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Comment by apocalypstyx | Hacker News Reader

Are you really sure about where you're ideas come from?

I remember the Christian anti-Harry-Potter craze when I was a kid. Preachers would have hour-long television programs about how this, this, and this were in those books. But none of it was. I knew. I had read them.

I have never trusted what others wanted to convinced me a book was 'about' since then.

Education (so far as I see it) should leave one, as best is possible, with an understanding of a body of work. To agree or disagree with that body of work is a separate affair. What those preachers and what people like James Lindsay want, so far as I am concerned, is a so-called understanding that leads to an end other than understanding in and of itself. Quite simply, if someone were to read Lindsey's work and come away thinking that X, Y, or Z in fact had a point, I doubt he would be happy with that outcome.

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I could see how some fundamentalist Christians could draw a line from the practices of the mystery cults and some Harry Potter stuff like secret knowledge, a secret society and an elite of magical lineage, but it's fiction after all, so why make a big fuss? If Harry Potter had an afterword that called on children everywhere to make secret societies with blood oath, initiation rituals, and all the stuff the people who wrote the bible more than 2000 years ago were talking about when they referenced Satan, then the fundamentalists Christians could validly criticize the books.

However, the academic leftist stuff is not fiction. It's totally completely serious endeavor, and that's why it's important to take it seriously and criticize its goals because they intend to foment a revolution and they are deadly serious.

There is no single "they". Half of leftist theorists argue with the other half more than three quarters of the time, the other quarter they argue with themselves.

And as for revolution, context is king. To the Southern slave holders, emancipationists were radicals intent on overthrowing the very foundations of civilization itself. The birth myth of the United States is revolution (though I admit we may have been better off eventually going the route that Canada took).

Of course it's serious stuff, people who try to figure out the world generally do take themselves seriously. A bunch of people sit around and try to figure out what the structures that we create are, how they actually operate, and if that is helpful or harmful to the human beings within those structures, serious stuff indeed. Their conclusions may be right or wrong or a mixture of both. Criticism, however, does not properly take the form of 'this idea is produced by an academic leftist, therefore it is bad and wrong'. Where's the marketplace of ideas in that?

Self-avowed conservative intellectuals have been wrong in the past as well. They have no less wanted to produce 'revolutions'. They have no less produced disastrous and failed revolutions.

And if we want to say that things shouldn't change from what they are now, at all, then that might be the most radical proposition of all, because it has never before happened in history, though many have tried it because they too thought their place in history perfect.

It's one thing to try and figure out the world. It's another to start with an ideological outlook and try to make the world fit that. To the extent people in academia and social science do that, it's a problem, because then it gets presented as scientific. Whatever the political slant might happen to be. Science isn't about how we want the world to be. Same with history. And yes, both right and left can be guilty of this.

Exactly. Some scientists are also activists, and that’s okay as long as they approach science as a scientist, with empirical mindset. In social scienses too often the activist mindset is all they have.

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