Article 36

Yet Further Media Recognition Of The Need For Change.

Formerly, I noticed that media commentators write in favour of one side of any debate or argument, and refer to the other side only to oppose it; and that they thus treat all issues as subjects for on-going debate of opinion/counter-opinion which I have shown to be the debate of belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence or news/false-news, no set of which is debate-terminating conclusive knowledge. However, in contrast, I have recently noticed that some such commentators are beginning to recognise the need for a more fundamental change, though they do not specify its nature: they merely imply that it should be the opposite of the situation they are deploring, though again they do not specify the means by which this un-specified change is to be delivered’ (c.f. Articles 34 and 35); and that ‘another example of this recognition of the need for change, without specifying the means of its achievement, has been provided by Sherelle Jacobs in a Daily Telegraph article of 3/12/20, entitled ‘Conservatives haven’t a clue about radical feminism.’ and subtitled ‘From Eton to universities, it’s vital to defend free speech, but the Right also needs to win the argument’, though, again, she does not specify the means by which such arguments are to be won.

She begins by stating that ‘you couldn’t find a more damning symbol of the reality that the Right has lost the argument, than that a master at that bastion of male debating prowess, Eton, has been derided and pitied as a free speech martyr’; that ‘the story of Will Knowland – dismissed for refusing to take down a You Tube video in which he challenges radical feminism – has it all’; that ‘the woke hauteur of the headmaster, the “Trendy Hendy”, has us salivating with outrage’; that ‘the revelation that the factual difference between men and women is now deemed controversial opinion chills us to the bones’; that ‘the tale still hits on something else disturbing’; that ‘the centre-Right has become incapable of winning intellectual disputes’; that ‘the Mr. Knowlands of this world of reasonable – if not flawless – intelligence, are elbowed out of respectable society as swivel-eyed loons’; that meanwhile, ‘proponents of “Marxapocalyptic” pap have gone mainstream as reasoned centrists;’ that ‘our only defence against this double standard seems to be pieties about the need to defend the maiden of free speech’; that ‘this, with the fidgety disclaimer that we might not always agree with her (ibid) dodgier claims – for example, Mr Knowlands suggestion that men are more vulnerable than women to rape – but that we defend her (ibid) inalienable right to make them’; that ‘the uneasy truth is that, at some point, the Right stopped being a challenge to the Left and faded into a force worthy only of its contempt’; that ‘the Left pulled this off  by ensuring that arguments are evaluated not by their veracity, but by their implications’; that ‘in the Left’s long march through the institutions over the past 70 years, academic inquiry has become drastically utilitarian’; that ‘the reputable scholar has morphed from the objective interrogator of evidence into an activist devoted to dismantling patriarchal capitalism’; that ‘free speech – with its potential to challenge the moral supremacy of this new orthodoxy- has become undesirable’; but that ‘Society cannot be indiscriminate in its tolerance of speech, where freedom and happiness themselves are at stake, as Herbert Marcuse railed’; and that ‘the modern, educated mind, in all its pompous rationalism, nodded sagely’. Here, I would ask Sherelle Jacobs how she  establishes  “veracity” and how she defines “utilitarian”.

However, she thus continues, that ‘the Will Knowlands are vilified, not because their views are wrong, but because they are considered revolting’; that ‘this is the secret to the Left’s success’; that ‘this is why academics don’t dare point out the holes in the concept of patriarchy’; that ‘it is also why scientists who undermine pro-lockdown modelling have been rejected by leading journals on the basis that their maths is dangerous rather than wrong’; that ‘it is not enough to say that our opponents’ views are technically incorrect, when their response is that our propositions are immoral’; and that ‘perhaps, we need to beat the left at their own game’; that ‘we need to prove their views are harmful’. Reverting to radical feminism, she claims that ‘if we are too careful, we will soon live in a world where manly rushes of adrenalin are considered as biologically shameful as menstruation, where boys are inculcated to believe that they are despicable and expendable, and where more will surely then behave as if they are’; and that ‘society will have more psychopaths and absent fathers’; that ‘radical feminists will welcome the latter’; and that ‘they wish to smash the nuclear family as the foundation of patriarchy’.

Thus, she  states that ‘the most dangerous tenet of radical feminism is that man is a destructive force that will annihilate the world unless his aggressive, completive spirit can be de-programmed’; that ‘by the way, this apocalyptic view of history has hung like a millstone around the neck of Western thinking since we stole it from the Zoroastrian Manichaeans’; that ‘when Extinction Rebellion prophesises lakes of fire lit by man’s abominations, they preach from the Book of Revelation’; and that ‘this is the only section of the Bible that has survived the proto-Marxist secular era, passed down through Engels who lusted over it with a passion’.           

Thus, Sherelle Jacobs recounts some experts who say that ‘what makes men – and women human, is not our wanton destruction’ but our unique talent for, and cognitive pleasure derived from, problem solving – from making stone-age tools and finishing crosswords, to tacking climate change, to inventing vaccines from biological quirks, like our astonishing hands evolved from primates which pre-dispose us to adapt to obstacles’; that ‘as the world becomes more complex we should thus be trying to grasp the various strengths and weaknesses of the sexes for solving super massive crises – and not delighting in self-fulfilling prophesy of our own extinction, and lambasting maleness’; that ‘perhaps women are not pulling their weight in mathematics and science because, socially conditioned to feign perfection and biologically wired to protect rather than to explore, women live in terror of failure’; that ‘it is time to move out of their comfort zone of softer subjects where there isn’t a wrong answer’; that ‘perhaps the most dangerous male flaw in this era of complex risk’ is not aggression, but a tendency to tunnel vision – bound up partly in man’s hunting instinct and partly in the archetype of the decisive male leader’; that ‘maybe society suffers not from toxic masculinity, but a toxic modernity that combines the worst flaws in the sexes: excessive risk aversion and one-dimensional thinking’; that ‘Will Knowland is right’; that ‘the radical feminists in all their prejudice and pessimism, have got it wrong’; but that ‘their attempt at factual takedown does not get at just how wrong they are’; and that ‘it is not the truth – but our very survival – that we are arguing for’. At this point, I ask how does she differentiate right from wrong and truth from falsehood?

Thus, I say again, as I have done throughout this website, that Sherelle Jacobs remains trapped in the ubiquitous debate of opinion/counter-opinion which is never more than the debate of belief/counter-belief, respectively supported by partially selected facts/counter-facts, evidence/counter-evidence and/ or news/false-news, no set of which ever amounts to debate-terminating conclusive knowledge; that only when beliefs are recognised as hypotheses for evaluation of their compatibility or non-compatibility with the reality in which we exist and have our being, do they become positive or negative knowledge respectively; that this evaluation of their cause-effect relationship with reality provides us with our only means of converting beliefs to positive knowledge (validation of belief) or to negative knowledge (refutation of belief); that the source of craftsmanship is always reality as observed by tool- cause and tool-effect on the work-piece, and that science is always the experimentation designed and constructed to isolate the believed (hypothetical) cause of the effect observed in reality from all other possible causes by such experimentation by which he/she observes the effect or not, and thus confirms the hypothetical cause’ or chooses another hypothetical cause to be thus evaluated, until one is validated by causing the effect; that when the cause/effect relationship is thus validated by relating measured cause to measured effect, the scientist derives a mathematical equation by which the magnitude of effects can be calculated from the magnitude of the corresponding cause and vice versa,ever after; and that such experimentation is not utilised when effects are simply correlated with believed causes in what I thus define as pseudoscience, as exemplified at present by the belief in humanity being the sole cause of the global-warming effect, the hypothetical cause, having not yet been recognised by its believers to be in need of the reality-evaluation of cause/effect on which science is unerringly based. 

Again, I say that the message of this website is that knowledge is non-acquirable by rational thought in the absence of reality-evaluation; that debate produces only a transient belief-consensus pending resumption of the debate; and that I am astounded that the belief in knowledge being produced by rational debate has survived to the present day, given that it was first doubted by Socrates some two and a half thousand years ago. Yet again, I say that the feminist-/patriarchy-debate can be terminated by the knowledge of reality that male and female are complementary rather than equal in all mammal species; and that all such species avoid self-destruction, only because enough of their individuals (both male and female) naturally abide by the injunction to do unto others as you would have them do to you, this being a summary of the reality-validated knowledge which harmonises our innate selfishness with our innate need for the hierarchical/cooperative social cohesion on which our species survival depends.    7/12/20.

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