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Notes -
From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
Honestly, it would be good for everyone if nobody voted. The reason that neo-liberalism must be so careful to purge society of crimethink is because we vote. I don’t think that all efforts for propaganda would stop, but the volume and ubiquity of culture war propaganda would vastly decrease if it didn’t matter so much that I personally sign off on various issues. Ukraine could fade into the background and I could call their capitol whatever I wanted. I could believe whatever I wanted to about transgender issues without worry about the elites or their lackeys trying to thought-police me to death. There might well be limits to this, but at least the volume, the fear, would be turned down.
Why would anyone normal care about other people’s genitalia or a war in a country they can’t find on a map and only became independent in 1992? Why am I, a relative nobody, worried about policing? And my suspicion is that the average person, because of the vote, is often forced to pretend to care, is policed for the ways they pretend to care, when they’d much rather spend time on kids’ education and sports, their jobs, their family, and whatever hobbies they choose to enjoy. I think almost everyone would actually be happier to never worry about cultural affairs ever again.
…perhaps. Notable non-democratic states of the last century were pretty famous for their wide ranging propaganda. Totalitarianism, of course, was not a system that involved voting.
Plenty of authoritarian leaders who don’t believe in any particular ideology have used mass propaganda: arguably all of Idi Amin, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mobutu, Trujillo, Videla; a lot of Nicaraguan leftists seem to think Ortega is a faker, etc.
But unless I’m reading the comment wrong, the OP doesn’t seem to be talking about the elites at all, but about how propaganda is used on normal people. If propagandizing is the same (or worse) even when the elites have completely different motivations and governing structures, this is much my point. It’s true there are big qualitative differences, but they move in the direction of more propaganda the farther we get from our own democratically elected, self-interested, incurious rulers. If the argumentative is that democracy is the root problem, that trendline has to be grappled with.
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