The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
The Forum - On Line Opinion's article discussion area



Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Main Articles General

Sign In      Register

The Forum > Article Comments > 'Diversity' nonsense in physics > Comments

'Diversity' nonsense in physics : Comments

By Babette Francis, published 16/1/2014

Feminist Luce Irigaray has argued that relativity is a sexed concept because it 'privileges the speed of light over other speeds which are vitally necessary to us'.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. All
Excellent article but Summers cost Harvard many millions because he helped a mate bilk money from the US Government.
Summers also worked for Obama and was as ham-fisted in this role.
I do agree with what you are saying and we do have to stand up to these power mad types who think the truth is only what suits them.
Posted by JBowyer, Thursday, 16 January 2014 8:08:13 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I second JBowyers comment --an excellent article.

"Diversity" one of the buzz words most often hyped by "progressives" these days, is in practice just another excuse for "progressives" get away with what they wouldn't allow anyone else to get away with--playing favourites.

Maybe it's just my area, but I've been noticing lately that those bodies that speak loudest about "diversity" usually have staff and management that are way out of kilter with community demographics--And staff and management which usually have abilities way below par with what is required for the job.
Posted by SPQR, Thursday, 16 January 2014 9:20:40 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
What exactly is the purpose of this vacuous fluff piece?
Meanwhile who tells the most lies?
I would suggest that in the context of USA politics those on the right side of the culture wars divide win this dubious accolade by an immeasurably wide margin.
This site introduces both their inbred idiocy and their various agendas.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org
Meanwhile the truth-telling work of Henry Giroux always provides a suitable counterpoint to what David Brock called The Right Wing Noise Machine, and what Chris Hedges described in his truth-telling book American Fascists The Religious Right and the War on America.

Also check out Henry's interview with Bill Moyers titled Zombie Politics & Culture In the Age of Casino Capitalism

Any one of the essays featured hear provides a necessary counter point to the right wing, lies all the way down the line, zombie propaganda machine: http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles.htm
Posted by Daffy Duck, Thursday, 16 January 2014 10:35:57 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I think that it is incredible that this nonsense was even entertained for more than 12 months. Whatever happened to common sense.
Posted by Gadfly42, Thursday, 16 January 2014 10:47:46 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Excellent article.
This is a common problem in academia, for those who want to see it. Unfortunately, reform in the academe cannot occur from the inside. The feminist sisterhood and their fellow "progressives" have too strong a hold on academia. Reform can only occur from outside pressure, which means withdrawing all funding for courses that teach or include feminism or are taught by feminists.
Posted by Aristocrat, Thursday, 16 January 2014 1:27:54 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Excellent article and good luck to Mr Vojkovic, a brave man indeed. I take your point Aristocrat, but it will never happen!
As a 'curriculum manager' in those hallowed halls for some years, I observed with some disquiet the amazing statistic that, participants in the 'Certificate in Women's Studies', had an 80% divorce rate by the completion of studies. As the convenor of the 'Maintenance of course standards' committee, I retreated from all meetings with diplomatic haste and cowardly intent...... :)
Posted by Prompete, Thursday, 16 January 2014 2:32:34 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
The views of Luce Irigaray are an absurd extreme that can safely be ignored. I doubt any serious scientist would give them a second thought.

The hounding of Larry Summers, though, is a far more serious issue. Regardless of one’s view of Summers, the things that he said did not warrant the response to them. If an academic is not free to posit a hypothesis that it logical and consistent with the evidence, then academia is seriously degraded. That’s not to say he’s right, of course!
Posted by Rhian, Thursday, 16 January 2014 2:36:30 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Great piece for the rubes on this site but pretty silly for anybody with a working brain.
Babette you go wrong in your first line and it just gets worst as you go. You need to read Luce Irigaray actual paper rather than copy and paste from your favourite right wing talking points website. I'd explain it to you but I don't think you'd get it.
I find it funny that you often read the right wing whining about how these lefty teachers don't teach kids to think. When faced with the actual teaching methods they can't handle it. I know I wasting my time with the OLO trolls but for thinking readers...
There is no privileged POV even in physics. Maths is a beautiful language more powerful than any other we have invented, but it isn’t perfect some thoughts just can’t translate. For anybody who has learnt another language would know it also gives you a different thought process as well. Culture also changes the way you view things. Different world view enables us to see things differently, provide insights that we may not otherwise have.
I find it funny that many right wings thump the table and say that the Judo-christ-stain world view has invented science and yet will poop poop the idea that a Asian world view would offer a different perspective. would colour their view on a topic including physics.
Posted by Cobber the hound, Thursday, 16 January 2014 3:46:48 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
It is interesting that E=MC2 was used as a reference point for this essay.
But what does the now famous archetypal equation E=MC2 tell us about the nature of Reality altogether. The nature of our body-mind-complex, and the nature of the Cosmic Process in which we are completely entangled and completely dependent upon even for our next breath.
What are its all-the-way-down-the-line revolutionary cultural implications?

First of all it tells us that we live in an open-ended Quantum universe which is full of space-time paradoxes. Heisenberg's Uncertainity Principle.
It also tells us that everything is light, that all of reality - every person, every object, every iota of space and time - is nothing but waves in an ocean of radiant light.
But what science does not tell us is that this light is not merely an impersonal force or mass of energy.
It is CONSCIOUS: it is ALIVE.
In Truth and Reality it is a Great Person of Light, a Radiant Being of Infinite Brightness.
Even better put,in REALITY, Light Is the DIVINE Person, the Great One, Living as everything, Appearing as everything, and yet, paradoxically, Always and Only Conscious Light.

So called "matter" is Conscious Light. Man, and every individual being, are, each and all, a paradoxical manifestation of infinite Energy and Being.

This is interesting from another perspective. Namely that this Quantum understanding is never ever featured or even taken into consideration by any of the usual dreadfully sane conservative or right-wing Christian propagandists. Which is to say that they are all stuck in an essentially 19th century world-view. An entirely mortalistic world-view which reduces everybody to the mortal-meat-body scale ONLY.

Using E=MC2 as our template what is our understanding and application of biochemistry, biophysics, human anatomy, human life, human culture?
What will we do when we take the discovery of the relationship between matter and energy seriously? How do we make medicine out of the understanding that the human body is Energy? How do we practice ordinary diet, sexuality, and social relations?
How do we practice religion on a day to day basis?
Posted by Daffy Duck, Thursday, 16 January 2014 4:09:53 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Realise that Ms Francis is talking about ideological Feminism, not describing the way normal,mentally healthy women think.
If you think that the quotes in this article are insane then read this:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/are-you-ready-for-a-feminist-programming-language/

Daffy Duck,
This isn't a question of Left vs Right, ideological Feminism isn't any more a valid critique of the world than Christianity or Islam, it's not rational, it's not evidence based and it's adherents are nothing but psychologically damaged individuals who behave like your typical deranged cultists
Posted by Jay Of Melbourne, Thursday, 16 January 2014 4:38:05 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
The sad thing is that these what Jay calls ideological feminism has discredited and obscured what was once mainstream feminism, which was mainly concerned with equality of treatment and opportunity, combatting violence against women and kids, and refuting false stereotypes.
Posted by Rhian, Thursday, 16 January 2014 4:53:27 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Cobber the hound, Luce Irigaray's claim is wrong on many levels. First, it resorts to fixed stereotypes about masculinity and femininity, which in themselves have not been empirically validated, but are just metaphysical claims plucked out of the feminist lexicon. Secondly, it engages in psychological reductionism. Reducing claims/theses/hypotheses to the psyche doesn't actually refute the claims being made.

There are bucket loads of other claims made by feminists that have no empirical grounding; instead they are metaphysical claims identical to how claims are made in religion
Posted by Aristocrat, Thursday, 16 January 2014 5:04:45 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
The disturbing practice of politicising science, which Babette Francis describes, is by no means confined to radical feminists.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union under Stalin attempted to mobilise its academic community with ridiculous slogans, such as: "For purity of Marxist-Leninist theory in surgery" and "For Party spirit in mathematics".

In Hitler's Third Reich, academics were expected to uphold and defend "German science", but to shun and condemn "Jewish science" (i.e., Freud and Einstein).

In his 1963 book, Techniques of Persuasion: From Propaganda to Brainwashing, Dr James A.C. Brown described the phenomenon witnessed under one-party dictatorships of the "curious mingling of science with politics, and the strange belief that a scientific theory is to be judged, not by its correspondence with the facts, but by the degree to which it accords with" the ideology of the ruling elite.

It is frightening that this phenomenon has triumphed to the degree it has in institutions of higher education across the world.
Posted by John from Melbourne, Thursday, 16 January 2014 7:06:40 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Rhian.
Exactly and ideological Feminism is probably worse than most religions in that it instills female hypoagency in it's adherents and derides many of the choices well adjusted women make.
Want a laugh? This is what RadFems actually think and write on their blogs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02m_VPCcLjU&list=UUmkSQppUOY6r7qd-sbcftBQ&feature=c4-overview
Posted by Jay Of Melbourne, Thursday, 16 January 2014 7:10:08 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Irigaray is a philosopher and all philosophers make weird and wonderful epistemological observations about the ways in which we are conditioned to think. Epistemology questions what knowledge is and how it is acquired. The application of masculine/feminine cultural paradigms to nature and matter is nothing new – in science or anywhere else.

Science is no more exact a discipline than linguistics or sociology. As with all disciplines, science is constantly in flux – theories are routinely disproved; perspectives are constantly being challenged. Feminist theory is one of many such challenges.

Having said that, I strongly suspect that Irigaray’s ‘quote’ about the speed of light has been given the right-wing, anti-feminist viral treatment – similar to Mary Daly’s ‘quote’ about 9 million women being burnt in the medieval witch hunts and Andrea Dworkin’s ‘quote’ about all heterosexual intercourse being rape. (Neither of them said anything of the sort, but consistent reactionary repetition of such falsehoods ensured they passed into the realm of fact.)

It’s impossible to find Irigaray’s ‘quote’ about the speed of light on the internet in any context other than in articles about dumb, silly feminists. If we were able to find the original claim within the context of how it was originally argued, then maybe there are grounds for a rational discussion.

Neither this essay, nor the bulk of the comments here, constitute anything resembling rational discussion.
Posted by Killarney, Thursday, 16 January 2014 7:26:56 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
"It’s impossible to find Irigaray’s ‘quote’ about the speed of light on the internet in any context other than in articles about dumb, silly feminists."

This is the best I've managed so far, Killarney...

""Is E=Mc² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged that which goes faster."
Irigaray, Luce. Parler n’est jamais neutre. Éditions de Minuit. 1987. p.110. (Quoted in and translated by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, London: Profile Books, 1998, p.100.)

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/luce-irigaray/quotes/

Of course, the hypothesised 'privileged' 'sexed nature' of the equation could be argued to be due to its being feminine.

But I prefer my metaphysics and philosophy to be more Oxford Ordinary Language than Continental.
Posted by WmTrevor, Thursday, 16 January 2014 7:55:02 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Killarney

the quote is cited on her "quotes" page at the European Graduate School

http://www.egs.edu/faculty/luce-irigaray/quotes/
Posted by Rhian, Thursday, 16 January 2014 7:56:16 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I wonder what Irigaray would make of F = ma ? Probably another book.
Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 16 January 2014 8:22:50 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
http://tinyurl.com/kqfckql

Well bullsh!t is better than the truth:)...I hope you find what your looking for....

Oh dear.
Posted by PLANET3, Thursday, 16 January 2014 9:28:33 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
OUG.....Its always an interesting read when its coming from blind faith. The problem is, and I agree with you to a point, that something has made us, but GOD is not what you think it is. One of the facts to support this, is the lack of love with-in or about any God for that matter and to think love is a God made thing, sorry friend, all intelligent life has some degree of it, and the rest is just a programmed instinctive res ponce.

It is more highly likely that what ever engineered all life on this planet, knew exactly what they were doing, hence mans wrong interpretations of it all, hence the bible/Koran and all human writings on the subject, with its multi failings.

The thing with the religious mind, its just afraid to move on to the next stage of what's drove us all to this point in time, and this fear is keeping the human mind in a state of evolutionary suspended animation of the brain.

I wrote a long time ago...(2006/2007plus) "If you lived long-ago as a primitive man, and something came from the sky, what would you call it?"

OUG...there is strong evidence to say, that a God of any sort, is not what we think it is.

"Is Gulf youth increasingly drawn to atheism?"

The only problem I can see with atheism, is the fact that religion is genetically woven into our very existences, and only time/evolution can remove it.

I support Atheism to a point, but these are early days considering mankind has just taken off its baby-boots on a scale of immortality that's seen all around the world considering religion in the hands of the powerful or just plain MAD.

Men kill for religion, but its the only system to use to cull ourselfes until now....(new diseases)+(better birth control) and so on..

IMO....the next stage of mans evo, is to go without a GOD and just take the past teachings with us into the new future.

To stay with the book, will cause mans destruction...so sayith your lord.

Planet3
Posted by PLANET3, Thursday, 16 January 2014 9:52:00 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
What is meant by progressive feminism ? Just fill in these spaces:

A.

B.

C.

D.

What is the position of women under Islam ? Just fill in these spaces:

E.

F.

G.

H.

So how does feminism square with Islam ? Just fill in these spaces:

I.

J.

K.

L.

So let's go through it again:

* all cultures are equal;

* some religions are more equal than others - or to 'no religion': Islam is superior to Christianity or atheism in championing the rights of women;

* equal rights before the law for women is a western bourgeois concept;

* E = mc [squared], as a sexist concept, is worth giving a second's thought to.

Is this what it has come to ?

I'm 71, but I look forward to the day when men and women have equal rights and equal opportunities, all around the world. But it won't happen as long as we have careerist academics, posing as feminists, like Irigaray, telling women how to think. And half-wits going along with it all.

Forty years ago, who would have thought that the Movement could degenerate so far ?

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 16 January 2014 10:02:35 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
Go to user and find the post...neutral...you know what's great about being neutral....everything:)

All the best.

Planet3
Posted by PLANET3, Thursday, 16 January 2014 10:14:05 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
The problem with false ideologies dominating the study of science and mathematics is that great misery is caused to the powerless. Nick Cater in his article "Australian Curriculum beyond saving (The Australian, 14/1/14) refers to Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring". The promotion of her thesis caused the banning of DDT, which has resulted in millions of deaths due to malaria in Africa and Asia.
Furthermore the emphasis on "sustainability" has given free rein to the ideas of Malthus and the "Limits to Growth" of the Club of Rome, which as Matt Ridley pointed out in "Malthus, not Mao, inspired this horrible Chinese experiment" (The Australian, 14/1/14) resulted in China's brutal one child policy. False ideas can have tragic consequences, and as Nick Cater suggests, the Australian Curriculum is beyond redemption. It should be scrapped and a fresh start made
Posted by Gadfly42, Friday, 17 January 2014 9:05:17 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
I really do hope that AJ Phillips, with whom I am presently debating on OLO on another topic, reads this article. Because it encompasses everything I have been telling him. It is preposterous that scientific truth should be subject to alteration or suppression by social theorists.

On the face of it, it is hilarious that feminist Lucy Iragarays opinion that the speed of light does not conform to feminist social theory, or that sexual differences should not be investigated. Except for one thing. 500 years after the beginning of The Age of Enlightenment, we seem to be regressing, and once again living in an age where wild eyed ideologues with lunatic agendas are telling scientists what to do. It is incredible that in 2014, such people, can, and do, intimidate scientists to shut them up, or at least force them to amend their scientific research results to conform to whatever is the contemporary social theory to Save the World.

Even within science, too many ideologues are gaining degrees in such academic disciplines as history, criminology, and perhaps even climate science, and using the authority and credibility which science bestows upon them to push their favourite social agendas in contravention of the scientific facts which they know are true.
Posted by LEGO, Saturday, 18 January 2014 4:05:27 AM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
It just goes to show that reality must prevail over ideology: a valid ideology, in other words, must conform to reality, to truth, to evidence, before it can bde taken seriously. Physical laws are, pace Popper, just that: the best approximation of reality.

The speed of light is what it is, regardless of any sympathies towards feminist or Christian or Islamist ideology. It isn't 'privileged' over, say, the speed of sound, or the speed of feminist understanding of the real world, just to rank those different speeds in km/sec.

The Enlightenment has been the bitterly and viciously fought-for outcome of a struggle towards an understanding of reality, for the development of science on one hand and the struggle for human equality, on the other, over superstition, religion and ideology. Irigaray and other opportunists may wish for some 'sign' that its products are gender-biased, but how do you distinguish between their approach and a reactionary retreat from reality ? Ah yes, that might explain their sucking-up to the worst forms of Islamism: the most 'complete' repudiation of the Enlightenment.

Meanwhile, genome sequencing and other breakthroughs move on.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Saturday, 18 January 2014 5:28:02 PM
Find out more about this user Recommend this comment for deletion Return to top of page Return to Forum Main Page Copy comment URL to clipboard
  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. 4
  6. 5
  7. All

About Us :: Search :: Discuss :: Feedback :: Legals :: Privacy