Judith Butler has spoken

[lionheart]

Damn.

www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

'If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.'

@9toenails

Thanks Goosefoot: ' Essentially the original premise is along the lines of, the only things can be empirically observed are real/meaningful/true. This is of course impossible to verify empirically, so the statement contradicts it's own criteria.'

-- But ' If it is true there is no truth, then it is false there is no truth' seems to depend only on a little logic (and possibly the bipolarity of 'truth' if that is non-logical). I still do not see any epistemological claim there, much less a specific commitment to empiricism of any stripe. (I could know the truth of that conditional even if all my knowledge were innate, no?)

The argument, in short, seems (to me at least) to be independent of epistemological commitment.

But, again, perhaps I miss something. Or, perhaps, the 'original premise' is not the one I quote. (Perhaps it is tacit, even? Are you saying the argument is enthymematic?)

I am sorry, this is possibly slipping off topic rather. I would like to understand, though.

I'm not sure we are on the same page. What I am saying is that the logical contradiction that screws up relativism is very similar to the logical contradiction that screws up strong empiricism. After all the arguments people have over them, both come down to a pretty simple logical problem.

Who is she anyway?

Anyone else read that in Nicki Big Brother style "WHO IS SHE?!" lol

Who is she anyway?

A dull, verbose, over-hyped American queer theorist.

There’s a line in A Career of Evil that goes something like “You can make them (Women) do anything if you make them forget you have a penis.”

That’s what’s happening here.

Meghan Murphy makes me laugh

www.feministcurrent.com/2020/09/27/judith-butler-resurfaces-to-remind-the-world-she-is-a-fraud/?fbclid=IwAR0Zo4A-05C6rpjeQI6zuCH294kq2MB16PSD0OIQ2--ErvT2i39Ri3Rz52c

@Quaagars

Anyone else read that in Nicki Big Brother style "WHO IS SHE?!" lol

Sadly yes. Showing my age again.

Goosefoot:
I'm not sure we are on the same page. What I am saying is that the logical contradiction that screws up relativism is very similar to the logical contradiction that screws up strong empiricism. After all the arguments people have over them, both come down to a pretty simple logical problem.

Ah. Thanks Goosefoot. I had misconstrued your ' same refutation'. A reminder of the relativity of identity?

Similar form to the arguments indeed. We could describe it in terms of John Locke's argumentum ad hominem (' to press a man with consequences drawn from his own principles') if the other sense of that phrase had not become more current.

But enough waffle about side issues. I read Butler in New Statesman. Pretty thin even by her own lights, I thought. We all get old; perhaps it would be kinder now to leave her be.

@Goosefoot

ErrolTheDragon and raddledoldmisanthropist

Yes, I do think that the fact that the sciences in general deal with material questions means the methodology tends to guard somewhat against gobblygook. In that sense mathematics can be a better comparison with philosophical subjects as it isn't so attached to that kind of experimental or observational element.

Genuinely clever people use specialist language to convery meaning more clearly and precisely. They may pitch to different audiences but someone will know exactly what they mean and how their argument is supported.

I don't know if I totally agree with this. I do think that in humanities subjects like philosophy clear thinking is very important and language is used to that end. However, I'm not sure that the specialist language is always so clear or defined. Philosophers often use language in new or unique ways, and they don't always give a primer for that. Sometimes it's through reading the whole of their works, or watching the back and forth between two thinkers who disagree, that you really start to understand the way they are using language. And it can take years for students to really start to understand what they mean and begin to talk about their ideas intelligently, this is part of why traditionally we haven't expected anything really new or interesting from humanities undergraduates. Their job has been to begin to understand the whole intellectual tradition so they have some background to start to grasp and evaluate new ideas or interpretations or new uses of language.

Don't get me wrong - I think Butler has a few poorly observed truisms contained in her thinking and the rest is empty. The language use contains nothing, and a lot of people suspect that when they read it as we can see. But many people have also read really great thinkers and initially found them equally opaque, using language in odd ways, and it's only after considerable reading and study that they begin to make way in understanding them.

People like Butler depend on people giving them that kind of space. To me the question is, how did these charlatans get into the academy in the first place - why weren't they identified and weeded out along the way by all the people whose job it is to do that?

This isn't really a comment on Goosefoot's post but the ideas discussed in it (and I agree with your final paragraph here)

I know this has moved on a little but I think it may have been me who brought up disliking people (and academics) making complicated concepts more complex and since then people have pointed out that academia is different to teaching, academics discussing with one another will use subject related jargon and that complex ideas often require complex language. All of that is true to some extent and yet I still find academics making complex ideas more difficult jarring. I was not talking about specialist language/ jargon I was referring to the overegging with this specialist language. To be clearer than my previous post my discipline was philosophy (and later politics) - not known for it's easy texts or indeed for being devoid of specialist language. I have experienced having to read a text or section of it a few times before getting fully to grips with it - that isn't what I meant by disliking academics making ideas needlessly complicated. Even using specialist language you should be able to convey a complex idea effectively. I don't think Butler does this.

I was reminded of something by a twitter post thins morning and that was Richard Feynman who was a physicist who believed that if you truly understood something you should be able to explain it in it's simplest terms adjusting for your audience. It is something more akin to this I was referring to. When I wanted to see if I truly understood something I would see if I could explain it to someone else, if I couldn't I didn't feel like I 'got' it fully. This is something like Feynman (although not in his league!) and I do vaguely remember the Feynman method and it may be where I originally got mine.

I still think that making a subject unnecessarily complex is part of maintaining an academic superiority that is undeserved. That isn't to deny there are great thinkers or people who come up with new ideas or ways of seeing things or to deny the extraordinary intelligence of many academics but I believe that if you truly understand something you should be able to communicate it effectively to an audience and even accepting her audience is academic I still don't think Butler does that (nor do I think she is the only one). There are clearly some incredibly intelligent women on this board - and I love reading what they have to say. Most of the women here communicate well and this adds to the understanding and appreciation of what they say. I think there is a beauty and a more complete understanding if you can do that specialist language notwithstanding.

From Feynman:
"Feynman was a truly great teacher. He prided himself on being able to devise ways to explain even the most profound ideas to beginning students. Once, I said to him, “Dick, explain to me, so that I can understand it, why spin one-half particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics.” Sizing up his audience perfectly, Feynman said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But he came back a few days later to say, “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we don’t really understand it.”

fs.blog/2012/04/feynman-technique/

Both of these were retweeted by someone and I saw it this morning so some of you will have seen it or already be familiar with it. I remember reading about it a while back but this reminded me.

Just to add a couple of unrelated things, first, this subject has been interesting some great post made by interesting women and second I think (not sure sorry) it might have been weebisom who wrote a post about how Bultler saw herself (about the effigy being burnt in the pink bra) I found that post especially interesting and hadn't considered how she saw herself before so thanks for that

Fab post, Pankhurst. Applying it to this...

I'm a mathematician, not a feminist philosopher, but when I see JCJ or Kathleen Stock doing their thing, I have full confidence in them because they're able to talk plainly, and I can firmly grasp 98% of it. JCJ is very good at delivering quite high-concept stuff to a general audience. (Which reaches its pinnacle in her , IMO)

When JCJ changes up an academic gear, as she does in some of the stuff on her blog, she does lose me, but I can see that's due to my lack of background in the field, and I can tell it's just that I'm not the target audience. It still seems like it would be clear if I had the background and knew the references.

But when Butler or Hines go off, even when writing for a general audience, I'm just stumped. I have no sense that even they understand what they're talking about.

And this worries me. I know I'm not stupid. Do they think I'm stupid? Do they care so little about their field that they are not bothered by it being totally impenetrable? Someone who believed in the importance of their arguments would want people to understand them.

So by Occam's razor, I've long concluded that the simple explanation is that they don't want people to understand their work. Because it's flim-flam. I've never seen a "Butler populariser" do "Butler for dummies". You just get the same gibberish shuffled a bit. It's an inherent contradiction - only an opponent of Butler (like JCJ) can do a "Butler for dummies", because it exposes it for the nonsense that it is. The content of what's being said is not the point - it's all performative. (Which is a bit like Goldstein's book in 1984, or Rachel MacKinnon's paper - all of them are quite up-front about being everything being performative. Totally self-referential. Or possibly the Iron Law of Woke Projection...).

And it's notable how little actual engagement with the content of Butler's interview there was from the TRA side. Just as they find it hard to figure out what they specifically disagree with in JKR's writing, they find it hard to say what they specifically agree with in Butler's. But it is such a fantastic argument.

I don’t really care if I can’t follow a professional argument in academic philosophy or science or medicine or whatever discipline, fair enough I don’t understand it, that’s not my job to follow it.
I have professional jargon too, that I use at work. Nothing wrong with using that when talking to your own colleagues, isn’t that what a lot of academics are doing when they publish academic books?

Though I do appreciate the impressive skill at being able to pitch complex work at an understandable level for the public which some academics/doctors/lawyers/scientists can do brilliantly. I have really enjoyed some insights into professional thinking that I wouldn’t have picked up from from their written work via public lectures etc.

But I think the insistence on ‘impact’ on public debate or whatever outside of your academic discipline, a standard academics are assessed against, is actually quite unhelpful. It is saying that scholarship for its own sake isn’t valuable, isn’t it?

And only some academic work is helpful in public policy making for example. A lot of it is just expressions of politics, art, opinion, debate about criticism, and so on. That’s all fine. It’s when we try to shoehorn it into something else that we can get unstuck very quickly.

As this poster on another thread has said beautifully:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4034239-i-don-t-believe-that-post-modernist-academia-should-have-any-influence-over-safeguarding-frameworks-that-are-grounded-in-material-reality

Yes, absolutely, there is wonderful work done on art and literature that is worthwhile for its own sake and doesn’t need to have any impact on how society works.

It’s part of valuing the culture the world has produced.

Yes- whoops didn’t mean to leave out arts and humanities, social sciences, psychology, and also women’s studies and gender studies. All of it. Academic work is not wasted time if it teaches critical thinking and research or teaching or writing skills. Sometimes the outputs of academia work like a public policy think tank or public health laboratory or whatever the equivalent is to the relevant discipline, but surely that isn’t the main point of it, just a useful result sometimes.

Heather Heying chipping in on this now. I'm pretty sure that Butler's article is just word salad but I need someone like Heying to dismantle it on the academic level level:

m.youtube.com/watch?v=vbyEIaaX55o

That video is very thrilling, I'm sure, but I'm not sure it's the sort of thing we're into on Mumsnet. Double-check your link?

(Or is there something really deep and postmodern going on here and I need to study it harder? Are you trying to out-Butler Butler?)

@NecessaryScene1

That video is very thrilling, I'm sure, but I'm not sure it's the sort of thing we're into on Mumsnet. Double-check your link?

(Or is there something really deep and postmodern going on here and I need to study it harder? Are you trying to out-Butler Butler?)

I am now rather interested in goings on in American football...

I watched Heather Heyling/Bret Weinstein discuss this article on the Dark Horse Podcast, so I can summarise the contents:

Heather: This is batshit crazy
Bret: Don’t insult bats please

Bit of context - Bret is an Evolutionary biologist with expertise in bats.

Well, it was only a matter of time before Nick Foles got this opportunity. I've always said so.

I think PP probably meant to link to this - end segment of Dark Horse Podcast #47:

Although I found the 13-minute answer to the question "If an immense giant thousands of miles tall was in space and capable of phyiscally grabbing the Earth like a ball, what would it feel like to him?" was even more entertaining.

Link here (although I've set the timestamp to the immediately preceding denunciation of puberty blockers, for more FWR relevance):

Ha! My bad, real link here:

m.youtube.com/watch?v=nnFtQC3-heM

If anyone makes some money by betting on Foles and the Bears then that's a bonus! (My advice: don't).

@TheRealMcKenna

I watched Heather Heyling/Bret Weinstein discuss this article on the Dark Horse Podcast, so I can summarise the contents:

Heather: This is batshit crazy
Bret: Don’t insult bats please

Bit of context - Bret is an Evolutionary biologist with expertise in bats.

Maybe I'm being pedantic here, but I thought that the phrase "bat shit crazy" referred to people suffering the effects of inhaling a lot of bat shit?

New essay by Heather Heying:

schweizermonat.ch/how-woke-activism-took-over-universities-and-descended-into-street-riots/

The gains made by 20th century liberalism, & any chance of confronting the big issues still before us, are being eroded by a new ideology. This ideology—call it the woke left, or the authoritarian left—traffics in blatant falsehoods & untestable claims.

Trans rights demands are used as a specific example at the end:

One small concession after the other

So to adults of all ages who have been captured, even just a little, by the new ideology, allow me this example of what the capture looks like. I will use the messaging of Trans Rights Activists, whom I distinguish from true trans people, the latter of which are extremely rare, and do not pretend that biology is a fiction. The Trans Rights Activists, however, would have us believe, among other things, that men can give birth—and they’ve got the New York Times going along with their fantasy.

Note that this is crazy talk. Five hundred million uninterrupted years of sexual reproduction in our lineage assures us that male and female are distinct phenomena. It is no less crazy than suggesting that plants are animals or that Europe is Australia. This is crazy talk, and no amount of social pressure changes that fact.

How, then, does the crazy idea spread?

When you object that, actually, men cannot give birth, your activist friend will look at you with sadness in her eyes, and a question: Why can you not just be generous and kind?