Apparently This Is For Real?

This image is part of a whole series of newspeak lessons in political correctness from a university I'd never heard of before. I gather that they intend them completely seriously and non-ironically, even the ones about "Shemales" and how "Just Kill Me" is insensitive because of suicide. (If you 'just kill me,' how is that a suicide?)

But get a load of this one:


Two things to notice here:

1) There is apparently no such thing as an objective judgment permitted: all judgments of a person's moral qualities are illegitimate applications of someone else's standards to another individual. I believe the academic way of saying this is: "To apply someone else's standards to an individual is to treat the judger as the subject whose experience and standards matter, while the judged is a mere object against which someone else's standards are applied." To treat someone else as an object is taken to be a kind of moral affront to that person, even though it's actually impossible to understand the world without the grammatical categories of subject and object. "No one must ever be treated as an object" is another way of saying "we must give up on describing the world."

2) Since there is no objective judgment, and all judgments must be subjective, there can be no judgment at all. Everyone is entitled to live life on his or her (or whatever's) own terms, without any moral weight being imposed on them from outside of whatever feels right to them.

I expect it is completely impossible to field a winning sports team on this model as you will not win if you cannot assert that players ought to push themselves and train harder and face whatever fears they have. That fact suggests that the Chico State administration are hypocrites. Presumably they don't adhere to this practice to the slightest degree when it comes to training their student athletes for competition, nor should they.

However, the suggestion of hypocrisy isn't needed to prove the case against them. The fact is that this whole set of posters is about teaching students to judge others. You can't apply someone else's standards to anyone? What about the guy who says "retarded"?

Hypocrites and fools are these. They not only don't believe in the standards they're advocating, they don't even know that they don't believe in them.

5 comments:

E Hines said...

There is apparently no such thing as an objective judgment permitted: all judgments of a person's moral qualities are illegitimate applications of someone else's standards to another individual.

I guess, then, there's no such thing as crime, either. Free Willie Sutton!

I expect it is completely impossible to field a winning sports team on this model as you will not win if you cannot assert that players ought to push themselves and train harder and face whatever fears they have.

It's impossible to field a winning sports team because it's impossible to win or lose--those are impositions of judgments of one over another.

The fact is that this whole set of posters is about teaching students to judge others.

I'll elide the shameful calling of hypocrisy on this; itself an imposition of one's judgment standards on another. No, I won't. Those promoting this set of posters are hypocrites: they're seeking to impose their own standard of non-judgment on others, with the implied judgment irretrievably attached.

Apparently, this school's administrators slept through their own courses involving critical thinking when they were pupils.

Eric Hines

raven said...

The purpose of this has nothing to do with the avoidance of insult.

The core issue is breaking up any human association to the lowest common denominator-the individual, and destroying all trust- we have seen this in the attempted destruction of Marriage, Family, Fraternal Organizations, The Military, etc- they seek to make every human lonely and powerless, and dependent on the state.

Without judgement, and discrimination, how does one form any bond or association?

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@raven - I think that is unconsciously intentional. The hard world must be brought under the control of good, reliable nannies who will insure that all will grow to healthy adult stature. Like hothouse flowers. Anything else would be damaging to plants. What could go wrong?

For the beginnings of this type of thinking, in Europe between the wars, CS Lewis's The Abolition of Man c. 1940 was prophetic. Short, easy read; lifetime of stuff to think about.

Ymar Sakar said...

This Slavery 3.0 works much better than the Southern plantation's Slavery 2.0, as you can see, Grim. The Slaves themselves think they are free. It resolves many of the issues with previous versions of human slavery.

raven said...

Hope she is not somebody's A-gunner. Well, wait- considering what side she will be on, I take that back.