I’m ruminating on the dissenting comments about the rhetoric of reason post, and the puzzle of how the slave society justified itself to itself, and the related puzzle of how abolitionists – whose cause seems so self-evident to us now – were seen as raving maniacs and extremists, and from there I arrived at James Fitzjames Stephens’s review of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which I consider a classic of the genre.

Stephens begins with the opposition of vehement passion and chilly reason:

Mr. Mill’s small volume or long pamphlet on “The Subjection of Women” is intended to prove “that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes– the legal subordination of one

Rick Wilson (anti-Trump Republican pundit) asks:

Why’s it so hard for us to say out loud that Trump has lost his mind?

Reporter Joy Reid has an answer that I don’t really get.

Chalk it up to the powerful media compulsion to normalize him as president. He is president, so the things he says and does are done in the name of the office, and so media writ large strains to import even the crazy stuff into the normal formula for covering a president.

I don’t get why it’s not the other way around. I don’t get why the media compulsion is to normalize him as president as opposed to normalizing the office by refusing to normalize him. … Read the rest

Kathleen Stock, at Brian Leiter’s blog, on the latest blacklistings:

I see that the blog of the Institute of Art and Ideas has taken down a piece ( Download The current transgender debate polarizes Western societies like no other) to which Holly Lawford-Smith and I contributed, alongside Julie Bindel, Robin Dembroff, Susan Stryker and Rebecca Kukla. I assume the reason to be the fuss the latter three have been making on social media and letters to the editor since the piece was published.

One complaint I’ve seen from them is that I have no relevant expertise in this area. Yet my contribution links to my forthcoming piece on sexual orientation, sex, and gender, in the Aristotelian Society proceedings.

Eve Fairbanks argues at the Washington Post that there is some overlap between the rhetoric of the dark web types and that of the “respectable” antebellum defenders of slavery.

My childhood home is just a half-hour drive from the Manassas battlefield in Virginia, and I grew up intensely fascinated by the Civil War. I loved perusing soldiers’ diaries. During my senior year in college, I studied almost nothing but Abraham Lincoln’s speeches. As I wrote my thesis on a key Lincoln address, Civil War rhetoric was almost all I read: not just that of the 16th president but also that of his adversaries.

Thinking back on those debates, I finally figured it out. The reasonable right’s rhetoric is exactly

So a woman is actually being prosecuted for telling a man he’s a man. Sorry to link to the Mail, but naturally the better sources are looking fixedly in the other direction.

[Kate] Scottow, 38, will face magistrates on charges of making malicious communications over social media comments about trans campaigner Stephanie Hayden.

The Crown Prosecution Service said she had been charged over ‘persistent’ messages designed to cause ‘annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety’ to another person between September 2018 and May 2019.

There’s something of an infinite regression here, it seems. Is she being prosecuted for “misgendering” or is it for persistent tweeting at someone? The CPS quote looks as if it’s the latter, but if it is, then … Read the rest

Philosophers chat:

Jason Stanley:

I have been surprised that this point has not been more salient. It is shocking.

@Valar_Festivus TFW you realize that AOC was widely condemned across the political spectrum for suggesting that jails for migrants were like concentration camps but Bret Stephens can compare being mocked on Twitter to the Holocaust and everyone is fine with it.

Rachel McKinnon:

White male privilege is very very potent and should never be underestimated.

Yes, McKinnon actually said that, apparently without irony.

Or maybe it’s more bragging? “Potent” is an interesting word to use.… Read the rest