GuppyShark wrote: ↑2018-02-26 05:48am
Ironically, it's the clumsy use of language that precipitated this thread.
The guy who wrote the article in the OP is a young radical, who went overboard: Suggesting that without 'whiteness' white people would be 'zombies', and later doubled down on his article with the assertion that 'only white people can be racist'.
He's a student. I take what he wrote with a pinch of salt because he's young and probably did not expect his article to be the subject of international scrutiny. I do not expect him to be an accomplished scholar of the field.
I still think there is meaningful insight to be gleaned if we can keep level heads.
The problem is, a process which turns sophomore* students into screaming lunatics, or people who
convincingly impersonate screaming lunatics, is only a trustworthy process if it promises to turn the students
back when they get their bachelor's degree. If following a certain trajectory screws up your sense of perspective and ability to use language to communicate ideas in a reasonably non-offensive manner, then following that trajectory
further is going to cripple you in important ways, unless it takes the things it screws up and screws them back
down.
The value of a field is reduced, in that our ability to learn actionable and useful things from it is endangered, if it actively subverts its practitioners' ability to keep level heads.
Not all academic disciplines have this problem. I'm pretty sure most don't. But uh...
whatever... the thing is that Effie and Straha did, it seems to have this problem associated with it.
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*In the literal sense as well as the '1-2 years into the educational institution' sense. The word 'sophomore' originally meant something like 'wise fool' or 'enlightened fool:' One who knows enough to behave foolishly as a result of new ideas, but not enough to put those ideas into context and apply them sensibly.
Alyrium Denryle wrote: ↑2018-02-26 01:27amIt also suggests that hating straight people as a class is the same thing as hating all of them personally, which, uh, no. That's not what that phrase means.
Really? When did that happen within the english language? Common use determines the meaning of words. If the same term means different things in technical jargon then it is on the user of technical jargon to precisely define the meaning they intend so as not to cause confusion. When you wade into an argument and use jargon, it is in fact your obligation to explain that jargon in clear language. Much like it is my job, when discussing the biochemical mechanisms of action for organophosphate pesticides, to explain what an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor is.
Especially since what's being defended here is very similar to a common defense of anti-minority bigotry: "When I say I hate the Martians, I just mean I hate their habit of [doing thing Martians do]! If they'd stop doing that everything would be fine! Some of my best friends are Martian!"
Whatever is going on under the hood, it
LOOKS very much like a straightforward mirroring of the biases and prejudices normally used by the majority to oppress the minority. And a lot of people who simply
oppose such oppression dislike it when it's pointed the other way, even if they find it less unsympathetic under those conditiosn.
There are instances where this is not the case, especially on platforms with limited character space like twitter, where a feminist might say Men Are Trash. They don't usually mean actual men, they mean the cisheteropatriachy, or they're grousing about some douchebag manspreading on the bus. But in the general case, they don't actually mean they literally think men are all individually terrible people, which is what hating a class of people is in common use.
And such tweets STILL tend to cause misunderstanding that feeds a great deal of honestly offended and confused backlash.
While most men have on some level internalized that when a specific man does something particularly stupid in a characteristically 'masculine' way, women will throw up their hands and shout "MEN!"... A lot of men don't seem comfortable with the idea that this license to cast aspersions on the group due to frustration with individuals generalizes to being able to say "men are trash."
And a lot of men who have no desire to filibuster "women's right to complain about jerkish men" or whatever wind up weighing in on this, because "Men are trash" is not
generally understood to mean "some specific men, plus a larger social infrastructure that most men didn't create and have little or no conscious desire to preserve, are trash, while some other men are not trash or at least not necessarily trash."
If you create ambiguous language in which you routinely say "all men are arsonists," you can expect a fair number of men to complain that this is unfair and inaccurate because they've never set a fire in their lives, or at least never set a building on fire.
Also, it might be a good idea to not craft posts as an impenetrable wall of jargon, as a general rule. It became very clear to me reading through this thread what everyone else means by "having a right to live in a place" and what Straha means by it, and what it implies, are different things.
See,
I couldn't even tell if this was the case. Straha was using "right to live" in a sense I am unfamiliar with, but showed no sign of that.
I mean, if I say "this person has no right to be in this place," and this place legitimately belongs to someone, the conventional understanding of my words is that in a lawful society, the person who properly owns the place has every right to order the intruder escorted off the patch by law enforcement. Scaled up to entire ethnic groups this becomes ethnic cleansing; anyone who says "Jews have no right to live in Boronistan" is
effectively advocating for the expulsion of the Jews from Boronistan by force. And furthermore, more to the point, it explicitly says that if the Jews were to resist such an expulsion order, they would be in the wrong for doing so.
There may be some very specific philosophy-of-social-science sense in which "no right to live" means something more innocuous like "has to be polite and deferential and apologize when asked and probably owes the owner some money or something." But that's another one of those terms that has to be defined.
Gnostic complicity:The state of being a participant in and benefiting from structural oppression while also 1) having consciously held prejudices and/or 2) having sufficient knowledge of structural oppression and working actively and knowingly to maintain a privileged position
Example case: Your racist uncle, or your born again sister who "loves you" but doesn't think you should be allowed to get married because it isn't what The Lord Intended. Electronic Arts during the development of Mass Effect (I am still sore I had to mod the game to get it on with Garrus because they wouldn't let bioware gay it up until ME3. Don't judge me!)
My first thought was "well, it's okay for EA to write in straight characters.
At the same time... they clearly
did not hesitate to create an attractive bisexual female alien, and indeed created an entire
species of attractive bisexual female aliens. Saying "hey no fair, I want an attractive bisexual male alien too!" is
totally fair.
Even when one is not actively being oppressed by one's "agnostic complicity," it's still
there and impacts the way one analyzes things.
Plus, if everyone is complicit, we MUST make distinctions between someone who is willfully complicit and someone who is complicit merely by being born and raised, otherwise we are unjust.
This. If we're going after giant society-wide Nebulous Evils, there has to be some way to categorize the majority of the population as being guilty of little or no crime, or at least no crime beyond the relatively petty level of "insufficient wokeness." Otherwise the struggle reduces to a tiny minority of the Woke against a vast majority of people actively hated by the Woke, and that
literally never ends well.
That is, if we understand hatred as the desire to destroy, it is almost necessary, practically morally compelled to hate straight people so that we might erase the straightness and let them live free as people. This understanding of hatred as a liberating emotion is hardly an invention of critical theory, either. There's close to 2000 years of precedent on it:
And there is where your rhetoric fails, because to anyone not seeped in your way of using language, that statement makes no god damn sense.
I know what you mean. Anyone coming in an reading this cold, will not.
Plus, even after one has learned what is nominally 'meant' by all this...
I will ever after have to wonder:
How literally should I interpret this? Once we create a situation where people can just calmly say "we must destroy maleness" or "we must destroy whiteness" and expect that this will be casually accepted by everyone around them... Well, how do you differentiate between people who want to "destroy maleness" in some abstract sense, and people who
literally want to destroy all the men and create a society of parthenogenic women or rely on giant sperm banks and tissue cultures? It's
really easy for people to equivocate rhetorically between positions trending towards the literal destruction of men, and the defense 'oh, I only mean toxic masculine behavior patterns!'
...
I mean, one of the biggest things we try to do in
stamping out overtly evil forms of bigotry is making it clear that it is just plain
not okay, to fire off broad shotgun blasts of destructive intent towards the entire minority group. Even if "that's not what I meant!" A man who says "Women! Should just lock them all in barrels and feed them through a hole in the side!" should be met with a response like
"SERIOUSLY WHAT THE FUCK", not a bunch of people smiling and nodding and saying "okay, I understand that when you say that, you
meant to say something relatively unobjectionable like 'there are some problematic female-coded behaviors in our society that need to change.' "
Because we don't want there to be men who take this literally and start literally locking women in barrels, and we know from experience that this can and WILL happen in a society where a lot of men think they have a socially accepted right ot do so.
...
I think similar arguments apply to our efforts to create a future society. The words for literal genocide or the cultural destruction of things that don't cause problems, and the words for destruction of genuinely harmful institutions that everyone would be better off without,
should not be the same words.
