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http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2014/11/everything-problematic/quote:People who belong to oppressed groups are just people, with thoughts ultimately as fallible as anyone else’s. They aren’t oracles who dispense eternal wisdom. Ironically, this principle of infallibility, designed to combat oppression, has allowed essentialism to creep in. The trait that defines a person’s group membership is treated as a source of innate ethical knowledge. This is to say nothing about the broader problem of how you’re supposed to decide who’s a source of innate knowledge. Certainly not someone who innately “knows” that homosexuality is disgusting and wrong, but why not, if you’re simply relying on private revelation rather than public criteria? Personally, this essay afforded me a bit of peace of mind after butting heads with some very intelligent, very pissed off activist friends. I'd like to say up front that it shouldn't be taken as supporting social or any other conservatism, especially not any sort of Men's Rights perspective; the author is still a queer activist. I remember that there were quite a few talented activists on SA in the LF days. I'm curious if any of y'all might've had similar experiences to those of the author of the above piece.
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Dec 3, 2014 04:28
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ReV VAdAUL, How on earth did you use that quote and make that analogy? She writes that gay views on homophobia "more important"; you write that that equates to "women's experiences of being women are irrelevant." Yes, some poorly educated and hateful people will misread her, but that's always the case with any public rhetoric. I also see absolutely nothing wrong with the argument about otherkin, which no one responded to substantively. Are you responding to the fact that otherkin are just obviously wacky and no one needs to take them seriously? If so, that makes me question your viewpoints on the mentally ill. Her point is that if you don't take every group who claims oppression seriously ("they're denying me my right to be a little fox, the human-bodied-privileged scum!"), why would you automatically take other groups' claims of oppression as fact? Automatically, meaning, without engaging your own judgement (which you more than likely do with regard to otherkin). Regardless, I appreciate y'all's comments on both sides of the argument. I'd like to add a personal example about not being able to trust the viewpoints of oppressed peoples. The example of the homophobic gay person, while rhetorically sound, was pretty hypothetical. Anyway, I worked in immigration advocacy for a couple of years. Some of the most virulently anti-amnesty people (amnesty meaning, providing a path to citizenship or at least decriminalization of being unauthorized/undocumented) were those immigrants who had arrived to the US in the last 5-7 years and who had successfully obtained documentation and authorization. They had to pass through a poo poo system with widespread, clearly evident racism, and they wanted them illegals to get the same lovely treatment. Just because those documented immigrants were linguistically (most of them were Spanish-dominant), racially, and otherwise oppressed, didn't mean that I was going to become anti-amnesty just to adhere to the viewpoints of oppressed people. To throw in a language-based example, many speakers of indigenous languages in Latin America, even monolinguals, believe their native languages to be worthless and that their children should learn Spanish or English. They're oppressed, but I don't agree that the source of their oppression is their mother tongue itself (rather than society's widespread discriminatory attitudes toward it), which should be discarded. Am I failing as a leftist? Mortley fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 12:20
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ReV VAdAUL posted:....If one fails at one of the criteria one becomes one of the bad ones. ... This is precisely the attitude that the article is arguing against. You're reading a strictness into the piece that's simply not there. They're literally suggestions for avoiding depression as a result of your political views; they're supposed to help activists keep on fighting the good fight. She's arguing against the "if you're not with us, you're against us!" mindset, and you're saying "she's not with me, so she's against me!"
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Dec 3, 2014 14:19
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I dropped out of the discussion, but I enjoyed reading this a lot. This was the first time D&D has made me laugh since LF. Thanks again, y'all.
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Dec 5, 2014 15:57
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Sorry, I know this was from a few pages back (grad school and teaching keeps me from keeping up) butGlyphGryph posted:.... Wait, is what's bolded above seriously something that the utterly disorganized left thinks that it can control?
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Dec 6, 2014 09:50
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sausage eyes posted:All it is a a rhetorical tool to explain structural oppression through individual experience. This was one of my favorite threads in LF - "explain yourselves, sex havers!" - accusing anyone who had ever had sex of discrimination. After all, if you are at all sexually attractive or good at sex, sleeping with you is a benefit. And if you distribute benefits based on things that people have no control over - the symmetry of their faces, broadness of their hips or shoulders, etc. - you're being discriminatory by definition. It's one of the reasons that I consider egalitarianism a goal always worth striving for but which is absolutely unachievable (and not desirable to achieve). This is a definite IMHO though. The Insect Court posted:Racism was(and is) used to create a false sense of shared identity between poor whites and white elites so the latter court exert social control. That's hardly a novel or controversial observation. I actually agree with your perspective, but I have to call you out for the meandering clusterfuck of language in the bolded section. "Serving to create a form of false consciousness by pretending" is called "making people think" or just "lying".
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Dec 7, 2014 22:22
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Gantolandon posted:"Here's why you really should sleep with me to be a good feminist!" - an LF goon discovering importance of intersectionality. The possibility of anyone saying what you put in quotes is exactly why I said that utterly thorough egalitarianism WASN'T desirable. Mortley fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Dec 8, 2014 |
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Dec 8, 2014 09:41
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Gantolandon posted:It's actually better than McGill's essay, as it describes the problem more clearly.
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Dec 8, 2014 23:03
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Helsing posted:Well I guess whatever uses this thread had have run their course but I guess that on some level this clusterfuck of a discussion is kind of instructive. Yeah, discussing politics online is kind of like democracy: it's godfuckingawful, and better than all the alternatives (i.e. boring and alienating your friends and/or never discussing politics).
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Dec 8, 2014 23:25
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Space Whale posted:I realize you're probably still pissed at me but I agree with this 100%, not that I want my sentiments to it to make it look bad by association. I wanted to agree with Job Truniht but I was hoping he would go back and edit that post. I can't follow exactly what was being said.
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Dec 8, 2014 23:54
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I know the consensus was that this thread derailed repeatedly and went to poo poo, but the last 5 posts have followed exactly what the article in the OP recommends - in activism, look for concrete policy recommendations which are informed by theory rather than political vaporware.
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Dec 10, 2014 19:42
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Yeah, "there was once an instance of a problem after a policy was enacted to counteract that problem" is not exactly a reason not to focus on policy. I also used to really question the systems approach to politics, though. I don't want to give a bunch of details, but one of my friends works on energy policy in DC and went to an Ivy League school. I'm almost certain that he was trained by neoliberal technocrats, and when we argued, I had just read "A Brief History of Neoliberalism" by Harvey. My friend basically approaches a problem like "how do we set the price of electricity in a certain market?" as an issue of computer modeling. You set parameters - e.g. "don't let corporations exploit the system" - and the computer spits out a way to structure the costs that is ideal. "Policy as market efficiency" is of course one of the hallmarks of neoliberal thinking, and the point-by-point of his final policy recommendations were out of my wheelhouse. I had one point of disagreement with him - I said, "what you're doing is political, in the sense that it is an argument about the ideal way to run society. You should think of it as political, not only as an engineering problem." He disagreed, saying that there was simply a best way of doing things, like there's a best way to build a bridge. I guess what I'm thinking through here is - there's a distinction to be made between focusing on policy in discussing politics and disregarding entirely the core issues, right? My friend didn't want to consider economic justice in the creation of his model. edit: thanks for your input Guy; very interesting. Mortley fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 13, 2014 18:27
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