurt school. They're just not important, even when compared to other people from the same time. If you want to trace the intellectual legacy of critical race theory, you'd have more luck going back through postcolonial theory to people like Fanon and French existentialism and the various attempts to create a psychopathology of racism.
Secondly, because I don't think you really understand what the Frankfurt school is, what they believed or how they are similar or different from other intellectual traditions. I think you've started from the right wing conspiratorial premise of a secret communist activist network and then worked back to find evidence matching that conclusion, when the reality is that the frankfurt school are generally quite boring and not very radical at all, and you should really try to read them before making judgements about them. I'm joking of course, noone has time to read the Frankfurt school.
Look, I am actually a critical theorist. I'm not imagining an objective view of anything because I don't think objective views are possible. That's not some scary recent postmodern thing by the way it's the basic premise of critical philosophy going back to the Enlightenment. Transcendental reality is inaccessible to reason. All we have to determine the truth of reality is the mental impressions it leaves on us. The consequence of this is that noone can claim superior knowledge of reality to anyone else, in a world founded on immutable and absolute authority the notion that everyone has the same limitations on their capacity for reason becomes incredibly dangerous, it becomes a radically anti-authoritarian statement that requires a new kind of society. Congratulations, you're now doing critique.
But that critique does not end. That utopian idea of a rational society (call it the "Enlightened age" if you like) does not end. The concept of race is one that has no reason to exist, and yet it does. You can be intellectually honest and face it, or you can whine about how it can't be true because true things must magically lead to good.
If society isn't "real", then you don't get to decide that all humans are in society. The boundaries of society are arbitrary, and thus we can use them as a metaphor to describe the way in which society is organised. In a technical sense you could say that (almost) all humans live in a society because they're not out in the woods hunting deer on their own, but if you believe that society is built around the understanding of and accounting for the needs of all humans equally, then I've got some magic beans to sell you.
That's a heavily exaggerated take, but you've managed to say it in a reasonable way.
You still don't understand words. If you have a source where the FBI says conservatives are the most likely to be terrorists, feel free to present it, but I'm entirely confident that doesn't exist. You're just conflating terms.
I'm a pragmatist. I'm not ignoring epistemology by stating the branch of epistemology I subscribe to.
Why are you telling me about objective views being impossible in response to me saying objective views are impossible? Why are you telling me that everyone has the same limitations or capacity for reason right after telling me marginalized groups have a better understanding of society? I like almost everything you're saying here, but the things you're saying here are perfectly regular philosophy. You say you are a critical theorist, but you're not describing critical theory in a way I've ever heard. I can scour the internet, through dictionaries and encyclopedias and ivy league schools, and still very much find descriptions that match my understanding, and not whatever you're on about. It's not some right-wing fear mongering, I've found nothing that agrees with you.
Ah, are they not conservative? Are you going to dance around them being conservatives so you can try and pretend your ideology is unsullied?
To be fair, storm is way more a conservative than the GOP. I don't think there is a single GOP member that I've heard of that is close to a conservative.
I'm going with Agema's interpretation that they are perfectly conservative, they're just an anachronism whose appeal to conservatism requires at this point violent revolution.
Is there a reason we do Enlightenment and philosophical scepticism now ? That kinda stopped being particularly relevant 200 years ago and the connection to critical theory seems weak. I mean you could argue that is one of the origins (it does share one or two ideas), but that is it basically.
And to go into more detail for those arguments specifically:
"All we have to determine the truth of reality is the mental impressions it leaves on us."
So sorting, remembering, accumulating and comparing those impressions is useless ? And people doing so might not know more that those that didn't ? That is why none can claim superior knowledge about reality is such a hard sell unless you start declaring all knowledge irrelevant because the truth is truly inaccessable
"That utopian idea of a rational society"
We already know that the Enlightenement people were full of themself and used way to much time to support each other that that they were so much more reasonably than those before. But today people don't actually believe that they live in an enlightened rational utopia. There is no need for philosophers to point it out.
"In a technical sense you could say that (almost) all humans live in a society because they're not out in the woods hunting deer on their own, but if you believe that society is built around the understanding of and accounting for the needs of all humans equally, then I've got some magic beans to sell you."
Yes, the technical sense is how the word is commonly understood. Where does the notion of " built around the understanding of and accounting for the needs of all humans equally" even come from ? That is not how i have anyone ever have heard presume society actually works.
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Critical theory is incredibly broad and covers a huge amount of things that might seem unconnected. To understand what critical theory is, it's helpful to go back to the point where all of those different traditions originate, because then you can see what they all have in common, and what they have in common is that they are all critical (I know, unbelievably shocking). They are all concerned with the same overarching objective as Kant's critical philosophy, establishing the limitations of human knowledge and understanding the consequences of human knowledge having those limitations. What I'm doing here is a pedagogical exercise to help you understand why we call this enormous body of work "critical theory".
No.
Not even engaging this point, it's too bad faith to even bother with.
Do people not live in an Enlightened rational utopia? Why do you think that?
What would an Enlightened rational utopia even look like? Can you imagine it?
If, as you say, you don't live in an Enlightened rational utopia, why can you imagine such a thing at all? Where does the society you live in deviate from being whatever you imagine an enlightened rational utopia to be? How do you feel about that?
Again, now you're doing critique.
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Do you think, even if we confined ourselves to talking about Horkheimer's definition of critical theory, it would be anything other than regular philosophy? Why are you looking for some special magic bad philosophy?
Because actually, exaggerated dunking on the Frankfurt school aside, what I'm saying is not significantly different from Horkheimer, and probably more influenced by Horkheimer than I'm acknowledging. Part of my point here has been to show that the nature and purpose of critique itself has emancipatory implications, even if those implications are denied or unintended. When Kant talks about the Enlightenment, it is an emancipatory project, it is humanity developing its capacity for reason against those who would tell them what to believe and think. Kant's politics are not magically separate from his philosophy, they're a logical consequence of his philosophy. Does this mean Kant is a secret communist activist who must be excised from the curriculum lest he brainwash kids into denying Jesus? No. There's nothing sinister about the idea of critique as an emancipatory tool (well, maybe there is, but not in the conspiratorial sense).
But there are two reasons I'm not talking about Horkheimer's definition of critical theory. The first is that you're not treating it as a definition at all, but rather as a method. I describe your argument as conspiracy theory because it reads like one. Once the philosophers lived in harmony, but then the Frankfurt school attacked and replaced the noble quest for knowledge with special bad philosophy called critical theory, and this is where all the bad things in philosophy come from. Again, the Frankfurt school is part of an intellectual tradition going back to Kant's critical philosophy, their ideas are not particularly exceptional by the standards of anyone who preceded them.
The second reason is because there's absolutely no relationship between the Frankfurt school and Critical Race Theory. At best you might describe them (as the Stanford article does) as having tangentially similar objectives, but again that's not exceptional. A significant proportion of modern "perfectly regular philosophy" has similar objectives. Critique as an emancipatory tool is nothing new, and nothing special. In order to situate critical race theory within critical theory, we need to understand a broader definition of critical theory, one which (and I'm repeating myself again) derives from critical philosophy.
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Because way too much stuff happens that is not particularly rational, even if you consider the viewpoints of the actors. Many acts can instead be understood as result of emotion quite well.
I don't think it is possible. Humans don't work that way. So the term "utopia" is quite right. I could only imagine it in some vague dreamlike skipping-over-all-the-details way, which is not particularly useful.
In a rational utopia you would assume that reason rules. For example, you wouldn't have people shift unpleasant decisions or measures into the future even if they know those are necessary just because they don't want to deal with it.
How do i feel about it ? Indifferent. I don't have strong feelings about impossible irrelevant utopias, why ?
As for Critical Theory. Yes it is huge and has a lot of subfields which often don't interact with each other much though sometimes they. Of course criticism based on one subfield does not apply to all the others as well so if you want to say that the reputation of the Frankfurt school should not taint CRT that has merit. But the reverse is true as well, just because you can point o subfields that don't share perceived flaws doesnt invalidate criticism based on those where they do exist.
And while CT is broad, extending it to basically all critique in philosophy seems way to broad. If you do that, the term kinda looses all its meaning. Critique is a technique, not a theory and has been around in some form for all of history and been applied to everything relevant. As something you can actually meaningfully talk about, CT is far more constrained. Usually when people complain about (and don't go on about Marxism), they complain about postmodern critical theory alone.
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I'm sure some of them are conservatives. Like, the Republican Party is not now nor has ever been uniformly conservative. Over the last half century, there are and have been conservatives, progressives, libertarians, evangelical theocrats, neoconservatives (warhawk liberals)... it's a pretty big tent of people who don't like communism. Which if I might take a stab at your insistence on using wrong terms, you probably don't understand that there are hundreds of valid ways to not like communism. And then beyond that, Trump people willing to storm the capital building aren't a typical cross-section of the Republican Party, and need to be analyzed seperately still to understand what's going on. You don't want to understand what's going on. You want to group together everyone who doesn't like communism. You want to take FBI claims about "white supremacists" and substitute the word "conservatives", cause it's all the same to you.
I'm not looking for special bad magic philosophy. I'm looking for the specific subset of philosophy given the title "critical theory". There's no inherent truth in the name of something, a name designates whatever people agree that it does. So far as I can tell, the name "critical theory" talks about specifically the intellectual lineage of Horkheimer and the Frankfurt school. You can't decide for yourself what a name means, without agreement from others, either currently or historically. So at this point, I'm gonna do the jerk thing, and demand you source your claims. You find me anyone other than yourself using the term "critical theory" as the vague synonym of "critique" that you are, and then we can move past this point.
Not to side track this wonder and very illuminating discussion of CRT, but Idaho also...
apnews.com
Which gets a big FU from me and make me wonder why they bothered reintroducing them in the first place
Bill to kill up to 90% of Idaho wolves heads to governor
The Idaho House on Tuesday approved legislation allowing the state to hire private contractors and expand methods to kill wolves roaming Idaho — a measure that could cut the wolf population by 90%.
apnews.com
Which gets a big FU from me and make me wonder why they bothered reintroducing them in the first place