Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

the brane-plasticity point about teh youth is oft made nowadays in higher ed

my brain is now as hard as a rock. go ahead. punch it as hard as you can.

lol @ law professors saying anything about undergrad pedagogy. then again, it's Slate, what else should I expect

In the responses to Beard and Tatchell that I read the problem seemed to be the assumption that if you sign a letter you're not just endorsing the words of the letter but the words, past and present, of all your co-signatories, thus implying that those two endorsed transphobia. I don't believe that's a reasonable assumption.

I've come to distrust every account of what happens on Twitter because everybody quotes the worst abuse from their critics and ignores the worst behaviour of people on their side. To take one example from the Feministkilljoys essay, those "understandably strong reactions to Cathy Newman’s racist rant" included the foulest misogyny, violence and anti-semitism (even though Newman isn't Jewish afaik), which the writer ignores. Equally, Newman's defenders ignore the legit criticisms and quote only that foul abuse. Unless you can be bothered to track someone's mentions column in real time, you can never be sure what the mix of responses really was.

The letter didn't appear out of nowhere, though. It's part of a vicious ongoing dispute in the feminist left and is going to look, to a lot of people, like an attempt from one side of that dispute to claim the moral high ground and paint its detractors as irrational and illiberal. It's a bit like signing a letter asking for a good faith debate on immigration organised by Migrationwatch and signed by half the staff of the Daily Telegraph.

It definitely seems like Beard and Tatchell signed in good faith, as it were, but I can see why people might be disappointed given the source.

I'm not sure a good faith debate is possible at the moment tbh but I like Beard's subsequent blogpost:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2015/02/no-platforming-1.html

There has to be a real word for "whorephobe" right?

I hope not to see the term catch on.

can't ppl dislike something like sex work w/out the presumption that their feelings come from a phobia?

like does everything have to be a phobia now? when you attach phobia to a word, is it even supposed to imply that you have a pathological response anymore, or is it just supposed to make u sound silly?

I think it compares gay and trans people with prostitutes. No wonder I don't follow feminist stuff online. It's lost touch with ordinary women.

The trans issue and sex worker issue are separate. It's typically framed as "exclusionary" rather than phobic.

is it just supposed to make u sound silly?

First google result for ephebophobe

gay women, trans woman & sex workers are ordinary women

Sex workers aren't "ordinary". Their situation should not be compared to people who are born a certain way.

Also people who say this often spend ZERO time on class issues that affect a lot of women. We should be doing stuff for women struggling to make ends meet, not distracting people with controversy.

Also, IMO there's a difference between stripping and hooking.

lotta opinions in those two posts

second-wave feminism: 'show us some women who are not sex workers'

Is the sw / trans thing as bitter in the US as it is in the UK? I don't seem to hear as much about it.

It's bitter here too, but most of the US TERFs don't have the kind of media exposure that, say, Julie Burchill has. Really, though, arguing with TERF trolls is tempting but seems exhausting and not as politically useful as other forms of activism.

if anything US TERFs seem to be perpetually on the defense any time they rear their heads & get exposed

which is as it should be

Sectarianism in left progressive politics is almost as bad as in Protestantism.

lotta opinions in those two posts

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, February 18, 2015 3:36 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Haha

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/

in the world beyond grade school, where adults must exercise their moral knowledge and reasoning to conduct themselves in the society

pity ppl who engage with the world like this, its like pua flowcharts applied to ethics rather than women

Seems like a bit of a leap there

If it’s not true that it’s wrong to murder a cartoonist with whom one disagrees, then how can we be outraged? If there are no truths about what is good or valuable or right, how can we prosecute people for crimes against humanity? If it’s not true that all humans are created equal, then why vote for any political system that doesn’t benefit you over others?

moral relativism has really easy and good answers to all of these questions

how can we be outraged if we can't be sure god is outraged with us

'how can we' uh how you been doin it all this time yo

Yeah, but he means 'how can we rationally,' right?

It is funny that he thinks some K-12 reading comprehension exercises are the main thing driving relativism.

People who complain about "moral relativism" are virtually always too simple-minded (or cynical) to actually apply their supposed moral universalism evenhandedly.

of course jmm but for some reason how can wes always leave out the fantasy about having unshakable grounding for every judgment we make when they get to saying 'how can we', which makes for a fairly different speech act in the practical context of moral alarm i suspect

xp isn't it possible to be hypocritical about your own moral universalism and still condemn a moral relativism totality?

how can we dance when our earth is turning how can we sleep while our beds are burning

The blank stare on his face said it all.

It doesn't seem like moral relativism is the real target in that article. It comes up in passing, and it's clear he doesn't care for it, but the real beef is with the view that there are no moral facts at all. Relativists, as I understand it, tend to think there are moral facts, or at least moral truths of a sort.

huh? moral relativism is the view that different people/cultures will inevitably have different views regarding moral truth (and everything else). it seems predicated on the the idea that so-called "moral truths" are social constructs, local preferences, thus not factual in any universal sense.

author is a complete dork though:

When I went to visit my son's second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and googled "fact vs. opinion". The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the ones I found in my son's classroom.

Handy metaethics chart (big image)

This one puts relativism as a species of moral realism: there is moral truth but it depends on our beliefs. That's basically how I understand relativism. It's different from anti-realism in that we retain the idea of there being moral truths and facts, but these vary with respect to culture.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/03/02/why-our-children-dont-think-there-are-moral-facts/

Do negative qualities have an apex or a nadir? Could something be, say, the apex of tediousness?

Oh, no reason. Just wondering.

abyss looks into u

I'm not sure Danish even have words for 'moral truths' and 'moral facts'. There might just be moral right and wrong.

How about like universally ethical v culturally mediated?

I sort of get the author's discomfort on some of those points, but I still think the idea of "moral FACTS" is awkward at best. "Killing is wrong," is, in the most literal sense, not a "fact" even if it is "true." Moral truths is maybe a better term. Seems more like some of those Q's should have been avoided altogether, as they could be confusing or ambiguous.

First, the definition of a fact waffles between truth and proof — two obviously different features. Things can be true even if no one can prove them. For example, it could be true that there is life elsewhere in the universe even though no one can prove it. Conversely, many of the things we once “proved” turned out to be false. For example, many people once thought that the earth was flat. It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative. Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.

this shit is so numbskulled I am filled with rage

There's a kinda analogue in Judaism- things we'd know are wrong without God (murder, theft, etc) and things we wouldn't (keeping the sabbath holy).

I thought the author gave perfectly fine reasons to think those definitions of "fact" and "opinion" are not very good.

Something might be a fact for me if I can prove it but not a fact for you if you can’t. In that case, E=MC2 is a fact for a physicist but not for me.

this is not how the scientific method works you goddamned moron

(not directed at you JRN)