If You Ever Begin a Statement With the Words 'I Feel,'… You Must Cluck Like a Chicken”


“If You Ever Begin a Statement With the Words 'I Feel,'…
You Must Cluck Like a Chicken”
Undoing the Dis-Education of Millennials
by Adam J. Macleod

“The only way you’ll understand the title is if you at least scan the article. Even a quick scan will entice you to actually read it. A terrific, and encouraging, way of purging mis-education from millennials’ 90 lb. weakling minds."

"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think.
The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
- Thomas Sowell

"I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn. But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are ens***ed to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.

They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi. Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “r****t,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.

Here is the speech I gave them: 'Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason. For many of you have not yet been educated. You have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.

Reasoning requires you to understand t***h claims, even t***h claims that you think are false or bad or just icky. Most of you have been taught to label things with various “isms” which prevent you from understanding claims you find uncomfortable or difficult.

Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as “diversity” and “e******y.”

Reasoning requires you to understand the difference between true and false. And reasoning requires coherence and logic. Most of you have been taught to embrace incoherence and illogic. You have learned to associate t***h with your subjective feelings, which are neither true nor false but only yours, and which are constantly changeful.

We will have to pull out all of the weeds in your mind as we come across them. Unfortunately, your mind is full of weeds, and this will be a very painful experience. But it is strictly necessary if anything useful, good, and fruitful is to be planted in your head. There is no formula for this. Each of you has different weeds, and so we will need to take this on the case-by-case basis. But there are a few weeds that infect nearly all of your brains. So I am going to pull them out now.

First, except when describing an ideology, you are not to use a word that ends in “ism.” C*******m, socialism, N**ism, and capitalism are established concepts in history and the social sciences, and those terms can often be used fruitfully to gain knowledge and promote understanding. “Classism,” “sexism,” “materialism,” “cisg****rism,” and (yes) even r****m are generally not used as meaningful or productive terms, at least as you have been taught to use them. Most of the time, they do not promote understanding.

In fact, “isms” prevent you from learning. You have been taught to slap an “ism” on things that you do not understand, or that make you feel uncomfortable, or that make you uncomfortable because you do not understand them. But slapping a label on the box without first opening the box and examining its contents is a form of c***ting. Worse, it prevents you from discovering the treasures hidden inside the box. For example, when we discussed the Code of Hammurabi, some of you wanted to slap labels on what you read which enabled you to convince yourself that you had nothing to learn from ancient Babylonians. But when we peeled off the labels and looked carefully inside the box, we discovered several surprising t***hs. In fact, we discovered that Hammurabi still has a lot to teach us today.

One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”

Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and e******y. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that e******y means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and e******y you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.

Furthermore, diversity and e******y are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor e******y is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if s***ery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of s***ery is worse than complete agreement that s***ery is wrong.

Similarly, e******y is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).

Related to this: You do not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean e******y. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.

Third, you should not bother to tell us how you feel about a topic. Tell us what you think about it. If you can’t think yet, that’s O.K. Tell us what Aristotle thinks, or Hammurabi thinks, or H.L.A. Hart thinks. Borrow opinions from those whose opinions are worth considering. As Aristotle teaches us in the reading for today, men and women who are ens***ed to the passions, who never rise above their animal natures by practicing the virtues, do not have worthwhile opinions. Only the person who exercises practical reason and attains practical wisdom knows how first to live his life, then to order his household, and finally, when he is sufficiently wise and mature, to venture opinions on how to bring order to the political community.

One of my goals for you this semester is that each of you will encounter at least one idea that you find disagreeable and that you will achieve genuine disagreement with that idea. I need to explain what I mean by that because many of you have never been taught how to disagree.

Disagreement is not expressing one’s disapproval of something or expressing that something makes you feel bad or icky. To really disagree with someone’s idea or opinion, you must first understand that idea or opinion. When Socrates tells you that a good life is better than a life in exile you can neither agree nor disagree with that claim without first understanding what he means by “good life” and why he thinks running away from Athens would be unjust. Similarly, if someone expresses a view about a******n, and you do not first take the time to understand what the view is and why the person thinks the view is true, then you cannot disagree with the view, much less reason with that person. You might take offense. You might feel bad that someone holds that view. But you are not reasoning unless you are engaging the merits of the argument, just as Socrates engaged with Crito’s argument that he should flee from Athens.

So, here are three ground rules for the rest of the semester:

1. The only “ism” I ever want to come out your mouth is a syllogism. If I catch you using an “ism” or its analogous “ist” - r****t, classist, etc. - then you will not be permitted to continue speaking until you have first identified which “ism” you are guilty of at that very moment. You are not allowed to fault others for being biased or privileged until you have first identified and examined your own biases and privileges.

2. If I catch you this semester using the words “fair,” “diversity,” or “e******y,” or a variation on those terms, and you do not stop immediately to explain what you mean, you will lose your privilege to express any further opinions in class until you first demonstrate that you understand three things about the view that you are criticizing.

3. If you ever begin a statement with the words “I feel,” before continuing you must cluck like a chicken or make some other suitable animal sound.'

To their credit, the students received the speech well. And so far this semester, only two students have been required to cluck like chickens.”
- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

You should see what made this a false f**g. It's real easy. Then you can come back and tell me the error of my ways. Until then I never believe what politicians tell me. They are all crap, democrat crap, republican crap but all the same crap. They are pieces of corrupt, tell you one thing but always doing the other, shifty eyed, back stabbing, American trashing, oxygen wasting, low lifes, and that's the good ones.The sight would ban me if I told about the ones at the lowest of humanity or the total wastes of good dirt that follow them.

It’s gut-check time. With each guilty plea, each indictment, each tweet, it becomes evident that Donald Trump is not the l********e p*******t of the United States. He was hoisted into the White House by at least one foreign power to whom he and his regime are now beholden. Trump’s domestic and international policies, such as an ill-conceived tariff war with China, unplanned troop withdrawals from Syria, and US abdication from key international treaties, reflect a White House that has been captured and is implementing the chaos policies that Vladimir Putin wanted.

The big question for 2019, however, is “What are Americans going to do about it?”

Impeachment will not be sufficient. Nor will a deal where Trump simply resigns and hands over the reins to Vice-President Mike Pence, who was handpicked by now-convicted felon Paul Manafort (guilty of conspiracy against the United States), and, who, as head of the t***sition team, overlooked the numerous warnings about Michael Flynn as a national security risk.

The problem, frankly, isn’t simply Donald Trump. He has been aided by a coterie of enablers, who have exploited the fissures, flaws, norms and loopholes in American democracy that allowed the unscrupulous to prosper at the expense of the people and the nation itself.

Removing Trump, while essential, will not fully address the work that needs to be done. Instead, it is going to take an effort akin to Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables to repair, rebuild and strengthen America.

And the first step is to understand what went wrong.

It is going to take a Herculean effort to repair, rebuild and strengthen America
Dark money and w***e s*******y fueled the disintegration of the Republican party. Without any viable core ideology to act as a lodestar, especially one that would resonate with the majority of Americans, the Republicans’ only raison d’etre now was power. Unable to win e******ns outright as they had in the past, the Republican party resorted, instead, to v**er suppression, e******n f***d, cancelling e******ns and lame-duck e*******l nihilism. In doing so, the Republicans not only deliberately undercut democracy but showed their utter contempt for it.

Their h**e for President Trump overrides the safety of the people that put them in office, we the people U.S. citizens. It sickens me to see all those overweight breeders with 2,3,4,5, children in tow. What are they bringing to this country besides the need for us to clothe, feed, medicate, educate and raise their children. They should get nothing, no asylum, welfare, nothing, zilch, nada!
Now there is another horde of invaders gathering to come here. Is it going to take fighting and blood shed in our streets for these elected i***ts to come to their senses?
These invaders have shown what they are capable of doing to the country they want to enter. Rocks are being thrown at our agents and other physical assaults.
The democrats are blaming President Trump for the crisis they have created. I didn't see or hear President Trump asking these i******s to come and bring their children on their "dangerous" journey. They can climb our fences come here refuse to assimilate and make demands.
How many more U.S. citizens have to lose their life before they act in a reasonable way and fund the wall/fence/barrier. Call it what you want, but build the DAMN wall and secure our nation.
How soon they forget the oath they swore to protect our country and constitution.
WE THE PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH, crap or get off the pot, now!
I am a Hispanic/Native American, not a r****t, but a Vietnam veteran, retired cop and a VERY PROUD AMERICAN! I have seen firsthand what these i******s do.

MAGA

Taxes... I have been paying from the 50s... but when you or I started is not the point..

where do you draw the line on funding people in need? what ever the cause of that need.

You right wingers always use that silly "bring them into your home" line..

Why do you think are taxes, as they should, go to the rescue of these or any people in need?

If you think bringing them into someones home rather the some facility for that purpose, then bring them
into your home.. all the talk about personal intervention rather then a govt program, but you always
want some one else to do that intervention. Not yourself..