Define “embattled” and “minority” and “group”
You’d think an adult who works in a job where he has to handle philosophy would refrain from publicly saying fatuous nonsense like this.
It depends what the “embattled minority group” is, obviously. I mean OBVIOUSLY, spoken with all the heavy disdain of an enlightened teenager. Duhhhhhhh-uhhhhhhhhhh.
An “embattled minority group” can be anything. It can be rapists. It can be murderers. It can be mass murderers. It can be men who stalk and trap and overpower and rape and murder women. It can be men who stalk and trap and overpower and rape and murder women and are cops. It can be lying cheating thieving heads of state. It can be anything. Just being embattled and a minority does not guarantee you are good or other-regarding or halfway decent people.
Jason Stanley can’t be so dumb that he doesn’t know that, yet he talks the childish slogany jargon anyway.
[Powerful, entitled, majority group] are rape threats.
In this case, men, as a class, are a threat to women, as a class. That’s a fact. This fact informs the politics and worldviews of both men and women, though in different ways.
This philosopher can’t think his way out of a wet paper bag. He’s an effective campaigner against philosophy as a major, and most especially against the philosophy department at Yale University.
Yes, and it has to be a politics or a world view to have truth value. Nevermind facts about the world, scientific data, personal accounts, or common sense. It’s propaganda and fascism all the way down because, I dunno, some Yale professor that wrote books about propaganda and fascism said so? What’s on the menu tomorrow professor? Relativism? Post structuralism? Or was that today’s lesson?
So much low hanging fruit it’s not even fun anymore. :P
I agree maddog @1, generally. Who he’s pointing at with the cutesy bracketry is trans “women” specifically. Men are rape threats and women are not (excluding extremely marginal cases), and that’s the fact of the matter. One doesn’t have to look far for proof. He’s trying to say that since TWAW, they are no longer rape threats. What he is ignoring, like most TRA’s do, is that trans “women” are a subset of men and *not* a subset of women. Simple deduction does the rest, which I’m sure he’s not versed in either.
You know, it’s unfair when I’m late to the party and all the [exasperated rebuttals] have already been made.
I’ll just piggyback on [what’s already been said]. Stanley’s little tweet summarizes the dominant, if not always explicit, view on the relationship between [power dynamics] and [ethics] in contemporary Left thought. In this view, [moral virtue] is proportional to [oppression, victimization, and marginalization]. Therefore, a minority group, particularly an [embattled minority group], is automatically virtuous and any opposition to that group’s, or a subset of that group’s, beliefs or behaviors is perforce an example of [fascist domination].
It’s a nice piece of [hypocrisy] for someone whose book’s subtitle is [The Politics of Us and Them].
I’m pretty sure I do some of that, not necessarily even intentionally but just as a kind of reflex. It’s hard to help. Bad behavior isn’t an uncaused miracle, and one cause for people at the bottom of the power yardstick may be that very position at the bottom of the power yardstick. If you see what I mean. It’s hard not to Make Allowances or Offer a Discount or some such knee-jerk thing.
You may be late Nullius, but not lacking humor. :D
@5 I get revved up too. I can’t even tone it down enough to comment in the Trump posts anymore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What I’m talking about in 5 isn’t getting revved up but doing that “[moral virtue] is proportional to [oppression, victimization, and marginalization]” thing.
OK thanks for clarifying, I think the bracketry threw me off. ;)
It’s a morally healthy intuition, actually. The strong ought protect the weak. The wise ought teach the ignorant. Of course, I endorse these principles with the knowledge that there are times that the strong ought not protect and the wise ought not teach, because morally is too complex to capture in a simple maxim. I mean, how much of literature is ultimately grounded in the tension between various interpretations of “rule” and “exception”?
But there’s a difference between (a) having a healthy aversion to being a bully, and (b) subscribing to the proposition, “if p is low on the totem pole, then p is virtuous”.
That’s a good way of putting it.
It’s parallel to the trans saga, too. There’s a difference between bullying trans people and knowing that people can’t literally change sex.
Yep, I guess it basically is the same distorted impulse. Gah.
In other words, the ideologues prey upon and pervert that which ennobles.
It’s sort of like running a machine at a much higher speed than it’s engineered for. The machine is fine at the right speed, it’s excellent, but crank it up too high and Katy bar the door.
So then I had to look up Katy bar the door. It’s Southern, origins unknown, possibly Scottish.
Katy bar the door would be trochaic trimeter, if I let door have two syllables. Which could be Southern.
Definitely. Doe-er.
Call me old fashioned, but I’ve always thought that making groups that are a threat embattled minority groups was kinda the point of civilisation.
One would think that, yes. At least, one would have thought that before the world meant barking mad. (And I have large dogs, so I don’t use that expression lightly. I’ve had to cover my screens and windows with quarter-inch polycarbonate because they have a history of getting so worked up they break my damn windows.)
Isn’t one of the main things that philosophy does and part of what it’s for to point out when two things are different?
Or to put it another way, isn’t quite a big part of philosophy about how to make and recognise good abstractions and to avoid bad ones?