University of London students demand ‘white philosophers’ like Plato, Kant be removed from syllabus
RT
Published time: 9 Jan, 2017 10:49
University of London students are demanding that thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, and Immanuel Kant be banned from the philosophy syllabus... because they are white.
UK media quotes students from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) as saying that “the majority of philosophers on our courses” should be from Africa and Asia.
A statement from the students’ union added that banning white philosophers should be part of a wider campaign to “decolonize” the university and “address the structural and epistemological legacy of colonialism.”
“White philosophers” should be on the syllabus only “if required,” and their work should be studied from a “critical standpoint,” the statement said, as cited by British media.
“For example, acknowledging the colonial context in which so-called ‘Enlightenment’ philosophers wrote within,” it elaborated.
Many scholars have been outraged by the demand, warning that the situation could spiral out of control.
“You can’t rule out a whole area of intellectual endeavor without having investigated it, and clearly they haven’t investigated what they mean by white philosophy,” Sir Roger Scruton told The Daily Mail.
“If they think there is a colonial context from which Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason arose, I would like to hear it,” he added.
The vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, Sir Anthony Seldon, told The Daily Mail that it looks like “a real danger” of “political correctness getting out of control.”
Opinions within the university are also divided, however. The head of SOAS’s Religions and Philosophies department, Erica Hunter, was surprised by the students’ statement, calling it “rather ridiculous.”
“I would firmly resist dropping philosophers or historians just because it was fashionable,” she added, as cited by The Telegraph.
However, Pro-Director (Learning and Teaching) Dr. Deborah Johnston sees the students’ initiative to question the syllabus as positive, explaining that “informed and critical debate and discussion about the curriculum we teach” is “a healthy and proper part of the academic enterprise.”
.
ReplyDeleteIn the immortal words of that great philosopher Pogo (in a slightly different context),"We have met the enemy and he is us."
It was the baby boomer generation that allowed, nay encouraged, this to happen. Many of us grew up and out of it. Those that didn't are now running what are euphemistically called our 'centers of higher learning'. We created the snowflake generation by indulging the little pricks.
In a few years, it will be us demanding 'safe places' to protect us from these vacuous little shits.
.
.
.
DeleteWell, to be a bit more accurate it's our kids running the schools and the grandkids who are the snowflakes but we got the ball rolling down hill in the 60's and 70's.
.
Some thoughts on “Russia’s Influence Campaign Targeting the 2016 US Presidential Election,” the newly released declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
ReplyDelete1. The primary purpose of the declassified report, which offers no evidence to support its assertions that Russia hacked the U.S. presidential election campaign, is to discredit Donald Trump. I am not saying there was no Russian hack of John Podesta’s emails. I am saying we have yet to see any tangible proof to back up the accusation. This charge—Sen. John McCain has likened the alleged effort by Russia to an act of war—is the first salvo in what will be a relentless campaign by the Republican and Democratic establishment, along with its corporatist allies and the mass media, to destroy the credibility of the president-elect and prepare the way for impeachment.
The allegations in the report, amplified in breathtaking pronouncements by a compliant corporate media that operates in a non-fact-based universe every bit as pernicious as that inhabited by Trump, are designed to make Trump look like Vladimir Putin’s useful idiot. An orchestrated and sustained campaign of innuendo and character assassination will be directed against Trump. When impeachment is finally proposed, Trump will have little public support and few allies and will have become a figure of open ridicule in the corporate media.
2. The second task of the report is to bolster the McCarthyist smear campaign against independent media, including Truthdig, as witting or unwitting agents of the Russian government. The demise of the English programming of Al-Jazeera and TeleSur, along with the collapse of the nation’s public broadcasting, designed to give a voice to those not beholden to corporate or party interests, leaves RT America and Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! as the only two electronic outlets with a national reach that are willing to give a platform to critics of corporate power and imperialism such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Ralph Nader, Medea Benjamin, Cornel West, Kshama Sawant, myself and others.
Seven pages of the report were dedicated to RT America, on which I have a show called “On Contact.” The report vastly inflated the cable network’s reach and influence. It also included a few glaring errors, including the statement that “RT introduced two new shows—‘Breaking the Set’ on 4 September and ‘Truthseeker’ on 2 November—both overwhelmingly focused on criticism of the US and Western governments as well as the promotion of radical discontent.” “Breaking the Set,” with Abby Martin, was taken off the air two years ago. It could hardly be tarred with costing Hillary Clinton the election.
The barely contained rage of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at the recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on foreign cyber threats was visible when he spat out that RT was “promoting a particular point of view, disparaging our system, our alleged hypocrisy about human rights, et cetera.” His anger was a glimpse into how the establishment seethes with hatred for dissidents. Clapper has lied in the past. He perjured himself in March 2013 when, three months before the revelations of wholesale state surveillance leaked by Snowden, he assured Congress that the National Security Agency was not collecting “any type of data” on the American public. After the corporate state shuts down RT, it will go after Democracy Now! and the handful of progressive sites, including this one, that give these dissidents space. The goal is censorship.
{...}
{...}
Delete3. The third task of the report is to justify the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization beyond Germany, a violation of the promise Ronald Reagan made to the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Expanding NATO in Eastern Europe opened up an arms market for the war industry. It made those businesses billions of dollars. New NATO members must buy Western arms that can be integrated into the NATO arsenal. These sales, which are bleeding the strained budgets of countries such as Poland, are predicated on potential hostilities with Russia. If Russia is not a threat, the arms sales plummet. War is a racket.
4. The final task of the report is to give the Democratic Party plausible cover for the catastrophic election defeat it suffered. Clinton initially blamed FBI Director James Comey for her loss before switching to the more easily demonized Putin. The charge of Russian interference essentially boils down to the absurd premise that perhaps hundreds of thousands of Clinton supporters suddenly decided to switch their votes to Trump when they read the leaked emails of Podesta. Either that or they tuned in to RT America and decided to vote for the Green Party.
The Democratic Party leadership cannot face, and certainly cannot publicly admit, that its callous betrayal of the working and middle class triggered a nationwide revolt that resulted in the election of Trump. It has been pounded since President Barack Obama took office, losing 68 seats in the House, 12 seats in the Senate and 10 governorships. It lost more than 1,000 elected positions between 2008 and 2012 nationwide. Since 2010, Republicans have replaced 900 Democratic state legislators. If this was a real party, the entire leadership would be sacked. But it is not a real party. It is the shell of a party propped up by corporate money and hyperventilating media.
The Democratic Party must maintain the fiction of liberalism just as the Republican Party must maintain the fiction of conservatism. These two parties, however, belong to one party—the corporate party. They will work in concert, as seen by the alliance between Republican leaders such as McCain and Democratic leaders such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, to get rid of Trump, silence all dissent, enrich the war industry and promote the farce they call democracy.
Welcome to our annus horribilis.
.
ReplyDeleteA Classic!
Clemson beats Alabama 35-31 on last minute drive, with 24 yard pass from Watson to Renfrow with 1 second left to win the game and the national title.
After watching Clemson take Ohio State apart you had to think they had a pretty good chance for the upset.
.
Watched the whole Washington / Alabama game the other weekend. Missed this one. Damn.
DeleteFrom a letter posted on the same Truth Dig article
ReplyDeleteWhen Hearst Artist Frederic Remington cabled from Cuba in 1897 that "there will be no war," William Randolph Hearst cabled back: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."
Last week the aging (84) Lord of San Simeon was out to prove that his hand had not lost its touch. This time it was not Spain but Russia on which Hearst had declared war. Hearst Columnist Walter Winchell pulled the first trigger. In a broadcast and syndicated column, he fulminated: "The Third World War is already being fought. . . . We are losing it. ... When the Communists are ready..."(from Time Magazine 10/27/47).
Today, we have a mainstream press that is almost uniformly composed of slavering warmongers; even what used to be regarded as "liberal" (i.e., peace loving) publications, such as The New Republic or Atlantic Magazine consistantly also fan the flames of perpetual military involvement in the Mideast.
The men who confronted tyranny on the Concord Bridge would never have dreamed that the government "of the people" would have degenerated into the Robo-cop-martial-war-scene that followed the Boston bombing that is actually glorified in Patriots Day and any number of other Hollywood monstrosities- as patriotic as The Patriot Act, or the Military Commissions Act which strip Americans of basic civil rights.
When the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens wrote his editorial "Resign, Mr. Comey," one of his objections was that he had argued against warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. Finding a champion of the Bill of Rights in the MSM is like looking for hen's teeth
Esqualido
Acadamia has become an intellectual toxic waste dump.
ReplyDeleteFor the record:
ReplyDeleteWho were the great African philosophers?
St. Augustine was a Berber.
DeleteThey, too, like everyone everywhere, thought well of themselves.
Berbers call themselves some variant of the word i-Mazigh-en (singular: a-Mazigh), possibly meaning "free people" or "noble men".[31]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers
The Catholics hold that St. Augustine was a profound thinker.
And at times I'm beginning to agree.
Even the Quirkites, an indigenous group from Southern Poland, related to the Neaderthals, think well of themselves, and call themselves The Quirkites, which, translated, roughly means:
DeleteThe noble people, the towering people, willing to stoop to any deceptive stratagem to get lots of goods and stuff for free
It's tough for pre-literate peoples to write philosophy.
DeleteWhich doesn't mean at all that they didn't have a philosophy.
Most of it was, naturally enough, of the perennial philosophy turn of mind, and can be found in their legends, myths, and story telling, episodes of the monomyth making appearances all about.
Those we are now supposed to call, to be politically correct, American Indians, according to their latest wishes, are heavy in this grouping.
See: Joseph Campbell and his picture of a truly beautiful Navajo sand painting which is nothing but the monomyth done with with amazing grace and skill.
I wish I could put this up but have tried to find it on the net before and failed.
I will try again.
One line of thought and understanding holds that 'literacy' leads to all sorts of superb non-sense, say, Marxism, for instance, or Nazism, or 'atheistic existentialism'.
Another holds that literacy is an excellent means of lying and deceiving more effectively, a quantum leap forward in this art.
Literacy seems to have a real connection with the development of farming, and the marketplace.
Calculating interest rates not far behind....:(
And then.....the deepest drop in human affairs yet experienced.....the development of ADVERTISING.
DeleteWalking on the moon.
DeleteFOR THE RECORD:
ReplyDelete* Russia is in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government.
* The US is not.
More than 20 civilians were killed in a B-52 strike carried out by the US on the Idlib province in Syria on January 3, according to Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
Gerasimov slammed the Western coalition in Syria for failing to achieve “any meaningful results,” adding that “at the same time, significant numbers of victims among the civilian population and government forces were reported.”
“As we remember, in September last year, the US aviation carried out an attack in the Deir-ez-Zor targeting government forces. After this attack, Islamic State started its advance,” Gerasimov said as cited by RIA Novosti news agency.
“The latest example of this is the January 3 airstrike, when a B-52 bomber – without warning the Russian side – hit a target in the town of Sarmada, Idlib Province, which is covered by the cessation of hostilities agreement. Over 20 civilians died as a result of the airstrike.”
The US, conducting airstrikes without communicating with the anti Islamic State forces, violated the "Rat Doctrine" and killed those that are the 'natural' allies of the United States.
DeleteHo ho ho
ReplyDeleteHa ha ha
Heh heh heh
Rufus is really running out of time with his prediction. He was at one time at the Fourth of July, of some year or other, and then finally said 'before Obama leaves office', stretching it out as long as humanly possible, as his final absolute last date for the wiping out of ISIS in Iraq.
ReplyDeleteI think that gives the old boy 10 more days for the final success of what he used to call 'the best military campaign of my lifetime'.
I blame this disgusting unnatural event on the monkeys -
ReplyDeleteMonkey and deer caught having sex in world first....DRUDGE
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/two-animals-species-sex-zoophilia-monkey-deer-japanese-macaque-female-sika-interspecies-sexual-a7519706.html
Making a mondee.
DeleteDylan Roof get death.
ReplyDeleteGood.
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
ReplyDelete- Castro
Asia ?
DeleteSouth Korea, Japan, China itself in a way....
Sessions now being asked by Sen. Franken about Trump's claim that illegal immigrants voted in the election, and more than 2 million votes were case.
ReplyDeleteSessions says every election "needs to be managed closely" and that there are regularly fraudulent activities during election cycles. He chose not to engage with Trump's specific claims.
The scientists are finally catching up with Farmer Bob, who has been warning about the coming of a new ice age for years now.
ReplyDeleteWe are much over due for the next Big Brrr.
I have gone so far as to urge Deuce to idle his Limo overnight each night to fight this coming threat -
Scientists Now Warn Of A New Ice Age As Temps Plummet to -80°F In Russia!....DRUDGE
http://www.climatedepot.com/2017/01/10/pravda-scientists-now-warn-of-a-new-ice-age-as-temperature-plummets-to-80f-in-russia/
I'm not one to bitch about the Hollywood set bitching about global warming while flying all over the world in their personal jet planes.
The last ice sheet in my area stopped just south of Spokane, Washington.
DeleteOne can see the line of demarcation very easily.....it's where the rolling hills of farm land turn abruptly into flatter rock strewn pine forests...
The Palouse?
DeleteYup. I think it's still called that up that way. The rolling hills, which I think were created by blown in
Deletestuff from the Cascades volcanoes, got flattened by the ice.
Yep, you'd be right. That's how they were created.
DeleteBill O'Reilly Is A Perv
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/business/media/bill-oreilly-sexual-harassment-fox-news-juliet-huddy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Jeez, some of this sounds quite bad.
C'mon, Bill, Good Grief.....
Either that, or one can't believe a thing many women say these days.
DeleteHuddy is the daughter of John Huddy, a former Fox News consultant and close longtime associate to Ailes. She was among a group of Ailes’ loyalists who were purged from Fox News shortly after the executive’s exit.
ReplyDeleteThe incident with Huddy is not the first time Fox News has settled a sexual harassment charge against O’Reilly. In October 2004, O'Reilly was sued by a former associate producer, Andrea Mackris, who said he initiated phone sex and regularly used lewd language with her at work and in dinner conversations.
O’Reilly countersued and called Mackris’ allegations a “shakedown.” A settlement was reached hours before a scheduled court hearing on evidence in the case that was said to include tapes of O’Reilly’s lurid phone calls.
Here it is !
ReplyDeleteHow did I not find it before ?
Unurthed
The Navajo Pollen Path
May 24th, 2007
A Navajo sand painting, New Mexico, c. 1950, dissected in Joseph Campbell‘s The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 1986. Such paintings, composed of colored sand strewn upon a hogan’s dirt floor, are used in healing and initiation ceremonies, wherein an assemblage of friends and neighbors chant and encourage an initiate, physically entering the painting, to [re]embark upon and [re]live a mythic adventure.
http://unurthed.com/2007/05/24/the-navajo-pollen-path/
Same symbolism as in India, then in Egypt of the pyramids.....but how to New Mexico ?
Through the land bridge.
DeleteIt is not definitively known how or when the Native Americans first settled the Americas and the present-day United States. The prevailing theory proposes that people migrated from Eurasia across Beringia, a land bridge that connected Siberia to present-day Alaska during the Ice Age, and then spread southward throughout the Americas and possibly going as far south as the Antarctic peninsula.
DeleteThis migration may have begun as early as 30,000 years ago[14] and continued through to about 10,000+ years ago, when the land bridge became submerged by the rising sea level caused by the ending of the last glacial period.[15] These early inhabitants, called Paleoamericans, soon diversified into many hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes.
Campbell had two ideas.
DeleteThe one, like your's above, of cultural diffusion, which he didn't seem to be able to quite figure out how in this case and context.
The other, that certain symbols and and ideas arise naturally in the human mind when a certain point of development is reached.
He left the topic with a ? mark.
His idea #2 still doesn't address where they came from.
DeleteIt does.
DeleteIt comes from within the human organism, when the organism is ripe for its coming.
It can be spread by diffusion, or, it can pop up here and there on its own when the time is ripe.
I'm going to order that book and read up on it again, and report.
I think it's fascinating stuff.
Trump asks for bust of Winston Churchill to be put back in Oval Office...DRUDGE
ReplyDeleteDamn right !
What a petty gesture that was by O'bozo, shipping Churchill's bust back to England.
Did you ever see, or drive through, The Drive Through Sequoia, Sam ?
ReplyDeleteYep, sure have! A long, long, time ago. Once upon a time.
DeleteChurchill was a racist:
ReplyDelete"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."
- Churchill
Probably got something to do with Obama's decision.
DeleteAnd Trump's decision for that matter. :)
DeleteChurchill didn't understand that it was the coming of farming that did all this, and not racial differences.
DeleteFarming slowly pushed out the paleolithic hunters fishers gatherers....it can support a greater population.....and the building of cities....
Winnie liked to think he and his folks did it all themselves....
Great man, though.
The true spirit of the fight against the totalitarianism of the left and right when the chips were down.
And for that reason his bust deserves a permanent resting place in the White House.
DeleteGod Save The Queen !
They'll always be an England !
The Sun shall never set on the British Empire !
Here here here
Hear Hear Hear !
Just goes to show you how well the new sailing ships and some machine guns will serve at certain times in history.
DeleteHo HO !
MOROCCO is banning the production and sale of Muslim full-face veils amid fears over terrorism, according to local media.
ReplyDelete...
But lawmaker Nouzha Skalli, a former family and social development minister, heralded the ban as “an important step in the fight against religious extremism”.