miked

"Gough Whitlam must be turning in his grave. The Great Man dedicated his life to the principles of the Age of Enlightenment: that rational, evidence-based argument could create a better and fairer society. Not only is the post-structuralist agenda anti-reason, anti-science and anti-family, it is also anti-education." From reason to radicalism: Gender fluidity May 30, 2016 11:30pm Mark Latham The Daily Telegraph The more I research the BRR and Safe Schools programs, the more bewildered I am as to how Labor leaders like Bill Shorten and Daniel Andrews endorsed this rubbish, says Mark Latham. WHEN John Maynard Keynes declared “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler a few years back”, he knew what he was talking about. The craziest trend in Australian politics is to teach Neo-Marxist genderless programs in our schools through the Orwellian-named Safe Schools and Building Respectful Relationships (BRR) curriculum. Even though Australian students are falling down the international league tables in maths, science and English, teachers are devoting class-time to the mechanics of breast-binding and penis-tucking. As Keynes envisaged, the thinking behind this madness is distilled from an academic scribbler a few years back. BRR’s author, Debbie Ollis from Deakin University, has attributed the intellectual inspiration for the program to a “post-structural understanding of gender construction”, drawing on the work of a Welsh academic Christine Weedon in her book Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. To understand what’s happening in today’s Labor Party and its attitude to education, Weedon’s tome is compulsory reading. I got my copy last week from the NSW State Library and was spellbound by its contents. Parents deserve to know where the Safe Schools and BRR philosophy comes from, and Weedon brazenly sets out the ideology behind these new teaching materials. Post-structuralism argues for a different way of looking at society, especially in understanding the nature of knowledge and learning. Since the rise of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, people have applied reason, rationality and observable truths in trying to build a better life. Weedon regards this process as inherently misleading. She thinks that from our first moments alive, we are brainwashed into accepting the social order around us. Governments, schools, churches, the media, popular culture and even fashion trends combine to reinforce the “power relations” and dominance of capitalism. The things we know from observing nature and studying science are dismissed as “biological determinism”. Former Labor leader Mark Latham /. Picture: Ian Currie So too notions of truth, commonsense and life-experience are disparaged as “historical constructs” — delivering “false consciousness” and tricking people into a misunderstanding of their best interests. For Weedon, the process of social conditioning denies its “own partiality”. “It fails to acknowledge that it is but one possible version of meaning, rather than ‘truth’ itself and that it represents particular (political) interests.” For instance, growing up with two straight parents is said to “lead to the acquisition by children of a heterosexual gendered identity”. Weedon writes of how: “For young girls, the acquisition of femininity involves a recognition that they are already castrated like their mother”, forcing them to submit to patriarchy, or male dominance. No one is immune from the process of false gender identity. Individuals are said to be “sexual beings from birth”, reflected in the “initial bisexuality of the child”. This is the kind of thinking behind the Start Early program developed by Early Childhood Australia (ECA), which teaches childcare and preschool infants about sexuality, cross-dressing and the opposite sex’s toilets. An ECA spokeswoman has said that, “(young) children are sexual beings, it’s a strong part of their identity’’. Most parents would be horrified by this stance but it’s become commonplace in the Australian education system. Having lost the battle for economic and foreign policy in the 1980s, Neo-Marxists embarked on a long march through the institutions of the public sector, especially universities and schools. Indoctrination programs like Safe Schools, BRR and Start Early are the inevitable result. This breaks the longstanding, bipartisan practice in Australian politics of keeping ideology out of schools. The purpose of a quality education has been to equip young people with the knowledge and vocational skills of a civilised society. If graduating students wish to pursue social and political change, they can do so through the democratic process in their adult years. Education has been relatively free from ideological indoctrination. But this is not the view of the new curriculum designers, with Ollis depicting schools as “in a unique position to educate for social change”. Weedon also said she wants to engineer an androgynous “ungendered” society through classroom tutoring. The other key Leftist battleground is for the control of language. Inspired by French post-structuralist Michel Foucault, Weedon writes, “If language is the site where meaningful experience is constituted (in capitalist societies) then language also determines how we perceive possibilities of change”. This is why Safe Schools seeks to eradicate the use of terms like “his and her” and “boys and girls”. It believes genderless language will produce a genderless generation of young Australians, self-selecting their sexuality as a fluid identity. Political correctness is not an accident, a random form of censorship. It’s a carefully targeted campaign designed to outlaw the language of observable facts in the discussion of race, gender and sexuality. For every commonsense ­aspect of life, there’s a PC push to eliminate identity differences. Weedon writes of how the “dominant meanings of language” force boys and girls “to differentiate between pink and blue and to understand their social connotations”. “Little girls should look pretty and be compliant and helpful, while boys should be adventurous, assertive and tough … (shaping) their future social destinations within a patriarchal society”. This pink/blue phobia is the basis of the Leftist ‘‘No Gender December’’ campaign, trying to outlaw gender-specific toys each year at Christmas. The more I research the BRR and Safe Schools programs, the more bewildered I am as to how Labor leaders like Bill Shorten and Daniel Andrews endorsed this rubbish. Gough Whitlam must be turning in his grave. The Great Man dedicated his life to the principles of the Age of Enlightenment: that rational, evidence-based argument could create a better and fairer society. Not only is the post-structuralist agenda anti-reason, anti-science and anti-family, it is also anti-education. It wants to abandon the conventional process of learning through known facts and universally established truths, creating a borderless world of genderless individuals. Australia’s political leaders are sleepwalking into an educational disaster. As parents we need to make our views known to election candidates and school leaders alike. Anyone who has researched this issue will know we are fighting for the future of our civilisation. Source http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/from-reason-to-radicalism-gender-fluidity/news-story/832eb330f1e68c0af8ab37521dc402d7#load-story-comments

Pretty amazing paper using Bing searches from pregnant women to explore the concerns of women over the gestation period. One of the head scientists at Microsoft, Horvitz, is an author. http://www.adamfourney.com/papers/fourney_white_horvitz_chi2015.pdf image hosting over 5mb

Word cloud of the video:

Leonard Peikoff's Lecture series on Logic is quite enlightening. $9.90 at the Ayn Rand Institute website I think. A study guide for a novice I have found useful: https://www.tragedyandhope.com/trivium/trivium-study-guide/

I found this article interesting - the author is a Harvard Business School academic who founded his own company. He talks about treating your life like you are managing a successful company in it for the long term (and other an-cap/philosophy friendly analogies). "First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?" How will you measure your life? http://www.pma.org/mda/assets/library/3-3/D%20-%20How%20Will%20You%20Measure%20Your%20Life.pdf

I was expecting a happy ending to that OP!

Hey man I enjoyed this and always had a niggly feeling about this story and why it might be so popular. I think you are onto something. When you were analysing the phrase "I love you too" I found myself wanting to hear the word "attention" as in he was seeking attention from his parents; notably, the parents are not shown and he had to create them as furry monsters in his imagination. Similarly, In Toy Story the parents do not feature, and I see themes of child abuse in that film too. As for the delivery I like how you started with your assertion and said 'if you are interested then keep watching' or words to that effect; that got my attention. Perhaps open some loops like "I will show you in a moment why I think the Monsters are the Parents" and then close the loop a minute later and show the picture on the wall because that was really interesting (I saw the picture at the start but didn't know what to make of it). Hope this helps. Also perhaps the role play as a wolf is not just innocent child's play; perhaps the wolf play-acting is a result of acting out because of other abuse.Cheers, Mike.

Hey all, I thought I'd go through and transcribe, and add some structure, to Stef's podcasts that gave me those 'aha' moments that indicate the implosion of some part of my previous conceptions and in the void an influx of knowledge and reason. Feel free to leave feedback on the format, I could include time stamps or links to other podcasts if it is useful. Here is 'How to find a good therapist' 00:00 - 17:35/46:57 Movie reference: A Beautiful Mind A therapist is someone who checks the reality of what you are seeing. Stef undertakes a moral exploration of the question ‘What is therapy?' He believes that if we have suffered from the predations of evil people, unfortunately we are lost in society - people will not say “Damn! That was evil, what happened to you, I’m so sorry”. They will clam up, keep a distance, shun and ostracise people who put them on the spot to make a moral judgment about what happened to the other person as a child. “Don’t get involved” seems to be the mantra of society, because we are addicted to betraying the victims of evil (see other podcasts). If I say I suffered at the hands of X as a child, people will feel agitated at me for putting them in a place to cast moral judgment; with this comes an onus of deciding to act against the evil or to do nothing. Contrast this with society where people are more than ready to cast judgment; Drug users, Evil! Homosexuals, Evil! Tax-avoiders, Evil! If you’ve suffered evil, as most people have, particularly if you have suffered as a child: you have the feelings of rage, vengeance, all these primal feelings you have pent up inside you. Its like a big crater of a volcano that never erupts, it wants to spew out but has no outlet. The after effects of evil cannot be assuaged on their own; we are social beings and we need outside input to validate what is going on. We need to turn to people in society and say “Listen, do you see that devil in the room? Do you see that evil?” How many among us will say “Yeah! I see see that! That’s terrible!”?More likely we will hear, “Ah maybe there is evil, maybe there isn’t just get over it. It’s your family, your culture, your religion, your nation get over it you’ll never get around it. Even if there is evil, think of the good in the evil person! You must have loyalty to them because of family/religion/culture.” With Nash’s hallucinations in A Beautiful Mind, people either say, “Yes, I see the people you see," or “No, I don’t see anyone". There is a definitive truthful ANSWER; if people don’t see the evil at least Nash knows he’s hallucinating. In society, in order to avoid awkwardness we don’t get an answer. If there is evil, people will say they don’t see it just to avoid having to act. The person inquiring with society has no root to reality; the rest of society deny him his chance of a definitive answer as to the reality of his experience. We are stuck with the effect of evil because nobody will socially accept the existence of the evil. Politically, however, people are more than willing to accept it; as long as it does not require them to act personally against an evil, people are more than willing to decry evil and give true evil the power over those decried. People have trauma because they have experienced evil, not because they have experienced misfortune. Take, for example a person who’s mother died of cancer when they were the age of 9. People will say “My goodness, that is awful, how terrible!”. If they have a great Dad he will help them through it and they will have the memory of their mother to grieve with and it should not lead to permanent psychological damage because the reality is accepted by everyone around the person. What if people said "I don’t know if she had cancer, is there such thing as cancer? I don’t think we can keep being friends if you keep talking about things like this.”? People are opposed to fundamental emotions: ardent love, passion, integrity, virtue. That’s why we need a community that reveres these most fundamental human traits. If you had a culture that denied the death of your mother, you’d go insane. "Be friends with cancer, it’ll make you tougher!” people would say. You would not be able to heal, inside you’d be living in a void; your experience would be so fundamentally undermined, so you could not feel anywhere near accepted in society. Your feelings of loss and anger and grief would be rejected or attacked. This will give you a permanent psychological problem until you see a therapist who says “Oh, my gosh that is so terrible. Tell me about that,” which means you still have to deal with the denial of reality by your society outside the therapist’s office. Anything serious or real threatens the collective psychosis. …

Hi All I wanted to make available some notes I took down from a podcast where Stef talks with a man who discusses the breakdown of his marriage, in particular the behaviour of his wife. I'm not sure which podcast it was... Can you suggest any more? If so, feel free to post below. Signs a person is preparing to leave a marriage and abscond with children - Removal of money from joint accounts - Not paying bills - Spending more time with friends - Talking to/flirting with strange members of the opposite sex - Making the other person sleep on the couch or a friend's house - Throwing things/violent in front of children - Unexpectedly allows time with children - usually occurs right before she leaves with children - Unexpectedly allows affection e.g. sex, kissing, where it was previously being witheld - Plays children against the other person - Children showing signs of 'brainwashing' Signs of demise - Fundamental disagreement about what marriage is supposed to be - Changes after birth of children - Taking children to family, friends without the involvement of other persons - Correcting the parental discipline of the opposite partner to win affection from children - Campaign of alienation against the partner Warning signs before marriage - Tending to marginalize partner to the point where they would get angry at the partner pointing out the marginalization - Not having any expectations about nurturing the relationship - Expecting to be cared for, paid for and looked after without reciprocity, but threat with withdrawal of sex - Selfishness/spoiled - A honey trap - Physically appealing and outgoing - don't mistake accidental characteristics for personal virtues - Likes attention from other men/women - Men -Vengeance of the beta male to screw up the alpha female - Lack of intelligence or willingness to learn and explore - Entitlement complex - Not willing to look at self-knowledge - Lack of empathy for the unfortunate Beware personal failings - Have you been conditioned to be treated in a certain way in your childhood, which means you will be put up with shitty behaviour? - Do not get married or have children without self-work - very dangerous thing to do - Hanging with the wrong crowd? If bad people like you then there is something in your behaviour you have to be aware of - Don't have kids straight away, especially with worldly, attractive people - unfortunately despite the stereotyping there are indeed greater risks here

Hey I ended up writing the essay and received 82/100. I explored a statist approach, a Marxist approach, and an Anarcho-capitalist approach to labour laws. It's not 100% polished but I got some feedback that it is well-researched and that I missed out the origins of the labour movement in Europe. If you are doing similar research feel free to check out my citations and read from there. I tried to make it objective and tried to be critical of the State involvement in the proliferation of labour rights, since most of the papers I came across always resorted to a State solution. I guess I have to note that my opinions are probably different to the various view-points put forward in the essay. Mike INTERNATIONAL LABOUR LAW - RESEARCH ESSAY MDM (SUBMITTED).pdf

I personally sense the distinction whether labour is or is not a commodity is irrelevant - it is the implication that arises when it is spouted by a governmental body that is of consequence. The implication is that the governmental body will want to insist that labour should not be treated as a commodity, and so there should be government intervention in the labour market, whether labour is indeed a commodity or not. Woodrow Wilson had a hand in the formation of the ILO which was founded at the same time as the UN. I'm thinking of framing the scope of the essay anlong these lines: "As a question of definition, whether ‘labour is not a commodity’ is a matter for debate in the fields of economic and social theory. This assertion of definition emanating from a governmental organization, however, carries with it the implication that 'to counteract free-market forces, force and coercion sanctioned by a governmental body are necessary in the labour market to prevent humans from being treated like inanimate commodities, capital, another mere factor of production, or resources.' It is the purported legal validity of this implication that is the subject of this essay." A few notes on the views of various legal theorists on the issue: Burke seems to argue labour is a commodity that can be traded. Marx argues there is a difference between labour done and the potential for labour or "labour-power" - he regards the labour-power pool as a community resource and not a commodity. Once labour is performed it is expended, so it is not like other commodities, and people are pressured to spend their time labouring - I couldn't really make heads and tails of the theory. Those who argue for state intervention in ensuring minimum standards of labour seem to want labour recognised as not a commodity because "people should not be treated like inanimate commodities, capital, another mere factor of production, or resources." Wikipedia I'm not sure where the justification for this belief comes from yet. Lysander Spooner would likely argue that labour is a commodity and government should not interfere with the contracts freely made to trade labour. He also argues a contract to enslave yourself to someone else would be null and void because it violates natual law principles that you cannot contract out your innate rights to self-ownership. (Letter to Grover Cleveland) He had a particular gripe against the licensing of particular professions, including requirements in his own profession, law.

I am studying International Labour Law and the research essay topic is "Labour is not a commodity. Discuss." The Labour arm of the United Nations, The Internaitonal Labour Organisation (ILO), has this as one of its tenents in the Declaration of Philadelphia. One of the main goals of the ILO is to have nations ratify their labour laws and put them into legal force. The argument is that human labour is not a commodity and thus should not be treated like a commodity would - e.g. fungible, transferrable, expendable. Human labour is part of human life and humans should be able to be employed and be able to live with dignity. Would an anarcho-capitalist argue that human labour is indeed a commodity - humans have human capital and social capital that they use to produce goods and services for income. The onus is on the human to develop circumstances where they are able to enjoy their life with dignity. I have read a bit of Lysander Spooner on his thesis that control of money and usery by the State is what keeps people from borrowing capital and being self-employed. I think this angle would be interesting to explore - how the legal system keeps people in a relationship of employment. Does anyone have any sources that could help? Cheers Michael