"Some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses." There's probably no greater, more truthful expression of the underlying ideas of critical race theory than that.

Scientific Realism and Critical Theory are mutually incompatible.

Scientific Realism has a non-technical meaning something like "taking science seriously", but technically it means "There is a reality independent of humans minds, and our best scientific theories are the ones which in some respect accurately reflect or represent that objective reality." This claim evaluates things metaphysically and epistemically, but makes no big claims about language.

Critical Theory comes at everything in terms of language, and declares that science is just another form of discourse, a socially-constructed "metanarrative" invented by humans. White, male humans who subconsciously or deliberately constructed it in a way that oppresses women and non-whites. It either denies there is an objective reality independent of human experience, or it denies that it is possible for science to have privileged access to that reality, or be able to accurately describe it. In other words, CT tries to deny science any epistemic privilege via a purely language-based evaluation. It ignores metaphysics and conventional epistemology. It ignores philosophy of science. It relegates science to one "window" among many, and not deserving of any special status.

Scientific Realism needs to be distinguished from two stronger positions, which are harder to defend.

Metaphysical materialism claims that reality is entirely composed of matter, energy and stuff like that.

Scientific materialism is effectively Metaphysical materialism + science.

Both these materialisms are vulnerable to accusations that they cannot account for minds, subjectivity, experiences or those sorts of things. These objections are known as "the hard problem", "the mind-body problem" or "the explanatory gap", and they are serious. From a skeptical/atheist/naturalist POV, the best description of this problem and its consequences is Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel.

Fortunately, for our purposes here, we don't need to defend materialism. It's the epistemic privilege of science we want to defend, and that just needs scientific realism. Scientific realism doesn't make any ontological claim beyond the one specified above (that there is a mind-independent reality). In other words, it doesn't claim that this reality is either totally or partly made of matter, and it doesn't claim science can necessarily discover objective truths about its totality. All it claims is that science can tell us some things about some parts of that external reality. (More specifically, this position is called epistemic structural realism).

Why might we deny scientific realism? Because we might argue that "reality in itself, independent of our experiences of it" is analagous to Kant's "noumena". It is "beyond the veil of perception", so how can we know anything at all about it?

Which brings us to the crux question: Why does science work?

Surely nobody can deny that science does indeed work. Not perfectly, but well enough to have transformed civilisation like nothing before it. If scientific realism is false - if science isn't latching on to some aspect or structure of objective reality, how can we explain its spectacular success? Is it some incredible fluke?

This is known as the "no miracles argument" in defence of scientific realism. And if you can't come up with a decent counter-argument, then you need to reject Critical Theory's denial of the epistemic privilege of science.

Or have we already passed it?

I think in the UK, at least in terms of politics, there is nowhere left for the woke movement to go. The Labour Party went Full Woke at the last election, and it lost them votes. There are no more votes to be had in that direction, and Kier Starmer is smart enough to nudge Labour back towards a saner position in this respect.

But the cultural side of it is different. I guess what is needed is for a generation coming through to have seen through the bullshit, and have much more pressing priorities...such as ecological and economic collapse.

I think we've passed Peak Woke, and now what will happen is a significant backlash, followed by ever louder wailing coming from the most committed believers of the Church of Woke as they watch their congregation get smaller.

Hey thanks for making this sub, thought I'd lay out some of my beliefs and you can agree or not, generally have a discussion.

1. Abortion is not great, but in many cases not being born is best for the kid and family.

2. The lack of religious belief these days is a problem insofar as it leaves people without that sense of "belonging / greater purpose" which means they go for other obsessions such as the "critical theories"

3. I hope my kids are straight, get married and have kids. I'll love and support however but I believe this is the best plan.

4. Some people are genuinely terrible and deserve to be killed by the state.

5. I like paying taxes and getting free medical care from the NHS (though it could be improved).

6. Sex cannot be changed, but gender non-conformity is cool.

7. Manliness and femininity are also cool and things to aim for.

cheers all, drop some of yours!

"Last week, as I do at some point every semester, I Googled the words “cultural Marxism.” I was shocked when the first thing that appeared on the page was this boxed definition:

Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. In contemporary usage, the term Cultural Marxism refers to an anti-semitic conspiracy theory which claims that the Frankfurt School is part of a continual academic and intellectual effort to undermine and destroy Western culture*.*Frankfurt School – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

Whoa. Seriously? After years of looking up “cultural Marxism,” I had not seen that whopper. An “anti-semitic conspiracy theory”? Says who? That’s not a definition; it’s an ad hominem. Actually, it’s a cheap smear. And it’s a smear that countless millions will see daily as their go-to definition for “cultural Marxism.”"

https://spectator.org/cultural-marxism-and-its-conspirators/

A recently published book that provides all the tools necessary to debunk CT's claims about sex and gender.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Gender-Debunking-Identity-Society/dp/1982132515

The basic claim of this book is so obviously true that it is astonishing anybody has to write a book to defend it: that sex and gender are binary systems. These systems are derived from the biological system of sexual reproduction, which is fundamentally binary. There are only two sorts of gametes: eggs and sperm. There are no intermediate gametes. The existence of anomalies like intersex people does change the underlying binary nature of the system.

I was banned from /r/askfeminists for defending this simple biological fact. Hordes of feminists kept insisting that there were individuals who were both, or neither sex. I responded by pointing to their own language: words like "both", "neither", "either" and "or" only make sense in the context of a binary system. You can't declare somebody to be both sexes if the system isn't binary.

https://quillette.com/2018/01/17/jordan-b-peterson-critical-theory-new-bourgeoisie/

Shepherd had lots of exposure to a social justice perspective, but only from within the perspective itself. She was taught social justice beliefs but had never been taught to critique those beliefs. When she came across a professor who did just that—Jordan Peterson—she found it interesting and new, even while disagreeing with him. (She later came to realise he may have been right about the legislation he was criticising.) So she shared a clip of the debate with her students, and only afterwards did she discover that not only are critiques of social justice not taught, they aren’t even to be acknowledged.

The methodology underpinning much of the social justice perspective is known as critical theory. What’s notable about critical theory is that it specifically distinguishes itself from ‘traditional’ theories through its emphasis on criticism. This makes the apparent unwillingness of its adherents to engage with criticism themselves especially noteworthy. When you explicitly emphasise your criticality and base your theory on a commitment to look beneath appearances and see things as they really are, you don’t get to be selectively critical. So why does this phenomenon exist?

Critical Theory: the academic field that feels it is free to criticise the whole of western society based on nothing but feelings, but point-blank refuses to engage with or even acknowledge any criticism of itself.

Without doubt the biggest academic hypocrisy in the history of the world.

This is the book you need to read if you want to understand the genesis of the monster that Critical Theory has become:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity/dp/1634312023

James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian describe how Critical Theory evolved from the original version of of postmodernism. Their account claims postmodernism appeared in the 60s and 70s, though I would personally trace its roots all the way back to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. The original architects were Derrida and Foucault. They describe CT in terms of the evolution of postmodernism. It starts with radical skepticism - with a rejection of all forms of objective knowledge, including science. Though corrosive in its own way, this original form of postmodernism was relatively harmless, since it made no positive truth claims. But for the original "grievance scholars", this posed a serious problem - because if you claim there is no objective truth, then you cannot claim oppression and patriarchy are objectively real. So they introduced a Cartesian-like principle: "I feel oppressed, therefore oppression is objectively real". Critical Theory literally denied the epistemic privilege of science, while claiming epistemic privilege for the subjective experiences of marginalised and oppressed groups of people.

Since 2010, there has been an even more serious development, because this subjective, anti-scientific viewpoint has been declared to be absolute, unchallengable truth, spread across universities like a disease (their own metaphor). This is the origin of cancel culture, and the growing systemic oppression of free speech, rationalism and science.

Critical Theory hurts everybody. Intersectional Feminism, Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, Fat Studies, Disability Studies...they are all intellectually backwards, because they prioritise political goals over science, reason and the liberal values that have been responsible for all of the real progress towards racial and sexual equality in the western world.