The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science presents: "Dialogue of Reason: Science and Faith in the Black Community.".
A dialogue with Richard Dawkins, Anthony Pinn, Sikivu Hutchinson, Todd Stiefel and moderated by Mark Hatcher concerning the role of faith and science in the Black Community. Faith has traditionally played a significant role among African Americans, while science has been marginalized. It is time to confront the issues that have kept too many Blacks out of the halls of science and confined to the pews
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Dialogue of Reason: Science and Faith in the Black Community
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Is Sikivu Hutchinson unbelievably pretentious, or is it just me? I hear huge long strings of polysyllabic, postmodern jargon and almost no real content.
ReplyDeleteOh my God! Hear all those syllables! How dare her talk like that?!
ReplyDeleteBlake,
ReplyDeleteI think it's just you.
Really? Just me? ok then. Parse this statement from her for me:
ReplyDelete"Again if we actually look at biblical text, or the koran and the degree to which those texts are absolutely predicated upon atrocity, upon barbarism, upon really a promotion of holocaust conditions, for those who are not within the dominant culture which is articulated as being the norm within those sacred texts we don't need a basis within supernaturalism to posit morality, or posit ethics, or posit a universal good, we can look at you know collective agency, we can look at the principle of doing unto your neighbor as you would do unto yourself, those are not categorically based christian or koranic or talmudic you know concepts and I think that again trying to foreground the historical trajectory of a secular humanist basis for african american civil resistance and liberation struggle is absolutely critical for trying to deconstruct these dynamics of patriarchal oppression and heterosexist oppresion within african american communities that are believed to be monolithically based upon the regime of theistic hierarchies."
(not spellchecked and not edited for grammar - mostly because the original statement was basically a huge run-on sentence anyway)
If you don't think that is a laughably pretentious way of speaking, I really don't know what planet you come from. She isn't saying a whole hell of a lot in that statement at all. I could've restated it using a tenth of the verbiage. She is obviously a very insecure woman who feels a desperate need to remind everyone she's talking to every 5 seconds of how incredibly intelligent she is. Compare this to Dawkins or Tyson in the previous video, who express clear, concrete ideas in an interesting and concise way that is intended to edify the listener with parsimony and honesty, not merely impress him with NEEDLESSLY expensive, showy words. This is the difference between someone who comes from a background of science and someone who comes from the artsy, sociology, postmodern, womyns studies, critical theory, media studies bullshit backgrounds. One genuinely desires to understand the world and convey meaning to you in the form of clearly defined ideas and thoughts; while the other is a pretentious showboater who decorates what little and poorly understood content they have to express, with tacky epaulets that do nothing more than stroke the speaker's obnoxious sense of conceited self-satisfaction.
<span>Agreed. It's always better to use "Pseudocounterinternalizationalintuitivistic-driven obscuranisticism" than "bullshit." It may rarely be understood, but impresses some people.</span>
ReplyDelete<span>It's always better to use "Pseudocounterinternalizationalintuitivistic-driven obscuranisticism" than "bullshit." While you might not be understood, you just might impress.</span>
ReplyDeleteIt was spoken debate, and I see nothing at all wrong with the first two thirds of that comment. Not difficult to understand at all. After that it gets into black American and i don't know enough about that to comment.
ReplyDeleteBut it was scarcely difficult.
Do you object to using 'foreground' as a verb? Is that your point? Or what?
You say that you could have said it beter in a tenth. Feel free. I never suggested she was terse.
Insecure, desprate, womyns, artsy,
if we actually look at biblical text, or the koran and the degree to which those texts are absolutely predicated upon atrocity, upon barbarism, upon really a promotion of holocaust conditions, for those who are not within the dominant culture which is articulated as being the norm within those sacred texts we don't need a basis within supernaturalism to posit morality,
ReplyDeleteParse that and tell me wher you disagree.
You think the reason you didn't understand her when she "got into black American and I don't understand....." was because you are uninformed with regard to that topic and not because she was being deliberately obfuscatory so as to ostentatiously impress the audience with vocabulary? Wow, well I guess you're just much more charitable than me.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I'm interested in the way things really are; so I'm afraid I have no patience or time for GROSSLY excessive and totally unnecessary self-important jargon that serves no purpose other than to make the listener feel less intelligent than the speaker. It annoys me, it wastes my time in learning about the way things really work, and it's a subtle way of lying about the world. I don't appreciate that.
Here's what I've deduced from this bit of her verborrhea: "Outsiders don't need god to tell them right from wrong in order to avoid the kind of inhumanity in yer holy books that gave us the holocaust."
ReplyDeleteOutsiders:"those who are not within the dominant culture which is articulated as being the norm within those sacred texts"
Inhumanity:"atrocity, upon barbarism, upon really a promotion of holocaust conditions."