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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I appreciate the link, I'll have to spend more time digging through the previous sections but the page you linked helps me understand where you're coming from.

There are a few threads that interest me that I think expose weaknesses in CRT related to your reply here.

  1. If you accept the capture of French philosophy and academic elites by communism in the 60's as analogous to CRT, its collapse could point to similar ways CRT could collapse in the future. And part of that was surely the political situation, but I'm also curious how much of that was Foucault, who possibly gave the academics something to "chew on", a less obviously activist, more wide-ranging theory. I'm sure that's a simplification, but I do think there was this kind of new breed with him and others of something more sophisticated that allowed communism to be kind of moved on from, something passe.

  2. As far as the abusers go of critical theory, like that legal theorist, I'm curious how much that is a kind of perversion or simplification of something that is more useful when treated with maturity, and not just useful to the left, but against the left's power. And it doesn't necessary have to be useful in a sense of persuading them, but instead of disillusioning its sort of fair-weather followers potentially.

  3. The other thing is something that I've had a hard time expressing, but I feel like CRT can't escape it's intellectualist roots, which is a point of failure it shares with communism. It wants to be pure activism, all about changing minds, but its identity demands that it take an intellectual root, and it sort of has to assume that the most effective activism is intellectual (or even pseudo-intellectual) activism, which I think is far from true, because I think you can argue most people bounce off that kind of thing, if not now then after it outstays its welcome.

Anyway I'll read your other posts but those are the threads of thought I've been pursuing