naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
The current release (as far as I know) of the agenda specifies that any child that expresses any interest or ideation about himself being transgender, should be immediately medically, socially and surgically transitioned, parents have no legitimate way to react to it except fully supporting and enabling it, and in case they do anything else, they should be immediately and irreversibly striped of all parental rights.
I'm not sure this even rises to the level of a weak man, though maybe you could point me to someone actually espousing precisely this position. My suspicion, though, is that this is a full fledged strawman. Please work harder to portray your outgroup's views in a way they would be likely to recognize and agree to, or barring that, at least in a way that brings strong argument/evidence that this is what they actually believe in spite of their protestations to the contrary.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
That seems messed up.
This is not really sufficient effort for engagement on the matter. "That seems messed up" signals your disapproval ("that view seems low status") without explaining why you disapprove, or how the observed evidence might be explained in other ways.
(It may help to sub a different ingroup/outgroup to grasp the dynamic here. For example, if the other user had suggested that men are naturally more violent than women, would you say "that seems messed up?" Or imagine they had suggested that young people are naturally more violent than old people, or that people with cognitive impairments are naturally more violent than cognitive normies. Whether any of these claims is actually true or false, you can hopefully see why someone might make such claims, and think of the kinds of evidence that would strengthen or weaken your tendency to endorse or reject such claims.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
I'm not engaging you on substance here--I was just providing examples that might help you understand why you were being moderated on inadequate effort.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
some Japanese megacucks
This kind of thing just degrades discourse.
Banned for a week.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
A week? That's ridiculous, it wasn't even a swear word.
What fucking difference would that make? It's not the words you use, here--it's how you use them.
I think you banned him because you know he is one of the few motters who could and would eloquently and persuasively defend that position.
I think I temp-banned him because next time I want him to lead with the eloquence and persuasiveness you seem to think he has at his disposal. I have quite had my fill of people getting moderated and then responding to me with eloquence and persuasiveness--or at least, with the evidence and effort they declined to furnish in the first place.
I want people to do that before they get moderated, and if they fail to do that often enough, then they're going to eat a ban. That's how this works--as you well know.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Just acknowledge that you agree with them.
Please refrain from telling others what they believe. This sort of thing adds only heat, no light. Don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
OP is low effort and many of these responses illustrate why we moderate against that sort of thing. "Pride now is just authoritarian mind control" may even be true, but how would anyone become more informed about that possibility by reading your comment? You're signalling a view without elaborating on the details; you're participating in a conversation without actually contributing anything of substance to it. Please post with more effort than this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Everything past that is sophomoric mental masturbation.
Maybe, but you haven't added enough light to the conversation to justify the heat you're bringing. Assume for the sake of argument that the objectively correct response to transsexual choices, behavior, or advocacy is mockery: here at the Motte, you can argue that this is so but you are not permitted to actually deploy the mockery. You can say "we should call freaks freaks" but you cannot nakedly assert "these people are freaks." I assume that people find it challenging to walk that line since almost everyone I know, here and elsewhere, is really quite bad at it. But it is the line that has been drawn around this space so you need to adhere to it here.
Here’s my summary of your posts.
You know we have a rule where you're supposed to respond (at least, first) to the things other people have actually said, before trying to impute things to them.
Looking over your user history, I want to think that someone who has received warnings against low effort posting from Zorba, Amadan, and myself, then been banned by both Amadan and myself for continuing to make low effort posts, might stop making low effort posts.
If you can think of a way to encourage yourself to not make low effort posts, please share it with us when you return from your two week ban. Others should note that the length of this ban is a question of steady escalation for repeat behavior, not a comment on how bad this particular comment is in comparative terms.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Who gives a shit what color Tolkien's world was or wasn't.
This is not how we engage with disagreement here.
Combined with your horrible posting history, banned for a week.
tl;dr: Do any of you read Portugese?
I am having one of those moments where I feel like I must be losing my mind, because the alternative is that the world is even stupider than I already thought, which is just too depressing to countenance. I was doing some research on education for what are, ultimately, culture war purposes (I think parents are more important than teachers, and I think people to my political Left get this horribly wrong all the time) and I came across a citation that seemed potentially useful. I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:
Politics are an important influence in schools; as Paulo Freire stated in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act” (p.19).
Now, any time I see a reference to critical theory from the 1960s, it piques my interest, because it has been my experience that a lot of people work very hard to obfuscate the origins of what is currently being called "Wokism," and used to be called "cultural Marxism" (not to be confused with the conspiracy theory that "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory--I assume Paulo Freire was not a Jew, but I admit I do not know for sure). Anyway I immediately went looking for a copy of Paulo Freire's seminal work so I check the quote out in context. Fortunately, the author of the paper appears to be a music professor at McGill, so the citation is right there for my use!
Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
I fire up the Internet Archive and find a 1972 edition of the book (the UK printing, apparently) and turn to page 19, which... does not contain the quote. I pull up other editions--there's a 30th anniversary edition, a 50th anniversary edition, someone clearly regards this as an important text--and not only does the quote in question appear nowhere in these pages, but chunks like "education is political" or "neutral act" also return no results. Maybe the text search is wrong? Maybe the scan is bad? Hmm, no, a quick sampling finds the OCR did a bang-up job, actually.
Googling the full quote generates a number of results. The University of Sheffield's "Education Matters" blog gives the citation "Freire (1970: 19)." But no--the 1970 printing also lacks the quote. Dr. Fatima Nicdao (she/her) suggests it's actually (1968), but that's the Portugese date of publication, as near as I can tell. Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change is also pretty sure the quote appears on page 19, as does Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices and Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education, to name only three of the books that agree on this citation. You may notice that all of these books were published in the last two years.
At this point I'm thinking, "I've got to be missing something. Maybe I'm making this too difficult for myself. I haven't even checked Wikipedia!" There I find the following:
There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the "practice of freedom", the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
— Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire
(emphasis added)
At this point I am feeling increasingly confident that the quotation is spurious. Now, it seems pretty clear to me that Freire would agree with the quotation! I don't think any of these people are misrepresenting his view (though they might be oversimplifying it). I'm able to date the quote "teaching is never a neutral act" back as far as 1998, in a book entitled (of course) White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America Similarly, "all education is political" goes back at least as far as a textbook from 1996:
What are some examples of Freire's idea that all education is political?
As an aside, page 181 of that textbook is also of historic interest, and reads as part of a chapter on "Teaching to Empower Minority Students":
The emphasis on empowerment is part of a broader educational development referred to as critical theory. Critical theory developed from Paolo Freire's work, a reconsideration of the work of Dewey, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Lois Weis, Alma Flor Ada, Jim Cummins, Stanley Aronowitz, and others. The following concepts are central to critical theory, and are useful in trying to comprehend and analyze your own teaching experience.
(Here is the list, for the curious, with definitions elided.)
Consciousness ...
Culture ...
Domination ...
Empowerment ...
Ethics ...
Hegemony ...
Hidden Curriculum ...
Ideological Domination ...
Ideologies ...
Social Class ...
Social Construction of Knowledge ...
Anywhow, I am terminally crippled with self-doubt, and proving a negative is hard. Part of me is certain that the very first reply to this rant is going to be "oh here's a direct link to the page where he wrote that, you just missed it." But I cannot find any evidence at all that Paolo Freire ever actually wrote the sentence, "all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act." Certainly those words do not seem to appear in any English-language translation of anything he has written. Which, who cares, right? Spurious quotations are totally an Internet thing, Abraham Lincoln said so.
But I care, because now instead of finding an academically useful citation I've spent three hours going down the rabbit hole of a spurious quotation. How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source? I mean, I guess this is in the end just a particularly academic example of the old "too good to check." But I'm frustrated in part because none of the foregoing accomplishes what I actually intended to accomplish today, which was to make progress on a scholarly paper. There's no place for me to publish a peer-reviewed essay entitled "Spurious Quotations in Education Theory: Jesus Christ You Critical Theorists Are the Worst Academics Alive, Check Your God Damn Sources For Once, You're a Fucking Embarrassment to the Profession."
So please. Embarrass me, instead. Find evidence that Freire actually wrote the quoted phrase. Somewhere, anywhere, in any language! Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
When I search on Google Scholar for that quote, I find only the source you link. Ditto when I search for the two phrases, “all education is political” “teaching is never a neutral act”. So, basically no one is publishing that quote.
I directly linked three books from academic presses from the last two years, an academic blog, an academic tweet, and an academic paper, and I only furnished a sampling of what I found because it just seemed silly to keep going after finding so many examples. That's a far, far cry from "basically no one."
What people ARE doing is paraphrasing Freire
The numerous, recent sources I already cited literally directly quote him, often giving a page number (usually, 19) for the quote. Are you... engaged in performance art here? Duplicating the phenomenon about which I am complaining?
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
It probably won’t make you feel any better, but this sort of thing is much more likely than we might prefer!
I actually deal with it with students all the time, because Plato is up there with Mark Twain and Winston Churchill among the pantheon of the spuriously-quoted. So a student will tell me something is in Republic and build their whole paper around it... and I will ask them where in Republic Plato makes this claim, and they will show me the website where someone claims Plato said that, and it will be wrong. So yeah, you're not wrong. But it sure is annoying to have to deal with it from colleagues rather than from students.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Do you think there's such a thing as a neutral education process?
I do not!
Not sure what else to say about it, though. Cultural reproduction is a really complicated proposition even in monocultures; in places with values pluralism, you're basically always going to be goring someone's ox. What Freire (and all the crits) tend to get wrong is that they decline to subject their own proposed solutions to the standards of their own critique. At best their position basically boils down to "yes, your way is not neutral, I guess our way is also not technically neutral but noticing that makes us the good guys so it's okay when we do it." Contemporary identity politics is just yeschad.jpg-ing your own views while wojacking your opponent's.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
You've probably repeated a few yourself.
I haven't created the impression in you that I'm actually extremely neurotic about quotation authenticity?
...uh, well, good!
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
So, uh…who the hell is Jane Thompson?
...this is worse than I thought!?
The Wikipedia citation goes to the book
Mayo, Peter (1999). Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education: Possibilities for Transformative Action. London: Zed Books. ISBN 978-1-85649-614-8.
On page 5 of that book, the quote is indeed attributed to Jane Thompson, as the editor of another book. The Gramsci book is on archive.org, the footnote points us to a 1980 text by Thompson, Adult Education for Change at page 26 (but also repeated in a different text by M. Mayo). That book is also on archive.org, and when you turn to page 26, you can see Thompson has block-quoted the block-quoted text, which she attributes to Paulo Freire! But return to the 1972 Freire text and you will see that, no, that quote is definitely part of Shaull's introduction to the book.
Just... astonishing. Multiple misattributions, literally none of the people quoting Shaull had any idea what they were doing. Words fail me.
And see my other response! Looks like we followed the same breadcrumbs. What a disaster.
EDIT: If you look through the Wikipedia page history, you'll see that at some point Shaull did get correctly credited for the quote, but someone checked the cited source (with the incorrect attribution) and "corrected" the correction.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I really admire how smoothly you were able to combine the implication "basically no one is doing this, who cares" with the implication "this happens all the time, who cares" in this comment. If that move hasn't got a fancy name like "motte and bailey doctrine" or "apophasia," then it should, and if it does have a name, I would like to learn it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
But to be more explicit, your post seems to me to be little more than "boo outgroup"
The "more" is really the important part, though. I admit these people are in my "outgroup" but the point was the sloppy scholarship (and my disbelief), not the outgroup per se.
your evidence that your outgroup is doing what you claim is incredibly weak
My evidence that the individual scholars I am directly complaining about are doing exactly what I am complaining about seems pretty ironclad to me, to the point where I doubt it could possibly be so straightforward, to the point where I asked a bunch of Internet strangers if they could maybe check the Portugese for me because surely these scholars aren't that stupid but--yes, these scholars are apparently at least that stupid. To the point where @netstack immediately identified a separate case of this same phenomenon happening in other articles referencing Freire.
you have no evidence that what that handful of outgroup members has done is unique to your outgroup, so, yes, who cares?
I care, as I believe I stated in my original comment. It's offensive to me, as a professional, when other professionals do shoddy work, especially when it costs me time. If that's not enough for you, like, okay! You should go talk to someone who counts in your eyes, instead of telling me that I shouldn't care about things that I care about.
And to be completely clear, those who cite Freire seem to me to almost always be full of shit.
This is how I feel about all critical theorists, but surely it helps matters to present the occasional clear case of academic malfeasance. I don't regard them to be full of shit because reasons, I regard them to be full of shit because look here are dozens of examples of easily-identified shitty scholarship on just one quotation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.
Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here. I've never seen anyone try to prove anything of worth by citing to "Google Scholar says" so I'm just kind of dumbfounded about it. Maybe I am just old, that is often a problem when matters of technology come into play, but there you have it. Google's front page search is orders of magnitude more valuable to my scholarship than Google Scholar has ever been.
But I don't do STEM, so, you know. YMMV.
And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it?
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate. The weird culture war stuff is bad, too, but it might be helpful for me to suggest that when I refer to these scholars as my "outgoup," I am about 60% thinking about the fact that they work in colleges of education, rather than thinking about their political alignment qua outgroup. That is, these are education scholars, often with Ed.Ds, while I'm a philosopher who sometimes writes analytically on education.
It's hard to not launch into a rant about this, honestly. And it feels like a failure of professional courtesy to be like, "oh, those teaching academics are the worst" when I'm sure the engineers or the business professors or someone feels the same about me. But the scholarship that comes out of these colleges of education, like, it's just so bad, basically all the time. And it happens to have kind of played havoc on my day, today, and I thought others might find it interesting to see a specific case, about specific people, making a specific mistake, that is kind of emblematic of the larger criticisms leveled against them.
I maintain that, if posting like that were normalized, this community would be much worse-off.
I literally implored y'all to show me I'm wrong. I actually wanted to be wrong about this. I wanted someone to show me the quote, maybe in Portugese, so I could say, "ah, yes, I'm a dumbass, that's much less surprising than all of these doctorate-wielding people being such complete dumbasses." That wasn't rhetoric; I came here to test my shady thinking, I wanted to be talked down, and the second thing you did was find another horrible example right there in the material I was citing.
That suggests to me that I'm not criticizing these people because they're my outgroup and I want to boo them, but in fact because they have earned criticism. Surely that's a valuable thing to learn?
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I like that analogy a lot.
This sloppy, lazy, or ideologically motivated science has the potential to be very harmful to a person's project of building a useful and accurate model of their world because when it's wrong, it's wrong in cleverer , deeper, more subtle ways than, say, the tabloid example above.
To this I would add: discovery of the problem also leads to similar harms. At some point every single one of these authors either (A) thought nothing of cribbing a cite from someone else without verifying it, or (B) wondered if they should check the cite, and then did not, or (C) checked the cite, decided to use the fake one anyway. I think that's an exhaustive list. In the case of (A), they basically are trusting any claim they happen to like, which is bad; in the case of (B), they are lazy scholars at best, and in the case of (C), they're actively deceptive. None of these possibilities rises to a level of "trustworthy professional," and I think that fact raises serious questions about other things they say and do. It impeaches their character as scholars. And rightly so! But this contributes to the ongoing crisis of confidence in our epistemic elites.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I usually have to search for books directly at archive.org (but the same is often true of Google Books, with the difference that Google Books will then often tell me I can't see more than a preview). But archive.org will search text as well as metadata, and the interface is quite lovely. The primary shortcoming is limitations being imposed by copyright law.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
You made a claim about academic malfeasance without any evidence apart from one person.
I'm done talking to you. Either you didn't read my post, or you didn't understand it, or you're flat-out trolling (which I often suspect you of doing, but I try to pretend that's not the most likely explanation for most of your participation here). I gave you a list of several people who did the same thing, I linked multiple examples including books from academic presses, and then I repeated that list to you when you ignored it the first time.
"Oh but Google Scholar only has two examples" is a non sequitur in that context.
The motivations and thought process of the average woman who gets an elective abortion was not the point, there. The point was that progressives do not oppose eugenics per se; practices of a eugenic character are in no need of special particular motivational states in order to be eugenic practices.
So, yes, if we're talking on a personal level about individual motivations, the science of "improving stock" (as Galton put it) is something individuals are not necessarily thinking about when they make decisions of a eugenic nature. But this was a discussion about policy, and I was responding to someone else who suggested that progressives oppose eugenics, which is simply not true. Progressives are fine with a wide array of eugenic practices, so long as people don't talk about the eugenic character of those practices (especially, while using the word "eugenics").
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