Sociology

Why is sociology such a touchy-feely, wishy washy field fully of SJWs these days and not a true science?

Back in the day there were several attempts to develop a positivistic social science (Weber, Comte, Durkheim).

There's no a priori reason that a scientific approach to social questions should be ruled out.

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It is not the professors, it is the students. Put yourself in their flesh:
> Say something about criminal justice/race/sex
> Hordes of SJWs storm the President's office complaining
> Lose your job

Yep, it is much better to just surrender. However, if you have the support of the college administration you can still make it. Search about the University of Chicago, they have said no to safe spaces.

I fucking hate all who study sociology. Always so strong opinioned and political and punchable.

>There's no a priori reason that a scientific approach to social questions should be ruled out.
wew lad.

Critical theory. It gave people with no understanding of the scientific method a way to feel smart and use big words (many of which are literally made up). It has ruined so much of the social sciences, and it distracts from efforts to understand society that would actually yield genuine insight and application.
Literally just complaining about muh dialouges and muh discourse.

I don't know what it is about sociology that made it succumb to critical bullshit. Perhaps it was a lack of adequate models or research methods. I'm just glad my field hasn't given in to it.

>Critical theory
Its interesting to read tho

You are just butthurt that people don't share your silly views.

Because it's really fucking difficult. Creating models that predict and model reality in Physics is fucking child's play in comparison to making accurate models for Sociology. So instead they just don't even try.

>There's no a priori reason that a scientific approach to social questions should be ruled out.
This is putting it mildly. I'd say that a scientific approach to the social sciences is the only productive one.

>I don't know what it is about sociology that made it succumb to critical bullshit
Oftentimes an audience interprets you more by what you align sharply against than on a thousand pages of your writing. Critical theory was largely a disillusioned reaction to Marxism which sought to salvage any working theories of "social justice" by stabbing the very heart of dialectics and historical materialism. Of course, this "disillusionment" was itself an artifact of theoretical weakness. It's a story of those utopians who stubbornly ignored the global nature of capitalism for Stalin's "socialism in one country," among many other things, because they simply -preferred- to see "progress" and a viable theory -- only to scream bloody murder and tear away any remaining pretense of these philosophical foundations when they so drastically mispredicted history, rather than confront their own theoretical weaknesses and utopian blinders.
Benjamin's critique, marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm which you may take as representative, was published after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed was submitted for publication before the first Moscow Trial began.
Of course, the bourgeois and its client states have much to gain in advancing a conspicuously heterodox "Marxism" that has ceased to be Marxist in any substantial sense.
Because historical materialism is a basic postulate if we are to have consistently predictive models in social science, suppression of Marxist ideas inherently requires sections of academia be nearly useless, stacked, and inertial. This isn't a particularly stable equilibrium. In fact, the modern SJW blight can be largely explained in terms of these contradictions.

Cont.
You'd certainly expect to see the ever more vicious and rabid attempts at self-justification we've observed. Privilege theory, especially, in assigning almost every malaise the label "oppression" and blaming an amorphous, nondescript, world of systematic injustice it has set up to be interchangeable with "the way things are right now" of any hypothetical instant, seeks to convince people of its necessity through an imaginary world and over its abject failures to cause actual improvements or so much as make testable predictions in the real one. It cannot abide challenge from within or without, because this perturbs the equilibrium that it feeds on
Stacked and useless cliques are inertial and insular, then, from a position of self-interest of individual members. Lysenkoism comes to mind, as do many other types of woo.