As has been pointed out, Professor Weinstein “supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement” and calls himself “deeply progressive,” but that’s not enough for the thugs at Evergreen.
My Apostasy from the Church of Critical Theory | @Reza_Ziai https://t.co/5BtLu4KuXg— Areo Magazine (@areomagazine) June 2, 2017
In 1997 I earned a Masters degree in psychology from Duquesne University, a Catholic university in Pittsburgh, PA. At the time, Duquesne was one of only a few schools in the country with an emphasis in existential phenomenological psychology that was also accredited by the American Psychological Association. So, off I went.RTWT.
Twice a week, for three semesters I carried to class Being and Time, a bible-shaped book by Martin Heidegger (who, although his private beliefs are still contested, was, in fact, literally a Nazi) across a courtyard under a really creepy fifteen-foot tall statue of Christ’s now very well-known execution.
In virtually every class, I was told that all scientific knowledge, and even science itself was founded on Western cultural constructions and was to be regarded as hegemonic. And since each of the world’s various cultural viewpoints were enmeshed in their own historicity, each respective one (especially the Western one) could only be understood in terms relative to all the others. Accordingly, objective truths did not exist. We were all taught that “reality” was the exact equivalent of how you perceive it...
What is happening at Evergreen is about college policy. It became focused on me because I objected. Rule by stigma. https://t.co/ZjuFjY130h
— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) May 31, 2017
Trans Professor in South Carolina Attacks Feminists as ‘Cockroaches’ https://t.co/T5sVKYmW6d
— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) May 24, 2017
cc @JenniferKabbany @fitsnews @JeffQuinton pic.twitter.com/ligk6egG5g
THE CONCEPTUAL PENIS AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT: A SOKAL-STYLE HOAX ON GENDER STUDIEShttps://t.co/7HrFFslFET
— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) May 19, 2017
OMG! An academic journal just fell for a big hoax. Published fake paper on "the conceptual penis." Hilarious https://t.co/yGIGas0ksz
— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) May 19, 2017
Shout out to @peterboghossian who did a Sokal style hoax on the academic farce called Gender Studies https://t.co/du4iA6wf3b
— New Real Peer Review (@RealPeerReview) May 19, 2017
Samuel Freeman reviews three new books on the lives and ideas of the Frankfurt School https://t.co/hvQCb6baBl
— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) March 13, 2017
Feminism is a movement devoted to destroying the family. Feminist theory condemns marriage and motherhood as institutions of “male domination,” which is why taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood is sacred to feminists: The road to “equality” is paved with dead babies.They're usually fat, ugly lesbians at that, heh.
Misery loves company, and the leaders of this anti-male hate movement therefore encourage young women to pursue lifestyles that will lead them to the same attitude of embittered resentment that defines feminism. Crucial to this project is the promotion of abnormal sexual behavior.
“Sex is about reproductive biology,” as I have previously explained. “Human beings are mammals, and any eighth-grader can figure out what that means in terms of sex. Once you understand this scientific definition of sex, everything else is just details.” Rejecting this normal common-sense understanding of sex, feminists adopt intellectual theories that are directly hostile to the reproductive purposes of human sexuality. One obvious reason for this hostility is because so many leaders of the feminist movement are lesbians...
One of the most remarkable controversies of our era is the conflict between transgender activists and radical feminists. Michelle Goldberg outlined this dispute in an August 2014 article for the New Yorker:Keep reading.
Trans women say that they are women because they feel female — that, as some put it, they have women’s brains in men’s bodies. Radical feminists reject the notion of a “female brain.” They believe that if women think and act differently from men it’s because society forces them to, requiring them to be sexually attractive, nurturing, and deferential. In the words of Lierre Keith, a speaker at Radfems Respond, femininity is “ritualized submission.”Having written a book (Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature) critical of feminist ideology, I cannot be accused of supporting Lierre Keith’s ideas about patriarchal oppression. Nevertheless, in their disputes with the transgender cult — and yes, the movement has developed a cult mentality in recent years — radical feminists are on the side of scientific truth. “Male” and “female” are biological categories, determined by chromosomes and anatomy. This is simply science, not politics, and the rhetoric of the transgender cult is not actual feminism, but is instead a weird mutant strain of postmodernism, heavily influenced by the “gender theory” popularized by Professor Judith Butler. Radical feminists have taken alarm at the way transgender activists have used the Internet— blogs, YouTube channels and other social media — to promote “transition” as a panacea for every problem young people may experience with their sexual identity. There now exists a vast online community of amateur advice sites on every aspect of transition. Medical providers of “treatment” — hormones and surgery — are now encouraging transgenderism even among preschool children, and some misguided parents appear to be exhibiting Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, by pushing their children toward “transgender” identification.
What is happening here? The rise of transgender mania — for which Bruce “Caitlin” Jenner is the celebrity poster boy/girl — can best be understood as a belated consequence of culture shifts that occurred 40 or 50 years ago, especially in the field of psychology. Whereas once heterosexuality was officially understood as normal, and homosexuality defined as deviant, this understanding was cast aside by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. If there was no such thing as normal sexual behavior, then it was no longer possible to describe any sexual behavior as abnormal. Pandora’s Box had been opened, and the potential results of this were difficult to predict.
Parents who have more or less traditional expectations for our children find ourselves compelled to protect our children against a culture which increasingly condemns “normal” as a synonym for oppressive. Progressive intellectuals consider you a very bad parent if you expect your boys to be masculine and your girls to be feminine, and you are simply hateful if you expect your children to be heterosexual. Advocates of “gender-neutral parenting” denounce parents who encourage their sons to play sports or who permit their daughters to watch Disney princess movies (which are full of “heteronormative” messages, Women’s Studies professors warn us).
“Until I started studying radical feminism, I never thought of ‘normal’ as an achievement,” I wrote in April 2015 after examining the way gender theory is taught in universities. As our society has lost any consensus of what “normal” adulthood should entail, a growing and quite vocal segment of the culture have demanded that the traditional family and religious morality must be destroyed. This cultural conflict produces profoundly confusing messages for children growing up in a society where there is no generally accepted definition of what kind of adult they should grow up to be.
Amid this confusion, it has become apparent that, in many cases, the transgender cult is exploiting the vulnerability of young people with serious mental illnesses. Many young people buy into a prevailing attitude that “transition” is a cure for problems of identity and social maladjustment. Many of the harshest critics of the transgender movement are those who are “destransitioned,” having quit the process of sex-change “treatment.” One mentally ill 21-year-old lesbian who abandoned this process described herself as “angry as hell” about her experience with “transition-happy therapists and doctors” who “decided to try to medically correct” her, based on their belief that she would “stand a better chance at being a more normal man than a normal woman.” But what is “normal”? And who is qualified to decide?
The egalitarian mentality — the idea of that social hierarchy is always oppressive and that liberation is always the answer to our problems — tends to undermine every source of authority in society. When ordinary people are unable to distinguish between right and wrong, between normal and abnormal, they are compelled to appeal to “experts.” But how do we decide who is qualified as an “expert”? In regard to transgenderism, we find that many people seeking “treatment” end up in a worse condition than they were before they resorted to this expert-approved process. And now we have activists seeking to require schools and other public facilities to accommodate transgenderism despite concerns for women’s safety. What we realize, eventually, is that sane people are being compelled to adjust their own expectations in order to accommodate the demands of mentally ill people who are unable or unwilling to adjust to reasonable standards of social behavior...
If that strikes you as an unbalanced question, consider that the guy posing it is Kim Holmes, a former Assistant Secretary of State and a long-time foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation. Holmes new book – The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left – lays out all of the disturbing facts.
Holmes sat down with Ginni Thomas of the Daily Caller (yes, and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) to explain why he believes the Left’s various contemporary outrages constitute “a mopping-up operation and they’re going in for the kill.” Rather than merely dismissing this as another despairing old conservative, you would do well to read and hear Holmes make his case.
President Obama came face to face with the horror of nuclear war Friday in a somber visit to Hiroshima, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to tour the site of the atomic bombing 71 years ago that killed tens of thousands in an instant and ushered in the nuclear age.More.
In a sweeping address that reflected on the obligations of humankind, Obama wrestled with the inherent contradiction that centuries of technical advancement have both made it easier to bind people together and given them the capacity for the carnage seen in this city. And he confronted the cold reality that his own goal of a world without nuclear firepower remains frustratingly out of reach.
Speaking slowly and solemnly, a tempo that seemed intended to underline his reach for history, the president noted that as battlefield weapons and tactics evolve, accompanying norms about whether to use them advances only in fits and starts.
"Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us," Obama warned. "The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well. That is why we come to this place."
Obama did not apologize for the nuclear attacks here and in the city of Nagasaki, strikes he believes ended the perils of Japanese aggression and brought about the end of World War II.
But, as the leader of the only country ever to have deployed nuclear weapons, Obama said it is the duty of those who hold terrible power to accept the consequences of its use.
"We have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again. Someday the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness," he said, using the Japanese term for survivors of the nuclear blasts.
The Peace Memorial park he visited Friday afternoon marks the darkest days of Hiroshima, where about 350,000 Japanese civilians and military personnel were living on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the bomb fell...
Congratulations on your important contribution to the movement, @andizeisler #callmeawitch https://t.co/gtN36E5B0P pic.twitter.com/iYJ9s971m3
— Meghan Murphy (@MeghanEMurphy) May 21, 2016
@Not_RSMcCain Have you seen Deep Green Resistance? -->
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) May 22, 2016
Radical Feminism Frequently Asked Questions https://t.co/dclol0ZFzA
Deep Green Resistance has been accused of transphobia because we have a difference of opinion about the definition of gender.Postcards from the Oppression Olympics, you might say, heh.
DGR does not condone dehumanization or violence against anyone, including people who describe themselves as trans. Universal human rights are universal. DGR has a strong code of conduct against violence and abuse. Anyone who violates that code is no longer a member of DGR.
Disagreeing with someone, however, is not a form of violence. And we have a big disagreement.
Radical feminists are critical of gender itself. We are not gender reformists–we are gender abolitionists. Without the socially constructed gender roles that form the basis of patriarchy, all people would be free to dress, behave, and love others in whatever way they wished, no matter what kind of body they had.
Patriarchy is a caste system which takes humans who are born biologically male or female and turns them into the social classes called men and women. Male people are made into men by socialization into masculinity, which is defined by a psychology based on emotional numbness and a dichotomy of self and other. This is also the psychology required by soldiers, which is why we don’t think you can be a peace activist without being a feminist.
Female socialization in patriarchy is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls—otherwise known as “grooming”—to create a class of compliant victims. Femininity is a set of behaviors that are, in essence, ritualized submission.
We see nothing in the creation of gender to celebrate or embrace. Patriarchy is a corrupt and brutal arrangement of power, and we want to see it dismantled so that the category of gender no longer exists. This is also our position on race and class. The categories are not natural: they only exist because hierarchical systems of power create them (see, for instance, Audrey Smedley’s book Race in North America). We want a world of justice and equality, where the material conditions that currently create race, class, and gender have been forever overcome.
Patriarchy facilitates the mining of female bodies for the benefit of men – for male sexual gratification, for cheap labor, and for reproduction. To take but one example, there are entire villages in India where all the women only have one kidney. Why? Because their husbands have sold the other one. Gender is not a feeling—it’s a human rights abuse against an entire class of people, “people called women.”[1]
We are not “transphobic.” We do, however, have a disagreement about what gender is. Genderists think that gender is natural, a product of biology. Radical feminists think gender is social, a product of male supremacy. Genderists think gender is an identity, an internal set of feelings people might have. Radical feminists think gender is a caste system, a set of material conditions into which one is born. Genderists think gender is a binary. Radical feminists think gender is a hierarchy, with men on top. Some genderists claim that gender is “fluid.” Radical feminists point out that there is nothing fluid about having your husband sell your kidney. So, yes, we have some big disagreements.
Radical feminists also believe that women have the right to define their boundaries and decide who is allowed in their space. We believe all oppressed groups have that right. We have been called transphobic because the women of DGR do not want men—people born male and socialized into masculinity—in women-only spaces. DGR stands with women in that decision.
For nearly eight years, President Obama has struggled to end wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Next week, he’ll finally succeed in closing chapters on two other ones instead – Vietnam and World War II.
Obama will become the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima and will meet with survivors of the atomic bombings that ended World War II. He will also travel to Vietnam, to whose communist government he is considering selling more weapons, a sign of how the U.S.-Vietnam relationship has blossomed in the decades since the war there ended.
For the president who promised to end two wars only to watch them persist, the end points this week in Vietnam and Japan — decades in the making — show just how hard that is, and how long peace could ultimately take.
“We’ve seen the difficulty or inability to disengage from the war on terror, including in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. “And he has seen that these U.S. commitments to protect friends and allies can be long-standing commitments, as evidenced by our continued presence in South Korea and Japan and Germany.”
Obama will pay heed to the past by promoting how far the alliances with Vietnam and Japan have come since the countries were bitter enemies of the U.S. He plans to highlight growing commercial ties in Vietnam, one of the 12 countries that are part of the massive Pacific Rim trade deal being negotiated. In Japan, where he will also meet with the heads of the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations, Obama's visit to Hiroshima is an opportunity to revisit his efforts toward nuclear nonproliferation.
“The very fact that the United States is traveling to Japan, that it’s now one of our closest allies in the world, and Vietnam, which is an emerging partner of ours, demonstrates how you are able to move beyond difficult history,” said White House deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes....
Obama may encounter some anti-American sentiment in Japan, where the arrest of an American suspected of killing a woman who disappeared last month has sparked outrage. Police say he's also suspected in her death but have not charged him.
On his final day in Japan, Obama will go to the city of Hiroshima, where the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb used in war in 1945. That bomb, and another dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killed at least 129,000 people and poisoned a generation with radiation.
Obama will pay tribute to the suffering and loss of war, aides say, though he won’t apologize for the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he views as having been necessary to end the war and save the world from tyranny.
At the time, President Truman made a decision he believed was “consistent with our national security priorities,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in explaining Obama’s refusal to apologize. “He believed that lives on both sides of the conflict could be saved by dropping the bomb.”
Obama has offered a similar defense of his own decision to use armed drones in the fight against terrorists in the Middle East.
More than that, though, he has spoken admiringly of Truman’s commitment to a new post-war order in which nations of the world worked together – the very kind of shift he has sought to enable the world to fight off crisis while still taking steps toward progress.
That new order was a marriage of “idealism to hardheaded realism, an acceptance of America’s power with a humility regarding America’s ability to control events around the world,” Obama wrote in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope.”
But the lessons of the 20th century wars only go so far, said [former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt] Campbell. They don’t necessarily provide a clear pathway for today’s leaders...
