If you don’t want to be slapped
Academic ethics…
You may think that’s just some high school kid but in fact he’s an academic. He’s been comparing gender critical feminists to Holocaust deniers for hours.
So he’s saying that the ideology that says men are women if they say they are is an authoritative ideology, and that it’s true or at least strives towards truth, while skepticism about that ideology is not true and does not even strive towards truth.
How do people get so confused?
We’re a “specimen of untruth” because we say people are what they are and not what they fantasize they are (unless the two happen to be the same).
This is a belief system where fantasies represent the truth and empirical reality is a specimen of untruth.
How did that happen?
They have definitely decided to lump us in with Holocaust deniers and racists because they have no argument. There are no well done studies that support their ideas, their ideology. They have to use straw man, ad hominem, and poor analogies in order to make their “case”. Scientific untruth indeed.
Well, you see, clownfish. And sometimes women pretended to be men in the past. NOT because many occupations were barred to women, but because they were TRANS. And lady-brains. And giving out puberty-blockers to kids and not following up on what happens to them is good medical “care.” And a “woman” is anyone who thinks they’re a “woman.” And no predatory man would EVER take advantage of the idea of “self-ID.” And what is this word “detransition” that you speak of?
Emphasis added.
I see the typical right-wing projection here. Grift is ubiquitous on the right, see, e.g. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con. On the left, not so much.
(Or maybe I’m wrong here. Is GC a really lucrative gig? Is the GC crowd raking in the the speaking fees and talk radio sponsorships and YouTube monetization? Inquiring minds want to know…)
Heh, very droll. No.
The only department that is more useless as a matter of routine than the Philosophy department is the Sociology department. Most Philosophy departments have a gem or two in the detritus, Sociology is just a disaster.
How do you know that “gender critical” (I hate that term.) feminism doesn’t conform to those standards? Have you, ahem, spoken freely with them? It’s easy to say that something isn’t true when you are not forced to engage with it.
My eyes are trying to roll out of my head. This whole thread is unjustified assertion and a perfect example of projection, which, I suppose, is appropriate given its wokeness. The thing about this sort of thing is that we can play the substitution game (gender ideologues for gender critical feminists) and produce something of equal worth. Specifically zero.
LOL regularly debated LOL
And poisoning the well is known to be fallacious since the time of Aristotle. Oh, right. Logic is a tool of white cisheteropatriarchy and should only be paid any mind when it supports woke conclusions. My bad. That’s nothing at all like the classic fundie line, “Where your original Hebrew agrees with my King James, it’s correct. Where your original Hebrew disagrees with my King James, it’s incorrect.”
One of my replies to him on Twit was “Poison the well much?”
“Good faith” = “I’m having some trouble accepting that trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary is valid, and trans people are who they say they are. Could you please provide me with some heartwarming personal stories, heartbreaking accounts of bullying, heartfelt threats of suicide, and science? Thank you.”
Academic freedom *is* free speech… it wasn’t ok when Mao’s PRC did it and it isn’t ok when you do it.
WTF? Eric, is this Opposite Day? Men who claim to believe they are women are not female. How the hell would the TAs be able to claim the “truth” ground?
Tbh everything he says makes waaaaay more sense if you read it as opposing TA.
Well, quite. And let’s start with:
Well, that sounds kind of bad, doesn’t it? Except that it’s the principle that people should be allowed to say what they want given the usual caveats of fire in a crowded theatre and what have you. It’s the principle that none of us is qualified or empowered to control what anyone else is allowed to say. It’s the principle that we should stand up for the right of other people to say things we don’t like.
I’m failing to see even the slightest bit of bad here. But “free speech absolutionist” is regularly used as a dismissive insult: “Oh, you’re one of those people, are you?”
Why yes, as a matter of fact, yes I am. And that makes you one of those people who thinks they can tell other people what they’re not allowed to say. I’m not the illiberal one here, fella.
And “consequences” (you say next, in my imagination, Eric)? Don’t give me that. There are rightly consequences to free speech but there are also responsibilities. If we want to live in the kind of society where we can criticise the government, then we have the responsibility to keep those consequences proportionate and to fight for the right of people to say things we don’t like. Don’t use “consequences” as a threat; listen to what people have to say and if you don’t like it, don’t listen again rather than trying to prevent everyone else from listening. Condemn speech you find hateful. Protest it, if you like. But stand up for the rights of people to say it anyway. Don’t dismiss that amazing and fundamental right – which is by no means universal – as though it’s some dusty, outdated point of abstract principle.
Honestly, this used to be so obvious that it was hardly worth mentioning. It’s becoming like “serious theologians” talking about Jesus. Listen, guys, your book says Jesus was a wizard, it’s really not any more complicated than that, just fucking deal with it.
I blame Plato. He was the first recorded person to push the idea that abstract or imaginary Truth is more real than the real world. I hate that guy.
latsot #11
Exactly. I’m under no illusion that “the solution to hate-speech is more speech” or “the solution to disinformation is better information”. If the last five years or so have taught us anything (or should have), it’s that trolls don’t turn to stone in the sunlight, the truth is by no means guaranteed to prevail over falsehood, and the best ideas are not guaranteed to rise to the top in a free “marketplace of ideas”. As long as speech is free,
somea lot of it is going to be wrong, harmful, dishonest, stupid, or evil, and all of it will be deemed wrong, harmful, dishonest, stupid, or evil by some. Much of the time falsehoods will be believed over facts, and bad ideas will prevail over good ones. But as long as true claims and good ideas are still allowed in the game, at least they stand a fighting chance, which is probably the best that can be hoped for. I sure as hell don’t know anyone I would trust to wield the power to decide who’s allowed to say what and not abuse it.It’s a fundamental principle:
Do you want someone else deciding what is ok for *YOU* to say? Because there’s no real reason to expect you’ll always be the one holding the hammer.
Completely agree. Why then are trans activists totally opposed to studies showing sexual dimorphism disparities persist after transitioning? Why are they opposed to examining the homicide stats to see if trans people really are being murdered at at disproportionate rate? Or the sexual harassment/assault stats at public toilets and dressing rooms that cease to be sex specific? Why the fuck are the opposed to any information at all?
Enquiring minds and all that.
Oh for FFS. You don’t get to call people Nazis when you’re the ones burning books.
https://www.newsweek.com/jk-rowling-books-burned-tiktok-transgender-issues-1532330
https://www.irishpost.com/news/jedward-call-on-jk-rowling-fans-to-burn-harry-potter-authors-books-following-trans-remarks-192995
To quote Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings#Persecuted_authors
This is one of the things I absolutely hate about the Woke, the tendency to make arguments that frankly wouldn’t be out of place coming from the mouths of the very people they claim to despise.
For example:
Which sounds an awful lot like the exact sort of shit a Nazi academic would say to justify the persecution of their “ideologically incorrect” opponents.
This is the danger of not reading the other side of the argument, of relying on cancelling bad ideas rather than countering them – all too often the basis of those bad ideas isn’t so alien as most of us would like to think.
The “truth” is that we don’t really know the truth. That’s the whole point to academic freedom, the fact that the “truth” is not clear, and whenever you get these bullshit artists claiming to have some sort of divine access to it, or that their intellectual opponents are not striving for it, things start going off the deep end.
There is a fundamentally fascist mentality to seeing universities as indoctrination centers, as if it is the university’s job to assure the moral and intellectual purity of the students. Universities aren’t there to raise people’s kids for them, their educational mission is for adults, who are expected to be able to think for themselves to some extent.
That means being able to disagree on things without assuming that the person disagreeing is the devil trying to subvert some sort of ultimate truth with doubt sowing lies. There is a principle of charity that you’re supposed to have picked up by the age of sixteen, that doesn’t seem to be all that present in these utter jackasses.
Yes, Mr.
Lysenko, er, Lybeck, institutional capture is not necessarily permanent. Your high horse of supposed moral authority isn’t immortal. You wouldn’t be saying this if you thought that this same standard was going to be applied to your beliefs.Gender ideology is a delicate, hybrid thing that can’t survive outside the safety of the academic greenhouse. It does not stand up against close scrutiny, or fact-based arguments. It is dependent upon obfuscation, distortion and redefinition of language, as plain language renders most of its claims nonsensical. Its pronouncements are to be taken on faith, without doubt or question. It would have little or no power to enforce its ideas without institutional capture to provide the muscle and intimidation to silence dissent. Its only hope for continued survival is to perpetuate its top down coup, to consolidate its institutional gains, forcing acceptance and compliance of legal and extra-legal redefinitions of reality before the “unwashed masses” see what is happening and cry foul. Keeping inconvenient, contradictory facts, as well as the arguments of gender critical feminists from being heard at al,l is key to this strategy. The fury and extremeness with which the GC position is being villified shows how desperate they are to discredit any reasoned questioning or opposition. You know they have no argument when their first step is Godwin.