According to the Collge Fix, labor-based grading “involves assigning grades based on the ‘labor’ students put into their assignments, rather than the grammar, style and quality of their work.”
At last, we know the answer to the question almost no one was asking: What happens when Karl Marx’s labor theory of value gets tenure?
The labor theory of value is very popular on the Left, probably because it makes no sense. Marx — who never labored once in his entire life — proposed that “labor” has inherent value, that “if we disregard the use-value of commodities, they have only one property left, that of being products of labor.”
I assure you it sounds even stupider in the original German.
The short version is that “labor” determines a product’s value, not the competitive marketplace.
It’s a crackpot theory, easily demolished.
Take the example of a skilled pastry chef and … me.
Give a few dollars worth of flour, sugar, butter, etc., to that chef and after a couple of hours of his labors, he can sell you a gorgeous and tasty cake that you would be happy to pay a lot of money to buy.
I don’t bake and have no interest in baking. Let me labor on those same ingredients for the same two hours, and you’ll get a hot mess worth less than the value of the ingredients that went into it.
(Apologies: This is not my example, but I can’t find an online resource listing the original author. [I first encountered this in a Robert Heinlein novel, but he may have been paraphrasing someone else])
It’s not the “labor,” it’s the results.
Now we’re supposed to apply this same thinking to grading English papers.
We’re supposed to accept that one student’s craptaculently-written essay has the same value as another student’s beautifully written paper because they both put the same amount of labor into writing them.
What Inoue wants college instructors to do is apply crackpot Marxist theory to those who will be disadvantaged the most if they aren’t taught proper English.
Stephen Green, “Fight ‘White Language Supremacy,’ Prof Will Grade on ‘Labor’ Not Results”, Vodkapundity, 2021-11-10.
February 13, 2022
QotD: Marx’s labour theory of value gets tenure
February 6, 2022
In Critical Race Theory, racism “only applies to powerful whites (and fellow travelers) vis-a-vis powerless blacks”
Andrew Sullivan on Caryn Elaine Johnson (stage name Whoopi Goldberg) and how her unconsidered anti-semitic worldview has been moulded and shaped by Critical Race Theory:
Whoopi Goldberg, I think it’s safe to say, is not a deep thinker, and wouldn’t claim to be. She’s also clearly not an anti-Semite. She’s a talented entertainer and merely reflects many (but not all) of the assumptions of Hollywood types — well-intentioned, rarely ruffled, cultural leftism. But that’s precisely why her comments on The View about antisemitism and the Holocaust are so interesting. They expose some aspects of “anti-whiteness” and “antiracism” as these CRT ideas have trickled down into the public consciousness, and also a deep, long-standing sense among some African-Americans that Jews in America are not usually the oppressed, but often the oppressor. These are things no one wants to explore very much — because it’s complicated, fraught, and, well, who needs the grief?
So here we go! Anti-Semitism is seen as not racism, because for Whoopi, and critical theorists, “racism” is defined as an essentially Euro-American social construction, which didn’t exist before the colonial era, and only applies to powerful whites (and fellow travelers) vis-a-vis powerless blacks. Racism is not, for them, a universal, instinctual, tribal, evolution-rooted suspicion of different-looking others that is always with us, and can happen anywhere. It is solely rather the deliberate, historically contingent oppression of the non-white by colonial “white supremacy”. However much truth this contains about American history (and it does contain a lot of it), it’s a terribly parochial view that misses a huge amount in the world, throughout history, and in America.
As Adam Serwer explains, this parochial view of racism also “renders the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust illegible”. Well, yeah. Any theory of racism that cannot explain the Holocaust is not just illegible, it is untenable. It would mean that the conflicts between, say, Tutsis and Hutus, Germans and Slavs, Jews and Arabs, Burmese and Rohingya, or Han and Uighur, are not instances of racism — because they are not examples of “white targeting non-white”. It wouldn’t include the Bible’s description of the Jewish people’s own enslavement by the Pharaohs, for goodness’ sake. And that’s a problem for any concept of racism — let alone one that now controls much of American culture.
Here, for example, is the Anti-Defamation League’s woke definition of “racism” the day Whoopi made her remarks (a definition swiftly changed after the contretemps): “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” But since Jews are deemed “white people”, by this definition, how could the Nazis have been racist? The same would also have to be said, would it not, about Louis Farrakhan today? He may sound like a Nazi about Jews, but his skin color means he cannot be racist.
Whoopi’s gaffe helps explain why the mainstream media now describes young black men assaulting Jews and Asians as expressing … “white supremacy”! This is what the WaPo op-ed page, referring to growing Latino support for Trump, called “multiracial whiteness”. If they are non-white and bigots, they miraculously become white. And notice how bigotry is exclusively ascribed to a single “race”: whites. Without whites, we’d have no racism at all.
This is not the only way critical theorists distinguish anti-Semitism from racism. “Whiteness”, disproportionately including Jewishness, is wrapped up in systems of oppression, especially capitalism, and defined by control of money and power. Robin DiAngelo argues in White Fragility that “white supremacy” exists in mainstream America by noting how many “white people” there were in various positions of power in 2017:
Ten richest Americans: 100 percent white (seven of whom are among the ten richest in the world). US Congress: 90 percent white. US governors: 96 percent white. Top military advisers: 100 percent white. President and vice president: 100 percent white. US House Freedom Caucus: 99 percent white. Current US presidential cabinet: 91 percent white. People who decide which TV shows we see: 93 percent white. People who decide which books we read: 90 percent white. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent white. People who decide which music is produced: 95 percent white. People who directed the one hundred top-grossing films of all time, worldwide: 95 percent white.
She goes on to emphasize Hollywood’s influence, in particular. Now just put the word “Jewish” where the word “white” is, and her list reads a bit differently, doesn’t it: “People who decide which books we read: 90 percent Jewish. People who decide which news is covered: 85 percent Jewish.” It’s an assertion that one race hoards power, controls the media, and directs the culture, a race so powerful it permeates everything. Sound a little familiar?
January 30, 2022
Fighting progressive illiberalism with populist illiberalism
In the free-to-non-paying-subscribers segment of this week’s Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan laments the ratcheting illiberal tactics of both the opponents and supporters of Critical Race Theory in American schools:
I’ve spent a lot of time these past few years concerned with left illiberalism, especially the replacement of liberalism with critical theory as the guiding principle of our republic. But at the same time, of course, right illiberalism has gone into overdrive, in a polarizing vortex. Being a conservative liberal, or a liberal conservative, is becoming close to impossible. And this week, as I pored over a mass of bills to ban the praxis, pedagogy and content of critical theory in public high schools, I felt as if I were being tossed between the blue devil to my left and the deep red sea to my right.
One core point: the illiberalism is real on both sides. Not always in equal measure, now or in the past, but definitely on both, feeding off each other. And in public education, once again a battleground in the culture war, it seems quite obvious to me that the left bears the burden of responsibility for the conflict.
Critical theory’s long march through the institutions reached its peak some time ago in higher education — and has gone on to capture media, corporate America, medicine, the federal government, tech, science, and every cultural institution. Over $14 billion have been spent on philanthropic “equity” initiatives since the summer of 2020 alone. Of course children’s education would be affected. What hasn’t been? And of course critical theorists aim directly at children. The woke, like the Jesuits, understand the value of instilling certain concepts at a very young age. How else to transform the world?
That’s why Ibram Kendi has bequeathed the world not just one but two books on how to rear “antiracist babies”. The publisher says the new one, Goodnight Racism, “gives children the language to dream of a better world and is the perfect book to add to their social justice toolkit.” My italics. Another recent book, Woke Baby, instructs toddlers to be “a good revolutionary”, and another one explains how “activism begins in the cradle”.
You truly think that in school districts where teachers are saturated in equity training, whose unions invite Kendi to be their keynote speaker, that this is all being made up? Just peruse through all the “equity” conferences, courses, syllabi, lesson plans and curricula that now dominate public ed. Many parents found out only because they overheard what their kids were being taught online during the pandemic. Or you can just surf the web as the woke dismantle schools for the gifted, abolish SATs, describe merit as racist, and lay waste to excellent schools merely because too many Asian-American kids are succeeding in them.
What we’re seeing now is the reaction to this left-wing power grab. And — guess what? — it’s a right-wing power grab. If the left has stealthily changed public education from above, the right has now used the only power they have to fight back — political clout in state legislatures. 122 separate bills have been introduced since January 2021, 71 in the last three weeks alone. They all regulate speech by teachers in public schools, but many are now also reaching into higher education — a much more fraught area — and outright book banning. The bills are rushed; some appear well-intentioned; others are nuts; many are very vague, inviting lawsuits to clarify what they can mean in practice. In most cases, if passed, they will surely chill debate of race and sex and history — and increasingly of gender, sex and homosexuality — in high schools. And that’s a bad thing for liberal education.
January 25, 2022
QotD: James Bond’s stand-in
Julie Burchill, “How James Bond became the prisoner of woke”, Spiked, 2021-10-14.
January 21, 2022
Conservatives versus the “Blob”
Sam Ashworth-Hayes is writing here about the British Conservative party, but just swap out the names and it’s equally applicable to the Canadian equivalent, and very likely true for the rest of the western world:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The Conservative party is trapped in a nightmare of its own making. Number 10 is rocked by scandals, support in the polls is plummeting, the Northern Ireland Protocol (Chekhov’s car bomb) waits patiently for its return to the newscycle. As with every good nightmare, there is the sense of unease that something remains undone.
That something would be “conserving”. Set aside economic policy, where the Conservatives and Labour are still just about separable — although the new interest in higher taxes, spending and regulation is rapidly eroding this gap — and judge the period on the social axis: same-sex marriage, net migration at record highs, the march of progressive ideas through academia, business and press and into government speeches. You could be forgiven for thinking that Labour won the 2010 election, and every bout subsequent.
Why is that the Conservative party governs in such a fundamentally unconservative way? Part of the issue is that the average Conservative MP is, on social issues, basically indistinguishable from the average Labour voter, while the average Labour MP is to the left even of this. The centre of gravity in Parliament is well to the left of the general population.
A second part of the answer — and a partial cause of the first — is that the infrastructure of British politics is not designed for the right. When Michael Gove and his then-Special Advisor Dominic Cummings attempted to shake up the English education system in 2014, they found themselves publicly at war with what they termed “the Blob”: an amorphous conglomerate of civil servants, academics and unions that acted to gum up change and ensure stasis in the interests of its members. Rightwards reform is received as violent revolution, whilst the constant leftwards drift goes unremarked and unchallenged.
When Cummings made his way to Number 10, so did the concept of the Blob, expanded to include the BBC, various quangos, much of Whitehall and what is sometimes called “civil society”. The example of hate crime policy is illustrative of the general idea. The concept is not dissimilar to Curtis Yarvin’s “Cathedral”, or the Trumpian “deep state”. Critics of such accusations point out, not unreasonably, that coordinating so many constituent parts would be almost impossible — but this misses the point entirely. The purpose of a system is what it does, and individual elements responding to an ecosystem of incentives that produce given results can act in a remarkably coordinated way, when those incentives point in the same direction.
January 15, 2022
The futility of “ethical” divestment agitation
In C2C Journal, William McNally explains why activists are demanding that university investments be moved away from fossil fuel companies in favour of “green” investment, and why it won’t work the way they expect:
A recent press release announced that 100 faculty and other staff at three Ontario postsecondary institutions have petitioned the University Pension Plan (UPP) to divest from the fossil fuel sector. The UPP manages the pension funds for over 30,000 employees at the University of Toronto, Queen’s and Guelph. The press release was issued by Shift Action, an organization that helps activist pension members agitate for divestment from what it calls “high-carbon, high-risk fossil fuel investments” such as oil producers and pipeline companies, and shift investments to a “decarbonized” portfolio focused on climate solutions.
I highlighted the UPP petition to draw attention to its activist source, but it is not unique, as it reflects a broader trend of politically driven or, as proponents prefer, “ethical” investing. The motivating claim for divestment in the Shift press release is that we are experiencing a “worsening climate crisis”. That too is a common sentiment nowadays. Because it is a crisis, we have a moral duty to mitigate the threat. The underlying reasoning is that divestment will starve fossil fuel companies of capital and less capital means less production which, in turn, means less CO2 emitted and ultimately slower climate change.
All campaigns of this sort trigger some immediate questions, such as, why choose a strategy as indirect as divestment? Why not reduce fossil fuel use in one’s own backyard, in this case the universities? Looking more broadly, Shift’s argument is more wishful thinking than sound economic analysis. Investors should feel free to hold any portfolio they want, but they should do so without illusions. In particular, they shouldn’t expect divestment to influence climate change by starving oil and natural gas companies of capital.
The first thing wrong is the underlying motivation: there is no climate crisis. As well-known author Bjorn Lomborg states in his most recent book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet: “Climate change is real, but it’s not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is.” One of the clearest ways to see this is through climate economics. Scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast that over the next 80 years worldwide GDP per capita will likely increase to 450 percent of today’s level.
Lomborg estimates that climate damages will reduce this anticipated increase to 434 percent. Climate change is a problem. Accepting all of the assumptions that went into this modelling, climate change is likely to leave us somewhat less well off than we otherwise would be, by modestly slowing humanity’s overall progress. But judging by these figures, it is not a crisis.
H/T to Robert at SDA for the link.
January 5, 2022
QotD: Measurement hack that lives on
The hack was too good to let fade away, so every now and then the fraternity makes its pledges repaint the markings. You might think this isn’t the sort of vandalism the police would tolerate, but they do. The smoot markings soon became convenient in recording the exact location of traffic accidents, so (as the story goes) when the bridge walkways needed to be repaved in 1987, the Massachusetts Department of Public Works directed the construction company to lay out the concrete slabs on the walkway not in the customary six-foot lengths but in shorter smoot units. Fifty years after the original hack, the smoot markers have become part of civic tradition: the City of Cambridge declared 4 October 2008 “Smoot Day”. MIT students ran up a commemorative plaque on a precision milling machine and created an aluminium Smoot Stick which they deposited in the university’s museum as a durable reference standard: the unit-smoot is now detached from the person-Smoot. Through the legions of MIT graduates driving global high-tech culture, the smoot has travelled the world. If you use Google Earth, you can elect the units of length in which you’d like distances measured: miles, kilometres, yards, feet – and smoots.
Robert Crease, The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, 2011.
January 4, 2022
QotD: Status signalling
In fact, their philosophy — the Marxist ideology they propound and the craziness behind it — has been in control of society, on top, since at least the seventies.
Being a leftist is a mark of being “good” and also well educated. The same way that in Elizabethan England poor mad Christopher Marlowe wrote his stage directions in Latin, to show that he had had an excellent education and deserved respect, so too the leftists of today pepper their works, from movies to TV to books to art, with odes to the oppressed and paeans to the coming revolution. It’s how you show you’re high-class and exquisitely educated.
All the old families, all the rich, all the captains of industry and power brokers signal left as hard as they can, because that’s where the power is — and in my field, the awards, the professorships, and the acclaim. Heck, remember what Trump signaled just to be allowed to do business.
And that’s why I’ve been watching in amusement the left going through the motions of kabuki theater revolution against a society … they control.
Sarah Hoyt, “We’re Seeing the Death Rattle of the Revolution, Not Its Birth”, PJ Media, 2020-07-28.
December 30, 2021
QotD: Richard Feynman discovers (to his shock) that females can understand analytic geometry
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up – that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line – a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn’t realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, “Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart,” etc. – I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.
Richard Feynman, “What is Science?”, Richard Feynman [presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1969].
December 27, 2021
QotD: The purpose of an Eton education
Auberon Waugh, Diary, 1973-09-26.
December 15, 2021
QotD: Suppressing intellectual heresy
The young people at Middlebury who shouted down Charles Murray and assaulted a faculty member who had tried to engage him in civil debate were, in effect, suppressing the ideas of a heretic. After all, a heretic’s ideas are too dangerous to be heard.
Dangerous ideas are, of course, interesting ideas, especially to young people. When we fail to address dangerous ideas in our courses, we add to their mystique. When activists shout down or assault heretical speakers they send two messages. The first and intended message is a display of righteous disapproval. The other, unintended message, is that there is something so menacing about the idea being expressed that it cannot simply be laughed off or even argued with, rather it cannot be allowed to be spoken.
Consider how that looks to someone who is starting to question the premises of the liberal orthodoxy on race, gender, diversity and so on. Why, our alt-right curious person might wonder, are there some ideas that are so laughably false that one need not even mount a counter argument (a flat earth or the financial benefits of college athletics), some ideas that are considered contentious but still open to debate (supply-side economics), and some ideas that are so outré that they can only be met with back turning, shouting, or by punches to the face?
Might it be, our waverer must wonder, that these people don’t want me to hear this idea because they don’t have a good answer to it?
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
December 4, 2021
QotD: Still making dystopia
Curl’s critique of the theory and practice of modernism demolished the economical-ethical-political arguments put forward for decades that justified forcing people to live in inhuman environments. It was all a power-play, to drive humane architecture and its practitioners into the ground so that a new group of not very competent architects and academics could take over.
Alas, after three years, the situation is much the same as it was before 2018. Whoever practised humane architecture continues to do so today. Practitioners who have always applied Curl’s philosophy include Classical and Traditional architects, and followers of Christopher Alexander (who do not necessarily use a Classical style, but reject the modernist design straightjacket so as to create a more living structure). Those who produced image-based inhumane architecture have not changed tack or been influenced in any perceivable way.
Curl’s book covers human-scale developments that were allowed at the margins of the profession during several decades, as long as they didn’t threaten the core where the spotlight shines. Practitioners the world over, most often working in isolation, produce excellent and humane buildings. That work is hardly ever seen in the media, certainly never in the architecture journals. I’m sure that those architects now feel vindicated. It is possible that Curl’s book provides a rallying point for those who desire a new, humane architecture.
Nikos A. Salingaros, “Still making dystopia”, The Critic, 2021-08-30.
December 2, 2021
QotD: The quickening pace of change
But nobody would mistake 1790 for 1890, let alone 1990. A Roman of the late Republic (100 BC) could still get around ok if you time-warped him into the late Empire (300 AD). Time warp a guy from 1790 into 1890, though, and he’d think he was on Mars. (Zap him into 1990, and he’d think he’d died and gone to Hell). The pace of change accelerated exponentially starting in about 1400; by the Industrial Era it was a blur.
Which is why I’m terrified right now. We feel like change is happening at light speed. As a Historian, I can promise you — it’s at least Warp 6, and the dilithium crystals are nowhere near to overloading.
Severian, “Faster and Faster”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-01.
December 1, 2021
QotD: When mere teaching isn’t enough, indoctrination takes over
There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything [during the pandemic]. It’s okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.
So says Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of the United Teachers Los Angeles union. A union representing 33,000 teachers and associated educational staff.
“Education is political”, says Ms Myart-Cruz, who boasts of her ability to act with near-impunity, and whose list of Intolerable Things includes cognitive testing, “structural racism”, border controls, policing, and the supposed “privilege” of parents who would like their children to actually learn things, including times tables. Our Mistress Of Higher Purpose struggles to comprehend why parents might object to their children’s education, even in basic skills, being supplanted by the nakedly self-serving and increasingly weird activism of the people paid to teach them those basic skills. Instead, she endorses claims that such objections must be driven by “white-supremacist thinking”.
David Thompson, “Activism Farms”, DavidThompson, 2021-08-31.
November 28, 2021
Cambridge University “uncancels” Jordan Peterson
Arif Ahmed explains why Cambridge originally “cancelled” Jordan Peterson and recently how that cancellation was overcome:
Jordan Peterson speaking at an event in Dallas, Texas on 15 June, 2018.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
The Peterson cancellation was one of several troubling events at that time which spurred some of us at Cambridge to fight back. Not only because we wanted Peterson to be able to visit Cambridge, but also because we wanted anyone whom any academic saw fit to invite to be able to visit. It should never have been up to the university authorities to dictate what academics can discuss or whom we can discuss it with.
And so we began a long and at first lonely campaign to realign this ancient and great institution with freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of thought.
Our battle has borne fruit. In late 2020 Cambridge adopted a new, liberal free-speech policy that protected our right to invite speakers of our choosing, and prevented the university from cancelling an invitation that had been accepted. In May this year, the vice-chancellor took prompt and decisive action to remove a policy aimed at policing “microaggressions”. And then in the autumn, Jordan Peterson announced that he was planning to visit the university, at the invitation of Dr James Orr at the Faculty of Divinity.
That visit has now occurred. And thanks principally to the courage and energy of Dr Orr it has been a tremendous success.
I saw Peterson speak twice on his Cambridge visit. He spoke passionately, at length and without notes, to rapt audiences. He engaged the crowd with care and warmth. His seminars were a model of academic engagement. There was a lively, disputatious and often rigorous battle of ideas that ranged from the neuroscience of perception via William Empson and 17th-century counterpoint to Mesopotamian creation myths.It seemed that everywhere Peterson went in Cambridge there were students who wanted to learn from him, to argue with him and sometimes to be photographed next to him (I advised him to check their t-shirts before posing). There were no protests, unless you count one silly but brave student popping up in a lecture wearing a lobster outfit.
One striking thing about Peterson’s lectures is the contrast between the forcefulness of his speech and the moderateness of the content. He espouses a moderate conservatism focused on self-discipline, on seeing the value in yourself and in others, and on finding meaning in life. And he connects religion with all of these things. He is no right-wing firebrand.
At his lecture on Tuesday night it became clear how much the tide has turned. In Cambridge’s largest lecture hall, before a sold-out audience, the first people to speak were the university proctors. The proctors hold an 800-year-old office whose principal duty is to uphold free speech in the university – as they reminded us in their speech. Their presence was the clearest possible signal that, this time around, the university fully supported Peterson’s invitation and his right to speak. The contrast with his cancellation just two years ago could hardly have been greater.
Free speech has won another victory at Cambridge.
