Aphorism of the Day: Moral certainty is simply greed dressed as poverty.
I’ve been sitting on this for several days.
An example of how it should be done? Or yet more perfidious evidence of my insatiable need to appropriate?
Either way, it’s both wonderful and wise.
It captures the way I feel all the bloody time. So now, for instance, I’m wondering what I could possibly do to get people to stop laughing about character defects, real or perceived, and simply engage my argument. I’m not a stranger to this. I intentionally go out of my way to seek these kinds of debates out. The regulars here at TPB are always advising me against it, and for good reason. I fret about my book sales, like every other midlist writer I suppose, but I always try to keep those worries to the side, assuming that if I’m open enough, relentless enough, I’ll at least be able to break even. I appreciate that I come off as pompous and pedantic to certain ears – Christ, I sound that way to myself half the time! But I’m an egghead, and as regrettable as I think it is, I understand why some people would want to lampoon me for that. Knowing and presuming are the same thing.
It’s a strange feeling, isn’t it? Knowing that in certain quarters certain people are whetting verbal knives to better carve your name. We all understand this, which is probably why we all fear it – and why we’re often so desperate to position ourselves on the carving side. I can remember how irresistible it was eavesdropping when my books first came out, cringing at this, raging at that, celebrating whatever scrap of artistic confirmation I could find. Not so much, now. Not at all, in some cases. The only thing that gets me genuinely angry any more is when people say I don’t understand Nietzsche – and I have no fucking idea why.
But getting past social sensitivities has two edges, I realize. On the one hand, it means that I can’t be shamed or embarrassed or whatever into ‘Shutting up.’ (I find it interesting that this is what both sides seem to want - the one outraged that I would critique the Dude’s shaming tactics, the other side perplexed that I would even bother engaging someone they simply cannot take seriously). If you want to shut me up then convince me, that the science is wrong or that I got the science wrong, or that sites like the Dude’s actually make a positive difference – as opposed to, say, sites like Doyle’s. Yukking it up on boards where everyone (unlike here) agrees, proves nothing, though it suggests that moral certainty does, as I’ve been arguing, have the effect of shutting reason down, and that moral outrage is far more about sorting people than reaching out to dissenting voices.
But I also realize that it renders me blind, in a certain way. I’ve been roundly criticized here for not being sensitive enough to the experiences that motivate people like the Dude, for engaging in some kind of masculine power-play, and the like. Arguing that sites like ROH do more harm than good, the idea seems to be, denies the legitimacy of the pain and the hurt that so obviously fuel her vitriol. Maybe my insensitivity to the power of shaming is the reason I don’t get the connection, because I’m afraid I don’t. It seems to me, that if making the world safer for women is in fact what the Dude is about, then she should be deeply interested in what psychology has to say about her tactics, and why so many people from such a wild diversity of extreme views – many of them openly misogynistic - seem to be so fond of them. Like I keep saying, we’re ALL idiots around here, all stumbling across our sorrows and our problems, all groping for solutions. Shouting only numbs us to the confusion.
And yes, I will continue calling her the ‘Dude’ so long as she calls me ‘shiteater’ and every other insulting moniker (some of them quite funny!) she applies to me. Why? Because quid pro quo is my point.
Back when women were obviously oppressed, when the inequalities were plain for all to see, shaming tactics were definitely an effective way to put misogyny on the defensive, and moral outrage was a very efficient means of rallying and motivating members. But the battle is more subtle now. It’s far easier for your opponents to explain away your complaints, even make the contrary case. In this situation, I fear, alienation simply begets alienation. Worse yet, sites like ROH simply feed into an image that genuine opponents of feminism (unlike myself) are using to great effect.
Like I keep saying, I could be wrong, but then I might be right. And as Haidt points out in his interview with Bill Moyers (the link so few bothered to check out!), the left is losing - feminism is losing – because the right seems to have a better understanding of the psychological terrain. All I’m saying is make this knowledge your own. I’m trying to defend my reputation, sure, but I’m also trying to empower.
I think all humans are stupid. I certainly know that I’m stupid. I’m an equal opportunity misanthropist, in this sense. So for me, screaming about dogma is nothing short of tragic. The ancient Egyptians screamed about their dogma, the same as every other group in the history of the human race, all of them convinced they had won the Magical Belief Lottery… all of them absolutely convinced – like you - that they just had to be right.
For my part, I’m far more interested in making the world a safer place for my daughter than I am in being right – let alone being popular. That’s why all voices, all questions, are welcome here. Engage.
Or laugh.
Is this meant to instructional or reflective or both?
What did you learn from this piece, and how do you plan to apply it to your involvement/engagement in future discussions?
In your opinion, what makes it wonderful and wise?
-Sci
I’m still mulling the thing over. It’s beautifully written, and ruthlessly honest. What I find so striking about it – on a human level- is the gap it opens between having human weaknesses and pursuing a righteous cause that seems to demand a univocality of spirit that the former renders impossible. What I find so interesting about it psychologically is the way it illustrates, even embraces, the hypocrisy that riddles all our souls, and the way our moral impulses can short-circuit our openness and compassion.
And you?
It really is raw and honest in a way great writers can really be.
What’s interesting to me is that this was written about 18 months ago, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t stopped Sady from making feminism or Internet Feminism a big part of her life. She still mocks the idiots, she still is witty and cutting, she still goes on speaking tours to educate. She’s found the balance in her life to go for a righteous cause without being entirely brainwashed to it or defined by it.
I suspect that a lot of people are like that, honestly – that they can be part of a big cause that is very polarizing but not be defined by it in the same way people think about them. Sady is defined by her feminism stances, but she’s also defined in numerous other ways that are orthogonal or opposed to that stance – and all of these things live together in happy hypocrisy.
Well said.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
(all to say I’m still mulling it over too but wanted the attention and cool points.)
Gosh I hope these internet feminista don’t fuck up The Horns of Golgotterath.
Amen to that.
Scott wrote:
“What I find so interesting about it psychologically is the way it illustrates, even embraces, the hypocrisy that riddles all our souls, and the way our moral impulses can short-circuit our openness and compassion.
And you?”
Well, my initial reaction was disgust. Mainly due to an inherent aversion to women who openly reveal their promiscuous and unfaithful desires. I blame either Catholicism or a billion years of natural selection (it’s easier than considering the alternative: that I’m a raging misogynist). Of course, you know that. It’s one of Achamian’s core motivations since the beginning of TTT.
The Internet in its “infinite wisdom” has already reduced the whole male-female sexual double-standard to a pithy meme:
http://tinyurl.com/ydadhwh
Of course, the truth is ALWAYS more difficult… have you seen the movie Kinsey?
Talk about an uncomfortable film.
I was gooned out by it as well. Sex, man. It fucks us up. Exactly according to plan, I suspect.
Brace yourself. We’re starting to get hits from right wing sites.
A crossroads between incompatible empires… *gulp*
I didn’t quite get the description of ‘taking her husband along’ in terms of the ‘performance art’? So he knows, or doesn’t know? If he knows, it’s wacky, but it’s not exactly cheating. Well, not by my yardstick, anyway.
I think that is the idea. That, if she can sell the lie to him, then she can use his belief to sell it to herself.
You mean sell it as if it’s really a cutting edge perfomance art to the husband??
Maybe a lie, but the lies we tell to let ourselves be human sometimes. As wobbly and random as that humanity is. And a lie shared, together, between husband and wife.
Mr Bakker this is just for you.
I understand where you are coming from. You suffer because you’ve seen a part of the truth (and a small one at that) and you want to show it to everyone, fight it and help others in overcoming it. This is the harsh truth: You can’t and you shouldn’t, because you have no right to do it. You are destined to fail in this endeavor and what’s worse you can negatively influence others by pursuing this goal. You have to understand some things; the truth really sets you free, but that freedom brings additional responsibilities. Beings don’t have the same starting positions, it may not be fair, but that’s the way of the universe. This means that we experience things at different times and in different ways and we don’t reach the peak of the mountain of knowledge at the same time. We all have different paths. You can’t carry others on top with you; you can’t show them a shortcut (because there aren’t any that work). You reach the peak when you are ready. Otherwise the truth will either break you or miss you. Don’t believe me? Just look at yourself and how shaken you are. Do you really want to inflict this on others? The most you can do is showing them the way, not drag them along your path as you’ve been doing. This is the most I can do for you right now. Please stop trying to save the world and just focus on yourself.
Quite the contrary. I don’t know why, but I actually haven’t been anxious about it at all. I remember a time when stuff like this would have me up for hours, rehearsing arguments, assembling face-saving rationales.
Otherwise, I don’t think culture will EVER be able to completely digest the new sciences of the human. But the only way to get the core ideas in circulation is to circulate them, come what may. If that makes me a fool or a sucker, well, dem da breaks. The more people know about how bad we are at reasoning and arguing, how prone to bigotries both benign and malignant, the more traction these arguments will have.
It harkens back to the most basic of addiction-fighting techniques: first you have to acknowledge there is a problem. That must come before anything else can. Thanks for linking to that!
Thank you for writing this. I’m dealing with an issue like this in my own life, and it helped.
I agree with some of what Mr. Gladius says…. but I don’t agree with his conclusions because I’m not certain Mr. Bakker is even TRYING to save the world. (Are you?)
Why I wrote “fuck ‘em” the other week is because of things like this. And because it takes serious balls to seize all of these disparate issues and uncomfortable social/gender/sex/religious truths and create characters that have to wrestle with them. As a white Anglo-Saxon North American male, to write about a prostitute and the things she’s done with her life… man, that takes BALLS OF STEEL. I wouldn’t even know where to begin regarding writing a character like Esmenet.
There’s also a lot of other literary things going on with that (whether intentional or not), such as the virgin-whore dichotomy and how the reader is going to unwillingly and unconsciously recall that dichotomy with the whole Virgin Mary thing and the entire mythology behind the divine virgin… and on… and on….
And dirty sex. Lots of it.
And now, we read this Feminist’s blog and she talks about.
“I’ve seen it happen. Too often, I’ve seen it happen; the people who can criticize a post, and then, when asked to back that criticism up, can only quote a different post by another Internet Feminist. The people who can look at a piece of art — or, hell, TV or pop music, those work too — and can only classify it as Oppressive or Subversive, or located at a greater or lesser degree of ‘problematic’-ness, according to current theories of what is or is not problematic. The lack of original thought, or of aesthetic judgment, is creepy: It suggests that we’re approaching this all like math, like a standardized test to which there are right or wrong answers, rather than as art, or (preferably) life, where what matters is not just your conclusion, but how you got there. And there are other things: The way we’ll go out of our way to invent political defenses of art we like — feminist reading of Twin Peaks, anyone? Because I’ve done that one — because it’s how we can justify liking it, rather than simply saying, I dunno, ‘it is misogynist as hell but I like how creepy it is and also it’s funny and also I have a thing for the young Kyle McLachlan, Lord help me.’ Arguments where we invent political insults (you’re a classist!) to cover up the personal feelings behind them (you’re an asshole!) because we know we can win on the grounds of politics, but might not do as well if we actually, honestly dislike each other. Incidents where we make up political rationalizations (as a woman, I have a right to voice my anger!) for stuff we shouldn’t get away with (I am getting up on your junk and acting like a douche!) no matter who we are, and that we probably, on some level, know to be wrong.
“I mean, I’m talking about myself here.”
When I read modern feminist literature and writings (with the exception of Camille Paglia) I feel like I’m a staunch misogynist. But when I read Mary Wollenstonecraft or other 19th and early 20th century feminists, I feel like a feminist myself. So, where the hell do I fit?
Sex, as Bakker wrote above, muddles everything. A good friend of mine once said, “All of the problems between men and women can be boiled down to one single, extremely convoluted statement: Women believe that men believe that women owe them sex. What makes things worse is that 25%-50% of the time, women are right about this. Even worse than that, a lot of women would PREFER it that way but don’t realize it.”
If I told you that the speaker was a man, would he automatically be a misogynist? If I told you the speaker was a woman, would that make her an incredibly insightful feminist? Why does having a penis make all the difference? I dunno, it just does.
The fact is that male feminists never get laid. Men who say they are MIGHT get laid (and probably do) but the real male feminist is out-of-luck, I think. Sex screws things up. It’s a big deal, and then again, it really isn’t.
Epistemology–what is truth anyway? Is 1+1=2 really true? For all intents and purposes, I guess so. What about whether or not a book is misogynist? What we’ve got is opinion now. Six billion Chinese can be wrong. So can 300 million Americans. Are they? Beats me. I got tired of being called names back in school. I don’t really feel like carrying labels as an adult.
“The only thing that gets me genuinely angry any more is when people say I don’t understand Nietzsche – and I have no fucking idea why.”
Understanding [insert any German philosopher here*] is a real achievement of someone who studies philosophy. Since I’m just a noob, I don’t get what Nietzsche is saying half the time, I rely on people like you to interpret back into something semi-comprehensible. Disclaimer: I don’t think he was actually saying we should all become tightrope walkers…
So, of course, given that you’ve put in the scholastic effort to get to the point where you DO get what he’s saying, it irks you when someone attacks you on that front. It doesn’t offend you when someone calls you a bad philosopher because you think we’re ALL bad philosophers, but given that Nietzsche forms the backbone of PoN it’s a pretty damning attack on everything you’ve written.
If someone called me a shitty scientist, it wouldn’t bug me (it’s largely true). But if someone told me I didn’t understand Darwin, I would fucking flip my lid.
*Seriously. Why are the Germanic philosophers ALWAYS the most difficult? Kant, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heiddegger… none of those fuckers are easy to read, let alone understand. Is it a translation issue? I find that hard to believe since the Ancient Greek philosophers are more accessible.
20th Century French philosophers are just as difficult as any German. In fact, I have more trouble with Derrida than Heidegger.
The frogs and the krauts, it’s always ends in a fight…
I would’ve agreed with you on Derrida and Heidegger way back when, but the latter’s later post-Kehre stuff… Old Jackie Dee can’t hold a candle. And then there’s Fucking Hegel.
I’m still wall-eyed.
I always thought that would be a great name for an album: Fucking Hegel.
The difficulty of philosophical texts opens onto a bunch of interesting questions. And of course I agree that the Germans are particularly egregious in this respect (esp. Hegel). But I’m not sure it’s right to say that ancient Greek philosophy was “more accessible.” Sure, some ancient Greek philosophy is more accessible than The Critique of Pure Reason is, but the same can be said of plenty of eighteenth-century German philosophy. I’m inclined to agree with Heidegger that the difficulty of some philosophical texts is linked to the difficulty of the topics they address. (Consider Heidegger’s comparison of Thuyciddes’ History and Aristotle’s Metaphysics!) Abstract thought is difficult. The further our thought is pulled from pragmatic contexts, the more tenuous it becomes — both in terms of its plausibility, and in terms of its comprehensibility. So people like Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger are difficult _in part_ because they were dealing with some seriously abstract shit — which is inherently difficult. Have you tried reading the Metaphysics? Or Parmenides? That’s no walk in the park either!
At the same time, I think that a lot of philosophy is inherently difficult. I don’t think that anyone is _born_ able to understand this stuff. We’re _trained_ to read it. (It’s part of a tradition.) Which means that whatever is written within one’s own tradition will strike one as inherently more comprehensible than philosophy written in a different tradition. So, for example, after spending enough time ‘thinking phenomenologically,’ I was able to read Being and Time relatively easily (emphasis on ‘relatively’). But without having spent the same amount of time ‘thinking analytically,’ I initially found (and still find), e.g., Quine to be utterly perplexing. I mean, seriously, who ACTUALLY understands “The Two Dogmas of Empiricism”? Nobody, that’s who. It’s deeply difficult to figure out what the hell Quine is talking about. Yet analytic philosophers are inclined to defer to Quine (at least ‘defer’ in the manner of analytic philosophers — meaning, they at least take him seriously, i.e., take him as someone to be taken seriously, even if they have no fucking idea what he’s talking about) while at the same time making snide comments about Heidegger (e.g., treating him as someone who is NOT worth taking seriously, because he’s ‘too obscure’ — when he’s no more ‘intrinsically’ obscure than Quine is!).
Parochialism, though and through.
Parmenides is tough, yes.
Thinking of the universe as static and unchanging is so in opposition to our intuition and experience, that it requires some creativity to accommodate it. You can start with seeing time as just an additional dimension, but it still leaves open the mystery of the ‘temporal edge’ of our Frame, to use a Bakkerism. (of course, from my perspective many of these difficult abstract questions can be reduced to The Hard Problem of consciousness).
Or to ‘Brassier’s Question’!
Amen to that. I’m pretty sure Quine secretly marveled that Two Dogmas became as influential as it did.
It was only when I began reading the Greeks in ancient Greek that I realized no one understood what they fuck they were talking about. It did give me my pet theory for why the ancient Greeks invented western philosophy: the language is so fucked up they spent half their time saying, ‘Wait a minute… Just what did you mean by that?”
I appal myself a bit by putting this genuine emotion through the scientific ringer. Take four test groups who haven’t heard of ‘I love dick’ before.
1. The first group is a control and are told the actual authors name and gender and that its an account from real life people.
2. The second are told the author is a male, made up name and it’s an account from real life people.
3. The third is told the author is male, made up author name, and the characters are made up.
4. The fourth is same as the third, but suggestions that the author is sexist or writes sexist texts are primed amongst the group.
I wonder if run if it would be found that in one group the text is fine, while in another group they find the exact same text sexist?
Or maybe they’d all read it the same?
From what we know about the power of priming to influence interpretation of events and representations, the safe hypothesis would be ‘No way, Jose!’ I really be amazed if anyone hasn’t tried this yet…
In light of Santorum’s victories, one does wonder if feminism – or progressiveness – is losing.
But what are the causes, and what are the symptoms?
In a world where the gradient flows in the direction of varied – and competing – privileges, what are the dangers of soft-prejudice and destructive narratives?
The last one is the one that makes me wonder. Is it silly to worry about soft-prejudice when the real “enemy” of progress rallies its own base, using sites like RoH as recruitment fodder?
That’s what you are asking, that’s the substance of your claim right? The other side sees RoH as an investigative reporter, forcing us to confront issues we might not otherwise see, being a polemicist.
I’ve seen people say to me (yeah I know, hard to believe) and others that we’re the good ones and they listen to us over RoH. This discounts the reality, IMO, that we’re only talking about an issue because it came up on RoH first. Bad Cop, Good Cop in essence.
So what the crux of this debate hinges on (outside your defense, a separate issue IMO) is the expected value when we average the negative and positive “weights”? Or is the first question getting people on both sides to accept that there are positive and negative weights with nonzero probabilities?
What then is our measuring stick?
We’ll have to wait for Haidt’s book to see his data and to get a comprehensive look at his remedial prescriptions. This has been a hobby horse of mine since watching So Goes the Nation several years back (a great documentary detailing how Bush beat Kerry in Ohio – and won the presidency as a result). I was flabbergasted by how psychologically savvy the republican campaign strategists were, and how idealistically naive their democratic counterparts were. The former understood they were selling toothpaste and battling for market share right from the beginning, whereas the latter saw themselves participating in a democratic process. Creepy shit. Highly, highly recommended.
RoH relies on a coalitional mindset, a no reason zone, which automatically triggers the same mindset in those identified as competitors. There’s a really good chance that she’s recruiting for the wrong side.
You have no idea how relieved I am that we’ve finally got back to this topic!
“RoH relies on a coalitional mindset, a no reason zone, which automatically triggers the same mindset in those identified as competitors. There’s a really good chance that she’s recruiting for the wrong side.”
The critique of coalitional mindsets, I suspect, works equally against TPB…or at least in the way it overlaps with a good set of fandom.
Again, I think the other side would say it is a safe space and dissenters who fail to adhere to the CoC are the ones banned/silenced/etc. Have you read a sample of the reviews, examining their range? Larry does have a point about the textual evidence.
The challenge here, as well, is it seems your criticism of ROH is at least partially based on the tone argument. I think many people find it valuable that they are free to express themselves freely, and approaching things politely is a sure-fire way to be dismissed and ignored by the varying groups of the privileged.
So it is like staring at two roads to failure. Be polite and ignored, or be controversial/angry/mean/honest and push people who might have listened away. The latter concern is somewhat mitigated, I suspect, by the overbearing experiential reality of the former case.
This is where I think people see the value of performance rage. It forces a space in which “good cops” can maneuver.
IMO, the most relevant-to-discussion point Haidt made was about the need for a meeting ground between dissenting groups. While the spaces seem to vary, here/OF/Westeros end up becoming those places in responses to things like RoH.
TPB is a ‘no reason zone’?
Is your counterargument that civility is prone to be ignored? I’ve never encountered evidence for this. Have you?
How does performance rage create this space for mediation? It certainly hasn’t done anything for the American political scene.
“Is your counterargument that civility is prone to be ignored? I’ve never encountered evidence for this. Have you?”
Trolling is the obvious example; a good troll (or shock jock or sports radio guy) will get significantly more responses than a civil ‘well, here’s my facts and opinions’ argument will.
“How does performance rage create this space for mediation? It certainly hasn’t done anything for the American political scene.”
That’s not true at all; it’s just not done it all that recently. The biggest successes in mediation came from extremes. The civil rights movement had moderates like MLK and extremists (or more extremists) like the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. The Vietnam protesters were okay, but it took things like the Kent State massacres and buddhists burning themselves alive for people to notice. Rodney King provoked a large change in how police systems were run.
The problem right now in my mind is that we have only extremists without the moderation; no one can be aligned with centrist views or moderate viewpoints. It’s political suicide. You see how Romney when cornered goes to being a ‘severe conservative’, as an example. Moderation is not an acceptable strategy. That isn’t to say that it’s never been that way – just not right now.
But I think if you look back on the successes of moving societal mores and views that the extremists have had a big role in getting the majorities to the table.
This last is Haidt’s point as well, if I remember correctly.
Regarding your first point, it’s the communicative effectiveness we were discussing, not the attention-getting effectiveness.
And leaving the middle for last, I entirely agree: the problem comes when the injustices decried become more subtle, as they are now, when the right actually has interpretative fodder for arguing they’re the persecuted ones. This is the narrative, and I find it everywhere in daily life, especially among young men.
Oh, and yes -TPB is as much a no-reason zone as anywhere else. This would be that argument you made earlier – that the folks who fancy themselves liberal and intellectual have caged themselves just as much as anywhere else.
No one is immune. No group is better. If we’re all idiots, that includes this site as well. This site is already self-selecting as fans of your works; do you think that that isn’t a bias?
If you really believe that then I have no cause to reply to you, now, do I?
I’ve never said critical thinking or reasoning is impossible. Saying no group is intrinsically better is not saying all claims are equal – which is definitely not the case.
Do you literally think the discourse on ROH is every bit is rational as here? If so, what criteria do you use to distinguish rational from irrational?
I tend to find RoH about as consistently rational as here; there are fewer trolls and fewer arguments for emotion there than here (because they tend to be removed entirely before being posted).
You have every cause to reply to me regardless of a no-reason zone. The obvious reason would be because you don’t want to believe otherwise. You don’t want to think that TPB is equivalent to ROH.
As to the discourse there – it all stems from basic understandings of feminist theory and discussion. The dialog is rational and internally consistent. They don’t accept outsiders in that dialog, but that doesn’t mean ‘no reason’. Instead of a basis point of neuroscience and philosophy they’ve taken to use feminism.
They certainly don’t ask as many leading questions.
If I ask so many leading questions, then why don’t you ever say, “This question is leading because…”? You seem quick enough to pounce on everything else!
I can’t speak for comments, because this site does welcome outsiders, only our relative posting.
How often does she express self-doubt?
How often does she resort to name-calling?
How often does she make arguments from authority?
How often does she engage in ad hominem attacks?
How regularly does she engage, let alone tolerate, dissenting views?
How regularly does she engage in special pleading?
How regularly does she bite bullets?
How often does she use loaded language?
I could go on… You do agree these are the kinds of things you teach in reasoning classes?
“If I ask so many leading questions, then why don’t you ever say, “This question is leading because…”? You seem quick enough to pounce on everything else!”
I don’t have time to hit every thing you’ve set up. I do have a job and a family. I’ve mentioned it in the past to both you and Larry; it comes from your teaching backgrounds but it comes off as immediately condescending. Instead of sharing your views you want the other person to reach a conclusion and you don’t discuss anything. It’s quite annoying.
I have no idea about the relative frequency of things she does or does not do. My personal view is that she resorts to namecalling about as much as you do, at least in the main texts. She uses loaded language quite often. SInce you consider all of modern feminism to be special pleading, she engages in it quite often.
And no, I don’t teach reasoning classes so I don’t agree. This is another definitional gap; you’re using reason as the Philosophy Term; I’m using it as something that most everyone does – make a statement, back it up with examples and facts, and discuss it.
“My personal view is that she resorts to namecalling about as much as you do, at least in the main texts.”
Now that is interesting, as I have read every single post on this blog and cannot offhand think of a single instance of namecalling. Do you have any examples?
He’s referring to my use of ‘the Dude.’
“SInce you consider all of modern feminism to be special pleading, she engages in it quite often.” Stawman. Why do you do this?
So you think ‘reasoning is obvious’ and that practical reasoning classes are a waste of time?
Exhaustion is setting in among the participants and this is starting to look like an obsession. Scott, are you honestly going to change your writing style to appeal to those who are currently pillorying you? You won’t convince them of your good intentions, period.
Not much typically gets resolved in writing – curse of the medium. And with these responses, I simply don’t have time to craft a message and to reply comprehensively. I’ll continue experimenting with different arguments, questions. I actually abhor much of the fictional advice I seem to be getting!
“Now that is interesting, as I have read every single post on this blog and cannot offhand think of a single instance of namecalling. Do you have any examples?”
Sure. Other than the Dude, we have Scott calling everyone idiots. We have him calling everyone Nazis. That’s in the last two posts. I can find plenty of other examples if you like – there were tons around the Theo stuff, for example.
“Stawman. Why do you do this?” How is it a strawman? Do you consider feminism not to be special pleading? Especially as ROH does it? The point of her view of feminism is that men cannot understand what it is to be a woman and thus are not as able to comment on it. This isn’t a strawman; this is a fundamental conceit of her argument.
“So you think ‘reasoning is obvious’ and that practical reasoning classes are a waste of time?” Not particularly. I think that you’re framing a debate using specific kinds of terminology and then getting upset when people don’t use your terminology in the way you want them to. Which is pretty much what ROH and Sady Doyle do as well, honestly.
This is something that most everyone does and is a big part of mansplaining – instead of actually listening to the point made you attack the way the point is made, which deflects entirely. You ask for charity in your interpretations, Scott; this would be the same charity you’re asking for.
Anyway, you’ve convinced me, Scott. You’ve convinced me that talking with you and the readers that post here is entirely useless. Thanks for the time.
I don’t remember the Theo stuff, but maybe I’ll go back and check it out. As for “idiots” and “Nazis,” come on. That’s just not the same. Might as well say “genetic robots” is namecalling. If Sady and Moon do this “mansplaining” thing, do you agree that maybe that’s a bad name for it, then?
Because this is a mystifying distortion of my view. I never said this. I never implied it.
Um, I know alternate terminologies used in different texts in different practical reasoning classes. They all refer to the same things, by and large. I literally don’t know what to say.
I’m flummoxed. When you attack a view that is not my own, what else can I do? When you equivocate terms, what else can I do? This is the reason practical reasoning is so valuable: it actually allows people who disagree to see their way past all the myriad communicative short-circuits that afflict us. I’ve been argued out of many, many positions over the years, some of them so dear I’ve felt nauseous for doubting them. I ask you for clarity and for charity, nothing more. If you can gobble this up under the rubric of ‘mansplaining’ (which, once again, I think is a useless category because it can applied to any instance of justification – witness!) then you can gobble up whatever you need.
I’m not making this shit up, Kal. I know you don’t like it. I know you’re convinced that all this is just meant to make you feel stupid or something along those lines. I know you’re convinced it’s all a CYA tactic, and I regret that. I’ve been frustrated with you, certainly, but never dishonest. There is a difference between reason and rhetoric, and the only sites that have any claim to the former are the sites that call you out on the latter. Sad but true. You can’t see the distinction clearly – not yet – but I encourage you to check it out at the very least.
To be clear, Scott – practical reasoning classes vs. the word ‘reason’ are what I’m talking about. I’ve never taken a practical reasoning class. (I’m sure you’re shocked). I do not know the terms you’re referring to and had to look them up. The notion that everyone has taken practical reasoning and thus is on the same page as you is so fundamentally broken a concept that it staggers me. Why would you think everyone’s taken a college class? Much less a college class in philosophy?
As to what you can do – you can talk about the points instead of attacking the method of making them. The mansplaining as a tactic is exactly what I said – to talk about things like special pleading when not actually talking about the argument being stated. This is to me akin to having someone write a long question and someone else saying that the question is invalid because it uses the word ‘your’ wrong. Okay, that’s true…but so what? Did that help discuss anything?
And no, the mansplaining can’t be used to talk about anything. It’s a way of completely ignoring the question at hand and instead talking about what you want. This isn’t doing everything, and that you don’t recognize this is…troublesome.
” I know you don’t like it. I know you’re convinced that all this is just meant to make you feel stupid or something along those lines. I know you’re convinced it’s all a CYA tactic, and I regret that.”
The conceit of what you know is so very lame, Scott. This is the same knowledge that lets others know that you’re a misogynist and a creep. But I’ll try one last time to offer understanding to you of what my central problems are. Perhaps you’ll listen this time.
I don’t feel particularly stupid after talking with you. Perhaps I should, but I don’t. I feel much like I did after talking with the socially inept geeks in high school who would ask questions like ‘if you had to choose, would you choose yourself or your loved one to die?’ and then talk about what a bad choice you made.Sometimes the questions are interesting, but talking about the questions is often too annoying to make me want to bother more. That’s what I continue to harp on you, over and over. And what you continue to fail to get, as far as I can tell.
I don’t think this is a CYA tactic. I don’t think you are trying to make me feel stupid. I think that you fundamentally have a problem communicating your ideas and thoughts in a way that many people would actually want to listen to them. I think that for a book that is about approaching hard topics about feminism you’ve managed to alienate a large chunk of the people that you’d want to talk to. I think that you’ve managed to act confrontational with the people you’d rather convert. I think you’ve got some very interesting ideas and it’s great to see some of the neuroscience out there. But I think you’re failing at the expression of them, the politics of them, and that is what bothers me more than anything.
There are plenty of examples where you do these things – the asking leading questions, the talking over people, the constant accusations, the reframing of questions to fit your worldview instead of listening to what the person is saying or empathizing on why they might be saying that. Feminism and misogyny is the biggest example of this behavior, but it’s not by any means your first. And I’m not the only one that views it this way – so many people on Westeros have commented that they’d like your books but gods, please, stop talking on the internet. Vandermeer said this. Your publisher has said the same thing, no? This was what ROH brought up – not anything about your books, but about you, personally.
And it’s not because they want to repress your views or they disagree with you – I believe it’s entirely because of the way you talk about things.
Anyway, this is the last time I post for a long while. Good luck with your blog.
“Anyway, this is the last time I post for a long while. Good luck with your blog.”
You will be missed. No sarcasm.
I already conceded the ‘you come across as an asshole’ point, haven’t I? Several times, by now, I should think.
I never assumed that everyone has taken practical reasoning courses, and actually explicitly expressed the opposite a few times on this very thread. I apologize if I read too much into your statement regarding reasoning and terminology: I thought it implied that you doubted my sincerity.
As I mentioned, if my questions are ‘leading,’ which is to say, imply an answer to the very issue under debate, then call me on it. I taught this shit, and I guarantee I would be apologetic if I ran afoul it.
You keep telling me that I lack the ability to empathize, so how about walking a foot or two in my shoes. For years now, you’ve been pressing me on essentially the same issues. Very early on I conceded all kinds of things: How the books could be read as misogynistic, How I have had a communication problem (with many, but not all) because of my approach, How the books could reinforce the very things I fear – and I conceded because I thought your arguments and the arguments of others were solid and convincing.
But you know what, for all my shortcomings, I have a few solid and convincing arguments as well – ones that you don’t like (as opposed the one’s you’ve conceded in turn). And you know what, that’s okay. We’re allowed to disagree. I just don’t understand why you refuse to let them go.
Otherwise, since we’ve laid my bad communicative habits on the table, can you at least consider the possibility that you have some of your own. Strawmanning is far and away your biggest weakness, and most frustrating simply because it wastes so much time. You do it regularly, brother, to the point where I’m sometimes not sure it’s me you’re replying to.
I make arguments, not bald accusations. I try to be careful about this. I’m not sure how it’s possible to ‘talk over’ people in this medium, unless, you mean that I use too much unwarranted, specialized vocabulary, which I accept could entirely be true. I’ve been caught out doing this in the classroom more times than I care to admit. When I read something that I don’t understand, I try to do what I just did above, which is ask what they mean. I do this all the time, primarily because I am concerned about feelings, and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time or emotion on arguing at cross purposes.
But when you attach logical/argumentative force to feelings, then this is simply a mistake (as LTP keeps trying to get Sci to see). You’re right, I generally lack the patience to draw this out in a gentle, nonthreatening way. But I don’t call people names, ‘freak out,’ or any of the other nasty rhetorical things you’ve suggested on this thread. I ask bloody questions. I try to make them as economical and to the point as possible. And this has the effect of freaking some people out. Witness the battle with Vox.
I’m glad acrackedmoon finally posted the criteria question, but the fact that it took all this time actually means something, Kal. Something quite significant. And I have a right to be puzzled by why you seem unable to acknowledge this, let alone the obvious force of many of the critical points made here by myself and other. Instead you chose to defend her all the way down the line, and I’m afraid that put you on some sketchy ground, argumentatively speaking.
And it seems to show. Sleep on it. Consider.
“In light of Santorum’s victories, one does wonder if feminism – or progressiveness – is losing.”
I saw Chris Hayes (MSNBC host and editor at the Nation magazine) put forth the following argument that progressives/liberals are winning the “culture war”…
http://upwithchrishayes.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/11/10381855-story-of-the-week-the-culture-war-isnt-done-with-us
Interesting – but it does remind me why I can’t stand MSNBC!
Personally, it’s the redistributive back-sliding that worries me. Libertarians aren’t liberals, although they actually agree about quite a few things. Also, winning on the gay marriage front does not a general victory make. Consider the issue of reproductive rights in praxis.
But the battle feminism is engaged in is definitely politically multipolar – this is one of the reasons I think feminist theorists need to consider the problem of nihilism, the way the erosion of traditional norms has allowed for the ‘normalization’ of more and more biological imperatives. If male biology is sexist (as I think it obviously is) then the collapse of traditional morality in the modern liberal democratic state is a troubling thing. Think of the normalization of cosmetic surgery, the way so many women are literally carving their bodies up to ‘maximize fitness indicators,’ which is to say, to compete for priority in the male gaze, which happens to be wired to give preference to long reproductive windows, which is to say, youth. Outside of education, there’s nothing liberal democracy can do.
What happens when neurocosmetic surgery hits the market? What kind of madness will be normalized then? Neuropath is a meditation on this question.
TPB is a ‘no reason zone’?
It’s a coalition mindset, and lacks the perspective of feminists. You don’t see yourself ignoring the meat of arguments to attack tone, cursing, some minor detail like disagreement of the word “nomad” as a form of appropriation?
Is your counterargument that civility is prone to be ignored? I’ve never encountered evidence for this. Have you?
Yes, both in person, on the internet, to myself or to others. Hell, I’ve done this to people, specifically to women, until it was pointed out how dickish it was. Civility is ignored when discussing prejudice and having taken offense at some comment or media. Either that or it is laughed at, then dismissed as being silly.
How does performance rage create this space for mediation? It certainly hasn’t done anything for the American political scene.
Sorry, perhaps better phrased as “Meeting Grounds come into being from diverse groups, where discussion takes place after RoH (or some other site) publishes something of controversy. The site serve as the catalyst.”
Also, I think I should point out that these discussions and disagreements are taking place in varied circles of women/minorities/queer-persons, inclusive of the author of RoH and her fans. They just don’t include us all the time. If we want to participate, it behooves us to listen if only so we don’t force the discussion back to square one in our ignorance.
“It’s a coalition mindset, and lacks the perspective of feminists.”
Not to be that person, but I strive for feminism (in fact, my favorite WGS mentor once characterized all feminisms as being a striving rather than a coherent, transcendent and unitizing political/social/theoretical identity) and I’ve certainly commented here before. You seem to be a feminist and are currently commenting here. Moreover, neither of us have ever been banned from commenting here – rendering it a safe space for disagreement and discussion. As prior threads have demonstrated, even posting really spiteful comments (comments that are uncharitable, shut down discussion by alleging “mansplaining”, or that are more performance art pieces than a desire to communicate) won’t get you banned.
I think it’s more accurate to state that this place does have a coalition mindset insofar as it is open to reasoned and respectful (and in some cases not so respectful) debate. Posting thoughtfully will merit engagement, although not always in the way the person being engaged would hope for.
I guess what I’m saying is that some coalitions are better than others, and a coalition that is formed around a cognizance of the limits and perils of coalitional thinking is simpliciter preferable to an alternative community that responds to critiques by simply reasserting the moral superiority of their own coalition.
But as best as I can tell, what I like about TPB is that it rejects the “Yes, and” comment construction popular among certain strains of internet feminists. What really turns me off to a place like RoH and (in some cases) Sady’s blog is that the “Yes, and” comment moderation actively encourages coalitional thinking, and in so doing discredits discordant reactions and responses – the kind of thing that, in my experience, is antithetical to the sort of feminism I strive for. And the constant demands that we “listen” and “reflect” on things like this also strike me as misguided because it’s paired with demands to know what Scott would “do differently” after listening and reflecting: it seems to me that Scott has listened and reflected, and he has not reached a conclusion that is to the satisfaction of certain groups of people (and, moreover, he’s prepared to literally put his money where his mouth is and lose sales because, after listening and reflecting, he’s determined that he has to see this project through on the terms that he believes it demands). Does listening and reflecting always require a concomitant requirement that the person listening and reflecting then agree with any criticism for it to be the right kind of listening and reflecting? I bring this up because my reading of your previous comments, saajan, seems to imply that Scott will only have listened to your satisfaction if he has a sort of “Ecstasy of St. Theresa/Paul on the road to Damascus” moment where his prior “errors” are clear and he will dedicate his life to fixing them to the satisfaction of everyone on the Internet (rather than continuing to please the people who already buy his books).
Now, lest it sound like I’m a Bakker fan boy and thus not the sort of person who says things that should neither be listened to nor reflected upon, count me in the camp that finds Scott’s work to be a problematic masterpiece – which, if I’m not mistaken, is kind of close to your position, saajan. It’s not something I can recommend to everyone, because not everyone falls on the side of the “Depiction=Endorsement” magical belief lottery that I do. In fact, it’s a series that I have to gear myself up to re-read because it’s so brutally bleak and screwed up. But given that I see in the work evidence that the author is striving for a really ugly critique of gendered metaphysics and religion, I’m OK with the fact that I can’t recommend it to everyone. In fact, I would have a real problem asking Scott to change the things that I find really problematic because doing so seems to me to be an example of imposing my own morality onto a work of art or another person.
And what are your criteria for a coalition mindset? Don’t get me wrong. I know I’m as vulnerable to confirmation bias et al as the next guy, but these are the shortcomings we all deal with all the time. Coalition thinking is far more specific, and far more problematic from a rational debate point of view. If TPB is an example of coalition thinking, then everything is (and therefore nothing is).
Otherwise, how, specifically, is my view not feminist?
What’s your evidence for the ineffectiveness of civility again? That you’ve been civil before and you were ignored?
The ‘catalyst for discussion’ point is well taken. It is a balance of considerations in this respect. But there’s ways to provoke discussion (look at TPB) without name calling or other signature characteristics of coalition thinking.
Is your counterargument that civility is prone to be ignored? I’ve never encountered evidence for this. Have you?
I’ll regret this, but sure you do! Your criteria question, which seemed to me atleast quite civil, was erased by moderation without show. So they think the other side will do what they are clearly prepared to do. They have to shout over…themselves.
Frankly I estimate it’s not about evidence, once it gets a bit war torn, because all the evidence shows against trying to be civil. It actually takes a bit of faith to think civility wont be ignored – probably what faith is good for, in terms of being perversely against what is otherwise the evidence of the moment.
Sci,
You don’t see yourself ignoring the meat of arguments
It seems like crackedmoon doesn’t argue, she simply asserts a conclusion and keeps asserting it. Maybe you can’t see yourself treating raw assertion as if it’s an argument? How would we test if it’s assertion or argument? Measure whether it’s an argument without the defintion of argument being adjusted to fit crackedmoon.
At the very least, if the measure came down to being assertion, then you could see your notion of argument ignoring is something you’ve made due to good will.
“Meeting Grounds come into being from diverse groups, where discussion takes place after RoH (or some other site) publishes something of controversy. The site serve as the catalyst.”
Based on an ‘if’, if no argument, no structure of reasoning is applied, what do all these other discussions actually discuss? It’s not reason, if they are pro, they bellow it and if they are con they bellow it and depending on who has moderation rights, that’s it.
What’s the discussion method, apart from reasonings? Without reason it seems to come down to “X is great” “No, X sucks!”. Just passionate assertions of passion dedicated to prior passionate assertions. When people argue like that about which sports team is better, it’s funny and enjoyable, but surely this is a bit more of a serious topic?
Actually the criteria question is still there over at ROH, awaiting Bakker’s response to her response. It’s somewhat troubling that the notion that he got banned or blacklisted is true when a very quick look can tell you otherwise.
I had no idea she had posted an answer. Good news!
The story about my comment never making it past moderation back when is entirely true. Is she claiming otherwise now?
Kalbear, why is it troubling? If you made a comment on my blog and I moderated it, you’d keep checking every day for a year or longer to see if it was there? If so, okay.
I think this shows how people who move between two groups (instead of the two being utterly divided) is a good thing.
I don’t know if she’s claiming otherwise or not. She stated that she removed it from moderation to leave it there in case you ever wanted to come back. I think she did it fairly recently, after the second time you freaked out about her.
“Kalbear, why is it troubling? If you made a comment on my blog and I moderated it, you’d keep checking every day for a year or longer to see if it was there? If so, okay.”
Because you were so troubled by her the first time that you post a second time about her 5 months later? I’d think you’d at least check.
I did check prior to my second ‘freak,’ as you call it. Nada.
Why, Kal? Do you not know the context of my first post, or are you conveniently forgetting? I called it Sweet Manna for a reason! Or do you need the CYA rationale as badly as she does? Do you think I’m simply lying?
What gives?
I don’t honestly know, Scott. It confuses me.
It confuses me why you’d want to try and alienate feminists by calling a lesbian woman ‘dude’ over and over. Why you’d do something that is so clearly self-harmful and coalition-defining; not in a ‘we are this way’ but in a ‘we are against this’ way.
It confuses me why you wouldn’t be checking out her recent comments when you reference her. If I’m calling someone out by name, I’ll follow up with them on a deeper level than just checking their posts.
@Less Than Pleased:
Sorry, I meant female feminists, though if you’re female I guess I was wrong on that front too. It just seems a little weird to think all the women interested in talking about depictions of women are elsewhere.
Coalition mindsets aren’t necessarily bad, as Haidt or Moyer noted, but I think by nature coalitions on an author blog will consist of an author’s fans. It’s also a little weird to read some of the…encouragement left as comments.
I don’t think Scott has to agree with me or any detractor. I think the question is whether the argument being made is even heard. This is the first post out of the four where I felt that anything anyone had to say in the ‘con’ department was at least sort of heard.
“Posting thoughtfully will merit engagement, although not always in the way the person being engaged would hope for.”
Agreed with reservations I’m having trouble putting my finger on at the moment.
@Callan S.
Your criteria question, which seemed to me atleast quite civil, was erased by moderation without show. So they think the other side will do what they are clearly prepared to do. They have to shout over…themselves.
Moon’s one person, unless we’re going to lump into a group everyone even tangentially connected to RoH. As to the Criteria Question not being answered or taken seriously over the last few days, my understanding was it was seen as a continuance of a perceived talking down pattern.
Again, I think there’s a conflating of issues here. One is whether RoH is accurate in its depiction of Scott as the “Prince of Misogyny”, the next is whether a part of the site’s contents are counterproductive to its goals, and whether these books and now blog posts are doing anything to engage a larger group of people, namely women, interested in feminism.
(I’m not saying that is right, just pointing out what I see as the other side’s position.)
It seems like crackedmoon doesn’t argue, she simply asserts a conclusion and keeps asserting it.
As I’ve said previously, I don’t think its a good idea to center this discussion to one review made by one author on one site. (Though you might want to go through some of the reviews) My point was that that the criticisms Scott leveled against other sites can apply to this blog and its author.
Based on an ‘if’, if no argument, no structure of reasoning is applied, what do all these other discussions actually discuss?
Well I meant a group inclusive but larger than RoH so, heh, lots of things. Nuances of racial/gender/queer-person politics, the subtleties of soft prejudice, issues on depiction, on how narrative affects our gaze in RL, and that’s just what I’ve given a peek.
fucking missing tag….
I’m slowly coming round to seeing saajanpatel’s viewpoint (if I didn’t get it wrong).
Perhaps BOTH sites such as TPB and ROH are needed. I might find TPB’s tone more suitable but I would never have read the interesting pieces on I Love Dick and Haidt if Pat didn’t get slammed.
Perhaps it is the beauty of diversity that will let us find a balance somewhere.
It’s the same ‘beautiful diversity’ that’s behind things like war, as well. Hate sites and hate discourse are horrible, and part of me is still amazed that anyone would defend them. The argument, “They deserve it,” is the same argument that EVERY hate site uses.
The bottom line is that hatred and vengeance tend – all things being equal – to foster more hatred and less thoughtful engagement.
cruise control for awesome.
It’s the same ‘beautiful diversity’ that’s behind things like war, as well. Hate sites and hate discourse are horrible, and part of me is still amazed that anyone would defend them. The argument, “They deserve it,” is the same argument that EVERY hate site uses.
The bottom line is that hatred and vengeance tend – all things being equal – to foster more hatred and less thoughtful engagement.
I kind of wonder if part of the problem is that the people advocating for ROH might think any critique of ROH is a push for hatred of ROH. Particularly when ROH is something they care about, for various reasons.
In the end, it’s not an advocation for hating ROH at all. But I wonder if that’s seen by advocates of it, or whether they see a push to turn the hate burners around on ROH itself? Perhaps atleast thats another approach, to make clear this isn’t a call for further hate.
Well Sci, you’ve enboldened me…
Moon’s one person
I was thinking of another blog as well, at the time, where I’d posted what I estimate to be civil, but it wasn’t a ‘Yes, and’ post. Otherwise I’d have just refered to moon, and I should have done so to simplify discussion.
As to the Criteria Question not being answered or taken seriously over the last few days, my understanding was it was seen as a continuance of a perceived talking down pattern.
This doesn’t seem problematic? Let’s say an important question is asked of them but it’s treated as part of a percieved talking down pattern, that’d be an important question ignored.
I can’t quite tell how you feel about it, you seem to say they percieve it as talking down and…you say no more, as if that’s that and nothing else is to be done? It seems a loss of a major communication channel with them based on nothing but a feeling. Do you hold that feeling in great regard?
Well I meant a group inclusive but larger than RoH so, heh, lots of things. Nuances of racial/gender/queer-person politics, the subtleties of soft prejudice, issues on depiction, on how narrative affects our gaze in RL, and that’s just what I’ve given a peek.
This isn’t touching on my point, which is what happens when such discussion contains no reason (because the thing that sparked the discussion contained no reason, in a domino like effect).
It’s a coalition mindset, and lacks the perspective of (female) feminists.
I’m not sure this has anything to do with whether TPB uses reasoning in it’s discussion. Reasoning can occur without a female feminist present. Or would you say no?
I think your trying to say they are required in terms of having a genuine source for the exposition of the feelings of female oppression (a genuine source of their own feelings – I’m not sure women can just speak for other womens emotions in a perfectly genuine way).
Cher Ying – Pretty much!
testing.
I also agree with RSB that seen in isolation or done excessively, the stance that Requires takes is probably detrimental to overall human progress.
However perhaps the collective human psyche has to find some room for it as long as it is balanced by other multitudes of voices.
Mr. Bakker, you’re ruffian but you’re on the side of the Angels – easy does it but do it -
Point taken. Danke.
God, I hate english. It really just has no spine, no mechanism to double check the equation by to see if someone has engaged a statement or not. Just everyone is left to checking whether they have engaged something by their own device and of course, at best one can say those checking methods don’t match.
I want something like chess. A fitness checking system transparent to both sides. Propose the configuration of the board, make the moves available or it’s clear cut you didn’t engage. Not waffle waffle semantic slide over to some other subject, how do I call that out, I can’t because there is no spine!
Completely alien to human communication, of course.
Lessthanpleased, Great post, btw!
That ain’t English you’re talking about. It’s human!
Damn, I leave out one bold tag and now everything’s bold!
So I go back and forth from here to other parts of the interweb. These posts are seen as a stubborn refusal to hear any opposing viewpoint, a last grasp on sanity, a treatise in “non-Earth logic”, and other varied observations that are less than positive.
It really seems like there is a chasm between viewpoints. But, again, there is a conflation of varied questions.
It all makes me suspect that our criteria for reasoning varies significantly. It’s hard to articulate, I can see both sides to an extent, but can’t figure out the insight/explanation/translation to find the common ground.
-Sci
@Callan S:
Basically I think the issue is people find these blog posts lacking in reason, a willful stubbornness to block out any attempt at an opposing viewpoint, and so on. So everyone is using the ‘no reason’ argument.
I think you’ve made the assumption that RoH, Tales of Foreign Markets (the author made the nomad comment people objected to here) contain no reasoned debate without necessarily examining this assumption.
Having read many of the reviews of the former and a glance at the latter tells me there is discussion/debate, but the grounds and expectations are different. Think of it this way – ever have someone take a course where they didn’t fulfill the prereqs, but decided you or another would help them along the way?
That I think is what is going on. Our perception, as my initial perception of the female dominated feminist discussion, was to think “God, WTF? I can’t get a word in?” but slowly I realized the level of discussion was amongst people who’d done a lot of education and self-reflection that I was essentially demanding everyone go back to Feminism 101 while in a graduate level discussion.
Now imagine someone like me demanding to be heard, whining that I’m being ignored? To me it seems like everyone else is a jerk, to them I am the uneducated one demanding everyone else lower the level of debate to my standard.
This is why I think it would be valuable to have a female self-identified feminist come along. Or we can use our own standards in an in-group discussion and bronze each other’s genitals until the cows come home…
-Sci
Sci,
I can see what your saying, but it’s not evidence of reasoning, particularly with the post deletes (of which Scott’s criteria question seemed to have come back from the dead it seems (I haven’t read posts below this one so far, just those above)). Maybe there is lofty reasoning going on that is above layman level, or maybe the structure simply obscures the absence of reasoning (ie, the only people who ‘graduate’ are those who don’t call out the lack of reasoning – everyone else is treated as a 101 student, otherwise).
To me what your describing could be either. And so it is not evidence reasoning is used, because it’s not indicative of which it is.
Sound fair or do you take it that that what appears as higher discussion must always contain reason?
What part of their viewpoint am I missing? What argument of theirs am I shortshrifting?
You know, I used to teach this stuff, and I’m sure that’s part of the reason many find my tone alienating. I literally can’t count the number of times I’ve taught students how distinguish between arguments and assertions, for instance. Post after post, I want to point out fallacies of relevance, equivocations, special pleading (over and over and over), and in many cases, a simple lack of understanding what possesses argumentative warrant and what doesn’t. Though I know that I’m right about these things (enough to fail students I genuinely liked back when I was teaching), I don’t point them out, because I realize that it would undermine the persuasiveness of my case. Make me look like a pompous prig.
But if you end up falling back on “Well they have their reasons and you have yours,” argument, the gloves are off! The question is one of who has the better reasoned argument. They got hate, which psychology tells us, turns the ability to reason off, and ramps the tendency to rationalize way up. I never said they weren’t intelligent or educated, only that their approach is uncritical and counterproductive.
What if it really is the case that bigotry is ugly and destructive no matter what it’s target happens to be, and that hate, by and large, engenders hate? That there is no such thing, as you keeping insisting, as a good bigotry…
Except the other side doesn’t think what Moon is doing is bigotry, they think it’s calling out a dubious “ally” who has co-opted feminism.
This is what I’m saying about the gulf of views. I hate to bring it back to perception, but look at our discussions – we’re probably closer to seeing some common ground and yet:
I think I am getting to the heart of the issue, you tell me I’m making second-order claims and avoiding the meat. I write long, long, posts thinking I’m being as reasonable/charitable as possible, thinking I’m making myself vulnerable in some fashion by drawing on personal experience and my own faults, and you tell me I am setting up straw men. Then one of us gets exasperated and quips, and we start our cycle over again.
To try and pin down something concrete -> To you the Criteria Question, the link to Haidt, were important and germane. I can see that. I can also see the point that when one person starts giving homework assignments it seems like the other side’s points didn’t register at all.
As for critiquing the logic of responses, I personally don’t mind. It might ensure some headway. And hey, I already think you’re a prig, just one who has a gift for writing something affected me profoundly. ;-P
I didn’t mean it personally, Sci. I just have a beef with ‘Everyone has their reasons,’ used as a way to suggest that it’s a logical standoff (as opposed to a social one – which we were doomed to have, probably). I’m actually grateful you’ve dogged me as persistently as you have – Don’t stop. I’ve squinted at much of what you asked, but I’ve sat back and pondered much as well. Hell, I even conceded your catalyst argument! The question is one of what it primarily catalyzes…
But in the meantime, you missed: What part of their viewpoint am I missing? What argument of theirs am I shortshrifting?
Oh, I didn’t take it personally. I like to understand how to communicate with people – and I think if I can understand your expectations for dialogue, just as I try to understand the other sides, I can see the meeting ground of thought.
“What part of their viewpoint am I missing? What argument of theirs am I shortshrifting?”
Well, I’m only one person, but I think people see these last few posts as some sort of CYA rationalization maneuver. I suspect this is because the four (so far) posts conflate too many things –
1. Your personal self defense.
2. How you see RoH (the perception is you are centered on the one review of yourself)
3. What it means for a man to be a feminist (and of course the PoV that you can only be an ally of a group).
4. How does one ascertain whether something is sexist?
So we have “Is Bakker sexist?” interwoven with “Are his books inadvertently/intentionally/subconsciously more sexist than feminist?”, interwoven with “What kind of site is RoH and does it do more harm than good?”, interwoven with “Does Bakker even care about feminists speaking with their own voices? And if so why does he talk over them?”….and probably more questions.
Sorry, it hit me I didn’t actually answer your question. My point was there are so many conflated questions/concerns it is hard to articulate what the varied points of the other side are.
I did ask Alex MacFarlane a variant of the Criteria Question:
“So I guess what I’m asking is if I were to face an accusation of misogyny due to my works or my online persona, what is the appropriate reaction?”
And she said she’d respond when she had time, so perhaps that will bring us closer to a topic both sides are willing to accept as the center of discussion. That’s part of it I think, accepting the subject(s) under discussion will branch/shift away from what one believes they should be.
There’s really no way for me to avoid the CYA suspicions. And I’m not sure how it would be possible to isolate the question of criteria from the other issues, because they are so closely implicated. I certainly could have done a better job at expressing myself, but I’m not sure it would have had any impact on the kinds ad hominem attacks we’ve seen.
But your response is interesting: you seem to be saying that I actually have addressed their arguments, but that I failed to communicate this effectively, and so brought their name-calling etc., on myself. Isn’t it funny the way the hot potato always belongs to other guy!
How about this narrative: They’re locked in a coalitional mindset that renders any rational engagement with critique impossible, even those with important implications for feminist practice.
Do you really think I could have framed this in a manner that would have led to a different outcome? I could have been Shakespeare and Frege rolled into one and we still would be here.
“But your response is interesting: you seem to be saying that I actually have addressed their arguments, but that I failed to communicate this effectively, and so brought their name-calling etc., on myself. Isn’t it funny the way the hot potato always belongs to other guy!”
Yup, it’s confirmed, we live in two different worlds.
What do you think their arguments are? Who exactly is “their” and what are their arguments? Because I’m really confused on how you got that from what I wrote.
“Do you really think I could have framed this in a manner that would have led to a different outcome?”
Yes, and we have evidence that you could have; Abercrombie replied at Westeros to his critics and defenders, took the side of RoH basically and RoH responded that she thought his response was really astute and he seemed to have genuinely learned something.
So I should have agreed with her that I was a “shit-eating misogynist?” Astute marketing perhaps.
What have I failed to ‘genuinely learn’?
Kalbear, could you link to that Abercrombie post, please? I think I’ve read it before but am not sure where to find it now.
Abercrombie didn’t agree in that respect. He agreed about what she was criticizing was problematic, saw the problems and suggested a way to solve it.
Callan, here’s the Abercrombie response.
What he learned (and probably knows) is that the most important thing is to make good characters that make sense. If you drop in shitty characters with little background people will latch onto what they do have and use that as their measuring stick.
I guess what I’ve not seen evidence of (and I have with him) is that your choice of actions, thoughts, whatever – none of this has changed so far. There’s not a lot of difference between the portrayal of women in Disciple and the portrayal of women in Neuropath and the portrayal of women in Earwa. It’s one of the main reasons I’m not going to be picking up non-Earwa books, tbh. I guess what you could probably learn that would be more useful is to figure out how to portray the things you want to without getting the Archie Bunker effect as much; to make it consistently more clear what you’re getting at, and to see what occludes your points.
I think Abercrombie’s response was fantastic… even more so if she was calling him a shit-eating neckbeard! He realized he hadn’t thought a particular character of his through, that he had shot from the hip. My problem, I would suggest, is that I think things through too damn much, which is probably why he’s writing and selling a shit load more books than I am – or probably ever will! The concession he makes is just one I can’t make. So I make different concessions, the kind that never seems to satisfy you, and that… a cracked moon would likely despise.
But I think I do see what it is you’re really gunning for, Kal, why it is you’ve spent years wringing the identical concession out of me time and time again, never to be satisfied. And I don’t think you ever will, because even if my present, evolving interest in the relationship between feminism and nihilism changes, my texts are always going to be dense and dark and masculine, and provide the same interpretative apparatus that can literally believe that ROH is every bit (and maybe even more) ‘reasonable’ than TPB with more than enough fodder to ensure your enduring dissappointment will not go unsatisfied!
I will always worry about the Archie Bunker effect, but is it really your burden to bear? You should relax.
Danke, KB.
Ah, Scott. Is this the part where you tell me I should masturbate more?
If it’s true that you’ve thought about things too much, decided that this was the best strategy to get your messages across and refuse to change regardless of external information, you’re absolutely right. I am completely wasting my time.
Though I am curious, Scott – why are your texts always going to be one way? Why are you beholden to only one means of writing, one style? Plenty of authors change their styles throughout their lives; heck, a few authors specialize at being chameleonic from book to book (Dan Simmons is a great example here). It sounds like you’re devoted to the notion that you must publish things that will provoke reactions in women because…uh…I’m not sure, actually.
You are. Until you can find an argument that get’s me to concede to writing something you and your group approves of…
But if I don’t buy into your vision of representational propriety, why would I even consider doing that? That really is the only bone of contention between us: I don’t write entirely the way you want me to. For me, it’s ‘Well, no shit, Sherlock!’ But for you it’s … uh… I’m not sure actually. Whatever it is, it definitely owns you!
Maybe the books will change, but then everything I’ve written has been dark and dense and masculine, back to my first D&D adventures! If it turns out that my books primarily appeal to men – what’s wrong with that?
“That really is the only bone of contention between us: I don’t write entirely the way you want me to. For me, it’s ‘Well, no shit, Sherlock!’ But for you it’s … uh… I’m not sure actually. Whatever it is, it definitely owns you!”
You should know better than that, Scott. By that same token does replying to me when there’s nothing you can do to convince me of my wrongness ‘own’ you? It’s a conversation I’m having on the internet that takes very little of my time. It’s an interest, but if you’ll note my patterns of posting they happen when other interests wane.
It’s a pity that you’re so hidebound to your views that no information can change them; in that respect you’re as conservative and reactionary as Theo. I had thought that eventually you may see things differently, even if I’m not the one to convince you of that.
“If it turns out that my books primarily appeal to men – what’s wrong with that?”
Nothing at all. Just don’t pretend that it’s some kind of feminist masterpiece or that women are somehow incorrect in seeing the careful button points that you’ve put in to tweak them. It’s not a problem at all to appeal to demographics, and if you’re really desiring the demographic of misogynist bigots, more power to you. It’s certainly a large demographic.
Not everything on RoH is bad. They have a scathing review of the sexist and racist character depictions in Deus Ex: HR which are pretty accurate.
Just because they’re right about one thing, doesn’t mean they’re right about everything though. Like the idiom says, even a broken clock shouldn’t throw stones at fish in a barrel.
#trollface
That’s a good reason why ROH (and other places) are a good thing – that they do offer a very different (and often to many people completely alien) perspective on things. Sady’s scathing review of GRRM, for instance, caused a lot of backlash – far more than acrackedmoon’s did – including from other feminists. But it was a catalyst for that.
I guess I don’t see acrackedmoon as harmful to feminism any more than I see Bill Maher harmful to liberals or Louis CK harmful to masturbators. It seems like the view of her is that she’s a critic or a reviewer or some feminist writer; to me, she’s a performer. I don’t berate Zero Punctuation’s reviews of videogames for not going into details about every little bit; I laugh and cringe occasionally when he hits too close to home.
So hate sites are harmless or even positive so long as their targets are the right targets? Bigotry is good so long as the hasty generalizations catch… what? 10% of the real offenders? 90%?
This strikes me as a difficult position to defend.
I actually disagreed with a fair bit of Doyle’s critique of GRRM, but Tiger Beatdown is not a hate site – that’s part of her magic: her ability to spin both attitude and critical self-awareness into her writing.
I don’t think ROH is a hate site. She doesn’t hate certain groups of people unless you want to call misogynists a protected group. I don’t think it’s problematic to call out people who like a certain thing that is very troublesome.
I just don’t see the bigotry or hatred that you do. Certainly don’t see the call to action that hate speech so often has.
Tell me, Scott – what is the fundamental difference between what she does and what, say, Jon Stewart does? Or Bill Maher? When Jon Stewart calls someone an asshole, do you think that that is more or less harmful than her calling someone a misogynist?
Then I need to know what criteria you use to distinguish hate sites from non-hate sites. I felt pretty hated, as I’m sure have many others. ‘White male,’ ‘neck-beards,’ etc., is tossed around pretty indiscriminately around there. Then there’s the title of the blog. The mission. There’s the more general shaming rhetoric as well. I have no doubt there’s moments of relative calm, even contemplation, but then you find this on every site, so that doesn’t count for anything, definitionally speaking.
Requires Only That You Hate comes from Warhammer 40K, and is a reference to that universe – specifically, I believe it’s a line for what the Space Marine Credo is. It’s not specific to her or her views, though I can see you getting confused by it.
I think she stays pretty close to what she says it is – a place to discuss and occasionally rage at the fails of SFF.
I also don’t think she hates all white men. I do think she sees White Men as a real problem and a real issue, but there are plenty of white guys who reply there. I don’t feel all that hated – as myself or as a white man.
The neckbeard thing…have you thought about shaving?
Seriously, I don’t see why this is such a horrible deal, but at least one commenter compared being called a neckbeard to being called the n-word or any other racist slur, so perhaps those folks who haven’t found the power of gilette fusion pro really do suffer. It’s a characterization tool. I guess, to me, the difference is one of action; I don’t think she’s calling for the beating of neckbeards or even the shunning of them. I think that she has no patience for ignorance, no patience to deal with those who feel entitled because they’re white men who have their SFF kings and don’t think about how problematic things are, and isn’t going to call them nice names when she doesn’t respect them.
So my criteria for hate speech? Actionable content.
As to shaming, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? The whole goal is to look at the cesspool of shitty SFF writings – where a book that has robot slaves get assraped as the primary storyline wins a hugo – and shame it, because guys…WTF.
Slurs require authority gradients to become personally degrading, which is a bigger deal than being merely insulting. She comes across as an obvious bigot, though. I invite anyone reading this to peruse her site.
And again, I urge you to check out the reactionary blogosphere, Kal. It’s the numbers these guys attract – we’re all chickenfeed in comparison. Do you remember the three punks in the RV in Borat? Some of the most troubling conversations I’ve had in the past few years have been with young men on the topic of women. Something genuinely ugly is happening, meanwhile women’s studies programs are shutting down. I personally think she is obviously feeding into this, but I don’t think I need you to agree to still have a forceful point.
If the result of all this is that she takes a more mindful, more nuanced approach, then that would be a good thing.
Otherwise, I can make neither head nor tails of your criterion. ‘Promoting hatred toward any identifiable group’ is the commonsense yardstick that informs the hate-speech legislation you (unfortunately) find here in Canada, with added criteria to prevent spurious applications of the law (and even still, it’s been gamed in a couple of cases).
Personally, I think America’s policy is the best. You have to have a lot of faith in the perpetual stability of your government to give them these kinds of legislative tools, I would argue.
PREDICTION ALERT!!!
Remember this, if only so you can all laugh at my Don Cherry hubristic bombast. Within the next few years someone will do a landmark study on generational attitudes regarding women and male usage of the internet, and it will be troubling as all get out.
I guess i don’t see it as getting worse. Perhaps you have, but the stuff I see these days is making public the thoughts and views that so many people had before this. It’s just now that you can see it on youtube or read it on anonymous comments sections. I don’t see people looking at extremists and shouting how this justifies their misogyny any more than ‘that bitch who dumped them’ does. Hatred will find its justification. It doesn’t take the internet to do so.
“Post after post, I want to point out fallacies of relevance, equivocations, special pleading (over and over and over), and in many cases, a simple lack of understanding what possesses argumentative warrant and what doesn’t.”
You know, I’m genuinely curious about this. Feel free to use my posts as an example, I’ll readily confirm I prompted you. I want to see what your mental processes are, if anything the next time we have one of our long debates it’ll save us from the circles we go into over and over.
Saajan,
First of all, I’m super sick and medicated (massive sore throat), so any infelicities of tone, style or content ascribe to the fact that I thought your post was very thoughtful and worth spending the time to respond to while feeling like poo. As such, it’s also way long because I think the medication has short circuited the newspaper editor part of my brain and, instead, privileged the pompous philosophy professor part of it – so brevity ain’t the length of wit, here.
Scott is actually way better at logic than I am so I’ll defer to him on the nitty gritty of what’s bizarre to someone with philosophical training throughout your posts. That being said, I also teach philosophy at University, have failed numerous students for being bad arguers, and I can use a few generalities to indicate where I (and numerous women philosophers) depart from the sorts of feminisms articulated online. Because at the end of the day, rational argument simply isn’t about the sorts of things we’ve seen throughout this debate-nor is it found in the things you seem to keep returning to as being somehow important.
You’ve talked repeatedly about the importance of others’ experiences, and listening, and how there’s value in oppositional viewpoints even if they’re argued poorly or discourteous. But at the end of the day, “including the viewpoints of others” isn’t a terribly reasonable metric in and of itself. Consider this analogy: when I worked as a newspaper editor, I felt no pressure to refer to an “alleged” Holocaust, or to include the opinions of Holocaust deniers in opinion features on anti-semiticism. The viewpoints of others simply had no bearing on empirical reality or truth, and including them would have given them far more legitimacy than their positions merit.
This is, of course, an extremely loaded example that will surely cause invocations of Godwin’s law and whatnot – but it’s useful insofar as it shows that virtually every thoughtful person on earth isn’t committed to some sort of universal standard of inclusion in discourses, and encapsulates my view on why responding to RoH is a bad idea. So when you say things like “RoH is a useful corrective to the discourse”, it causes someone like me (or Scott, or Jane Q. Philosophy Teacher…) to get really confused over what you value in the discourse. Because, in my view, you can’t contribute meaningfully to a discourse when you don’t ascribe to the principle of charity and give out the respect your thoughts merit. When Scott talks about “performance rage”, there’s a real value judgment embedded in there: from a philosophical perspective, the articulation of emotion is the opposite of an argument.
An argument is an attempt to go from true premises to a justified and true conclusion (either by induction or deduction), with the goal of persuasion (or coherence with reality); arguments can be engaged in, debated, and it’s possible to understand how or why a response is good (or at least better than other responses). A performance of rage is an attempt to show everyone that you’re angry about something; presumably it’s a form of communication, but this communication is univocal and dismissive of attempts to engage in a dialogue. Indeed, throughout philosophy there’s been a strong sentiment to connect reason with adulthood, and emotion with childhood.
To me, and I’d think to most people who’re trained in philosophy proper (and not WGS Studies, Queer Theory, or the sort of Theory taught in humanities departments), the exchange between RoH and Scott has looked a lot like this.
ROH: Scott Bakker is a bad man who is also sexist and I’m mad about this, so I will call him names. Also, he clearly doesn’t think deeply about feminism.
RSB: I am not a bad man. I have thought deeply about feminism (although I might have failed at demonstrating this in the book). Why am I sexist, and what are the criteria for a person being sexist so that I can understand why this accusation can be asserted in the absence of proof (or in spite of evidence that I’m doing something quite complex and purportedly not sexist).
ROH: Mansplaining. Condescension. Name-calling.
RSB: Repeats requests for clarification.
Now, again, this is in some ways a reductive reading (I’m doing neither side justice, although I would contend the above is accurate despite this). But from a philosopher’s viewpoint, what ROH is doing isn’t entering into a discourse; it isn’t engaging in argument; it isn’t showing respect for the other participant in the debate or engaging in the possibility that it could be wrong. It’s a tantrum, and as any mother worth her salt can tell you you don’t engage with a tantrum thrower: you wait for the tantrum to end, then you engage. Moreover, there is no way to falsify what ROH is doing: rationally speaking, all I can say with certainty is that the person writing the blog’s internal subjective experience reading Scott’s books was angry, which provides readers with no knowledge that is useful beyond its immediate application (“ROH blog writer is angry”).
The notion that Scott (or, I suppose, I at this point) are “mansplaining” is also really bizarre. As everyone who’s ever engaged in graduate study (or been an instructor of record) can tell you, it’s not discourteous to assume the vast majority of people you encounter simply don’t share your expertise – especially when confronted with a rage performance piece masquerading as argument (people who’ve had decent instruction in philosophy simply don’t do those sorts of things in a debate because they’re invalid arguments).
TANGENT: Scott does some really fucking bizarre cognitive science stuff: although I’m not a fan of it most of the time (I don’t think cognitive science has any better chance to win the magical belief lottery than, well, most other philosophical movements), I don’t assume Scott is “mansplaining” by explaining this in a debate simply because it’s a fringe belief that requires explanation if you want to understand what he’s saying! Were I approaching this conversation as a Derridean, I would assume that I have to explain pretty much everything: I was taught Derrida by one of Derrida’s graduate students, and have found that most people simply don’t read Derrida the way that I do!
To a philosopher, a lot – if not the vast majority – of what you’re doing is engaging in special pleading. To wit, the demand that the discourse at TPB is somehow flawed or doomed to failure because of your perception that women feminists are not participating in the discourse. Do women feminists – by virtue of being women – have a better answer to Scott’s criteria question? Do women feminists’ genders make them somehow more reasonable than men (sidenote: the best logician I’ve ever encountered is a woman; by her estimation, her skill in logic is the result of training and not her gender)? Were this debate centering on Scott making claims about what the experience of being a woman in a sexist society is necessarily like (i.e., Scott presuming to give voice to lived experiences that he hasn’t lived while discounting/excluding those who’ve actually lived them) then the sorts of inclusions you’re arguing for would be reasonable; but as best as I can tell, Scott is attempting to make an argument that works on the merits of his premises (premises whose truth or falsity are irrelevant to the lived experiences of person but are instead a function of reason, and thus it’s unclear why you think this omission of lived experience is relevant).
The above is in no way an attempt to discredit the very real perspective women can bring to questions about sexism insofar as women have experienced massive amounts of sexism; but the (typically post-structuralist) feminist demand that personal narrative and personal experience have universal merit for consideration is something that’s utterly foreign to logic or reasoned argumentation. It’s merited in certain circumstances (and when it’s merited it’s fucking crucial!), but when you’re dealing with arguments and things like that it’s just not clear whether the inclusion will bear any argumentative weight.
There’s more, but I’ve been thinking about this for the past hour and I’m starting to feel sicker, so I’ll go. I think Scott’s answers, should he have time, will be much clearer than the above.
Saajan,
Looking at LTP’s example, I think it’s worth considering how much the following is all conclusion without any description of how the conclusion is arrived at:
ROH: Scott Bakker is a bad man (conclusion) who is also sexist (conclusion) and I’m mad about this, so I will call him names. Also, he clearly doesn’t think deeply about feminism (conclusion).
ROH: Mansplaining (conclusion). Condescension (conclusion). Name-calling.
Maybe it’s like LTP or Scott think of X as being reasoning while you think Y is reasoning. I wouldn’t bother to argue who’s right there, I’d just be interested in making clear everyones definition (so as to see the difference instead of us all using one word as if meaning the same thing if we don’t actually mean the same thing).
But in terms of X reasoning, ROH is all conclusion and no description of how that conclusion is arrived at. She just says the text IS sexist (a conclusion). There is no description of how she arrived at that conclusion. I mean, when Scott mentioned that ‘yo’ has been associated with racism, you wanted to learn how that conclusion had been arrived at. Same with us.
As I’ve said before, atleast for me I’d be fine if she had some defintion for a sexist text like “A text with rape in it is sexist unless the rape happened years ago in the narrative, is only hinted at during the text until the end, where when the past event is revealed and cathartically confronted the rapist is shortly after jailed, dies in a car crash or from OD’ing on drugs or similar. PON does not conform to this, thus it is a sexist text.”
I’d think such a restriction is rediculous, but I would grant that reasoning (of type X) was indeed used and I could see the reasoning.
Right now you seem to take it that if a crackemoon says it’s sexist, it is. This is a complete lack of type X reasoning.
Do you use a different definition of reasoning? I am not going to jump all over you if you do (I’ll actually sigh with relief that such a difference had been made apparent instead of the confusion over the use of one word for two things continuing).
Thanks for this, lessthanpleased.
So you’re seeing “Even if she’s wrong she’s right because she’s a woman and a minority!” while I am trying, perhaps poorly, to say:
1. The negative impact of RoH is theoretical, though this centers on my concern that Haidt’s conclusions are not wholly applicable…Note his comments on reason as well.
2. RoH is more than a site with rants. There is textual analysis for anyone who bothers to read the reviews, sampling from the varied tags (specifically the positive ones). Perhaps Cory Doctrow’s For The Win, Valente’s Palimpsest and Deathless, and the Tanith Lee reviews for example.
3. Discussions we’re not a part of are not automatically lacking in reason. This requires some actual examples, otherwise the statement is too broad a brush.
I’ll also say that I think this conflation of questions is still, IMO, a big issue. Arguing if the site, as a whole, is a bad thing is separate from the accuracy of one rant.
Better to challenge the latter wholly, in a reasoned piece showing whatever flaws you believe it possesses, than wrapping it up as part of the larger claim.
I agree with you about the cognitive psych stuff passing into history, but only because I think the history of science and the existing trends make it a good bet the actual situation will prove to be far more complicated (forcing us to parse our concepts) and far more dismal. In the meantime, the question has to be, ‘Compared to what?’ Armchair ruminations? The same goes for evolutionary psych. Otherwise, if you grant that the skeptics already owned the argumentative high-ground, then none of this now mountainous research – most all of it flawed in the predictable ways – comes as much a surprise. I quite often feel like I’m reading Hume, following this stuff.
It grows on you, being stupid…
The rules of reasoning are implicit, which is why they have to be taught. The rules of influencing are also implicit, which is why they are so difficult to distinguish from reasoning in the first place. In the absence of distinctions, it all seems to arrive on the same train. But it’s a hard row to hoe, trying to get people to see the distinction in the middle of an argument. And if it weren’t the case that the discourse I’m up against so often seems so blithely opportunistic, I doubt I would even have played the ‘professor’ card – simply because it boils down to an argument from authority, and lord knows we’ve seen enough of them here!
Maybe it’s warranted, I don’t know.
The fact is the goal of Three Pound Brain isn’t to teach the ability to sort argument from rhetoric, but to simply preach the gospel of worldly complexity and cognitive frailty, to reach as far away from academia as possible. The bottom line is that I intentionally go looking for these kinds of interactions. Many find them alienating simply because they can smell the professorial presumption, the unspoken confidence in the ability to parse the serious from the silly, and given that we are naturally inclined toward the silly, that we need to take classes to do this sorting, they have an inkling that judgement lies in wait no matter what they say. Since they can’t see the distinctions that underwrite it, they chalk it up to an arbitrary exercise of ego.
Anyways, thanks for this LTP. I think I needed it, for a reality check as much as anything else! But also to remind me of the global point: to press the hard questions with relentless civility, and to just get people thinking about the difficulty of things.
Scott. I love your books. I love your blog. I appreciate your point of view. I am repulsed by RoH. Still, EVEN I wish you would stop referring to her as Dude. It’s not proving the point you want it to prove.
@Callan: Saw your post after answering Lessthanpleased’s.
I really think myriad issues are getting conflated, so I’m responded to point/claim X and someone else thinks I’m talking about Y.
Perhaps someone can do a formal rebuttal of the actual post Moon has so we can see exactly what we’re arguing on that front at minimum?
I really think myriad issues are getting conflated, so I’m responded to point/claim X and someone else thinks I’m talking about Y.
Well maybe. But the point I’m also adding is that reasoning type X (or something similar) is what many folks here subscribe to and crackedmoon doesn’t seem to.
So, how to build a bridge?
Perhaps someone can do a formal rebuttal of the actual post Moon has so we can see exactly what we’re arguing on that front at minimum?
When it’s all conclusion, then the only rebuttal would be to make more conclusions and as the decider, hope somehow magically our conclusions are louder and more vehement.
What’s the engagement method your imagining? I mean, her post really revolves around her reading. If she says she hates the sound of nails down a blackboard, then she does. If reading the text is, for her, like nails down a black board, then it is. One could focus on that part by itself and only that. This is what I recall Abercrombie did in his westeros post, but I may be remembering really badly.
This is, however, rather paternal in how it focuses on the persons subjective dislikes, when that person is making objective claims and not at all talking about their personal, subjective dislikes. A bit like a kid saying brocolli is yuck, as if it’s yuck universally, for everyone, but the parent works around the kid knowing it’s just the kid doesn’t like it.
Well, I was thinking that the “Prince of Misogyny” examines the ways that Scott comes across as looking down on women and not being interested in what they say.
So a rebuttal would be how can one read the same text and come to a different conclusion, or how the text is biased.
Honestly though, upon reflection I really don’t think it is all that important in the larger discussion.
As for reasoning, I think without examples of authors and their posts from the ‘Net it is hard to see who exactly is being circumscribed in the ‘No Reason’ zone.
As for reasoning, I think without examples of authors and their posts from the ‘Net it is hard to see who exactly is being circumscribed in the ‘No Reason’ zone.
In terms of type X reason, I can’t imagine you having trouble at all? A conclusion is made, no criteria for arriving at the conclusion is listed. For reasoning type X, it’s that straight forward to detect a no reason zone.
Maybe what’s hard is that when you thought about some places in regards to this specific measure, there seemed to be alot of possitives? And so you assumed you were wrong and this must be a hard thing to figure?
This one will be briefer, Saajan!
I don’t think you’re saying “[e]ven if she’s wrong she’s right because she’s a woman and a minority!” From my point of view, her status as a woman and a minority has no bearing on the rightness of her points in this particular discussion – which, given that her points amount to assertions of her personal offense at the text (and the text’s author), I’m a) ready to believe her expertise on her own mental states and would never argue that she is not offended and b) given that I could believe that someone who is neither a woman nor a minority could be offended (and not need to justify their offense in any way!), I’m not clear on why it’s relevant.
My position amounts to being puzzled why you think her being a woman or a minority merits inclusion in the debate going on at TPB, or why these two fact of demography would affect her ability to reason or the quality of her responses. If this were a discussion that struck me as being about the experiential validity of sexism/privilege in a given person’s life then these points are extremely salient. But in a discussion of in-group biases, the necessary and sufficient conditions of charges of sexism to be merited, the relationship between depiction and endorsement and the like, I’m just not seeing the connection in this specific conversation. Although I’m not the biggest fan of cog-sci, one of its strengths is that it short-circuits demography and focuses instead on the structures of brains that produce individual, contingent (and culture bound) responses.
All that being said, I think my thoughts on RoH likely comes from a different understanding of feminisms – an understanding that probably can’t be reconciled. I firmly believe that asserting feminism as an identity (or even one thing that universally conditions responses) is totalizing, flattening, and necessarily disregards other feminisms like mine that view it as process-oriented, something to which one strives (in other words, something both men and women can participate in meaningfully and whole-heartedly, warts and all). My position on feminisms probably resembles the materialist tradition of feminism – and acrackedmoon would be INCREDIBLY justified in pointing out that her lived experiences as a minority woman suggest that such an approach is probably only possible among “first world” (ugh, I hate that term but I use it as intellectual shorthand) feminists (or white feminists), and that’s a case where the sort of listening/thinking you advocate is really valuable.
I mention the last point not to disregard the points you’ve been raising in previous comments, saajan, but to reiterate my earlier concern that it’s dangerous to assume that a failure to change our position in light of your requests to learn and listen doesn’t mean that what you’re doing isn’t good or even worthwhile. But my reading of the situation is that there are only certain situations wherein lived experiences carry argumentative weight (and were acrackedmoon to slam my process-oriented feminism, she’d be well-justified in pointing out its limitations because that would be the kind of situation where that kind of thing flies).
PS: I think Haidt’s views on reason are way more damaging to someone who puts faith in cog-sci than it is to an Aristotelian/Derridean like me (don’t ask how I reconcile this because I’m still grappling with it like myself). The older I get, the more I start to buy Descartes’ claim that properly invoked reason can never be wrong (it’s when we start to use reason willy-nilly that things get all screwy)! OK, back to cold meds!
Naughty! You should be in bed, resting! Bad philosopher!
@Lessthanpleased:
“I don’t think you’re saying “[e]ven if she’s wrong she’s right because she’s a woman and a minority!””
What do you think my position is exactly? I think we may have derangement of answers and queries going on.
“If this were a discussion that struck me as being about the experiential validity of sexism/privilege in a given person’s life then these points are extremely salient.”
I think the best thing is for to me ask what you think we’re discussing? Because I think there are numerous topics under discussion.
By my count, what’s under discussion (i.e., what Scott has raised in his posts and, thus, what’s germane to the discussion) is:
1. Is Scott sexist?
2. Are the PoN/AE series sexist texts (extension of this: depiction/endorsement; can feminist texts depict sexism to expose it without being sexist)
3. Is a charge of sexism sufficient to ethically/logically “convict” someone of sexism? Should it be?
4. What constitutes a debate? How is this informed/impeded by in-group thinking and moral certainty? What makes a debate rationally productive?
Although other comments/questions have been posed in the comments (particularly by you and a few others), in my view they are at best tangential to what the debate going on at TPB is actually about. None of these questions allow for things like “subjective personal experience” or “talking and listening” as a valid argumentative strategy. Most, by my view, require rational (i.e., dispassionate and rigorous) engagement with concepts insofar as they all are asking for collective consensus on definitions (and, as such, arguments for these definitions).
I think a lot of what you seem to bring up and be focused on including in the discussion are simply red herrings that don’t have much (if any) bearing on how we can arrive at internally consistent and rigorous understandings of these topics that cohere with the facts as presented.
If Scott had said something like “acrackedmoon isn’t actually offended by what I wrote” then I would be piling on with much, much tougher questions than anything you’ve posed – and I would be demanding a lot of talking and listening at that point, as well as being a huge jerk about how arrogant it is to dismiss someone’s claims about their internal subjective experiences without, well, knowing the person. But he hasn’t said that; instead, he’s focused his questions on the sorts of things that bear significant (and dispassionate) critical thought, perhaps out of the view that what the post on RoH did could not in any way be a learning/teaching moment without a nuanced and thoughtful response that attempted to divorce a few of the claims made from one reviewer’s subjective emotional reaction to the book/books/text.
Now, Scott has copped to being one arrogant SoB in this thread. I’ll trust him on this point, but based on what I’ve seen, I suspect that I’m far more arrogant than Scott (despite him being pretty clearly a better philosopher than me; but then again, I’m getting my Ph.D. in a non-philosophy field, now, so Scott should be a better philosopher than me). And you’ve brought up earlier, saajan, that there is an equivalent conversation vis a vis rationality at some of the sites under discussion here. I’m a fundamentally shitty logician, by the by: but if someone is claiming that performances of rage, accusations of mansplaining and the like are hallmarks of a “rational” debate then I can only conclude that the people making those claims either 1) don’t understand logic, 2) are even worse at logic than I am, or 3) aren’t using the word “rational” to describe the sorts of discourses or responses to which it denotationally and connotationally refers in common parlance.
Again, as you say, there now seem to be numerous topics under discussion. But I think that’s a function of well-intentioned people like you not fully grasping the sort of conversation Scott was initially trying to have – and repeated instances of special pleading have muddied the waters a fair bit because it might not have been clear the sorts of assumptions a person trained in philosophy might be bringing to the discussion (this isn’t to speak for Scott – it’s just my reaction and attempt to explain the shape discussions and comments have taken for the past week that initially puzzled the crap out of me). So perhaps a more complete answer would be: I think the initial four things I’ve listed are under merited discussion; numerous subsidiary questions are attempting to be under unmerited discussion due to people not grokking relevancy or thinking through why the things they are saying should be merited.
Were this blog moderated on a “Yes, and” basis, saajan, I think a lot of your comments (perhaps even most of them) would have been deleted because of the above. I assumed throughout most of this week you were simply trying to derail the discussion by raising points that struck me as repeatedly irrelevant – sort of meta-trolling by posting informal logical fallacies over and over again on the blog of a writer who’s known for actually having done philosophy. But then when you asked a few good questions about philosophy, I realized that you just didn’t come at this the same way I did (or, presumably, that Scott does) because it’s a discourse with which you are unfamiliar (as most people are, given how insular and off-putting philosophical discourses are).
This fact hearkens back to both my uneasiness with “Yes, and” posts and is, I think, pretty devastating to the sorts of feminist blogs you praise (including Sady’s, if only on this issue): on the one hand, by allowing this discourse I actually was able to communicate with you and figure out why you were saying the sorts of things you were saying (as you were also able to do with me); on the other hand, think how much poorer both of our lives would be if I’d adopted Sady’s “I’m not your feminism instructor” attitude in regards to our disconnect and told you to go back to college and take a few philosophy classes because it’s not my job to intellectually engage with someone on a comments board who wants to understand me but doesn’t? And this, of course, speaks to Scott’s concern on whether blogs like this really do any good for the cause of gender equality: because, while Sady and others are right that they are not anyone’s personal feminism instructor and aren’t interested in so doing, the safe space they have constructed online’s purposeful insularity means it’s not engaging in the vital task of persuading the misinformed and undecided.
I mean, it’s not their job to be evangelical feminists. But if there’s one cause where I think every person should be an evangelical, it’s feminism/gender equality. This doesn’t mean that I think these blogs are “doing it wrong” because there is undeniable merit in creating a safe space: on my personal scale of morality, though, I think outreach and evangelism are necessary such that we can eventually eliminate the need for safe spaces by creating a better world.
Then again, I’m a University instructor so that’s much easier for me to make practicable than other people given that I am shaping the minds of the youth. My feminism is always a part of my teaching (even in philosophy): it just doesn’t effect how I teach the Sorites paradox.
You ask what I think your position is.
I said the following in my too-long post:
“My position amounts to being puzzled why you think her being a woman or a minority merits inclusion in the debate going on at TPB, or why these two fact of demography would affect her ability to reason or the quality of her responses.”
Given your responses to numerous questions, I believe your position is that you believe the presence of actual women in the debate at TPB would make the debate better; given that you believe there are none currently here, I can only assume you think this speaks poorly of the discourse all of us are participating in. Presumably, this is because they have lived sexism and oppression in ways that (white, straight) men cannot, and thus bring perspective to this that would be helpful.
As my quote notes, I simply don’t understand this position because the sorts of things we’re (supposed to be, as my above comment notes) discussing aren’t the sorts of things where the experiences of being either a minority or being a woman actually matter. In the search for rigorous definitions that correspond to empirical reality or that are logically consistent, all that’s required is a good mind and some debating smarts. Were this a debate about how being a woman effects my, your, or anyone’s reading of Scott’s novels, then perhaps what you seem to be saying would be relevant – and perhaps our refusal to reflect on what outside women readers/bloggers are saying would be problematic.
But if I’m reading you right, you’re assuming that the act of excluding or being indifferent to what women on other blogs are saying is problematic. My position is that when they start having the conversation we’re having over here (rather than their own separate conversation which might, to a non-expert observer, seem to be the same conversation we’re having over here), they’ll be included. I honestly don’t assume that most women I know are terribly interested in engaging in philosophical inquiry – in fact, most men I know aren’t interested in that, either. But I would never attempt to include someone in a philosophical discourse simply because they’re a man or a woman. In my view, assuming that their genders require us to be solicitous of their input (irrespective of whether they’re interested or intellectually inclined to participate) strikes me as paternalistic tokenism.
lessthanpleased, I’m curious – what is the fundamental difference between using terms that philosophers use in a specific way to frame an argument and call others wrong for misusing them and using terms that feminists use in a specific way to frame an argument and call others wrong for using them?
I’m just gonna do a drive by posting without reading any comments because what I’m gonna say feels tangentially related to the post.
I heard a TON of bitching today from the guys at the office about The Vow. Of Course not a single one had seen it, but they were offended it existed. Browsing the internet today, I came across a review of the new blu ray release of the film Love Story, cue even more vitriolic, brainless hate. Last night I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the first time and when I related my loathing for the film (well made and very well acted technically, but well made garbage–it’s nothing more than a filmed trip with a lot of milque-toast drug-addled rambling that will only sound profound and insightful to the already high) and the precise response from the guys at the office was, naturally, outrage, “You, you fail at life for not liking that movie,” was the exact quote. We also watched the original Return of the Jedi Saturday and I was horrified to discover just how BAD the film is in comparison to the first two films (we’ve been watching one a weekend for the past three weeks). The direction is exceptionally infantile in comparison, staging of action is pathetic, cinematographic sense is non existent, plotwise the film precisely recreates the first film (but at a faster pace, and this actually makes sense if you’ve seen Flash Gordon which basically recycled identical plots and sets with minor variances throughout the serial) and the dialog scenes are all suddenly flat, dragnet style back and forth completely lacking in any subtext or acting ability. The ‘emotional stakes’ of Luke suddenly fighting to save his father is horrifyingly awful. Luke flat out says, “I’m here to save your soul.” And Vader is all sad saying, “naw, to late for me, pilgrim.”…and then they repeat all this dialog with the emperor. I had used to think that Star Wars fell apart with Phantom Menace, now I see all the flaws of that film in Jedi as well–a film I adored as a child and still rate more highly than it deserves out of nostalgic affection…
I did not mean to go into a review of Jedi, goddamit, but it’s okay, because talking about star wars is always okay on the internet because the internet is mostly boys.
What I meant to come here to say was that the fucking hypocrisy of the dominant culture absolutely infuriates me. When a film plays to archetypes that women enjoy but don’t go out of their way to flatter the male ego it is an offense against nature. The reason we men should all boycott the Vow, according to the guys at the office, was that “it sets unfair standards, and fucks up women’s brains.” Because women expecting devotion and fidelity from male partners is some kind of offense against nature. Love Story is like this, it’s a film with the worst line of dialog ever written in a film, “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” but it is also a damn fine story of a relationship, and again, about devotion and fidelity… Ironically it’s also illustrative of a lot of casual sexism while it thinks it is being shockingly liberal and free spirited. It’s a fabulous example of how “Liberals” are just as guilty of sexism even when they think they’re being modern. In any event, the film plays archetypes beautifully. (Titanic is naturally another film that achieves this gendered response)
What’s so frustrating is that the dominant culture is immediately hostile to and dismissive of these films. These films are important parts of culture. Yet when it comes to boys’ films that use the same ontological devices of successfully exploiting archetypal storytelling the films are soon incorporated and celebrated (too much success breeds some contempt, of course). Star Wars is the classic example here, but there is abundance of other films that elicit a gendered response, and in general, if the gendered response is in favor of the male, that film gets a more serious treatment. Safe House also opened this weekend, yet because it is a male film it will largely get more favorable treatment than a female film like The Vow (remember most film critics are male, and by most I mean over 90%). the male gaze gets such a preferential treatment it is absurd.
This is rambling and I’m not sure where it’s going, except to say that the one film some of the guys in the office watched this weekend that everyone agreed was great was The Apartment–naturally it’s the film where the schlubby office naif is treated like dog-shit by the hot, unapproachable office babe and he ends up getting the girl in the end–how very predictable that although its a romantic comedy, it can only engage men by playing that particular hand of cards.
We’re hardwired for hypocrisy is the long and the short of it: we have a native genius for calling others to account for our own sins, and since lying is work, we confabulate, we actually believe what we’re saying. Remember back when all those high profile American televangelists were getting punked, and people were shaking their heads, saying, ‘How? How?’ They ask that, but they already know the answer, especially if they’re men. What they are really interested in is appearing moral. There’s all kinds of experiments out there demonstrating how elastic our moral fibre is, how it changes depending on the perceived audience, and how almost all of us become cheaters in solitude. It could be that’s what’s driving you crazy, how your office mates are not so much interpretating the movie as they’re interpretating what they think society thinks – Official Culture.
This is the dilemma that feminism faces. Now that its precepts have been incorporated into Official Culture, actual culture can get back down to business, relentlessly hammering women’s sense of social confidence, convincing them they need a carnival of prosthetics to simply feel minimally secure in public.
@Lessthanpleased: Thanks, now we draw closer to fixing the derangement.
“1. Is Scott sexist?
2. Are the PoN/AE series sexist texts (extension of this: depiction/endorsement; can feminist texts depict sexism to expose it without being sexist)
3. Is a charge of sexism sufficient to ethically/logically “convict” someone of sexism? Should it be?
4. What constitutes a debate? How is this informed/impeded by in-group thinking and moral certainty? What makes a debate rationally productive?”
I agree, these are some good questions to focus on, but starting with Misanthropology 101 the major question has been the positive/negative efficacy of RoH.
“But if I’m reading you right, you’re assuming that the act of excluding or being indifferent to what women on other blogs are saying is problematic. My position is that when they start having the conversation we’re having over here…”
Again, apologies for pulling out this pseduo-Socratic method, but what conversation are we having here?
It’s clear no one here thinks Scott is sexist, the closest position was stated by Kalbear – That Scott is not a misogynist, but it’s understandable how people reach that conclusion. So in light of 1 being false, and no one believing 3, I would think the question would fall to how can his online persona be read that way? Seems that is the only constructive direction.
Honestly 2 is one of favorite questions, but I’d rephrase it as “Can PoN/AE be read in a manner that confirms sexist interpretations, and what have other works done to guard for this misinterpretation?”
My problem with 4′s second part is the assertion, sans textual evidence that RoH or the “boards where everyone agrees” are ‘no reason’ zones. Without clear evidence that TPB is somehow demonstrably better, I see this the favoring of TPB an opinion that contains an unfounded accusation.
So, IMO, if we’re going to get to the reasoning behind a charge for sexism (something it seems a lot of women believe about TPB btw) we should seek out those who are making the charge on other parts of the ‘Net.
At some point you write off people when they can’t be convinced. Why have these women written off Scott and to an extent TPB? Why is the *defense*, given over four blog posts, seen as evidence that the RoH claim is correct?
As I said, we can have a debate on the grounds TPB seems to function under but that amounts to, essentially, a form of in-group thinking as in the end the most vocal critics here – Kalbear and myself – don’t believe Scott is the bad guy. Think of it as allies pushing you toward diplomacy, but no genuine engagement with the party you are in conflict has occurred.
I’m curious what this site would require to convince you, Sci.
Evidence that this is a meeting ground for the broader range of opinions seems lacking. I understand Lessthanpleased’s position, that what matters is the quality of debate with regards to reason, but I think how and where this reason is being applied is unclear and thus seen as sophistry used to dismiss rather than engage detractors.
How would you know, Sci? The problem is that absent specialized training we almost always interpret disagreement with irrationality, and here you just happen to be encountering a lot of disagreement.
Here’s the criterial questions I gave Kalbear in response to the exact same contention (I’m still awaiting his answer).
The evidence is right here. No forum on the internet is truly “a meeting ground for the broader range of opinions”. They all devolve into a circlejerk to some degree (some certainly more than others). The fact that this debate is happening AT ALL means this place isn’t an echo chamber, small as it is.
It kind of speaks to the whole point of TPB, actually… That the point is so difficult to see!
Since Adam brought up film….
Anybody familiar with Gaspar Noé’s film “Irréversible”? It’s a disturbing film, but it’s also a film that will challenge the viewer.
The story is that of a young couple, Alex and Marcus, who are in love and are elated to find out that Alex is pregnant. Alex and Marcus go to a party with a friend, but because Alex is unhappy with the behavior of her boyfriend, she decides to leave. After she leaves the party she is raped. Marcus and a friend discover the identify of the rapist and track him down to a gay S&M bar where they attempt their revenge.
The film is a series of scenes told in reverse chronology. So instead of starting out with this young, in love couple and progressing towards a climax of sex and violence, the film starts with Marcus’s attempt at revenge and progresses backward from there. The movie ends at the begining of their story; that of a young couple who are happy and very much in love.
Roger Ebert’s points out in his review of the film,
“The fact is, the reverse chronology makes “Irreversible” a film that structurally argues against rape and violence, while ordinary chronology would lead us down a seductive narrative path toward a shocking, exploitative payoff. By placing the ugliness at the beginning, Gaspar Noe forces us to think seriously about the sexual violence involved. The movie does not end with rape as its climax and send us out of the theater as if something had been communicated. It starts with it, and asks us to sit there for another hour and process our thoughts. It is therefore moral – at a structural level.”
Gaspar Noe is a visionary, no doubt about that. People should be warned though that Irreversible – true to its title – cannot be unseen. His more recent Enter the Void is equally brilliant, but more palatable because the register is more existential and less intense than sexual violence. I would recommend people check out the latter.
He’s actually used in The Sandman, a quasi-documentary exploring the faux-snuff horror film sub-genre, as a justification for the genre – which goes to show that he has Archie Bunker Effect problems of his own.
I just added Enter the Void to my instant viewing queue on Netflix. I will be watching it tonight.
Hands down, best cinematic representations of … in any movie, period.
No spoiler version!
“Gaspar Noe is a visionary, no doubt about that.”
Oh, there’s doubt alright. How can you fall for Irreversible when you saw through Infinite Jest?
Watched “Enter the Void” last night and really liked it (the title sequence was…wow).
Unlike Noe’s other feature length films, “Seul Contre Nous” and “Irreversible”, I actually look forward to (and will be able to handle) repeated viewings of “Enter the Void”.
Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. Bakker.
I’ve been keeping half an ear out for a couple years now, wondering whether anyone has sued him for inducing epileptic seizures with the opening.
I feel the same way. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing SCN.
The thing I love about him the most is the fact that he’s doesn’t feel the need to defect from basic narrative conventions to prove his artistic credentials. He tells moving stories using coherent characters while spraying/dripping visual acid in your eyes and soul.
And his violence actually violates, something remarkable for me, given how desensitized I feel otherwise.
Apologies, but I mistyped the title of Gasper Noe’s first full length feature. The correct title is Seul Contre Tous not Seul Contre Nous.
I found SCT a little bit easier to watch than Irreversible, but it’s still a difficult film. Noe says in a NY Times interview, “All I have done is filter out the positive side of life. I have left the butcher with nothing more than the negative power of his existence.”
I like and agree with your comment that Noe’s “violence actually violates.” There is one other film that I’ve seen that left me with similar feelings/reactions and that was Larry Clark’s “Bully.”
@Lessthanpleased:
I realizing there’s good chunks of your post I haven’t replied to. I’m going to have to note that its good food for thought, especially the part of how some charity must be necessary to have engagement between parties if anyone is to have hope convincing the other.
This isn’t to say I’m qualified to critique Sady’s blog or RoH on the grounds that all detractors are dismissed. I have seen Moon engage detractors, however mockingly, on the nature of the tone argument.
Again, thanks for the critique, and continue to point out fallacies as you see them and as they admittedly occur. It’ll save us all headaches!
“The concession he makes is just one I can’t make. So I make different concessions, the kind that never seems to satisfy you, and that… a cracked moon would likely despise.”
I know you’ve apparently repeated this “ad nauseum”, but what are these concessions?
Also, I’ll note that if you had begun with a critique on what you believe to be logical fallacies on RoH’s part it would have been a better approach.
Because, when you go back, it feels as though you present evidence on why it’s bad without actually appearing as if you’ve genuinely examined a good sample of its content beyond the “Prince of Misogyny” article.
Bad statistics y….dude. (okay, sorry, can you link me to the post where yo is perceived as racist?)
“How would you know, Sci? The problem is that absent specialized training we almost always interpret disagreement with irrationality, and here you just happen to be encountering a lot of disagreement.”
Why I said *seems* and why I said I didn’t mind people pointing out where they felt I was committing logical fallacies – mind you I still think the majority of that was derangement of questions/responses/rebuttals.
I once had a driver’s ed teacher who passed on a very important lesson: “‘Be careful even if you have right of way – You can be right all the way to the hospital.”
Four blog posts, and people linking describe this as your “melt down”, that you are “insufferable”, and most importantly these posts – your very defense – are evidence that Moon is right.
Surely a wrong turn was made somewhere, regardless of this special training?
Mamatas called it that, didn’t he. I’ve had meltdowns, and this particular accusations leaves me feeling amused and sad – and cognizant of the fact that no matter how sincere the bored smile on your face as you type, people will be inclined to hear you screaming and ranting if they need to discredit you.
But either way, I’m dreadfully curious to hear you explain how unsubstantiated accusations regarding tone and my provision of counterarguments imply Moon is right.
Maybe even take a crack at those questions, maybe?
In the interest of limiting derangement, right about what?
To quote: “Four blog posts, and people linking describe this as your “melt down”, that you are “insufferable”, and most importantly these posts – your very defense – are evidence that Moon is right.”
Good question. Right about what?
Saajan, your driving instructor is refering to people who drive badly/against the rules can still send you to hospital even if your following the rules/have right of way. He’s really arguing some other people operate in no reason/no driving rules zones.
I’m kind of staggered you suggest that if you don’t avoid the other bad drivers impact, it’s you who made a wrong turn? At best, that really is paternalism.
Bad analogy maybe?
My point is even if the use of reason -as one sees it- is being applied correctly, that one achieves the opposite effect is telling.
Worse if the defense is itself seen as confirming evidence that the original claim (“Scott is sexist”) is true.
As to doing it right, I meant as Scott perceives it. The reality is I think there have been numerous wrong turns in this series of PSAs.
Touche – egg on face.
They think she’s right that you dismiss concerns women have about your books via a combination of questioning their intelligence – specifically their ability to engage the semantic density of the text – and sophistry.
I suspect to many this whole thing has sounded like “The impression Moon has of me is wrong because that site harms feminism.”, or restated: “I am not a sexist because this woman is a bad feminist”.
As I noted, conflation of varied issues, scents of ad hominem. Not your intention, and I get that, but from the first post I’ve been shaking my head in advance of the responses you’d get.
Lessthanpleased,
If Scott had said something like “acrackedmoon isn’t actually offended by what I wrote” then I would be piling on with much, much tougher questions than anything you’ve posed
Actually when you put it that way it strikes me that ‘what I’m offended by’ and ‘sexist’ are being mashed together into one by moon. Let’s call it sexistimoffendedby.
When someone mashes the two concepts together then to that mind that mashes, when Scott says something isn’t sexistimoffendedby, well at the same time he’s saying actually no, you aren’t offended by this thing. Or so it appears.
I mean when I think about it right now, I have a hard time of thinking of something being sexist to me, without me being offended by it. Even I mash sexism and what I’m offended by, together!
Or maybe it’s even harder than that – the only way in which she’s offended is by her notion of sexism? She can’t be offended in any other way, like offended by depiction. So perhaps there is no prising away the notion of sexism without attempting to say ‘actually, no, your not offended’?
Hard.
@Callan: Reading her piece “Prince of Misogyny”, and the interview from which she quotes, what would your rebuttal be?
How would you demonstrate that her conclusions are wrong?
Saajan,
Her conclusions were “This offended me” or “I think this text is appallingly sexist.” Given that I can see no other real conclusion, I don’t see how I’m positioned in any way to critique those conclusions because I am not an expert on anyone’s internal emotional states (except, possibly, my own).
I think Callan’s intuition that moon has conflated her own internal emotional state’s with universal claims regarding sexism is spot on. As such, I’m not sure that there’s any profit in considering it very deeply. That others seem to agree is interesting – but again, it’s only interesting insofar as it communicates the feelings of a group of people. Interesting anecdotal information, without doubt, but not grounds for an debate or even a discussion. You acknowledge the feelings and move on.
That being said, I tend to separate my feelings from my judgments – which might not really be possible for acrackedmoon given the original post on RoH. For instance, I don’t like the Beatle’s music, but I still think they’re the greatest rock band ever: my taste and my ability to assess quality/content diverge from each other with pretty appalling frequency (but, then again, I’m writing a post-structuralist historiography of professional wrestling for my dissertation right now so it’s possible I’m just a glutton for punishment and weird).
Re: saajan’s point that “they think she’s right that you dismiss concerns women have about your books via a combination of questioning their intelligence – specifically their ability to engage the semantic density of the text – and sophistry.”
I think the error on these critics’ part is that they’re assuming that this dismissal is coming because the critics in question are women. In Scott’s defense, gender has nothing to do with his questioning these critics’ intelligence. Readers of all genders can fail all books (and as for their counter-defenses regarding “the death of the author”, such arguments are trite, vacant, and indicative that the person arguing this learned theory in an English department that taught a straw man of Derrida; continental philosophers tend to hold such misreadings in really low esteem). Moreover, why should Scott privilege their gender when he dismisses concerns from men just as thoroughly? Again, special pleading.
I think the sophistry point would be a fairer claim if Scott hadn’t said things like “I agonized over these decisions, may have gotten them wrong, but I believe that my approach will be vindicated by the end of the series and to do otherwise would be to betray the work so far and the argument I’m making.” Given that this defense is accompanied by an acknowledgment that this will cost Scott some readers and he’s willing to take it in the pocketbook given the lost sales suggests that he’s engaging honestly, has heard the complaints, and decided that he’d rather lose money and readers than not attempt to see his story through to the end warts and all. These criticisms – and the fact that they continue to be raised here through quotes and on other Web sites – strike me as kind of weird: its almost as if the people complaining aren’t happy simply not reading something they find sexist or problematic, but will only be happy if they convince an author to stop writing something they don’t like (or to change it), despite the fact that there’s a near zero chance that, were these changes to occur, any of the people so arguing would buy a book were the changes implemented.
This goes back to the listening/hearing deal I brought up earlier. Scott HAS listened and heard. He understands that the price of him staying the course is continuing to alienate people he’s already alienated, and he’s willing to pay that price. The outcome is not what the people calling for him to listen and reflect have hoped for, but there’s nothing attendant upon listening and reflecting that requires the person actually change.
“Oh, there’s doubt alright. How can you fall for Irreversible when you saw through Infinite Jest?”
Murphy, could you elaborate?
Irreversible is a wretchedly smug and facile film, vulnerable to a lot of the criticisms RSB made of Infinite Jest. Noe is a deeply immature film-maker and in praising him, Bakker seems to be making an odd exception to his dislike of formalism in art.
I see where you’re coming from, but I disagree SO MUCH IT HURTS…
If Neuropath is anything to go by, this is love.
Also, saajan:
“How would you demonstrate that her conclusions are wrong?”
Conclusions come from arguments. From my perspective, your attempts to constantly return to things that don’t have rational arguments but, rather, are defined by their strident communication of their internal emotional states is incredibly problematic.
Philosophically speaking, you can’t prove a negative. No one can ever “prove” someone wrong. It’s incumbent upon the arguer to prove themselves “right”. Shifting this responsibility to us is something that does a violence to reason itself. As best as I can tell, acrackedmoon has proven that she was offended and is angry about that. Beginning and end of discussion, and no one sane or charitable would ever contradict that.
That being said, what we have going on here at TPB is actually a lot more interesting. People who disagree are talking to each other about things that can debated on the merits. People are doing so civilly and charitably. In so doing, everyone (I suspect) is learning a lot – and learning about things a lot more interesting than whether a person (or persons) were personally offended.
Although I haven’t tackled the criteria question, I would be interested to see others take another go at it. I’m not sure I’ve got a handle on how to set up a defensible answer to it – but I suspect that other people making stabs at it might help me figure out what an answer might (or, at least, shouldn’t) look like.
“From my perspective, your attempts to constantly return to things that don’t have rational arguments but, rather, are defined by their strident communication of their internal emotional states is incredibly problematic.”
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but in the interest of avoiding more derangement of questions/responses/rebuttals can you give an example where I’ve said this?
Also I asked Alex MacFarlane to answer a variant of the Criteria Q, she said if she has time she will.
sorry, meant “where I’ve done this?”
Every time you ask us to reflect on her original post, as if there’s a way to meaningfully respond to it other than noting that the author has communicated her feelings stridently.
Yes. It’s “Look at her express her feelings!”
Feelings, being the primordial reasoning, then in the face of someone sad (assuming its not all just ‘a laugh’), is to stop.
It just doesn’t seem that easy anymore. You take your kid to be stabbed with thin hollow steel and cry about it. And we call it immunisation. Small pains in exchange for avoiding larger ones.
Actually last time my daughter didn’t cry. Because I suspect she trusted me. Which makes it hurt more.
@lessthanpleased: You’re referring to “Prince of Misogyny”? Because, as stated by Moon herself, the piece is about Bakker’s online persona, not about Prince of Nothing. She even says she didn’t read the book.
I actually made the mistake of thinking it was a book review the first time around as well.
Now, I reach different conclusions than her, but only by being privy to information she doesn’t have – knowing Bakker longer and in more varied capacities. If, however, I had only the interview and these four blog posts to go by I’d come to largely the same conclusions she has.
“I think the error on these critics’ part is that they’re assuming that this dismissal is coming because the critics in question are women.”
From what I’ve seen – and the popularity of Elodie’s story – it seems clear people recognize the dismissal, the question seems to be whether it’s dismissal upon consideration/reflection or a dismissal on the grounds that the critique is negative.
I think the claim to “special pleading” is an inaccurate application of the fallacy here. The question is whether the narrative contains tropes that inform a negative depiction of women. Women, being on the receiving end of these tropes, should be more likely to recognize them. This, I believe, has been the crux of Kalbear’s argument for some time now.
“Readers of all genders can fail all books”
How do you see readers failing at books? And why is “Death of the Author” a poor charge? Perhaps it means different things to us – my understanding of the term is demanding a book be read in a certain way is like demanding a knife, hammer, or anything be used as the creator desired.
“This goes back to the listening/hearing deal I brought up earlier. Scott HAS listened and heard.”
In general, I think its Scott’s idea that he covered all the angles, thought about everything, and other people saying they still see issues and fumbles to which the rebuttal seems to be that Scott thought about it really hard.
This is what Moon, rightly or wrongly, seems to be lampooning. The idea that no woman could have thought as hard as Bakker did about depiction of women, and if there’s a complaint the reader should go back and reread.
Further, I think the impression, rightly or wrongly, is a sensed lack of empathy. So someone says, “When you use the word lithe in a rape scene, and describe the victim’s nipples in the sun, you sexualize violence against women – even more so when there’s no perspective from the woman but instead the supposed thoughts of her husband” the rebuttal:
“My desire is to problematize gender, and specifically in that instance it was to examine the contradiction between beauty and horror.”
Seems to miss the charge entirely. It says nothing about how the book, now published and out there, has this text that women – and men – perceive as misogynistic. It suggests that social concerns can be answered with aesthetic arguments.
“I think Callan’s intuition that moon has conflated her own internal emotional state’s with universal claims regarding sexism is spot on.”
What is the textual evidence that this is the case? What in “Prince of Misogyny” makes you think that Moon was really offended by the interview that she got really angry about it?
It seems to me she’s having a laugh. You could argue her piece is biased specifically because she wanted to make a performance out of it, but that leads to why so many people think it – not to mention Elodie’s story – are funny because they are “true” to their perception of Scott.
What is the textual evidence that this is the case? What in “Prince of Misogyny” makes you think that Moon was really offended by the interview that she got really angry about it?
It seems to me she’s having a laugh.
Saajan, hold on, is she offended, or she doesn’t care and she’s just taking the piss at random and the whole sexist charge is for laughs?
Saajan, this seems to be shifting ground? As much as maybe Scott needs a FAQ, I think you need some document that keeps things (atleast from your perspective) in one order. Awhile ago you were asking to empathise with the idea of being told ‘no, actually you’re not offended’. If she isn’t offended, that’s not even relevant!
To me, the joker in the dark knight made alot of political statements. Except he didn’t, it was all a joke to him, a way to make things burn. Perhaps a walking avatar of nihilism.
This conversation about ROH kind of reminds me of Cnaiür. In the end I wanted to take some kind of knife to him, that could cut out the parts I thought were good and keep them, while consigning the rest to the furnace. And I know to want that is nothing pretty about me.
I know alot of parts of ROH are very valuable to you.
But it seems like to value some means you keep all of it.
“Awhile ago you were asking to empathise with the idea of being told ‘no, actually you’re not offended’. If she isn’t offended, that’s not even relevant!”
Where have I said this?
“I know alot of parts of ROH are very valuable to you.
But it seems like to value some means you keep all of it.”
I’ve already stated I don’t agree with all of the reviews, opinion pieces, comments, etc. What I have stated is that the textual analysis she brings to her reviews, especially with regards to the depiction of women/minorities/queer-persons, is valuable. I’ve also noted the performance rage pieces are effective at fostering discussion.
Hi Saajan,
Looks like I thought you and Kalbear were arguing the same thing? As far as I understood him, he thought moon had taken offense (he kind of seemed so sure his was THE arguement, I sort of assumed you were making the same! Oops!). Looks like you were both arguing different things, my mistake!
But why your concern about a no reason zone if it’s just for laffs? If someone told me monty python was a no reason zone, I’d say fuck yeah! Why so serious?
It sounds like the no reason zone thing concerns you – but in terms of comedy, who cares? (I wont get into how some comedy is slander right now, but anyway). You mean there are good articles there?
What I have stated is that the textual analysis she brings to her reviews, especially with regards to the depiction of women/minorities/queer-persons, is valuable.
It depends on whether the other articles rely purely on assertion. If so, they are valuable to those who simply want to hear pure assertion, I’ll grant.
Is that the demographic for the blog?
I’ve also noted the performance rage pieces are effective at fostering discussion.
I think you need to show me where someone says “Hey, I wasn’t prepared to listen, but then moon called me a neckbeard and I totally started listening and changed my mind!”
I’d totally agree it fosters discussion amongst the choir. Does it actually go outside of the choir?
At the very least, it sounds like Bakker is annoyed at a certain demographic of 14 year old males. But he doesn’t call them shiteaters or cronic masterbators to deliver his performance rage. Because that’d just frighten them off before he’s done beating them up.
Though he does have Sorwheel suddenly masterbate…perhaps Scott was a bit blunt in his attack with that one!
saajan,
I think this exchange is another example of the disconnect that I have perceived in your posts: you have on several occasions attempted to re-orient this discussion by asking several of us to revisit the RoH post. I sense that this is once again part of your strategy to get people to listen to and reflect on what she’s saying. Although I can’t speak for Callan and Scott (the people I’ve seen you use this tactic on other than me), I think you believe you’re being virtuous in so doing – that this will in some way inspire a dialogue and convince us that we’re wrong, despite the fact that the post in question tells us an awful lot about acrackedmoon’s feelings but contains no arguments to which we can charitably respond. But I still contend that there’s an extent to which you seem to believe that the only way we can demonstrate that we’ve actually attempted to “listen and reflect” to acrackedmoon would necessarily result in all of us agreeing with your position and responding the way you want us to. If there wasn’t, you wouldn’t keep doing it – and you would assume that we have re-read this piece multiple times, internalized acrackedmoon’s feelings, and concluded that the way we are discussing it now is as charitable as we can be (even if said result isn’t resulting in us agreeing with you).
Regarding your request to revisit the text once again (as if I haven’t already done that) because you have a different reading of it that I do (which, as this conversation has established, is because I approach this discourse in a fundamentally different way than you do), I’ll cite a response I made a few moments ago. I have revisited the RoH piece several times, and have come to the conclusion that the only thing that is being communicated is the author’s distaste. Continuing to re-orient me to something that I’ve already responded to as best as my training allows seems (dare I say it) awfully similar to mansplaining. I’ve read it carefully, several times, and think it’s time for you to stop asking me (and others) to revisit it given that, philosophically speaking, the only thing that it’s reasonable to get from the piece is that the author (and others like her) had a very intense subjective experience to quotations of a text and blog posts by Scott. It would be indecorous of me or anyone else to claim that acrackedmoon is somehow unqualified to assess whether her individual response accurately reflects her internal emotional states, and uncharitable in the extreme for me to suggest that she’s saying something other than that given the content of the piece. In other words: your requests that I revisit a text that I’ve already revisited upon several occasions is getting to be slightly offputting, and asking me to respond to it in a way other than how I already have would require me to perpetrate a philosophical violence that I consider unethical and uncharitable to acrackedmoon.
You have stated you believe RoH’s post is worthwhile. I disagree, and have explained to you the limits of what charity and philosophical training allow me to say about the piece – and that’s all I’m going to say. I reflected, listened, (re-reflected, re-listened, and so on) and reached the above conclusion. Future requests to do this again will be met with respectful silence, given the above reasons and the feeling I get that you won’t be happy unless I venture to say more than the piece in question reasonably merits.
Philosophy Shop Talk: people who don’t care, skip.
As for “death of the author”, it’s based on a pernicious misreading of Derrida perpetuated by the theory industry of Humanities departments in American post-1968. Here’s the cliffs notes version of that. Most people read Derrida as a post-structuralist rather than as a post-Heideggerian (and thus position him as a nihilist rather than another neo-Kantian). Conflate this (in my opinion) mis-reading of Derrida with North American humanities departments (particularly English Departments) and you have an entire generation of baby boomers profiting by creating the post-structuralist theory industry. Meeting publication and research demands – and thus acquiring performance pay raises – in the contemporary academy became significantly easier when the bastardization of Derrida began being used to justify de-privileging authorial intent – after all, if everything’s a text and all texts defer meaning, then why bother doing nuts and bolts research when you can just provide a deconstruction and some journal will publish you if you use the right jargon? Ask a good Derridean who’s read Derrida in France whether you can deconstruct something and they’ll laugh at you (frequently, the words in French are “se deconstruir” which is more accurately translated as “it deconstructs itself”; Derrida explicitly rejects deconstruction as an analytic method in his interview with Hannah Arendt, I believe, in Positions). The Death of the Author is usually invoked based on misreading Derrida as someone who produces an iterative process rather than describing a phenomenological givenness of subjective experience. Applied outwards, this reading is what motivates a lot of Queer Theory (which is frequently unrigorous when they do poststructuralist stuff, although people like David Savran have explained why post-structuralism has destroyed queer theory a lot more eloquently than I have) and some contemporary Feminist theory. In both of those cases, people like Savran (materialist queer theory) and Jill Dolan (materialist feminist theory in performance, such as in “The Feminist Specator as Critic”) have argued for a more processual (and Marxist/materialist) understandings of the complexities of both.
For me, stuff like RoH reads like someone who read about deconstruction in an English class. Reason, as a discourse, is patriarchal and dominated by men, perpetuated for centuries by the exclusion of women. Ergo, for a feminist to communicate they must reject Reason and posit its Other, Rage (or excessive emotion, or whatever). In so doing, they reverse the binary and correct the power imbalance.
Philosophically speaking, for me at least, this is a complete misreading of the way Derrida informs this. Rather than this sort of weird Hegelian vibe, it’s more productive to understand that Reason, as a discourse, always already contains its Other, Unreason – and this is phenomenologically given to us throughout every given discourse. So what you tend to get is a conversation like we’re having at TPB: reason confronts its other and deepens its understandings how discourse functions (with Scott’s insights about cog sci and in-group thinking serving this purpose).
In other words, the Death of the Author came about because of specific material conditions in the Academy, and its predicated on the idea of reversing privilege as a good in and of itself. Historiographers like myself think that this is really, really problematic. When given evidence that an author’s views are available (e.g., Scott on his attempt to expose the marriage between violence, gender, metaphysics and beauty; John Dryden on dramatic theory and praxis in the 17th century; etc.) it’s incredibly irresponsible and dishonest to not take those views into account – even as we problematize those views! Furthermore, it also sets a dangerous anti-feminist precedent in the academy when it comes to early women writers who provided both literary texts and theoretical/reflective texts – if the author is dead, why shouldn’t we discount the views of early women writers who succeeded in a publishing industry that was anti-woman when those views are available to us?
Now, the above would likely be read as mansplaining by people who hold that they really do understand this sort of thing. But in my experience as an educator of philosophy, most people really don’t understand the above! In part this is because many philosophy departments refuse to teach Derrida because of the analytic/continental philosophy divide in Anglophone philosophy departments, and the feeling that Derrida is guilty of charlatanism in how he dishonestly convinced the English Department at Yale to bring him in in 1968; in part this is because Derrida has been wholly appropriated by departments dedicated to perpetuating Paul De Mann’s mis-readings of Derrida as foundational in Baby Boomer literary theory used throughout the academy.
End Philosophy Shop Talk.
“I think the claim to “special pleading” is an inaccurate application of the fallacy here. The question is whether the narrative contains tropes that inform a negative depiction of women. Women, being on the receiving end of these tropes, should be more likely to recognize them. This, I believe, has been the crux of Kalbear’s argument for some time now.”
What percentage of women have to recognize this for it to be a legitimate issue? Why are we totalizing women into one body politic that can unequivocally recognize these things, when such a large part of feminism is moving away from the totalization of femininity into a unified thing rather than a collection of disparate and individuated voices? What percentage of women who’ve read this book agree with acrackedmoon, and what percentage would have to agree for this to be an “objective” assessment? Is this a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease? Why is the Internet feminist community of women being privileged above those with alternative, non-unitary understandings of feminism (and who don’t congregate online into self-selecting communities)? In other words: why do we have to include this particular group of feminists, and not others (hence special pleading)? What happens if a materialist feminist like myself, a post-structuralist feminist, a second-wave or radical feminist, and a first wave progressive feminist recognize the codes in this text differently (not to mention a citizen of the first world as opposed to a postcolonial feminist)? Again, this is the difference between subjective lived experience and “objective” reality: there’s no rigorous criterion that can establish this without doing the incredibly unfeminist action of totalizing all women into a group represented by one group of women and excluding other groups of women.
Most of these questions can’t be answered, sadly, because all are problematic. But I trust you do understand that, from my position, this is as much a conflict of feminisms as it is an issue about a text. Hence why I’m being so specific in this conversation: given the lived experiences of everyone discussing this, we have to limit ourselves to what we can say with certainty (individual readers having individual, individuated responses to a work or an author; taste versus statements of overarching empirical validity). It all comes back to the fact that all any of us can offer from our individual experiences when it comes to an issue as big as this is how we felt about the book and its argument. That’s all any of us have!
Final response to a great post, and then I have to eat to take another round of medications.
“Seems to miss the charge entirely. It says nothing about how the book, now published and out there, has this text that women – and men – perceive as misogynistic. It suggests that social concerns can be answered with aesthetic arguments.”
Aesthetic arguments against social concerns are the only arguments available to artists in their works. 19th century women writers in England are increasingly under fire from post-colonial women critics for ignoring issues of imperialism and racism (e.g., Spivak) when they focused on Western gender inequities: does that invalidate their trenchant criticisms of patriarchy within literature? Should they have remained silent and worked only on political solutions rather than using problematic literary examples to further women rights by attempting to change culture (something in which they were successful, incidentally)? Gramscian Marxism (or neo-Marxism, I guess) includes these sorts of things within his concept of organic intellectuals attempting to change hegemonic social structures, and it’s one of the things that’s always resonated with me when I read his work.
It’s fair to say that Scott’s argument isn’t working thus far, if that’s how you read the text. But isn’t it better to attempt to engage with a problem aesthetically rather than continually reify existing injustices (even if said engagement inadvertently reifies existing social problems)?
Now, I’ll saying something problematic related to this point in an attempt to bring the discussion forward. Ultimately, committed women feminists being horrified by the depiction of sexism isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) a particularly strong argument against the efficacy of Scott’s argument; given their subjective lived experiences and the intellectual sophistication of their position regarding equality and justice, they don’t need to be convinced that Scott’s attacking something horrific, using the tools of the masters to tear down the masters’ house. They aren’t the people Scott is attempting to convince with the horrors of what he’s showing. I’m curious whether the type of men who stereotypically read fantasy – which, as numerous feminist bloggers have pointed out, is a genre seemingly filled with problematic assumptions about gender – are rethinking the sorts of fantasies they’ve uncomplicatedly read in the past. Feminist critics like you and me don’t need to be convinced that the combination of sexism, violence, beauty and metaphysics is horrifyingly fucked up – rather, it’s probably men who’ve never thought seriously about how this same screwy combination of sexism, violence, beauty and metaphysics is whitewashed within numerous other fantasy novels they’ve read.
In certain ways, Scott’s argument isn’t terribly different than the performance of rage pieces we’ve been criticizing. For his (stated) argument to work, he’s got to put this stuff front and center to force people to react to it rather than slink back into their sexist preconceived notions. RoH’s post was ineffective as an argument, but effective as a conversation starter; perhaps we can say the same of what Scott’s doing with misogyny and sexism in the books. For me, this isn’t always pleasant to read. But this aestheticization of a social problem is one I can understand and appreciate, even if I don’t always like it (and if similarly-minded women feminists don’t like it, either).
Whoah. Great post. I’ll have to reread it to fully absorb it. On a personal note I appreciate the time you took to explain ‘Death of the Author’.
One caveat: I apologize if it seemed I was berating you by asking for textual referrals to the “Prince of Misogyny” post. My intent was not for people to reread until they change their view, but rather being unclear exactly what evidence people are using when they make varied claims about RoH.
Without referrals to the text of the site, though not necessarily “Prince of Misogyny”, IMO it’s not very fruitful to discuss it’s status as a ‘No Reason Zone’.
-Sci
It’s hard to give examples of absence, Saajan. If we were saying ROH never uses exclamation marks, it’d be hard to give a textual example of where in particular exclamation marks were not used.
Do you see criteria for the conclusions made? If not, there you go. If so, feel free to post the text here.
Your final point is entirely where I see my gamble taking place, LTP. But I would argue that psychologically speaking, the difference betweem my approach and acrackedmoon’s is as stark as can be. Rage-performance/shaming-tactics trigger a number of defense mechanisms, in-group and out. Their point seems to be one of motivating and ensuring solidarity within an existing membership, something which reliably triggers a reciprocal response from outgroup competitors. If you think about it, the effect of my books are almost precisely the opposite. This is what makes the Archie Bunker Effect so problematic. So you use Archie to get past typical defensive responses, but what if he simply reinforces more than he problematizes?
What Sci and Kal and acrackedmoon want is good old fashioned easy-to-recognize positive representations of marginal groups: the intuition is the same one that made our ancestors (and quite a few of our contemporaries) so paranoid about the written word, the fear that sustained representation of moral or political deviance will have the effect of normalizing this deviance for the reader. My response (in less technical terms) has been that the work of normalization has already been done, on both fronts. Representations of women in positions of power has been normalized, and representations of women in positions of abjection has also been normalized. Welcome to the post-industrial cultural kaleidoscope! All I’m trying to do is reach past both, to explore esoteric questions about patriarchal tradition, instrumentality, animality, etc., as well as to simply plant an exoteric seed: these things are fucking difficult!
To make people think, no matter what their group.
For me, the real enemy is the illusion of apparent univocality that academia has indirectly generated by convincing so many critically-minded cultural producers that turning their back on the cultural commons is the only way to be taken ‘seriously.’
Time to root for the Leafs…
Really interesting post, LTP. Where’s a good starting place for David Savran on queer theory?
“What Sci and Kal and acrackedmoon want is good old fashioned easy-to-recognize positive representations of marginal groups”
This is not what I want – or rather not solely what I want – and judging by opinions of Kalbear and Moon expressed elsewhere, I’m going to assume they want more than what you are suggesting.
(I’m not even sure how you reached that conclusion TBH)
I think the initial derangement or misunderstanding of questions/responses has led to myriad assumptions on everyone’s parts. Perhaps the next post will engender more fruitful discussion, or maybe the half-time show could conclude with an Atrocity Tale?
Maybe I’ll even crack open a math book and read about logical fallacies…
Moment of truth:
It’s been something like 10 years since I’ve taken an actual logic class. So, when I have to teach logical fallacies, I go here: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
Don’t bother with a math book. Informal logical fallacies are what appear in normal debates, and they’re available for free online.
I think a big problem with a lot of Web sites is that argumentation frequently allows an explicit or implicit appeal to ridicule. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-ridicule.html
Frequently, when you’re dealing with commentaries on an individual who produces both literature and commentary you get something like poisoning the well. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-ridicule.html NOTE: This happens to me with both Ayn Rand, Stephen Donaldson and Orson Scott Card. So even though it’s irrational to let something like this affect my reasoning, it still effects my subjective experience of trying to read their books. So I could see why some readers might read Scott’s blog and then find the books hard to enjoy!
Oh, heh, sorry – I have a lot of math books lying around, a few with logic as an introduction.
Thanks for the links!
Occurred to me that while I said I appreciated your time, I didn’t actually thank you. Apologies, and thanks for the information on Derrida!
I’m not even sure how you reached that conclusion TBH
Well if Scott wrote about Xena clones who fight (ie, wage war) for justice, do you think we’d be here? Or does moon often lay into texts which pander to a female empowerment fantasy?
I don’t think we’d be here if Scott just wrote that stuff?
And in terms of wanting more – more things you’re uncomfortable with? Because if you want more things that your going to be comfortable with, that’s not really leaving ones comfort zone.
You say ROH has some good articles – does moon describe in one of them being made uncomfortable by the text, her values seemingly not affirmed – yet she doesn’t explode at the author? I’m genuine, maybe we can bring one to light where she does that? The tiger beat down link certainly seems to contain that in spades?
“Well if Scott wrote about Xena clones who fight (ie, wage war) for justice, do you think we’d be here?”
I think there are multiple paths that could lead us here. When I say future conversation will be more fruitful, it is an indictment against myself as well – it’s funny, I actually wouldn’t have minded the challenge of structuring posts within parameters conforming to listing a claim then the claim’s evidence.
“And in terms of wanting more – more things you’re uncomfortable with?”
I think, IMO, a book seeking to be subversive isn’t enough, because subversion itself has become a tired trope. I think it’s good for artists to take risks, but taking a risk in and of itself does give the reader quality engagement.
As I’ve said before, IMO some areas of PoN and AE are successful in that regard, others are not.
“does moon describe in one of them being made uncomfortable by the text, her values seemingly not affirmed – yet she doesn’t explode at the author?”
Good question. Perhaps ones of these will meet requirements?:
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/jeff-vandermeers-city-of-saints-and-madmen/
https://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/living-next-door-to-the-god-of-love-and-how-my-skin-crawled-off-my-bones-thanks-to-justina-robson/
http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/palimpsest-and-the-dubious-sexual-politics/
I think there are multiple paths that could lead us here.
Saajan, by how I measure things, this is a dodge. Why does Scott think ya’ll want possitive representations of the marginalised? Because if you’d gotten it, we wouldn’t be making these posts.
I think it’s good for artists to take risks, but taking a risk in and of itself does give the reader quality engagement.
I’m reading that last bit as ‘does not give the reader quality engagement’, otherwise I’m not sure what your saying?
I think, IMO, a book seeking to be subversive isn’t enough, because subversion itself has become a tired trope.
This seems to be off topic – there’s subversion just for the sake of subversion, and there’s subversion towards making a point/the point of making something problematic.
I thought you considered PON to be doing the latter, not just the former?
If you want to say subversion to make a point is old hat and doesn’t get through to anyone anymore, I think that’s an interesting position to pitch (would have been great if moon had said that).
“does moon describe in one of them being made uncomfortable by the text, her values seemingly not affirmed – yet she doesn’t explode at the author?”
My mistake, I phrased my question poorly in one of those “he’ll just get what I’m urging at” kind of moments. I meant made uncomfortable, of having her values not affirmed/broken, but then she sees something from a new perspective because of having those values messed with and then comes to appreciate the new perspective.
I’ll grant those links of her are where she politely says she doesn’t like it. Actually, the texts reviewed in the links do sound a bit ‘subversion for subversions sake only’. Ie, just for entertainment.
Does she have any ‘this changed my life’ books? And by changed I don’t mean just further affirmed what she was already doing?
Scott:
Is it safe to say that your attempt to problematize male titillation by describing beauty during scenes of abjection is part of this attempt to force male readers to feel revulsion at something too many fantasy authors rely upon (seemingly) without reflection?
Because I think your decision to attack sexism and misogyny by going after the people who consume it unthinkingly in genre is quite possibly the gutsiest (maybe even Quixotic) thing I’ve ever heard of a fantasy author attempting to do.
And in all fairness, I think you’re underselling the differences between PoN and performance rage (as I most certainly did to push things forward). You’re harnessing some really icky stuff to make an argument. Where performance rage’s efficacy lies in shouting out one’s feelings, your argument’s efficacy is going to be decided when the last book is published.
But, given the number of commenters I’ve seen here over the past year decide to get interested in philosophy because of what you write, I think you’re doing an awful lot of good in building a critical readership – and an intellectually engaged readership.
PS: I’ve gotten all of the cool, younger professors who like fantasy novels in the Philosophy Department where I adjunct into your books. I know that two of us – Jon Cogburn and I – hold your series in as much esteem as Martin’s. I actually recommended it to a few of my dramatic literature students last Spring (Achamanian’s quip to Esmenet that “There’s something sad about all couples” was how I started our Valentine’s day seminar last spring) who’ve also really gotten into it. So even though you’ve left the Academy, we’re actually reading your novels!
I see the formal resemblance to be sure, but like I say, I think they operate on a completely different terrain psychologically. The difference in medium alone, I think necessitates this – but there’s more.
As for the rest… *shudders*
Nah, cool beans.
You are a breath of fresh air to this topic LTP thanks for posting. Your posts seem to have cleared up a lot of misunderstanding about what’s under discussion from a philosophical point of view.
I hate to show my ignorance, but in the hopes of raising quality of the debate I must confess I am still unsure “what’s under discussion from a philosophical point of view.”
Aeons ago, a chance asymmetry in the investment in gametes led to an evolutionary positive feedback loop where two distinct morphologies in gametes and strategies emerged. Some more stuff happened, and this crazy savanna ape gets it into her head that maybe we shouldn’t let such an ancient occurrence dictate how we perceive and behave toward each other. In doing so, this savanna ape comes up against 2 billion years of natural selection and invariably loses the fight. Hence “I Love Dick” and that poor, poor feminist’s confusion over her culturally constructed ‘oughts’ and her genetically constructed reproductive program.
Brassier’s question indeed.
The problem is that you could just as easily replace ‘feminist’ with ‘moral realist’ in your statement. And even if you side with the nihilist (as I refuse to do), embracing ‘biological imperatives’ is no kind of solution, simply because they’re adapted to pre-technological contexts so widely different than our own. Human nature is the enemy here – cut and dried, I think.
In a sense, all I’m saying is ‘Know thy enemy.’
Keep your friends close and your emotions closer.
I attempted to google the term “Brassier’s question” and was met with naught.
As did I. Google thought I needed to buy a bra.
Same here.
I’m guessing the question was posed by Ray Brassier, and relates to his statement, IIRC, that “nihilism is an opportunity”.
Mind you this was a glance at his Wikipage, rather than true familiarity with his works.
@Callan:
“Saajan, by how I measure things, this is a dodge. Why does Scott think ya’ll want possitive representations of the marginalised? Because if you’d gotten it, we wouldn’t be making these posts.”
“I don’t like (some of) your risky depictions” does not lead to a desire solely for positive depictions.
That’s all I meant.
Saajan,
“I don’t like (some of) your risky depictions” does not lead to a desire solely for positive depictions.
I think for someone who holds a mere dislike, they would make peace with it, not keep reporting it to the author over and over again (maybe I’m thinking of Kalbear here). Nor do I think if it was mere dislike, would they write a piece called “Prince of Misogyny” which is full of vitriol (as far as I can tell) – though this may be a generation gap and/or a priveledge gap I have, where people write explosive pieces about things that don’t really matter to them (like I guess someone out there has probably written how they hate kitty litter trays with much vitriol as well, when it really doesn’t matter to them much (or does it?))
It depends on whether it’s more than just a dislike for moon and whether you share that more than a dislike or not. If you say it’s only a dislike for you, fair enough, it’s not fair to lump you in to some sort of wants only positive depiction category.
@Callan S: I’m not sure if the level of emotion is relevant but perhaps it is best to ask Kalbear and Moon their preferences directly.
Addressing an earlier point, I don’t remember a book that caused a value shift for Moon.
I’m not sure if the level of emotion is relevant
Not relevant? It’s critical!
Do you think that given two options only, if someone really, really, really hates choice #1, that means they don’t soley want choice #2? Parcicularly if they actually enjoy the flattery of choice #2?
I gotta say, we go seperate ways even in knowledge itself on the idea that level of emotion isn’t relevant.
I don’t remember a book that caused a value shift for Moon.
That’s probably what I’d ask her. But I’m disinclined to go to the blog due to what I feel is toxicity in discussion (I get a similar feel for vox’s blog, as a comparison).
Completely off topic:
I went to a discussions session today where a physicist, and a philosopher talked about science and religion. Instead of being a confrontational sort of thing, it was more about understanding the way things got to be where they are today.
The philosopher had this intriguing notion that the idea of ‘science vs. religion’ came about in 19th century when science institutionalized itself as a profession, and thus the implication is that it isn’t so much an ideological struggle that put us where we are today, but rather a political power struggle. An interesting thought, at least, even if I don’t fully agree with it.
The other speaker was an astrophysicist who hoped to encourage people to talk about the ‘meeting points’ between science and religion. During his brief talk, he emphasized that the concept of ‘the sacred’, ‘awe’ and ‘human experience’ as places where religion and science could meet and talk and be productive.
Of course, I seized the opportunity to veer the discussion towards where I wanted it to go by eventually asking him if he thought there was something that was not amenable to scientific reductionism. (He admitted to being a Heiddegerian phenomenalist immediately)
Almost immediately, the whole room was essentially discussing The Hard Problem.
A neurosurgeon even noted that he had once accidentally elicited bliss in one of his patients. (He described himself as a “disturbed dualist”)
A neurosurgeon even noted that he had once accidentally elicited bliss in one of his patients. (He described himself as a “disturbed dualist”)
Far out.
These things make my head spin, anymore. A Heideggerean astrophysicist, phenomenalist? Yeesh. I can hear his corpse grumbling all the way from Messkirch!
But like I’ve been saying, these are very, very exciting philosophical times.
“Do you think that given two options only, if someone really, really, really hates choice #1, that means they don’t soley want choice #2? Parcicularly if they actually enjoy the flattery of choice #2?
I gotta say, we go seperate ways even in knowledge itself on the idea that level of emotion isn’t relevant.”
What are choices #1 and #2? If they are “‘Problematizing’ Gender Roles” and “Positive Depictions” then it seems too binary.
Really, I’m not sure how fair/accurate it is for me to try and play Devil’s advocate for sides absent in the discussion. I think, if I understand your desire, you want to make some assessment of Moon/Kal’s preferences? You should probably just ask them.
Or, at least for Moon, I recall her saying something about enjoying Le Guin, and there is at least one Le Guin review. Might be a place to start?
Damn, I meant “play Devil’s Advocate *as*”…and now it hits me that might not make sense.
As an econ prof once said, “When shove comes to push…When shove….I hate this language.”
What are choices #1 and #2? If they are “‘Problematizing’ Gender Roles” and “Positive Depictions” then it seems too binary.
It is too binary, that’s the problem if someone hasn’t heard of a third option past sexist or positive, so they only see a binary (or maybe it’s a trinity: sexist/don’t like it/positive).
Maybe the Le Guin interview will show up some recognition of a problematic in it?
You should probably just ask them.
Well, how would you phrase the question to moon, Saajan? You’ve read alot more of her than I have?
@Callan -> I liked a Le Guin review by Alex MacFarlane – is that what you mean? Or is there an interview I don’t know about?
As for asking Moon, I suppose I’d put all the cards on the table about your goals and then just ask.
Sorry, I meant review, as in moon’s review, but I wrote interview – must show a deep bias in me against reviews, I guess! (that’s a joke for anyone reading; don’t get primed!)
As for asking Moon, I suppose I’d put all the cards on the table about your goals and then just ask.
Well, in terms of ‘shoulds’ and ‘should ask her’, that one doesn’t seem to provide much help in doing so and I’m not a fan of those sorts of shoulds. It just seems a ‘your left to your own divices in the wilderness’ kind of should. If I’m left to the wilderness, I’ll just take my own approach vectors then. And by them, I don’t think all her cards are on the table, no matter how forthright all the swearing seems. I don’t think she’s interested in any psychological evaluation of her own approach and so I don’t think she’d answer (with anything other than toxicity).
I read Wizard of Earthsea by LeGuin when I was in 8th grade.
I asked my teacher, “why does the author make it so that women are weak spellcasters?”
She said, “Well, that’s just the way she wrote her books. You have to be born with the gift, and women simply don’t have it.”
To which I said, “Man, that system sucks, in D&D anyone with an INT of greater than 10 can cast spells, and there’s no gender bias.”
But how cool was my 8th grade teacher that she had us read WoES? She was an interesting character… another thing I remember her doing was completely flipping out at one of my friends when he used Christ’s name in vain. Also, a complete hottie. Very difficult to learn how to interpret text when your teacher is a solid 8 or 9. (Yes, I’m a pig, but that’s why I’m here right?)
I’ve known feminists who thought all male desire was intrinsically violent. One once told me how conflicted she was by her heterosexuality, because she loved intercourse, physically and emotionally, but intellectually felt that she was doing something wrong – or allowing something wrong to be done to her. This is where feminism becomes destructive to women, when it begins demonizing their desires in the name of condemning all things male. And the irony is the way it begins to resemble traditional religious attitudes towards sexuality, as something evil that needs to be bottled up.
It’s something I’ve been interested in ever since: how do you negotiate that line between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ desire? It’s the line you see me zigzagging across in all my books. The liberal democratic state, of course, has washed its hands of the dilemma, the way it’s washed its hands of all moral dilemmas not involving clear cut exploitation/harm/coercion. This is where the problem of normalization comes in: the reproductive competition between women seems to have created a ‘race for the bottom,’ and legions of women who genuinely want to be ‘objects of male desire,’ and are entirely free to do so, leaving the feminist with yet another difficult ‘false consciousness’ argument to make. This ‘want’ becomes a massive market, so a whole economic sector begins spontaneously propogandizing, playing on fears and insecurities (self-surveillance), and making virtues out what is so obviously pathological. If you think about, over the half of the human race has some version of BDS. It’s fucking crazy, and I don’t want my little girl to have any part of it. But if she doesn’t ‘play the game,’ you can guarantee she’s going to have a rough ride in school and elsewhere. Too rough.
If a crackedmoon wants to rage and shame, then this is what she should target. The corporate world is actually vulnerable to this stuff.
This is another reason why I think a retooled education system, one that teaches kids who and what they ARE, is so important.
@Callan S: “If you think about, over the half of the human race has some version of BDS.”
Yeah, I actually lived with someone who had body dysmorphic disorder. It was interesting the amount of trust that was required before I could say something like “You’re pretty.” without triggering.
(My indirect technique, not even sure why it worked, was to quote Eternal Sunshine’s “you’re pretty, you’re pretty” line.)
Anyway I’d be interested in a post on your thoughts regarding this. You, in case the jukebox is taking requests.
BDD – so it’s disorder, now. It should be. The fact I thought it was a ‘syndrome’ speaks to how unqualified I am to speak about it! All I know is that it fucks people up.
heh, put Callan where I meant Scott. Sleepy.
Yeah, I don’t think I could have comprehended the weight that early abuse leaves on a person’s shoulders.
What’s as frightening are the staggering numbers of people who are connected by such abuse.
Treatment facilities are also, apparently, so lazy at times as to be infuriating ->
I heard, from this same person, a story of her friend (also abused early and often) being treated for eating disorders whose room at a hospital had messages of “encouragement” along the lines of “Don’t let them force you to eat. Stay strong.” that, for some inexplicable reason, were never painted over.
WTF?
I’ll likely steal that little tidbit for something, if you don’t mind, Sci. WTF, indeed.
Sure. Just, uh, make sure it’s anonymous.
Murphy:
I just caught your post asking for help finding a good starter place for David Savran’s queer materialism. This is a tough question because of an advantage I have over some people: I’m affiliated with a university, so I have free access to online journals and stuff that most people have to pay out the ass to get, so I can’t really recommend specific articles because they’d cost you a shitload of money to read if you aren’t affiliated with a university, too!
A good collection is Savran’s “A Queer Sort of Materialism”, I think. I can’t remember the exact essay where Savran explains why he’s come back to Marxism after becoming disillusioned with Queer Theory, unfortunately, but I think you can see the results in this collection of essays. Just be warned that they’re less “theory” heavy than they are an attempt to put theory in practice: Savran’s field is theatre history (what I’m getting my Ph.D. in), so the book’ll be talking about a lot of plays and performance practices.
Jill Dolan’s “Feminist Spectator as Critic” does the same sort of deal from a woman feminist’s point of view, and is short and easy to read, too.
If you want to get heavy into reading this sort of thing, Judith Butler is probably someone you should check out, too! “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” is the big book by her to check out – and although I’m no post-structuralist feminist, I agree with a lot of what Butler says (and the book contains why a Web site like RoH or even Sady’s blog frequently trouble or are discordant with my feminism). Same goes for her “Bodies that Matter”: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ “. All that being said, Judith Butler is a bad prose stylist (she’s won “awards” for being among the worst technical writers in academia).
I’m also a big fan of camp theory and female impersonation (I do research on a gay Mardi Gras krewe in the Bible Belt that one of my friends is a member of), so Morris Meyer’s book “The Politics and Poetics of Camp” (I think that’s the name of it) is really awesome and readable, too. I make all of my Introduction to Theatre students read an essay he wrote while a graduate student called “I Dream of Jeannie” that’s a performance and historical analysis of transgendered identity in the context of a strip routine done by a transgendered MtF in a male drag show.
I was also going to respond to Kalbear’s earlier comment to me, but it seems like he’s ragequit the conversation so I’ll let it die because I wasn’t really sure whether the question was serious or if it made sense.
I left this out of the above: the advantage of all of the above is that (aside from the article “I Dream of Jeannie”) all of the recommended stuff is books you can get through Interlibrary Loan or more cheaply on amazon than most academic presses would charge you to read a single article! Hope this helps!
Thank you very much, LTP! That is genuinely helpful stuff. I really appreciate it, especially as I’m not in academia and I feel like my nose is pressed up to the candy store window sometimes. These all sound brilliant and affordable, so thanks again.