Rationalist
Hail Voltaire
LOL. Take a look at some of Bork's other views and let's see what you think. You may agree with him on feminism, but I doubt you'll agree with him on homosexuality or the role of religion in government.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
- Thread starter cancel2 2022
- Start date
I never railed against the word cunt. Ever. Find one post where I rail against it, needledick. You won't, because I haven't.
You're a fucking crybaby with no one to blame but yourself for the fact that you're repulsive. That's why you hate women. You assume it's their fault that you're repulsive. Suck it, loser.
Doesn't matter what my credentials are if I'm 100% spot-on, needledick.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Just because I agree with some aspect of his philosophy doesn't mean that I agree with everything else, why is that so hard to understand? I will give you this excerpt and tell me what you disagree with.
Its [the New Left's] adherents did not go away or change their minds; the New Left shattered into a multitude of single-issue groups. We now have, to name but a few, radical feminists, black extremists, animal rights groups, radical environmentalists, activist homosexual organizations, multi-culturalists, and new or freshly radicalized organizations such as People for the American Way, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the National Organization for Women (NOW), and Planned Parenthood.
Each of these pursues a piece of the agenda of the cultural and political Left, but they do not announce publicly an overarching program, as the New Left did, that would enable people to see that the separate groups and causes add up to a general radical philosophy. Yet these groups are in touch with one another and often come together in a coalition on specific issues. The splintering of the New Left proved to be an advantage because the movement became less visible and therefore more powerful, its goals more attainable, than was the case in the Sixties.
As the rioting and riotousness died down in the early 1970s and seemingly disappeared altogether in the last half of that decade and in the 1980s, it seemed, at last, that the Sixties were over. They were not. It was a malignant decade that, after a fifteen-year remission, returned in the 1980s to metastasize more devastatingly throughout our culture than it had in the Sixties, not with tumult but quietly, in the moral and political assumptions of those who now control and guide our major cultural institutions. The Sixties radicals are still with us, but now they do not paralyze the universities; they run the universities.
If the problem were only the universities and the chattering classes, there might be reason to be more optimistic. The Sixties have gone farther than that, however. "The New Left's anti-institutional outlook and anti-bourgeois value scheme has fed into the 'new liberalism' increasingly held by the upper middle class.
Indeed, the 'radical' values and orientations expressed by SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Comittee] and SDS workers in the early sixties have become the conventional wisdom of college-educated urban professionals, especially those under thirty-five.... Whatever their other successes and failures, the youthful radicals of that decade propelled a new set of values from the fringes to the very midst of contemporary social conflict.[18]" That was written in 1982. It seems even more true today.
Thus, the themes and traits of the New Left have become prominent in today's culture. As will be seen throughout this book, the Sixties generation's fixation on equality has permeated our society and its institutions, much to our disadvantage. Their idea of liberty has now become license in language, popular culture, and sexuality.
The idea that everything is ultimately political has taken hold. We know its current form as "political correctness," a distemper that afflicts the universities in their departments of humanities, social sciences, and law. Works of literature are read for their sub-texts, usually existing only in the mind of the politically correct reader, about the oppression of women, Western imperialism, colonialism, and racism. Political correctness is not confined to the enclaves of the academy. It is now to be found in museums, art galleries, seminaries, foundations-all the institutions relating to opinion and attitude formation.
A corollary to the politicization of the culture is the tactic of assaulting one's opponents as not merely wrong but morally evil. That was, of course, a key stratagem of the New Left, and it remains a crucial weapon in modern liberalism's armory. The rioters in the streets did not criticize the universities as in need of reform but as institutions rotten with immorality from top to bottom.
The student radicals' habitual lying is easily enough explained. They were antinomians, just as those Christian heretics thought themselves freed by God's grace from any obligation to the moral law, so the student radicals, imbued with the political grace of the Left, were freed of the restraints of law and morality. It could not be immoral to lie in a noble cause. For the same reason, it could not be wrong to break laws or heads. Modern liberals, being in charge of the institutions they once attacked, have no need to break heads and only an occasional need to break laws. They do, however, have a need to lie, and do so abundantly, since many Americans would not like their actual agenda.
christiefan915
Catalyst
I was talking about his book, too, and I disagree strongly with this opinion piece. First he claims there's a decline in America and then he blames it on liberals. It's the same sweeping generalization conservatives have used for decades, they pick out what they think is wrong with America and blame it all on liberals. One would think conservatives were innocent bystanders in the affairs of this country.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
I couldn't agree more that it isn't all down to liberals and I've already said that I don't care for much of his philosophy. However the guy is no fool and his description of how the broad Left splintered and fractured into many single issue protest groups chimes with me, if not with you.
SpiritOf76
Verified User
string says the emphasized part would make you think she lost her physical beauty and that he and I were just pricks after all. He says you are all a bunch of nitpicking cynics looking for the worst in others. I told him not to worry but he insisted. That was NOT what I meant.
He's still a dumbass, but not a bitter dumbass.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Bork is probably the single most articulate sociopath who ever avoided a prison cell. What a shame that he did.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
What was he supposed to have done?
cancel2 2022
Canceled
I could also mention Robert Byrd, he organised a KKK cell in the '40s, was for the Vietnam War and against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet in later years he renounced his former beliefs and came against the Iraq War.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
More from the book.
[h=3]RADICAL FEMINISM vs. EDUCATION[/h]There are now more than 600 undergraduate and several dozen graduate programs in Women's Studies in American colleges and universities. At first sight that might seem odd since so much of feminism is utterly inconsistent with intellectual seriousness. In many universities today, however, intellectual integrity comes in a distant second to political correctness. It is thus only an apparent paradox that institutions which, because of their professed devotion to reason and knowledge, should be feminism's sworn enemies are instead the centers of its power.
There are also, of course, programs in African-American Studies, Hispanic Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and more. Nothing could make clearer the politicization of higher education. These so-called disciplines vie with one another in claiming victimhood, but feminism is by far the strongest and most imperialistic, its influence suffusing the most traditional academic departments and university administrations. Feminists are revising and radicalizing textbooks and curricula in the humanities and the social sciences. They have a major say in faculty recruitment. Feminists increasingly control what is taught in high schools and elementary schools as well. Speech codes and "sensitivity" training severely limit what can be said on campus. The feminists have not only done harm to the intellectual function of universities and schools, they have made campuses extremely unpleasant, especially for white males, who are subject to harassment and demands that they toe the feminist cultural and political line.
The incongruity of feminism as an academic subject is heightened by another development. Though most feminists reject the idea of difference between men and women, more recently a coterie has appeared that insists upon, and celebrates just such difference. These women claim that rationality, sometimes called "linear thinking," is a coercive tool of the oppressive patriarchy. That may be because they have noticed that evidence and logic are running heavily against the no-difference position. It is necessary, therefore, to identify evidence and logic with the enemy and to exalt intuitive and emotional "women's ways of knowing." These "difference feminists" claim to perceive all of reality through the "sex/gender lens." Judging from their reports of what they see, that must be like peering at the world through the thick glass of a bottle bottom.
Thus, we now have what Patai and Koertge call "TOTAL REJ (total rejection) feminists" whose creed is that "Our culture, including all that we are taught in schools and universities, is so infused with patriarchal thinking that it must be torn up root and branch if genuine change is to occur. Everything must go - even the allegedly universal disciplines of logic, mathematics, and science, and the intellectual values of objectivity, clarity, and precision on which the former depend." (25) If acceptance of logic and standards of evidentiary proof are causing radical feminists to lose arguments, it is clear that they must be discarded if the feminist enterprise is not to be abandoned. But if logic and evidence are jettisoned, it follows that all of the disciplines built up on logic and evidence cannot remain intact. In the place of these oppressive disciplines and values there are to be constructed feminist alternative versions. Nobody seems to have the faintest idea, for example, what a feminist physics would look like, but the total rejectionists are sure one is out there somewhere. It seems to be assumed that a feminist physics, though different, would work as well as the version we now have. Feminist rocket scientists, apparently, could place satellites in orbit without using any of the laws of motion that are now employed.
Needless to say, there is so far not a single axiom or proposition of feminist science that explains or predicts anything or is capable of being tested empirically. When that unhappy fact is brought to a feminist's attention, the reply is often that the patriarchy has had over 3,000 years to build its mathematics, logic, and science whereas women have just started. Thus, the absence of anything but oratory about the wrong-headedness of science as it is must not be viewed as an embarrassment. But there is no shortage of oratory.
Anne Wilson Schaef, for example, denounces what she calls the "White Male System" (WMS) of rationality. Schaef says this system consists of four myths. First, the WMS is the only system that exists. Second, the WMS is innately superior. Third, the WMS knows and understands everything. Fourth, the WMS believes that it is possible to be totally logical, rational, and objective. To be sure, no one with any sense has ever claimed anything like all this. The virtue of the scientific method is precisely that mistakes made are corrected by others and that one investigator's results must be replicable by others in order to be accepted. The people involved do not think they are totally logical, rational, and objective. They know that no human is.
Radical feminist inanities about science, rationality, linear thinking, etc., rest on the allegation that knowledge and modes of reasoning are socially constructed; that is, that there are no objective truths and no single valid method of reasoning. That is a very convenient position for someone making irrational assertions. It would be rather difficult to hold an intelligent, or even an intelligible, discussion with someone holding that position, and it would be impossible to win an argument with her. That, of course, is the point of the exercise.
Take women's studies themselves. On the evidence proffered by Sommers, Patai and Koertge, and others, women's studies programs and courses are abysmal swamps of irrational dogma and hatred. The feminist classroom is an arena for emotions rather than intellect or analysis. Agreement with the ideology is mandatory.
A feminist professor can have enormous influence with immature young women in a forum where there are no intellectual constraints. In such a classroom emotion and opinion rule. The students are expected to recount personal experiences of suffering and oppression. Since feminists insist that the oppression of women by men is universal and unrelenting, a failure to have instances ready at hand for recitation is taken as insufficient understanding of the subject. The students are at an age when, male or female, they are uncertain about life, susceptible to absolutisms, and easy to persuade that they are being treated badly. The result is that young women pour out their emotions in uncontrolled fashion. It is dangerous to inflame young women's capacities for anger and self-pity; severe emotional harm can be done. In some classes, the woman may state in advance that she does not want any of her testimony repeated outside the classroom and the others agree to honor that request. No respectable academic discipline would keep classroom discussions secret.
Feminist bias in scholarship seems indomitable. The sociologist Steven Goldberg states that on numerous occasions Margaret Mead denied in writing that her research disproved the existence of sex differences. (26) Indeed, in reviewing Goldberg's book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, Mead wrote: "It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed.... Men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home." (27) But when Goldberg examined introductory sociology books, he found that thirty-six of thirty-eight began their sex-roles chapters with a discussion of Mead's work as demonstrating the environmental nature of male and female behavior. These books misrepresented Mead because "[t]hey, like the discipline whose work they represent, have an ideological commitment to denying that masculine and feminine behaviors and emotions are rooted in male and female physiologies and that all social systems conform to the limits imposed by this reality."
Feminists are transforming mainstream college curricula, they claim, in order to "make knowledge broader," but also to fight against prejudice. (28) "There is," said a professor attending a National Women's Studies Association conference, "a correlation between groups excluded from the curriculum and hate violence aimed at groups." She said most "inclusion" work has focused on blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and American Indians. But in order to "fight the hatreds and 'isms' in the world, we have to include education about more groups than those four." Other groups whose achievements should be taught, she said, include lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals, and issues of social class and disability should be included. "Some argue that there are different cultures of disability, like deaf culture."
Students subjected to propaganda in the name of history will graduate with no clear comprehension of what took place and what was important. Students whose instruction is in fighting "isms" and giving recognition to different sexual groups and cultures of disability are unlikely to graduate with any knowledge that would qualify them for positions other than as sensitivity counselors. As part of their campaign to convert higher education into a propaganda tool, feminists are deforming literary studies by seeking to discover classical allusions to feminism. George Will recorded a few of the choicer items:
[h=3]RADICAL FEMINISM vs. EDUCATION[/h]There are now more than 600 undergraduate and several dozen graduate programs in Women's Studies in American colleges and universities. At first sight that might seem odd since so much of feminism is utterly inconsistent with intellectual seriousness. In many universities today, however, intellectual integrity comes in a distant second to political correctness. It is thus only an apparent paradox that institutions which, because of their professed devotion to reason and knowledge, should be feminism's sworn enemies are instead the centers of its power.
There are also, of course, programs in African-American Studies, Hispanic Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and more. Nothing could make clearer the politicization of higher education. These so-called disciplines vie with one another in claiming victimhood, but feminism is by far the strongest and most imperialistic, its influence suffusing the most traditional academic departments and university administrations. Feminists are revising and radicalizing textbooks and curricula in the humanities and the social sciences. They have a major say in faculty recruitment. Feminists increasingly control what is taught in high schools and elementary schools as well. Speech codes and "sensitivity" training severely limit what can be said on campus. The feminists have not only done harm to the intellectual function of universities and schools, they have made campuses extremely unpleasant, especially for white males, who are subject to harassment and demands that they toe the feminist cultural and political line.
The incongruity of feminism as an academic subject is heightened by another development. Though most feminists reject the idea of difference between men and women, more recently a coterie has appeared that insists upon, and celebrates just such difference. These women claim that rationality, sometimes called "linear thinking," is a coercive tool of the oppressive patriarchy. That may be because they have noticed that evidence and logic are running heavily against the no-difference position. It is necessary, therefore, to identify evidence and logic with the enemy and to exalt intuitive and emotional "women's ways of knowing." These "difference feminists" claim to perceive all of reality through the "sex/gender lens." Judging from their reports of what they see, that must be like peering at the world through the thick glass of a bottle bottom.
Thus, we now have what Patai and Koertge call "TOTAL REJ (total rejection) feminists" whose creed is that "Our culture, including all that we are taught in schools and universities, is so infused with patriarchal thinking that it must be torn up root and branch if genuine change is to occur. Everything must go - even the allegedly universal disciplines of logic, mathematics, and science, and the intellectual values of objectivity, clarity, and precision on which the former depend." (25) If acceptance of logic and standards of evidentiary proof are causing radical feminists to lose arguments, it is clear that they must be discarded if the feminist enterprise is not to be abandoned. But if logic and evidence are jettisoned, it follows that all of the disciplines built up on logic and evidence cannot remain intact. In the place of these oppressive disciplines and values there are to be constructed feminist alternative versions. Nobody seems to have the faintest idea, for example, what a feminist physics would look like, but the total rejectionists are sure one is out there somewhere. It seems to be assumed that a feminist physics, though different, would work as well as the version we now have. Feminist rocket scientists, apparently, could place satellites in orbit without using any of the laws of motion that are now employed.
Needless to say, there is so far not a single axiom or proposition of feminist science that explains or predicts anything or is capable of being tested empirically. When that unhappy fact is brought to a feminist's attention, the reply is often that the patriarchy has had over 3,000 years to build its mathematics, logic, and science whereas women have just started. Thus, the absence of anything but oratory about the wrong-headedness of science as it is must not be viewed as an embarrassment. But there is no shortage of oratory.
Anne Wilson Schaef, for example, denounces what she calls the "White Male System" (WMS) of rationality. Schaef says this system consists of four myths. First, the WMS is the only system that exists. Second, the WMS is innately superior. Third, the WMS knows and understands everything. Fourth, the WMS believes that it is possible to be totally logical, rational, and objective. To be sure, no one with any sense has ever claimed anything like all this. The virtue of the scientific method is precisely that mistakes made are corrected by others and that one investigator's results must be replicable by others in order to be accepted. The people involved do not think they are totally logical, rational, and objective. They know that no human is.
Radical feminist inanities about science, rationality, linear thinking, etc., rest on the allegation that knowledge and modes of reasoning are socially constructed; that is, that there are no objective truths and no single valid method of reasoning. That is a very convenient position for someone making irrational assertions. It would be rather difficult to hold an intelligent, or even an intelligible, discussion with someone holding that position, and it would be impossible to win an argument with her. That, of course, is the point of the exercise.
Take women's studies themselves. On the evidence proffered by Sommers, Patai and Koertge, and others, women's studies programs and courses are abysmal swamps of irrational dogma and hatred. The feminist classroom is an arena for emotions rather than intellect or analysis. Agreement with the ideology is mandatory.
A feminist professor can have enormous influence with immature young women in a forum where there are no intellectual constraints. In such a classroom emotion and opinion rule. The students are expected to recount personal experiences of suffering and oppression. Since feminists insist that the oppression of women by men is universal and unrelenting, a failure to have instances ready at hand for recitation is taken as insufficient understanding of the subject. The students are at an age when, male or female, they are uncertain about life, susceptible to absolutisms, and easy to persuade that they are being treated badly. The result is that young women pour out their emotions in uncontrolled fashion. It is dangerous to inflame young women's capacities for anger and self-pity; severe emotional harm can be done. In some classes, the woman may state in advance that she does not want any of her testimony repeated outside the classroom and the others agree to honor that request. No respectable academic discipline would keep classroom discussions secret.
Feminist bias in scholarship seems indomitable. The sociologist Steven Goldberg states that on numerous occasions Margaret Mead denied in writing that her research disproved the existence of sex differences. (26) Indeed, in reviewing Goldberg's book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, Mead wrote: "It is true, as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed.... Men have always been the leaders in public affairs and the final authorities at home." (27) But when Goldberg examined introductory sociology books, he found that thirty-six of thirty-eight began their sex-roles chapters with a discussion of Mead's work as demonstrating the environmental nature of male and female behavior. These books misrepresented Mead because "[t]hey, like the discipline whose work they represent, have an ideological commitment to denying that masculine and feminine behaviors and emotions are rooted in male and female physiologies and that all social systems conform to the limits imposed by this reality."
Feminists are transforming mainstream college curricula, they claim, in order to "make knowledge broader," but also to fight against prejudice. (28) "There is," said a professor attending a National Women's Studies Association conference, "a correlation between groups excluded from the curriculum and hate violence aimed at groups." She said most "inclusion" work has focused on blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and American Indians. But in order to "fight the hatreds and 'isms' in the world, we have to include education about more groups than those four." Other groups whose achievements should be taught, she said, include lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals, and issues of social class and disability should be included. "Some argue that there are different cultures of disability, like deaf culture."
Students subjected to propaganda in the name of history will graduate with no clear comprehension of what took place and what was important. Students whose instruction is in fighting "isms" and giving recognition to different sexual groups and cultures of disability are unlikely to graduate with any knowledge that would qualify them for positions other than as sensitivity counselors. As part of their campaign to convert higher education into a propaganda tool, feminists are deforming literary studies by seeking to discover classical allusions to feminism. George Will recorded a few of the choicer items:
- Shakespeare's "Tempest" reflects the imperialistic rape of the Third World. Emily Dickinson's poetic references to peas and flower buds are encoded messages of feminist rage, exulting clitoral masturbation to protest the prison of patriarchal sex roles. Jane Austen's supposed serenity masks boiling fury about male domination, expressed in the nastiness of minor characters who are "really" not minor. In "Wuthering Heights," Emily Bronte, a subtle subversive, has Catherine bitten by a male bull-dog. Melville's white whale? Probably a penis. Grab a harpoon. (29)
cancel2 2022
Canceled
This is really fascinating and is more or less what I had been saying on here albeit nowhere near as articulately. Feminists and more particularly American second wave feminists are very quick to claim the credit in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
FEMINISMS PAST AND PRESENT
Some of today's feminist dissatisfaction is due to the lack of adequate recognition of the immense contribution women have made to Western culture. That is changing, but, oddly enough, it is the feminists who continue to denigrate the role women played in the past.
There was a time, of course, when feminism had real tasks to accomplish, real inequities to overcome. Feminism achieved major victories in the last century and the first part of this one. Though they take the credit, feminists, radical or otherwise, actually had little to do with the progress of women in the latter half of this century. The trends that would of themselves produce today's results were in place at least by the early 1960s. Once such things as the right to vote and the right of wives to hold property in their own names had been won, the difference in the opportunities open to women has been largely due to technology. I am old enough to remember my grandmother washing work clothes on a scrub board, mashing potatoes by hand, and emptying the water tray from the bottom of the ice box. There was simply no possibility that she could have had both a family and a career. Were she young today, she would find that shopping, food preparation, laundering and much else have been made dramatically easier so that she could, if she wished, become a lawyer or a doctor or virtually anything that appealed to her.
Many people suppose that feminism today is a continuation of the reform movement of the past. They occasionally notice a ranting Bella Abzug or an icy Gloria Steinem but imagine them to be merely the froth of extremism on an otherwise sensible movement. That is not the case; the extremists are the movement. What the moderate academic feminists Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge write about radical feminism in the universities is true of the movement as a whole. Today's radical feminism is not merely about equal rights for women.... Feminism aspires to be much more than this. It bids to be a totalizing scheme resting on a grand theory, one that is as all-inclusive as Marxism, as assured of its ability to unmask hidden meanings as Freudian psychology, and as fervent in its condemnation of apostates as evangelical fundamentalism. Feminist theory provides a doctrine of original sin: The world's evils originate in male supremacy. (6)
Carol Iannone was drawn into feminism in graduate school in the mid-Seventies. "I enjoyed, revelled in the utterly systematic property feminism takes on when used as a tool of analysis, especially when to the exclusion of all others. Like Marxism, feminism can explain everything from advertising to religion by following its single thread, the oppression of women." (7)
Feminists call their grand theory the "gender perspective." "Gender" is a code word in the feminist lexicon. The enormous importance the radicals place on that term became apparent during the preparation for and conduct of the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September, 1995. (The Beijing conference will be mentioned frequently because it demonstrated most of feminism's least attractive features and its worldwide aspirations.) The object was to debate and adopt a set of proposals relating to women (the Platform for Action), which the various nations would, presumably, be under a moral duty to implement. Each nation sent an official delegation, and many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), accredited by the United Nations to lobby the delegates, were present. The Beijing conference revealed the political and cultural agenda of the movement as a whole. At a preparatory session in New York, Bella Abzug, the head of a major NGO, denounced "retrogressive" developments:
Changes in the social and cultural environment to make the roles of men and women identical are what the feminists intend. This explains the Platform's incessant harping on "gender." While I am not sure of the final count, at one point there were 216 references to it. Unfortunately, many people who would dislike the radical feminists' project assume that "gender" and "sex" have the same meaning. They do not. Their attempt at Beijing was to incorporate the "gender perspective" into an internationally accepted document that would impose at least moral obligations on the governments of the world.
The gender perspective of radical feminism is easy to ridicule but it must be taken seriously. It attacks not only men but the institution of the family, it is hostile to traditional religion, it demands quotas in every field for women, and it engages in serious misrepresentations of facts. Worst of all, it inflicts great damage on persons and essential institutions in a reckless attempt to remake human beings and create a world that can never exist.
FEMINISMS PAST AND PRESENT
Some of today's feminist dissatisfaction is due to the lack of adequate recognition of the immense contribution women have made to Western culture. That is changing, but, oddly enough, it is the feminists who continue to denigrate the role women played in the past.
There was a time, of course, when feminism had real tasks to accomplish, real inequities to overcome. Feminism achieved major victories in the last century and the first part of this one. Though they take the credit, feminists, radical or otherwise, actually had little to do with the progress of women in the latter half of this century. The trends that would of themselves produce today's results were in place at least by the early 1960s. Once such things as the right to vote and the right of wives to hold property in their own names had been won, the difference in the opportunities open to women has been largely due to technology. I am old enough to remember my grandmother washing work clothes on a scrub board, mashing potatoes by hand, and emptying the water tray from the bottom of the ice box. There was simply no possibility that she could have had both a family and a career. Were she young today, she would find that shopping, food preparation, laundering and much else have been made dramatically easier so that she could, if she wished, become a lawyer or a doctor or virtually anything that appealed to her.
Many people suppose that feminism today is a continuation of the reform movement of the past. They occasionally notice a ranting Bella Abzug or an icy Gloria Steinem but imagine them to be merely the froth of extremism on an otherwise sensible movement. That is not the case; the extremists are the movement. What the moderate academic feminists Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge write about radical feminism in the universities is true of the movement as a whole. Today's radical feminism is not merely about equal rights for women.... Feminism aspires to be much more than this. It bids to be a totalizing scheme resting on a grand theory, one that is as all-inclusive as Marxism, as assured of its ability to unmask hidden meanings as Freudian psychology, and as fervent in its condemnation of apostates as evangelical fundamentalism. Feminist theory provides a doctrine of original sin: The world's evils originate in male supremacy. (6)
Carol Iannone was drawn into feminism in graduate school in the mid-Seventies. "I enjoyed, revelled in the utterly systematic property feminism takes on when used as a tool of analysis, especially when to the exclusion of all others. Like Marxism, feminism can explain everything from advertising to religion by following its single thread, the oppression of women." (7)
Feminists call their grand theory the "gender perspective." "Gender" is a code word in the feminist lexicon. The enormous importance the radicals place on that term became apparent during the preparation for and conduct of the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September, 1995. (The Beijing conference will be mentioned frequently because it demonstrated most of feminism's least attractive features and its worldwide aspirations.) The object was to debate and adopt a set of proposals relating to women (the Platform for Action), which the various nations would, presumably, be under a moral duty to implement. Each nation sent an official delegation, and many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), accredited by the United Nations to lobby the delegates, were present. The Beijing conference revealed the political and cultural agenda of the movement as a whole. At a preparatory session in New York, Bella Abzug, the head of a major NGO, denounced "retrogressive" developments:
- The current attempt by several Member States to expunge the word "gender" from the Platform for Action and to replace it with the word "sex" is an insulting and demeaning attempt to reverse the gains made by women, to intimidate us and to block further progress.
We will not be forced back into the "biology is destiny" concept that seeks to define, confine and reduce women and girls to their physical sexual characteristics. (8)
Changes in the social and cultural environment to make the roles of men and women identical are what the feminists intend. This explains the Platform's incessant harping on "gender." While I am not sure of the final count, at one point there were 216 references to it. Unfortunately, many people who would dislike the radical feminists' project assume that "gender" and "sex" have the same meaning. They do not. Their attempt at Beijing was to incorporate the "gender perspective" into an internationally accepted document that would impose at least moral obligations on the governments of the world.
The gender perspective of radical feminism is easy to ridicule but it must be taken seriously. It attacks not only men but the institution of the family, it is hostile to traditional religion, it demands quotas in every field for women, and it engages in serious misrepresentations of facts. Worst of all, it inflicts great damage on persons and essential institutions in a reckless attempt to remake human beings and create a world that can never exist.
Last edited:
Stymie
New member
string says the emphasized part would make you think she lost her physical beauty and that he and I were just pricks after all. He says you are all a bunch of nitpicking cynics looking for the worst in others. I told him not to worry but he insisted. That was NOT what I meant.
He's still a dumbass, but not a bitter dumbass.
If she's boning a pretty boy like String she got what she deserved! Wait till she comes running to cry on my shoulder! Boo hoo! I am going to tell her the same thing I tell all of them - you got what you deserved you stupid bint! That'll learn you.
zappasguitar
Well-known member
Yeah...it's almost as bad as the filthy rich hypocrite politician who grew up an effete New England milquetoast but won the Presidency by passing himself off as some sort of cowboy from Texas.
christiefan915
Catalyst
It's nice you had your consciousness raised, Popeye. Because I remember really clearly how the victim was blamed in that incident.
Haiku, you wanted to know about Tom being incorrect? Well here he is.
Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
He was a hatchet man for Nixon. Though not neccessarily a willing one. His views are a bit to the extreme, he's opposed civil rights legislation, privacy rights legislation, believes a congressional super majority should be able to over rule SCOTUS decisions (a direct violation of the seperation of powers) and endorses a view on antiturst legislation that permits the concentration of wealth into a few privelaged corporations. His views are far outside the judicial mainstream though no one would argue that he's not a brilliant jurist with a good eye for talent. I would not want to live in Robert Borks America.
Last edited:
apple0154
MEOW
"As the rioting and riotousness died down in the early 1970s and seemingly disappeared altogether in the last half of that decade and in the 1980s, it seemed, at last, that the Sixties were over. They were not. It was a malignant decade...."
While I read the entire excerpt I didn't have to go any further than that. Not only were the 60s the freedom decade but an entire generation stood up and said, "Hell no. We won't go!" to a slaughter. An entire generation defying a government in a time of "war". A war started on a lie, non the less.
Bork wants to talk about morality. He wouldn't know morality if he fell over it. God forbid two people make love. Disgusting! But kill people? Right on! That's Bork's morality. And, yes. We see the same 60s malignancy today in Obama. How dare he talk to people instead of starting wars. Iran. Syria. Obama is blowing opportunities to kill not only Muslims but Americans, as well.
"Political correctness is not confined to the enclaves of the academy. It is now to be found in museums, art galleries, seminaries, foundations-all the institutions relating to opinion and attitude formation"
Yes, it's called evolving. It's the dragging of man out of the caves. It's replacing barbarism with civilization. It's getting rid of the works of art and general theme that depicted war and bloodshed as glorious. Where a statue may have shown a war amputee with a rifle over his shoulder there now stands a baby nursing on his mother's breast. OMG! I'm sure Bork would prefer to gaze upon the legless man and, by inference, celebrate war and suffering and death rather than gaze upon a woman's breast and celebrate bonding and love and life.
"Works of literature are read for their sub-texts, usually existing only in the mind of the politically correct reader, about the oppression of women, Western imperialism, colonialism, and racism."
Is the man a complete jack-ass? When those "works of literature" were written there WAS oppression of women, western imperialism, colonialism and racism. We have gained the insight and knowledge and recognize it when we see it. We have evolved. Well, most of us and that's thanks to the 60s generation. Yes, they ripped open society and exposed the putrid parts such as the belief women looked real nice but unless controlled they would turn into vile creatures and war was to be glorified and celebrated and while child birth was a gift from God none other than the Devil himself was door man at the "port of delivery".
I could go on but how many words are necessary to point out what can only be described as the verbal vomit of a sick man.
cancel2 2022
Canceled
Political correctness has become a form of mind control however well intentioned it may have been to start with. It is really no different to a revolution which starts off replacing the bad guys only for a new set to emerge. I suggest that you listen to the words of Won't be Fooled Again by the Who, Pete Townsend wrote that specifically about the sixties, he wasn't fooled even then.