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Ted McCormick Profile picture
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13 Mar, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Meet the “oppressed” parents and students Bari Weiss wants to save from marginalized people

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
h/t @Paul_E_Cohen
Full disclosure here: I went to a boarding school in Massachusetts for most of high school, so (while accumulating substantial student debt there and at subsequent levels of US education) I’ve also benefited from this system. It does not need to be saved from “wokeism.”
Here’s the Weiss piece I was talking about. Come for the nonsense about history, stay for the oppressed Dalton parent

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More from @mccormick_ted

Ted McCormick Profile picture
13 Mar
On the misuse of the observation that race is constructed as a way to silence discussion of racism.

This could have been written today, but it’s from Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness (1995), 255. Image
I think this illustrates a conflation of race and racism that Fields talks about — but instead of making the ostensible fact of “race” an alibi for the effects of racism, it uses the constructed nature of race as an excuse to treat racism as imaginary or historically irrelevant.
It also shows the important role that misconstruing “socially constructed” as “not real” or “malleable at will” plays in these and related arguments. This is not a mere misunderstanding; it’s essential to the point.
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
10 Mar
It's probably no surprise to anyone familiar with the genre, but it's remarkable that in a piece supposedly worried about curriculum, almost every source for curricular content decisions is characterized at second hand, mostly via hostile sources.
(As an aside, it's also funny that in this purportedly skeptical, critical, free-thinking tale of rebellion against elitist orthodoxy, the idea that a handful of small, expensive private schools *should* be tasked with educating "America's elite" is assumed throughout.)
This bit of silliness has rightly come in for mockery -- there was always more to physics than Newton -- but it's worth noting that *at no point* is the actual source of the change identified, much less the rationale stated. We just get the student's impression... maybe
Read 12 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
10 Mar
So the defenders of Western Civ are now railing about noted anti-racist SJW, Napoleon.

Just like they rail about celebrated left-winger, Hitler.

Just like they praise that great anti-slavery movement, the British Empire.

Imagine if they put this energy into learning something.
Imagine treating an intellectual tradition you claim to revere in the shallowest, silliest way possible. Imagine making transparently ludicrous alternative histories the basis of your worldview.
Imagine the highest goal of your intellectual efforts being to waste other people's time, and perhaps make them a little more ignorant and a little less curious about the world.
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
9 Mar
To join the chorus: "socially constructed" does not mean "unreal" or "malleable at will." Among the many obvious social constructions anti-constructionists habitually discuss as real and durable are rights, progress, property, capitalism, science, the Enlightenment, and The West.
Others are money, law, interlibrary loan, and breakfast. Just about the only thing uniting these is that they are created by human beings acting in a social context. The contrast is not with what is "real," or with what is "malleable," but with what occurs outside such a context.
Not even Richard Dawkins, at least after some thought, maintains that scientific claims are made or tested outside of social context. No one thinks money predated society, nor that that makes it unreal. Conversely, all manner of natural things are "malleable" and studied as such.
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
4 Mar
Loving truth and winning the culture wars by putting neo-Nazi words in Voltaire’s mouth
Punchline
Genius = spreading bullshit to a huge audience
Read 4 tweets
Ted McCormick Profile picture
3 Mar
This is a clear and worthwhile thread.

But I wonder how one addresses the weaponization of ambiguity that occurs when ordinary academic uses of a term are condemned on the basis of the term's non-academic meaning(s). This is the stuff the culture war is made of, it seems to me.
It's not quite the same issue, but there's also a sleight-of-hand involved in -- for example -- smuggling specific, pseudo-scientific claims about race into public discourse under the cover of broader and more innocuous terms ("population", "demographics").
In both cases I think the divergence between academic and non-academic understandings of the terms is not simply a by-product of miscommunication but the necessary condition for attacking academic work as a danger to the public, civilization, etc, etc.
Read 5 tweets

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