No, spoken like someone who doesn’t think censorship is the worst thing that can happen to a person - losing your job, losing your home, losing your life are worse than censorship. They are the things people self-censor to avoid happening. I can’t understand your idea of censorship as meaning anything other than “a really, really bad thing.” That is semantics, though, so I’ll leave it at that.
Here’s the problem - you are pointing out the problem with their reasoning. That’s what people with power do when people with less power try to express themselves. Instead of pointing out the problem with their reasoning, think about what they are saying, why they are saying it, what experiences they have had that led them to think differently about it than you. You can only point something out if it is there to be pointed at. Your statement assumes you do understand what it is like to be them. That sounds worthy of a drink in the face.
Yes, exactly. Accidentally accumulating changes is what works. That’s how we got from inanimate to animate, it’s how we got from single celled to multi-celled, it’s how we got from brainless to brains, and it’s how we got from smart things to smart things that can go to the moon. The system works by individuals lurching towards what they perceive to be better things. We aren’t smart enough to see the big picture, so I don’t see how this could be improved upon by replacing that random lurching with a deliberate, overarching scheme.
Well then we’ve reached our essential point of impasse. My identity is concrete. It exists in space, has a volume and mass, and can be damaged by being hit with a rock. It has a finite capacity to do work (measured in J). To me, it sounds like your position implies that people’s suffering is a concept they can escape by choice as opposed to a physical arrangement of things in an existent world that they can’t escape by choice any more than they could escape from under a collapsed building by willing their body to do so.
That’s the leap from “it’s part of me” to “I can change it with my will.” I can’t grow another arm on a whim. I can’t make the arm I have bend backwards at the elbow. People can’t just change their minds about anything at any time - and if they can they mostly won’t which, from a system perspective, might as well be the same thing.
But she is making up that that is anywhere near equivalent to censorship, or even belongs in the same evidence pile for her “Let’s change the world together” tyrade.
Fiction will always be a place where anything can be explored. Mass-market publishing, popular awards, etc… however, will also always be places where popular opinion affects decision-making. Nobody said it should be the role of “the public” (vague and undefinied, as is her entire rant, and I’m not sure when “the public” was assigned our roles, I certainly missed that meeting…) then that is on the publishers to decide to ignore them/us…
Write what you want, no one is stopping you, but write super offensive to a very a large group of survivors stuff and win awards for it, and people are going to say something. Freedom of expression cuts both ways, you can write what you want, and I can say what I want about it. (Said as the founding member of Twitter Cabal Toronto Chapter #416) It always strikes me that those crying about censorship and freedom of expression are actually crying about freedom from reaction/criticism, which is not a thing that exists.
I disagree. I am the college dropout and they are the PhD. Their assumption is I lack critical thinking. The power play is honestly in the other direction.
Also, isn’t people yelling about things on Twitter really really good publicity?
Would any of us had even heard of this book if people hadn’t been talking about it?
We all wish we could get this kind of publicity for any of our endeavours!
Oh yes, there is an example I would use of how this political correctness twitter thing doesn’t actually censor anyone but I refuse to mention it because my understanding is that all the complaining about them has just made them popular and they are horrible, horrible.
I think the power play is almost always in both directions. I think my point still holds. If you were, in fact, pointing out to them the problem with what they were saying, then they may have felt quite condescended. What if how they feel about it is actually hard to understand because you are white? If that’s the case then you’d be being a real ass by explaining to them how they are wrong about that from your position of lack-of-understanding.
So many examples I have of that… so so so many.
(Just follow Lindy West on twitter and your feed fills up with examples. She’s so strong, I lurve her.)
Ah, to clarify. One white cis to another white cis. One argues that you can’t know as a white cis what it is to be a person of color because of anthropological theories, and that was their dissertation. And I fundamentally disagree with the Hypothesis. Which ends up pissing them off, since they have made it obvious I should defer to them.
I apologize to academics here, but academia culture is the reason I quit academia >:) (really, asking basic questions is harder than your dissertation defense?)
Possession of a PhD doesn’t always mean being in possession of more power in any given situation. Ask the thousands upon thousands of adjuncts who also have PhDs… Now I think you can argue the ability to get a PhD is often evidence of a certain amount of privilege (like myself), but (nearly) having a PhD doesn’t automatically confer me with more social power, especially not compared to say already tenured professors, the administration of my university, our schools president, or the board of regents.
I can understand that, as the academy (lke any other institution), can be problematic… but part of the problem of academia is that it’s not as cut off from the rest of society and power structures as we imagine, unless you are at an elite institution (as a student or prof)… It’s rather revealing to see newly minted PhDs coming out of elite institutions, where they are often receiving tons of institutional support, landing in places like GSU, where (unless you’re in a department with lots of grants coming in), you get little to none. It’s become quite dog eat dog in some cases (at least from my own subjective vantage point). These are people who are in the middle of serious culture shock.
I’d argue problems with academia are institutional
I acknowledge and mostly agree with your arguments. The specific part that I disagree with, that @humpabella brought up, was the implication that using the language ‘to point out’ was indicative of me having more power in a conversation.
I also acknowledge I am a physically big white dude. But I disagree that pointing out flaws in a hypothesis is inherently a power play. It often is. But my own prejudice leads me to believe I have already gone through that territory,and even then if I am wrong will gracefully admit my failure.
[ levity ]
I’ve never actually been hit by a drink. But the closest I have come was by another big, cis white dude who just didn’t like his martini cause it had too much vermouth.
Ugh… depends on when I turn it into a book? I keep kicking around the idea of starting a website and if I did, I’d likely put some of my work up… But who knows when I’ll get around to it.
Thanks! I do have a computer scientist better half, so I likely have the architecture covered… I might ask around here for ideas on what to include, though, and that sort of thing.
