How many soft willed young academics get into debt that they can never recover from on their own by majoring in gender studies.... then, the job market after graduation (???) is completely closed. The researcher, Whitney Stark, is fully involved in manufactured subjects to maintain her position as a serious researcher in a flimsy field... Katherine Timpf handles this beautifully. BH
Note.... the writer of this piece is Katherine Timpf and she is exposing the words of Whitney Stark, the gender studies researcher. Read the last paragraph.BH
Note 2... From Mike Walker
Ah, where to begin? Let me make just three points,
(1) Galilean-Newtonian physics is essential for anyone hoping to become an engineer, scientist, medical doctor, veterinarian, architect or to enter into any other science-based career.
The author should be cheerleading for girls and young women to enter those fields - not disparaging the heart and soul of the physical sciences.
(2) Almost everything we see around us is either explained by or - more importantly - created through the application of Galilean-Newtonian physics.
Yes, there are apparent phenomenon and very important fields of study where quantum physics offers the only explanation and the application of quantum mechanics is demanded but in no way does that undermined the need for Galilean-Newtonian physics.
(3) Not to shock the under-informed but quantum physics clarifies, complements and completes Galilean-Newtonian physics.
It explained troubling problems that plagued science for centuries and brought new harmony to - yes - the old physics (think Galilean relativity v. Einsteinian relativity).
In other words, you need to start with Galilean-Newtonian physics to get to quantum physics and you end in a world where Galilean-Newtonian physics is as relatively relevant (pun intended) as it ever was.
As the warden said in Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to communicate and using a tortured combination of inane social science doublespeak and stale Marxist jargon is no way to address the issue.
Academic Journal: Quantum Physics Is ‘Oppressive’ to Marginalized People
by Katherine Timpf, National Review
Culture and gender-studies researcher Whitney Stark argues that physics is oppressive.
A feminist scholar has published a paper claiming that quantum physics is oppressive and that we must use “quantum feminisms” to make the science more intersectional.
In a paper for The Minnesota Review, culture and gender-studies researcher Whitney Stark argues that physics is oppressive because it has “separated beings” based on their “binary and absolute differences” — a structure that she calls “hierarchical and exploitative” — and the same kind of system is “embedded in many structures of classification,” making it “part of the apparatus that enables oppression.” Stark explains:
This structural thinking of individualized separatism with binary and absolute differences as the basis for how the universe works seeped into/poured over/ is embedded in many structures of classification, which understand similarity and difference in the world, imposed in many hierarchical and exploitative organizational structures, whether through gender, life/nonlife, national borders, and so on.
According to Stark, the tendency to categorize in this way particularly hurts marginalized people because it can cause the activist efforts of minority groups to be “overshadowed” by the efforts of dominant groups.
“For instance, in many ‘official’ feminist histories of the United States, black/African American women’s organizing and writing are completely unaccounted for before the 1973 creation of the middle-class, professional National Black Feminist Organization,” Stark writes.
“Part of this absence is the frequent subsuming of intersectional identities under supposedly encompassing meta-identities more readily recognized by/as hegemonicized groupings,” she continues. “For instance, black women subsumed under ‘black,’ equated with male, or ‘feminist’ equated with white women.”
Thankfully, Stark has a solution to this very clearly serious problem: “quantum feminisms” and “intersectionality.”
“By taking a critical look at the noncentralized and multiple movements of quantum physics, and by dehierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to reconfigure structures of value, longevity, and subjectivity in ways explicitly aligned with anti-oppression practices and identity politics,” she writes. “Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces.”
Honestly, all of this makes perfect sense. Personally, whenever I think about oppression, the very first thing that comes to my mind is: “Damn it Isaac Newton! This is all your fault!” I’m just glad someone is finally writing about it. Maybe someday we can take it a step further, and replace all lessons on the outdated, sexist, racist concept of “quantum physics” in our schools with lessons on quantum feminisms. Ah, yes. Then, and only then, will our nation be truly great.
This story was initially covered by the College Fix.
– Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.
