Imposing my assumption of how units work is actually just stating how units work. Postmodernism would say, "ah ha! You're blind to your bias!" but really I'm just right. Repeat, ad infinitum because unlike serious people, postmodernists can go on being wrong forever. https://twitter.com/mdsteele47/status/1282369312024596486

Postmoderism holds that whether or not something is true isn't all that interesting. The really interesting thing is making people aware that political power, mostly in the sense of a diffuse social SYSTEM, authenticates statements as true, say by choosing which methods work.

I started to type that postmodernism is interested in HOW political power authenticates statements as true, but that's wrong. It only pretends to do this because it believes (Foucault's power/knowledge) that's just what power does. It mostly just says it a lot and confuses itself

Postmodernism would be concerned specifically with how rigorous methods and thus real truth limit the possibilities of other ways of knowing (read: thinking) and thus limits the "potentialities" of knowingness (read: bullshit it's possible to say). It "expands" these w word games

Foucault's contention (power/knowledge) is that "truth" misses the point of the politics inherent in the social process of authenticating statements as "true," and then "true" statements shape society (biopower or biopolitics) because people (politically) believe their truth.

Dipshits like this math ed activist and math teacher ( https://twitter.com/mdsteele47/status/1282369312024596486?s=19) play word games like "when does a heap become a pile?!" to confuse themselves and others (politicians and our kids) about the simple fact that like units are required to made addition mean something.

Their next step is to make political use of that confusion to reorganize math according to a pedagogy of confusion and mind-expanding explorations of other potentialities, all while dropping Critical Theory lines about how white, Western men brutalized and excluded other cultures

Their goal, on paper, is to make "math achievement" (but not math literacy or competence) go up by getting rid of real mathematical assessment and real math and replace it with nonsense like art projects and storytelling, all subjectively graded for equity. All Critical, too.

The "ethnomathematics" programs already being installed in Seattle schools and possibly San Francisco's explicitly make these claims, trying to make math "more collectivist" and discussion/ storytelling-oriented about when math maintains or overthrows injustice.

At the forefront of these projects are political interests on the left, talking about other cultures' approaches to math, how the West "stole" or "excluded" those (first by starting to do math well, then by demanding rigor/proof, which they see as white supremacist politics).

They explicitly want to move away from the idea that there's "one right answer in math," which is a slightly complicated topic, to admit "multiple ways of thinking" and subjective "answers" to mathematical-ish questions, usually involving feelings, stories, and word games.

A lot of people don't know this, but I started my journey into speaking publicly because I was incensed that some Christians around 2010 refused to recognize the first amendment by wanting Biblical creationism in public schools. This is legitimately far worse than that.

Addendum: In light of this remark, because postmodernism views all claims on truth as political stances, it is almost entirely culturally relativist, but because it, especially now, is Critical in orientation, it believes "oppressed" "truths" are most true https://twitter.com/DonDraperClone/status/1283038281588969473?s=19

The Woke ideology is a very specific form of (Critical) applied postmodernism, which dramatically magnifies the belief that "marginalized" politics are, by definition, better than "dominant" ones. So, "dominant" truths are much less valid than "oppressed" "truths."

It's absolutely crucial to understand that this principle about knowing, called the radical egalitarian principle, is a functional core to Woke "logic." It's the politics of "liberation" from "systemic oppression" (Neo-Marxism) with postmodernist truth-as-politics relativism.