Is There a Way to Succeed?

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Race is such a huge issue in the western world. My wife, who's from germany, has been stunned by how much race just comes up in conversations. The founding of america very much depend on the subordination and exploitation of one race for the benefit of certain members of the other. I think that there was progress being made with what they call the civil rights discourse of martin luther king. And now the critical race theorists are very critical of them,. So yes, i think things were getting better, and they're, they're not getting better.

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

In this wide-ranging conversation Helen Pluckrose recounts the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.