Don't Cry for Soros’ Gender Studies in Hungary

I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions of the article below, but I really like the acerbic tone and some of the sharp observations made about the current Maoist gender hysteria so prevalent in Academia and Media. I do think that governments have no business putting a stop to academic programmes on largely ideological grounds, private universities should have the freedom to determine what is being taught on their campuses.

The George Soros founded and funded CEU is 100 percent privately funded and run, so I consider the constant attacks on it purely politically-motivated. It is a bit more complicated with my Alma Mater, ELTE, which is Hungary's largest state-run university, therefore the government does have full control over what programmes are offered and funded with taxpayer funds.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271...iel-greenfield

Without gender studies, what will happen to all the animals in the Budapest Zoo?



Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism

First, Hungary built a wall to keep Muslim migrants out. Then it passed the Stop Soros law. And then it really went too far by refusing to pay for degrees in gender studies at Soros’ pet leftist university.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s decree dropped funding and accreditation for gender studies last week.

The tragedy was only lessened by the latest findings within gender studies that gender had been invented by dead old white men to oppress the women who (as the latest research in gender studies had proven) never existed. If gender doesn’t exist, why do we need gender studies? Shouldn’t gender studies go the way of single sex bathrooms, due process and the entire history of western civilization?

Gender studies insist that gender is just a performative construct of the patriarchy, and if so, gender studies had disproven its own existence and eliminated itself from the threadbare fabric of reality.
Why do we need an entire academic discipline to study its own non-existence?

It doesn’t help that there’s no word for gender in Hungarian. Instead, gender studies uses a coined term, “társadalmi nem”, which apparently means, "social sex". Making gender studies sound like a mandatory Stalinist collectivist dance in a gulag hasn’t helped win Hungarians over.

Hungary’s government has offered certain salient arguments in defense of eliminating the noble and non-existent field of gender studies, such as the few students enrolled in its courses, and the non-existent employment opportunities in the non-existent field of the non-existent discipline.

Or, as one Hungarian politician noted, "no-one wants to employ a gender-ologist."

There are only two universities in Hungary that offer courses in gender studies, Eötvös Loránd University and the Central European University. ELTE has yet to graduate any asexually budding ‘genderologists’.

CEU was founded by that noted scholar of gender studies, George Soros, whose graduate degree in the field was achieved when his former Brazilian soap opera mistress punched him in court over his refusal to give her a $1.9 million Manhattan apartment.
Nor was she invited to lecture on gender studies to Hungarian hipsters in the hallowed halls of CEU.

CEU does currently offer an MA degree in Critical Gender Studies to “educate and train future generations of gender specialists”. Since gender doesn’t exist, it’s unknown if these generations of gender studies specialists will come from budding, cloning or other forms of asexual reproduction, and who or what wants generations of otherwise unemployable gender studies specialists in Hungary.
Especially as Hungary will no longer be accrediting or funding these gender specialist generations.

To gauge the sheer parasitic uselessness of the field, the MA degree posits that ‘genderologists’ may find jobs in, “education, academic research, social services, non-governmental organizations, policy, social change advocacy, government advising and applied research, journalism, as well as jobs that entail various kinds of artistic production”. To summarize, genderologists can poison minds in academia, create destructive policies for the government, write nasty screeds for the media or make bad art.

This isn’t an academic discipline. It’s a political movement. Its only employment opportunities are indoctrinating students to indoctrinate others in order to establish a leftist totalitarian dictatorship. Like other identity politics studies, it’s Marxism-Leninism in tribal identity flavors. And the Hungarians, like just about everybody else outside Berkeley and Brussels, are maxed out of Marx.

Soros U or CEU claims that the Department of Gender Studies “strives to meet the growing demand for expertise in gender issues”. How big is this demand? After a decade, CEU claims that only 129 students have an MA in Gender Studies. An average of 16 enroll every year. According to the National Lightning Safety Institute, more Poles are killed by lightning strikes than Hungarians enroll in gender studies.
Here are some of the PhD thesis topics in CEU’s Gender Studies sure to attract corporate employers.

"Re-con-queering Shakespeare: a Feminist Genderconstruction," "Queer(ing) Naturecultures: The Study of Zoo Animals", and "Integrating the Patriarch?: Negotiating Migrant Masculinity in Times of Crisis of Multiculturalism." It figures that the only ones to get a pass on patriarchy would be Muslim migrants.
And how can any company pass up the opportunity to hire the author who contended that, "the issues of sexuality and gender have been a part of the zoo project since its inception"?

Without gender studies, who will genderqueer all the animals in the Budapest Zoo?

To paraphrase Gloria Steinem, Hungary needs gender studies like a fish needs a bicycle. Or Natureculture piscines queering Shakespearean velocipedes at the expense of Hungarian taxpayers.
CEU, for its part, has issued a statement warning that eliminating gender studies, "would harm the prestige of the country". As the SS Panzer Corps had before it, the Open Society Foundation has been forced to retreat from Hungary to Berlin. CEU could take its gender studies off to Soros’ Open Society Fuhrerbunker in Berlin near the Rotes Rathaus (Red City Hall) once rebuilt and decorated with swastikas by the Nazis. If the Muslim migrants now filling Berlin won’t find gender studies appealing, who will?

Berlin has once again welcomed its occupiers turned refugees. And the Open Society Foundation’s personnel have reportedly found new homes, coffee shops and plans to irradiate all the world’s gold.
The twilight of gender studies in Budapest has led to an outpouring of support from useless academics worldwide. The London School of Economics Gender Department denounced, “right-wing populist agendas that naturalise power relations between men and women”. LSE’s Gender Department would apparently prefer that these relations be unnatural instead.

ATGENDER (European Association of Gender Research, Education, and Documentation) condemned, “the logic that the provision of academic degrees should be made dependent on financial merit”, and RINGS, the International Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies, denounced it as, "anti-educational, anti-scientific, anti-democratic, and anti-equality."

The National Women’s Studies Association, which supports a boycott of Israel, with no sense of irony, condemned Hungary's move as "an affront to academic freedom and to the open exchange of ideas".
Below that is a letter defending Rabab Abdulhadi, an anti-Israel academic who had used public funds to meet with Sheikh Raed Salah, the noted gender studies leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel convicted of funding Hamas. The Muslim Brotherhood is a feminist organization whose “family experts” have preached that if a woman is beaten, “she shares 30 percent or 40 percent of the fault.”
There’s some material for gender studies there, but they wouldn’t touch it with a thousand foot pole.

And Hungarians will somehow have to make do without hearing lectures about the evils of the patriarchy from radical academics whose feminism ends at the barbed green border with Islam.
Soros apologists have claimed that criticizing the hoary anti-Semite is anti-Semitic. Now they claim that ending support for ‘genderologists’ who accept beating women is sexist. Not to mention that failing to fund an ideological movement that seeks to destroy rational inquiry at universities is anti-intellectual.

Supporters of an academic boycott of the Jewish State hypocritically clamor about academic freedom, and the organizations that ‘no platform’ opposition speakers whine about political intimidation.
If it weren’t for the misogyny, misandry, anti-Semitism, and Islamism, gender studies would be just another academic scam for turning unemployables into political activists willing to work for almost nothing in exchange for wreaking vengeance on the society that refuses to employ them.

This is what Hungary is missing out on by passing up the opportunity to fund gender studies.

Don’t cry for Soros’ Gender Studies, Hungary. Weep for American academia instead.

129 degrees in 10 years? Seems like much ado about nothing...unless it's not about gender studies?


It might be about what the future looks like...full loathing of difference as if difference is an affront to life...really? I think life laughs at idiots like this...and other recent thread starters whose name starts with a t and ends with an a...Talk about gender confusion...we got it going on right here...The inability to embrace ourselves as we are leads to a shadow takeover.

I'm afraid I didn't quite get NAP's post above, so I won't comment on it, sorry, I'm confused.com

I would like to continue with this thread though as I am fascinated by the increasing Divide between Eastern and Central Europe compared to the West. The Western half of the continent seems to be getting ever more liberal and Left-wing, particularly where young people are concerned, whereas the exact opposite is happening East of the Elbe river (the countries that used to be behind the Iron curtain, including Eastern Germany), where right-wing, conservative and populist parties increasingly have a monopoly on power and the Left is going extinct. This seems to be mirroring what is actually happening in the US and UK heartlands. The likes of Hungary and Poland are in fact remarkably similar to Red states in the US in terms of their policies and overall political and social direction, minus perhaps the overt religiosity and gun culture. I wonder if Europe is actually developing a similar divide between Blue and Red member states than what already exists in the US. I was prompted to write this post after I read the below article in the Right-Wing American Thinker, which certainly seems to have noticed this phenomenon.

https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...rightwing.html

October 25, 2018
Why Are Young Eastern Europeans So Right-Wing?
By Martin Horicka

At least since the French revolution, young people have traditionally been more left-leaning than their parents. It hasn't changed over the past few decades, and there is little reason to think it's going to reverse any time soon. The fact that older people are more conservative and younger people tend to be more liberal is also in line with existing research and scientific literature. In Western Europe and throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, this theory hasn't been challenged for a long time, and despite some of its shortcomings (youths seem to be more liberal on social issues than economic ones), it still works today.

But what if we look into Central and Eastern Europe?

As unbelievable as it may sound, here it's completely different – the situation is exactly the opposite. Evidence suggests that the right has been steadily gaining momentum over the last few years. It even looks as though conservative parties will soon have a monopoly on the political power. To some extent, we can already see this happening in Orbán's Hungary and Kaczyński's Poland.

More surprising must be the observation that, unlike in the United States or Britain, right-wingers draw their strength especially from young voters. How is it even possible? The short answer is – as usual – the most obvious one. Countries where communist regimes had lasted for as long as four decades and left a permanent mark on local population possess different experiences and understanding of the world affairs from those of their western counterparts. They have, for example, good knowledge of what socialism is and how extreme some left-wing policies can actually be in real life.

The longer answer is a little more complicated and requires deeper comprehension of the post-communist mentality. It's true that socialism has distorted the thinking of eastern and central Europeans, as many E.U. officials often find in Brussels. Members of the Visegrad Group, they say, are all just naïve fools who do not understand the obvious benefits of tolerance and multiculturalism – but it's really not the case. Even here we like Indian cuisine. We also know how the left-wing totalitarianism looks.

Right-wing youth

This mysterious phenomenon can be observed in virtually every country that has undergone such development. Hungary is the brightest example. In the April parliamentary elections, the ruling Fidesz party, led by prime minister Viktor Orbán, gained support from 38% of voters in the 18-29 age group. Yes, it's less than the total number (which stands at 49%), but we have to understand that even though Fidesz is nominally a conservative and right-wing party, it's still mainly a movement of one egoistic politician without any clear (or at least honest) ideology. And remember, Fidesz was a proud liberal party in the '90s.
This kind of ideological uncertainty is not at all present in Jobbik, the second strongest party in the Hungarian parliament, usually described as far-right or ultranationalist. It received 31% of votes among young people. According to a 2015 poll, Jobbik is also the most popular party among university students.
Similar numbers are available from other countries of Visegrad Group. According to the Slovak Institute for Public Affairs, up to one third of teenagers in the smallest Central European country support the People's Party – Our Slovakia, which is commonly referred to as neo-Nazi. (Its leader, Marian Kotleba, a great admirer of the right-wing authoritarian first Slovak republic, gives to poor Slovak families checks for 1,488 euros.)

The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland also enjoys growing popularity among youths. In the last election, almost 26% (less than overall but still many) of voters under 29 cast their ballots for this conservative and heavily Christian party of Jarosław Kaczyński.

Second place (with 20% of young people) went for the Kukiz'15, an anti-establishment and euroskeptic movement created by rocker Paweł Kukiz, and third place with 16% went for a right-wing libertarian party called Liberty, whose leader is Polish MEP Janusz Korwin-Mikke. He is well known for an international audience because of his infamous television interview with Piers Morgan, which went viral on YouTube.

"Of course women must earn less than men because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent," said Korwin-Mikke, with a roughish smile, to the shocked hosts of Good Morning Britain. He was immediately branded as "the most sexist man in politics." Mr. Piers Morgan went even farther and called him on live television "a horrendous sexist pig."

It's obvious that the popularity of someone like Korwin-Mikke is much bigger among young men. But his party enjoys steady support among young women, too.

The traditional role of the right-wing and left-wing parties in some eastern European countries is not as clear as it should be. In the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania, the left is often perceived as conservative, anti-immigrant, and euroskeptic. It's a unique and specific paradox: social democrats are sometimes more on the right than Christian democrats.
As political scientists Martin Eiermann, Yascha Mounk, and Limor Goultchin of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have shown, populist parties (mainly right-wing) are on the rise in Central and Eastern Europe. While in 2000, populists took an average of 9.2% of the national vote, their popularity has since more than tripled to 31.6% in 2017.

Beyond politics

Ironically, Stalinist regimes in Europe had besides many horrible effects on population also some positive ones. Socialism is hampering technological progress and limiting human potential – that's a well known fact. Nobody, however, seems to think that it also slowed social progress.

While left-wing movements have pushed in the West the left's social agenda, the communists and their unchanging dogma froze Eastern European societies permanently in the old, more conservative past. Despite the official state ideology of Marxism-Leninism, the population remained traditionally oriented. Therefore, eastern and central Europeans had shielded themselves in an unprecedented way from malign progressivism of the New Left. As a result of this, post-socialist countries entered the new millennium more resilient against the ubiquitous offensive of the modern Marxists.

Germany is the epitome of ideological disparities between West and East. The eastern Germans are different from their western colleagues not only in terms of economic prosperity, but also on the level of political preferences. The former GDR is now the stronghold of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany, which is, according to the latest survey, the most popular party here – with the support of almost 25% of local citizens (country average is just below 17%).

New Iron Curtain

For people in Eastern Europe and especially in the Visegrad Group, the pressure from the E.U. officials on Poland and Hungary is a clear attack on post-communist countries, despite the fact that there may be a lot of truth in their allegations. The Sargentini report criticizing the state of liberal democracy in Hungary, the theatrical approval of which triggered a wave of emotional reactions all over the European Union, punishes a country where more and more young people are planning to vote for the right. It will doubtless add fuel to the populist fire.
"Hungary shall continue to defend its borders, stop illegal immigration and defend its rights – against you, too, if necessary," said Viktor Orbán to MEPs in the European Parliament. He meant it – as long as the majority of young people in Hungary agree with him.

If we want to keep our dream of a united Old World alive, we should be careful. With this kind of attitude toward eastern members of the Union, Europe could easily fall into two hostile parts again and hide its ideological differences behind a new Iron Curtain – although, from the perspective of the left-right political spectrum, this time in reverse.

Interesting, I appreciate this broader perspective that's difficult to obtain here without going on safari. So the great widening divide is not just here in the States.

You know I'm loathe to even think about things from a political perspective, because to use the boat analogy again I see the driving engine of world matters in general like the ocean's deep powerful currents, whereas the boat floating along the surface would represent the body politic. But alas, the boat is sort of the capstone of that engine, and it's the only part of it that we can point to, and even interact with to a small degree.

So this ever widening Left/Right divide. I don't think it's organic in nature, no more so than that caravan of migrants heading north through Mexico to be at America's back door by election day. No, we're definitely being manipulated here. I can't point to it any more than I can point to those deep ocean currents, but it's most certainly in play just like them.

And you know, the shit of it is that both Left and Right have great things to offer. WE NEED BOTH WAYS! There are old ways that need to survive, but we needn't become dormant there either. The Left does it's job by forcing the Right out of it's comfort zone, and the Right does it's job by not letting our past be erased as we progress forward. This is of course way overly simplistic, but I think it's at least a good cut and dry example of what I'm trying to get at here.

Too bad both sides can't just work together on things like both wings keeping a bird in flight, as left to our own devices I think we could work things out. But me thinks a bigger bird is doing it's job by not only not allowing that to happen, but stirring the pot to boot.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Fred Steeves

Interesting, I appreciate this broader perspective that's difficult to obtain here without going on safari. So the great widening divide is not just here in the States.

You know I'm loathe to even think about things from a political perspective, because to use the boat analogy again I see the driving engine of world matters in general like the ocean's deep powerful currents, whereas the boat floating along the surface would represent the body politic. But alas, the boat is sort of the capstone of that engine, and it's the only part of it that we can point to, and even interact with to a small degree.

So this ever widening Left/Right divide. I don't think it's organic in nature, no more so than that caravan of migrants heading north through Mexico to be at America's back door by election day. No, we're definitely being manipulated here. I can't point to it any more than I can point to those deep ocean currents, but it's most certainly in play just like them.

And you know, the shit of it is that both Left and Right have great things to offer. WE NEED BOTH WAYS! There are old ways that need to survive, but we needn't become dormant there either. The Left does it's job by forcing the Right out of it's comfort zone, and the Right does it's job by not letting our past be erased as we progress forward. This is of course way overly simplistic, but I think it's at least a good cut and dry example of what I'm trying to get at here.

Too bad both sides can't just work together on things like both wings keeping a bird in flight, as left to our own devices I think we could work things out. But me thinks a bigger bird is doing it's job by not only not allowing that to happen, but stirring the pot to boot.

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The way I see it, we need both left and right to function in a harmonious manner. I am a centrist myself and non-ideological anyways. One of the most useful things I learnt from Singaporeans is to look at life and politics in a pragmatic manner, to look at what actually works in the real world, rather than be informed by ideology, which can often be completely removed from reality. One of the reasons Singapore has become so successful, despite its inauspicious beginnings, is that it could never allow ideology to override pragmatism. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore's founding father, always believed in doing what was best for the country as a whole, irrespective of whether the idea came from the Left or the Right. He "stole" whatever policy was best from both sides.

For instance, he built up a serious armed forces, based on the Israeli model, using Israeli advisors, despite the fact that Singapore lies in the midst of one of the major Islamic strongholds in the world and has a substantial Muslim minority. They actually had to hide the fact that they were using Israeli advisors to build up the military, so officially, they were Mexicans…

This is a decidedly right-wing policy, as was the arrest and indefinite detention of the entire organised criminal class of the country, which was mostly made up of Chinese Triads. One night, the entire organised crime network was arrested in one giant raid and jailed without trial. They remain in prison to this day and as a result, crime is almost unheard of, let alone organised crime.

On the other hand, there were plenty of left-wing policies that were introduced, such as the Housing Development Board. This giant state-run conglomerate builds over 90 percent of housing in Singapore, anyone who isn't an outright millionaire lives in one of these state-built and run housing projects. Unlike the ones in the UK and US, these are actually safe and liveable and there is no stigma attached to living in one, though private housing developments are of course more prestigious. These can be bought at a discount rate and Singaporeans (as well as Permanent Residents) can use part of their pension and social security contributions to pay for one.

This is just to illustrate that a combination of right and left-wing policies is most likely to yield success and these should be chosen pragmatically, not on the basis of ideology, but what actually works.


I also think there is a hidden, esoteric aspect to this, where the universe requires us to balance left and right to achieve a harmonious existence. If we want to move forward, we need both our left and right legs, we can't just cut off one leg and hope to hop forward on one leg towards a better society.


Another aspect to Left and Right is that these two sides separated at the very foundation of the material universe, which is why we must achieve a synthesis of the two. The Left is associated with Femininity, the Moon, the Left Hand Path, whereas the Right is associated with Masculinity, the Sun, the Right hand path, etc... The very essence and aim of existence is to harmoniously synthesize these two opposing forces and this applies on the macro as well as the micro level.

And, since we are trying to achieve balance and synthesis here, I though I'd post an essay by an Afghani woman who is actually affected by the whole banning of Gender Studies at CEU malarchy. Coming from a habitually sexist society, it provides a pretty interesting perspective on why the state should not impinge on academic freedom, especially with private-run universities. I should note here, that the university at the centre of this Storm, Soros's Central European University, has just announced that they will be opening a Vienna Campus and move US-accredited courses to Austria. Presumably, Gender Studies will be among them, as this course is no longer accredited in Hungary. This division of the University into Viennese and Budapest campuses, based largely on ideology (Left-wing goes to Vienna and Courses acceptable to the Right-Wing government stay in Budapest) speaks volumes about the East-West, Right-Left divide emerging in Europe that I wrote about on this thread.


https://www.euronews.com/2018/10/25/...ilence-us-view

From Kabul to Budapest, you can ban gender studies but you can’t silence us


By Sahar Fetrat

I am a feminist. I came from Afghanistan to Hungary to do my master’s in gender studies at the Central European University (CEU).

Quote:

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Gender studies is only pseudoscience for those who are too privileged and fearful to acknowledge the existence and rights of others.

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Sahar Fetrat
Afghan feminist and filmmaker


What we call “feminism” in Afghanistan now, is probably the Afghan women’s first steps fighting for the most basic rights: for our rights to claim existence, to reclaim the spaces that are dominated by men and make our voices louder and louder, hoping to be heard.

I came to do my master’s in gender studies because of a personal anger. Because of the many gender-based discriminations that I grew up with in Afghanistan and all the intersecting oppressions I had to face as a refugee in childhood and as a woman of colour when I was travelling in the different parts of the world when I grew up.

Studying gender studies is extremely important because there is a big gap that needs to be filled in Afghanistan’s academia, especially in the gender studies field. From the surface, the whole world seems to care about Afghan women and marginalised voices but they equally contribute to the problems that Afghan women continue to face. Outsiders push the marginalised more into the margins through the way they identify and present these women.

I was angry because of how Afghan women are seen and represented in the world through a western “Savior” gaze. The knowledge, news and any reports that are produced about women in Afghanistan, is either of them being “victims” or being “saved”. There is no real or neutral image, and this is what fuels my fire. I wish to cultivate this anger with the necessary tools and knowledge, so it can flourish in my ability and responsibility to produce and to push for authentic and responsible knowledge-making in this field.

Coming to Hungary was not easy. I had to travel to Pakistan twice to get my visa and two days after I received it in August, a friend sent me a message saying that gender studies programs were to be “banned” in Hungary. It was terribly shocking and saddening, but CEU later confirmed that it would not affect our program.
When I came to Budapest, I found it to be a calm and beautiful city, but one that constantly reminds you of your skin. The pigments and melanin, that perhaps you didn’t have to see before, become more visible. Since I have come here, I can feel my skin more, every day. Which means, if you are a person of colour, you should have more patience for disgruntled behavior, being singled out in lines and ready to be shouted at. It is very similar to Kabul where you are indebted to society, paying the consequences of being a woman and living.

On 12 October, the Hungarian government published a list of approved master’s degree courses, from which the subject of gender studies was removed. We found out about it three days later through CEU’s Gender Studies chat group which left us all angry and helpless to some extent.

The removal of gender studies from the Hungarian Accredited Programs, to me, speaks about how the patriarchy is visibly alive and guarded in the first world as it is in the third world, and there is no justification for it. This is a political act, to gatekeep and safeguard the oppressive institutions of power that limit rights and spaces of others to live to their full potential.

The first master’s degree in gender studies in Afghanistan started in 2015 and there are many fears around this subject growing. To me, this fear, no matter in Kabul or Budapest, is the fear of visibility, recognition, and the voices of so many who would otherwise be denied existence.

Coming as a feminist from Afghanistan to pursue my master’s in Budapest, I have seen this fear everywhere and in many different forms, but I feel extremely sorry for Hungary because it has dismissed an important area of knowledge, oppressing the emergence of voices that are rarely heard, in the name of conservatism or lack of labour market opportunities.

As much as I see the gender studies’ ban as an attack on democracy in Hungary, I equally see it as a warning for a global wakeup call. Today it is a gender studies ban, tomorrow it will be about other forms of silencing and oppression.

This strong pushback from Orban’s government, however, also speaks a lot about the importance of this field. The very fact that a “government” stands against gender studies shows how significant of a field it is and how important it is for it to grow bigger as an academic field. It also gives it more importance because every action has a reaction and there is no way for conservatism to ban gender and women’s studies all over the world.

Gender studies is only pseudoscience for those who are too privileged and fearful to acknowledge the existence and rights of others.

excellent topic. I am coming off of a trigger from other things in my 3D life, so I am responding to just one tiny thing in the first post... don't mean to derail the way the conversation is headed, I want to get back into "the flow," so my apolgies in advance for that...

But I also think that context is so helpful, and that I had a fairly unique perspective from the "accident" of my birth time and place, so I'm hoping that despite my "tone" it will be received as a contribution.

I'd like to add from my experience at a "Groud Zero" of the Birth of gender studies. I grew up in Berkeley, (1960--> ) have been a student at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, and was briefly exposed to how it was being played out in a state of "reversal" at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business by the mid-90's, which was another "Ground Zero" for the "powerful white men are the victims" narrative.

I also had a very interesting experience in Greece in 1981, when Reagan was president, and had an opportunity to dialogue with about 10 young woman from all over Europe, and it was such a relief to get their perspective on what was going on in America, and to discover that Sisterhood knew no borders.

I am WELL versed in the "social engineering" that goes on, and has done on for decades/centuries/millenia, BUT I need to say that I think it is important to look past the narrative that it soley comes from "Soros" and some kind of "powerful deep state Left-wing agenda."

My parents came from mid-america, were politicised by Kennedy, McGovern, Martin Luther King, and the Viet Nam War. By the time I was 12, my mom was participating in the first women's consciousness raising groups that existed. And I can tell you, that they weren't funded, there was no outsider coming in thumping a Little Red Book. It was an organic process, of women, simply getting together, and talking about the circumstances of their lives. The outcome was that we had a family meeting, and she told us she was no longer going to be the Cook, that the rest of the family had to pitch in an make dinner some of the nights of the week!

We had a lot of Hamburger Helper. :o

Multiply this experience by every single woman I have ever known, and it's really hard for me to get behind the label of "Maoism." That label makes no sense to me. As far as I can tell, it is the same "red cape" that was waved by Reagan when he was a governor in California, the president, etc, to "fire up his base," as we call it now, to serve his OWN agenda, which is to keep the rich white powerful men/families/corporations/military-industrial-complex IN POWER.

The fight to get gender studies in the Universities was at *fight.* from the bottom up! Because of the CONTENT of what was being taught IN the curriculum. Because HISTORY IS TAUGHT FROM THE VICTORS POINT OF VIEW. It was the "battle of the canon." It was a HUGE fight in Academia. What should a "well educated" person be expected to know? What the Gender Studies asked, was WHY does a well educated person need to know THIS, and not THAT? WHAT is the AGENDA here? WHOSE position does this serve? Nobody (i.e. those in power) wanted to look at that... it was quite threatening to them.

Case in point: In Texas, they have JUST passed a law to ERASE Hillary Clinton from the Textbooks! Because "they can't afford to include everything, they have to save money somehwere." WTF???

By the time I got to SFSU, there was also Native American studies. I took all the classes I could. And believe me, there were no textbooks available to get the ACTUAL history of the US, that included ALL the points of view.

I was a film student, studying independent feature film production. I was really interested (and still am) in documentaries, in giving marginalized people a voice. I took a LOT of "media studies" courses, when we de-constructed what was going on in the messaging. Again, no textbooks here, but precious precious readers, that I still have to this day.

I will never forget the day I happened to switch channels and saw the same footage on two different networks, but edited differently, with two completely different narrations.

There was a big protest against a nuclear power plant being built (ON A FAULTLINE!). The protestors were making a human chain. The workers were being brought in on a bus. The bus driver got triggered, and slowly (fortunately) started to run over one of the protesters. He stopped, finally, with the protester on the ground, the bus on top of him, just his head and shoulders sticking out.

On one station they showed the whole thing, on another station they showed the end, and said that the protester got under the bus, to "make a dramatic statement." Those radical left-wing liberals! They will stop at nothing to make us look bad! Sound familiar?

My point is, that gender studies, Native American studies, media studies, etc. etc. are VERY IMPORTANT because they examine and deconstruct the dominant narratives. The Ivory Tower is the Fifth Estate in the US. It holds the Fouth Estate accountable.

And human beings are story tellers. In my view, a huge part of this global "battle" we are witnessing, is a battle of narratives. And the players are very very very sophisticated.

Fast forward through a whole lot of crap in my life, and recovery from it, which landed me back in academia studying human communication. Even in that field, there was a major historical split. There was the Rhetorical Critics, who traced their lineage from Aristotle, who identified and layed out the original playbook for every speech you have ever heard. There was Argumentation and Debate, the training ground for lawers, politicians, and preachers. And then there was the Humanist contingent, drawing from psychology and sociology, but including intercultural, gender, group, nonverbal, etc. stuff.

I wanted a career in Organizational Development--essentially applied social engeneering in corporations--but there was no such thing at that time, so I cobbled together my own Masters from Public Administation (Human Resources), Sociology and the Communication Department.

It almost broke me. But that is another story.

I'm not even sure what I am trying to say here. I typically discover that as I am writing. I think I will go ahead and post this, soak on this, maybe someone will have something helpful to say, and I can come back and add something useful!!!

Thanks for reading!!!

That was a very good post starry night because you gave your personal experience and witness. That's super important.

And as I've witnessed myself, the bias in the media is not left-leaning. It's usually business.

The business wants to pretend the activist was a faker in order to get away with the stupid that it's foisting on the community.

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Originally posted by starry night

excellent topic. I am coming off of a trigger from other things in my 3D life, so I am responding to just one tiny thing in the first post... don't mean to derail the way the conversation is headed, I want to get back into "the flow," so my apolgies in advance for that...

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I apologize for not reading this earlier...this is great stuff and it is plain to see that you have MUCH to offer this forum...thanks...

I'm curious...do you have connections here or have you spent time at PA? I feel like I should be more careful about my grammar now... :)

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Originally posted by NotAPretender

I'm curious...do you have connections here or have you spent time at PA?

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starry night is palooka's revenge's housemate, NotAPretender. ;)

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Originally posted by Aragorn

starry night is palooka's revenge's housemate, NotAPretender. ;)

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ok, that's what I thought...i wasn't sure... thnx

I think I'm getting your drift Starry Night.

I try to stay Neutral in the whole Left vs Right debate I see problems with both sides. However, talking about the US specifically, it doesn't strike me as the kind of place that has way too much Feminism and Minority rights. I resent sweeping characterisation of men as automatic members of some sort of oppressive Global Patriarchy. Yet, I can't help but notice that the US is in fact one and doesn't hide its disdain of women and minorities very well, if at all. There is a lot of talk about women's and minority rights, but that is exactly what it is, just talk. Lip service is being paid on these issues, but when you look at actions and policies, what is actually done by those in power and how they treat women and minorities, a completely different picture emerges. My own country is unabashedly patriarchal and has never had a female leader. Yet, women here get three YEARS' paid maternity leave, after which they can return to their original place of work and have to be rehired by LAW. How many WEEKS paid maternity leave do American women get again?


We also have free childcare and free education from Kindergarten all the way to college. It seems to me that in terms of actual policies the countries of Europe are far more female-friendly than most other parts of the world.

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Scott Adams on Soros

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Scott Adams - Saudi Alibis, George Soros, Caravans, Fake News, and #FentanylChina
(Oct 24, 2018)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzpPqG3dJ78
Description:

Scott Adams talks about Saudi alibis, Soros, caravans, fake news, #fentanylChina, and coffee.
Note: The Soros part of the Scott Adam's monologue begins @ ~ 29:50... https://youtu.be/hzpPqG3dJ78?t=1789

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Rebuttal by Lee Stranahan

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More on Soros, Scott Adams and why it matters
(Oct 24, 2018)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjlWqbLT3gI

An interesting Vice article about how Soros became the central figure of hate for right-wingers globally. I don't agree with the article's premise that the anti-Soros hate campaign originates in Hungary. Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, as well Mahathir Mohamed (Malaysia's ex-PM) were blaming Soros for pretty much everything that's wrong in this world at least a decade before Orban jumped on the bandwagon. His close links with Steve Bannon and Breitbart have probably a lot to do with his adoption of the anti-Soros rhetoric.

That is not to say that Soros doesn't deserve some criticism for some of the appalling things he did to get rich. I'm certainly no fan of his. Still, this has now morphed into barely disguised anti-semitic propaganda and we all know where that might eventually lead, so it's important to stay informed and avoid the relentless brainwashing.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/...ound-the-world

How Hungary helped make George Soros the ultimate villain to nationalists around the world


George Soros is remarkably busy for an 88-year-old — at least, that’s what his critics say. In just the last couple of years, conspiracy theorists have accused the billionaire philanthropist of toppling the government of Macedonia, staging chemical attacks on children in Syria, fomenting anti-corruption demonstrations in Romania, and having a hand in the murder of a Slovakian investigative journalist.

In the U.S., he’s been falsely accused of bankrolling both antifa and anti-Kavanaugh demonstrations. Even Facebook hired a DC PR firm to discredit its critics by linking them to Soros. In November, President Trump joined the pile-on, publicly entertaining bogus claims that Soros could be bankrolling the migrant “invasion” on the southern border. Trump pushed the theory weeks after a deranged supporter mailed a bomb to Soros’ home in Bedford, New York.
Soros’ support for liberal, pro-democratic initiatives has long made him a favorite subject for right-wing conspiracy theorists in Europe and the U.S., but in the last few years smears against him have increasingly moved beyond blog posts and message boards and into the halls of government. The billionaire can largely thank the land of his birth for that.
Since Europe’s migrant crisis of 2015, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has taken a fringe, false narrative — that Soros is plotting to undermine nation states through funding large-scale illegal immigration — and made it a core plank of his government’s policies. In doing so — to great electoral success — he’s unleashed the most sustained attack on Soros yet, and created a blueprint for other nationalist governments to follow.

“I do think they learn from one another, unquestionably,” said Leonard Benardo, vice president of the New York-based Open Society Foundations, the nonprofit through which Soros has given billions of dollars to philanthropic causes around the world.

Benardo believes Soros has become the “Rothschild of the 21st century”: a convenient anti-Semitic bogeyman to the growing ranks of nationalist world leaders — from the Philippines to Israel to Russia to Italy to Turkey — embodying the liberal, globalist values they see as a threat to their regimes.
Increasingly, he said, these governments were mimicking each other in using Soros as a catch-all smear against their liberal opponents, so that “anyone who represents anything of a globalist, cosmopolitan nature [is] immediately ridiculed and harangued and maligned and lampooned as being part of the Soros conspiracy.”
“It’s a global phenomenon,” he added.
“An enemy with a face”

Soros has long been a hate figure to right-wingers around the world, from the U.S., where he’s been a major donor to the Democrats, to Russia, which has been unnerved by his efforts to foster “open societies” in former Soviet states. But it’s in Hungary, where Soros was born in 1930, that the attacks have reached a fever pitch in recent years, with the billionaire branded a public enemy by the government and made the explicit target of its successful re-election campaign last spring.
The demonization began after Hungary became a front-line state in Europe’s 2015 migrant crisis, with more than 386,000 migrants passing through the country before the government closed the borders in October. Orban, who envisions Hungary as an “illiberal democracy” and defender of a Christian Europe, immediately adopted a hard-line anti-immigration platform that pitted him against the European Union and its proposed solutions to the crisis.

“He really became a hated figure that you could mobilize the masses against.”
But in Soros, who funds various philanthropic efforts geared toward supporting refugees in Europe, Orban found an even more effective opponent to rail against — “an enemy with a face,” in the words of political scientist Peter Kreko, director of Budapest-based think tank Political Capital Institute.

Since 2015, he said, Orban has embraced and amplified the previously fringe conspiracy theory that Soros was behind a plot to flood Europe with immigrants, relentlessly demonizing him as the shadowy, globalist mastermind behind the myriad external forces that challenge Orban’s brand of nationalism, from the European Union to the United Nations to humanitarian NGOs.
“Soros played this role of the personalized ‘umbrella enemy’ that you can put all your enemies under and say that he is the ultimate puppet master of every bad thing,” Kreko said. “He really became a hated figure that you could mobilize the masses against.”
“Stopping Soros” has become a catch-all justification for Hungary’s efforts to clamp down on civil society, allowing Orban to press ahead with an increasingly authoritarian agenda.
In June, his government passed what it dubbed the “Stop Soros” law, criminalizing NGOs it deems to be supporting illegal immigration by providing assistance to migrants. NGOs slammed the move as a push to clamp down on civil society and place the sector under government control. Hungary has also slapped tough restrictions on a Soros-founded university in Budapest, threatening its continued operation in the country.

“It was not sophisticated at all; it was really coming from the playbook of 20th century propaganda campaigns.”
Ahead of the elections this past April, the government shifted its campaign of character assassination into overdrive, with a propaganda offensive that experts say drew on age-old anti-Semitic tropes.
Open Society says Hungary invoked “anti-Semitic imagery from World War II” in its vilification campaign against Soros, in which Orban railed against the Jewish financier at a rally in March as “an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland, but feels it owns the whole world.”

Indeed, Orban’s government mailed out a “national consultation survey” to citizens asking them leading questions about a supposed “Soros plan,” which had allegedly been cooked up with the EU in order “to diminish the importance of the language and culture of European countries to make the integration of illegal immigrants happen sooner.” The government’s election campaign saw the billionaire’s face plastered on billboards, captioned with the slogan “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh,” and emblazoned on bus floors, where it could be trampled underfoot.

“It was not sophisticated at all; it was really coming from the playbook of 20th century propaganda campaigns,” said Kreko.
But it was effective. Condemnation from external groups such as the European Union did nothing to rein in Orban’s campaign, and his government won re-election in a landslide. The following month, Soros’ Open Society Foundations — which says Hungary’s attacks on it are based on a fundamental misrepresentation of its work — relocated its Budapest office to Berlin. The move was a direct response to Orban’s increasingly repressive environment.
“We see that Mr. Soros is basically the political opposition of the government.”
Despite this sustained attack on Soros and Open Society, Orban’s government rejects any suggestion that it has fueled conspiracy theories about the billionaire for political gain. (In March, Orban publicly alleged without proof that Soros likely had a role in the murder of an investigative journalist in neighboring Slovakia.)
Instead, Hungary maintains its campaign against Soros has been a legitimate response to what it sees as his role as a political player, according to government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs.
“We see that Mr. Soros is basically the political opposition of the government,” Kovacs told VICE News. “He’s using his very excessive network of so-called civil organizations, NGOs, to influence in political power. This is a different kind of democracy from what we believe in.”

He said that his government believed that anyone who provided assistance to illegal immigration “is an enemy of public order and is posing a real danger to democracy.”

The nationalist blueprint


The Internet has proven a fertile breeding ground for anti-Soros conspiracies, and has given the Hungarian government’s narrative about the philanthropist an audience far beyond the country’s borders. Now, when nationalist leaders around the world need a scapegoat, they’re increasingly using a familiar playbook to smear Soros as the source of their country’s problems.
In Europe, ruling populists have targeted Soros with attacks that strongly echo Orban’s narrative, from Italy, where Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini claimed in July that Soros wanted to “fill Italy and Europe with migrants,” to Slovakia, where former prime minister Robert Fico blamed the financier for the demonstrations that forced him from power in March.
In Romania, the leader of the country’s ruling party has claimed Soros ordered an assassination attempt and spread corruption allegations against him, while in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last week blamed “the famous Hungarian Jew Soros” for orchestrating mass protests against his regime in 2013. Open Society announced Monday that it was wrapping up operations in Turkey in response to the baseless claims.
“I know that this is the age of disinformation; there’s no truth left. But ... we don’t have a lot of alternatives.”

Nationalists in the United States, too, have followed suit. In one National Republican Congressional Committee TV spot in Minnesota ahead of this month’s midterms, Soros was pictured behind piles of cash, while a voiceover told voters that “Billionaire George Soros bankrolls ‘the Resistance.’” Matt Gaetz, a Republican congressman from Florida, suggested on Twitter that Soros was funding the migrant caravan, a claim that Trump himself promoted, even after a pipe bomb was sent to Soros’ suburban New York address.
Some in the president’s circle have gone even further in their vilification: Last month, his attorney Rudy Giuliani retweeted a post that linked Soros to anti-Brett Kavanaugh protests and labeled him “the anti-Christ.”
For Benardo, the burgeoning creep of these fringe conspiracy theories into the mainstream of American politics shows that it’s high time for his organization to push back more forcefully. He said Open Society is determined to call out the falsehoods, hopeful that Soros’ status as a liberal bogeyman “can’t last forever.”
“I know that this is the age of disinformation; there’s no truth left,” he said. “But ... we don’t have a lot of alternatives.”