Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

like, at work, where I'm one of the plain language emo kids, it's not a good thing when people take a term with jargon and regular meanings, even when they're related, and use the jargon definition in the wrong context. It's sloppy.

It's not sloppy it's disingenuous

It's the left wing equivalent of right wingers calling liberal policies "social engineering." It gives a conspiratorial, sinister edge to things they disagree with.

i don't think terms like structural or symbolic violence are foreign to people who study philosophy, women's studies, or any other humanities field, which is where this conversation is taking place. they certainly were common in the english department at my school.

We can still dispute their usage.

didn't know nymag.com was part of the humanities literature but it makes sense

didn't intend for my link to sound like I was supporting the journal's accusation, which is yeah problematic like Sund4r said, but I thought it was worth throwing into the conversation. I always associated struc. violence w/ ingrained prejudice/hatred that's baked into political/economic institutions, for the most part.

I read the article. My immediate reaction is that it does a reasonable job of showing that some ways of treating transgender identity as legitimate while discrediting "transracialism" don't work. I'm less certain about the attempt made near the end to block parallel moves from being made on behalf of e.g. "otherkin" people, and I suspect that anxiety about just that kind of slippery slope is part of what drives the hostility to her position.

I'm sure there are arguments against her position that she didn't consider, and I'm willing to be persuaded that she was egregiously negligent, or worse, in not considering them. I'll be curious to read some of the response articles that will probably be coming soon.

(My immediate reaction is similar.)

Thanks for the link, stphone.

i don't think terms like structural or symbolic violence are foreign to people who study philosophy, women's studies, or any other humanities field, which is where this conversation is taking place

but their familiarity isn't the same as their being accepted in those circles, in particular being accepted in the usages intended by the critics of the tuvel article.

the answer to tombot's q is that the usage (given its uptake) changes the social reality, obviously.

part of the skepticism about the journal's response comes from reluctance, within the broader intellectual communities in which the core constituency of the journal is included, to concede the validity of the usage.

i read something today that highlights tuvel's commitment to millianism abt things like liberty and experiments with life-projects, and that would certainly underline the difference of opinion between tuvel and her detractors, since a millian is unlikely to agree that much speech can be harmful in any sense injurious to liberty, particularly philosophical speech produced in the service of liberty of thought. but that just seems to show, depending on your tastes, how the disagreement was illicitly converted into a moral-political one by her detractors, or how it occupies just the kind of border territory about harmful speech for which philosophy will never be capable of settling distinctions of licit and illicit.

Your last point is a great reason why philosophers should shut the fuck up every now and then, btw.

bite me, creep

Hey, if you want, I can try and play the game as well:

The disagreement wasn't 'illicitly' converted into a moral-political one, rather what we have here is what Lyotard calls a 'differend', a conflict between two discursive systems that cannot be resolved in either one. A political discourse finds the wrongs of an article of philosophical discourse so grievous - deadnaming someone on page 1, using a term found offensive to many without discussion, failing to include viewpoints of the minorities the article proclaims to be about - that they attack it, but using their own discourse. Significantly, Leiter seems to recognize this differend, as he calls for law to be involved, rather than further philosophical discourse.

tl;dr: Philosophers should shut the fuck up from time to time, when they don't know what they're talking about.

well that's never stopped you has it

http://www.totalprosports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/fight-of-the-century.jpg

Well, no, but then again, I am not a philosopher, and I don't do philosophical discourse :) That's, like, my point...

Yes of all the forms of discourse that should be able to threaten and bully and cuss out other forms of discourse, let's have shouty political dudgeon be at the top of the pecking order, please

also Fred I think you missed Adam's point just a tiny bit

and, yes, white people policing the borders of black identity is violent.

This makes it seem like the paper is taking the position of getting to define who is and isn't black, when surely any defense of transracialism (ignorant, ill-advised, whatever) works towards a situation where this can no longer be defined? Blackness as a social construct being a political invention to further white supremacy.

I realise the problem is that race being a social construct does not eliminate its reality in everyday life, structural oppression, etc. and that these issues need to be faced, which is why there was such a strong negative reaction towards Dolezal, but "policing the borders" seems like a weird way to characterise something that aims to make those borders irrelevant.

But at the moment, nobody expects transracialism to go both ways, so isn't it in practice just a further consolidation of white privilege?

But at the moment, nobody expects transracialism to go both ways

I literally only know of one person who identifies as transracial, and I think that goes for most people who've heard of the term (just did a search for "transracial", "assigned black at birth" and that throws up nothing but Dolezal links, too), so isn't it a bit early to make that statement?

(a bit early to write an academic paper on the issue as well, probably)

a certain key&peele sketch comes to mind..

it's weird how strategies that seek to erase race, a bit like people who don't see skin colour, always seem to work in a whitening direction

🗻

the revelation that nv thinks of fred b as the muhammad ali of ilx discourse has turned my world upside down

two titans of the challop game at the peak of their powers

couldn't find a Gary Mason pic quickly enough

I am thinking of self-identifying as a member of the upper classes, see how that works out for me

*tugs forelock deferentially*

class is just a social construct, plebs

it's working out great so far imo

Are people seriously calling for Stephen Colbert to be sacked over that cock-holster joke?

Are people seriously calling for Stephen Colbert to be sacked over that cock-holster joke?

Right-wing internet people who think they see a lever, yes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzVc7s-_e8

Couldn't find the exact right thread but needed to relay this story somewhere. My wife, a teacher, had to attend a workshop on microaggressions, led by two Hispanic women and a very tall white woman. Toward the end, people were sharing their experiences with microaggressions and the tall white woman described how she hated being referred to as an "amazon" and that it made her think of grace jones, but then someone told her it was like being like Wonder Woman and she no longer felt bad about it. A black woman in the audience asked if this had anything to do with the fact that grace jones is black and Wonder Woman is white, and she responded "oh no, my best friend is black."

What's wrong with Grace Jones?

The "best friend is black" line is tacky but the grace jones implication is v offensive.

Of course it is, that's the point.

Yeah.

Sometimes I feel like white people who lead antiracism seminars tend to be sort of racist. Like that dude tim wise.

At least in some cases. It's not a general rule.

maybe theyre just put on the spot in front of ppl more often idk

maybe they shd think about whether they're the ideal person to be doing that kind of training idk

tbf I do a bunch of disability awareness stuff despite crippling incompetency not being an actual disability

What's wrong with Grace Jones?

― Treeship, Tuesday, May 9, 2017 10:28 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My impression of Grace Jones is that she's androgynous and kinda a weirdo, if someone were to ask me why I would rather think of myself as Wonder Woman rather than her

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/ff/Slave_to_the_Rhythm.png

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/05/11/st-olaf-president-racist-note-was-%E2%80%98fabricated%E2%80%99

A racist note threatening a black woman at St. Olaf College was “fabricated” and was not a genuine threat, the college's president told students Wednesday, The Star Tribune reported. The note led to a series of protests on campus and demands that the college do more to promote diversity and to fight racism. The college's president, David R. Anderson, revealed few details about what the college has learned about the note. But he said it was part of a “strategy to draw attention to concerns about the campus climate.” Anderson said that a student was responsible for the fake note, but that privacy laws prevented him from discussing the person's identity or the college's actions involving the student.

dammit

My wife, a teacher, had to attend a workshop on microaggressions, led by two Hispanic women and a very tall white woman. Toward the end, people were sharing their experiences with microaggressions and the tall white woman described how she hated being referred to as an "amazon" and that it made her think of grace jones

Yeah wtf is wrong with being Grace Jones was also my reaction to this

I mean I know what tall woman means obvs: doesn't like being singled out as a 'weird person' for the way she looks and Grace Jones pops into her head as an example of a 'weird person'

weird of her to think of grace jones

Grace Jones is tall, like an amazon.

Obviously being Grace Jones is awesome, plus you don't have to worry if your movie will be decent like WW has to.

Yes, if you're Grace Jones you already know none of your movies has been decent. (Sorry, Conan the Destroyer!)