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Global Warning
Written by Lisa Jain Thompson
Saturday, 08 July 2006
Springfield, Virginia, USA. When catchy academic phrases bring the laughter they deserve instead of doctorates, and discussions of gender’s performative nature and normative conception become nostalgic trips for aging university feminists, post-modern’s inherently anti-intellectual philosophy will collapse under its own weight like some ill-constructed third world high rise where the money goes into politician’s pockets instead of good steel. You can safely ignore the previous sentence since I have been told on good authority that words have no meaning, facts do not exist, and the physical reality of the universe around me is non-existent. I’m not making up this stuff. Have you ever argued with a postmodern, under educated, enthusiast? This is how they argue: Whatever your position may be, the postmod expert will find an exception to something in your argument and then make it into an extreme example in an attempt too undermine your principle. What you actually said does not matter (words are meaningless, remember?) – the important thing is what they say you said. They will always interpret your arguments in their most extreme form. They will religiously avoid making absolute statements, preferring to make unsupported assertions that are both startling and sensational. (Think of their statements as the intellectual equivalent of media feeding sound bites.) They will always deny dichotomies because any rule or division always has a few exceptions. (Male and female are arbitrary distinctions because some women are stronger then some men.) They accept nothing, they reject nothing, they define nothing, making it rather difficult to criticize them because they have no clearly defined viewpoint or position. The postmodern expert will purposely write vaguely to permit the greatest number of interpretations of what they have written. Obscurity is the goal in which nothing is defined, no one is offended, and no conclusions are actually concluded. If you let them, they will invent new words and phrases (e.g., performative nature, normative conception) to obscure their unoriginal ideas and shoddy scholarship. And having invented a term they will not and cannot define, they will refuse to ever change their terminology and insist their arbitrary choices cannot be altered while yours are just a pile of ignorant obstinacy. If you do attempt to carry on a discussion with a postmodern enthusiast, you will soon find yourself accused of defending the establishment (which is usually labeled sinfully capitalistic). If you continue to question them or ask them to define their terms, you will shouted down and sent to Coventry, having been found unworthy of their attention. Michel Foucault, a postmodern visionary, believed that there are no facts and everything (life, the universe, science and medicine) is interpretation. “There is no final meaning for any particular sign, no notion of unitary sense of text, no interpretation can be regarded as superior to any other.” Whether intentionally or not, the postmodern culture fosters a self-indulgent subjectivity where nothing is real except what the postmodern enthusiast wants. And so, tumbling down this rabbit hole, we find ourselves stuck in the morass of the “Gender Spectrum.” Male and female do not exist (quit peeking at your crotch). Everyone is what they say they are, no more or less. Tomorrow may be different. No one seems to know what “transgender” means except everyone prefers being transgendered to being a queer or a fetishist. In this world, sexual genitalia are societal impositions and gender identity is a political construct. The mention that scientific and medical research would suggest otherwise is treated like blasphemy and the person who uttered the fatal words brain structure, chromosome activation, and fetal development is deemed, at best, a victim of brainwashing and, at worst a lackey of the establishment whose only concern is keeping the oppressive male power structure in place. But discussion? Compromise? Actual accomplishments that make gentle the way of the world? That would be too much like work and might require they define their terms or learn the rules of logic, or worse yet, admit the world actually exists. Post-postmod cannot occur too soon (although I suspect they will invent a new catchy term for it that they will then refuse to define).

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