Counterweight advocacy group want to hear from people who have been affected by imposition of social justice ideas (UK only)

[NonnyMouse1337]

Helen Pluckrose is part of a new group called Counterweight. Maybe some here will be interested in the current project.

She has posted the following on Twitter :

I am looking for people from the UK to send me descriptions of the ways in which critical social justice ideas have been imposed upon them at work, university, children's school etc. As detailed as possible in terms of what was said to you, required of you etc. 1/2
twitter.com/HPluckrose/status/1335896456763420674?s=20

I want to gather as many case studies as possible. We can change details to anonymise you. Needs to be specifically UK on this occasion. Can send by DM here (i.e. Twitter) or even better to [email protected]
twitter.com/HPluckrose/status/1335896667455959044?s=20

She clarifies what counts as critical social justice ideas.

Any of it. Postcolonial/decolonial stuff, queer theory/trans activism, critical race theory/intersectional feminism, disability/fat activism, generic "Social Justice" stuff. Anything that takes that authoritarian/ideological approach.
twitter.com/HPluckrose/status/1337013857831821314?s=20

Thanks for the link op. I have some examples for her.

Helen Pluckrose isn't a feminist

Can anyone clarify why? Not being a feminist certainly doesn't mean someone isn't worth listening to but feminism would seem to fit with her views I've seen.

@donquixotedelamancha

Helen Pluckrose isn't a feminist

Can anyone clarify why? Not being a feminist certainly doesn't mean someone isn't worth listening to but feminism would seem to fit with her views I've seen.

She explains here:

areomagazine.com/2016/12/29/why-i-no-longer-identify-as-a-feminist/

Thanks sunset.

I think it’s time I accepted that “feminism” no longer means “the aim for equal rights for women” but is understood to refer to the current feminist movement which encompasses so much more and very little that I want to be associated with.

Frankly every word of that article makes her seem like a feminist to me.

I understand why, in academia, she might feel that feminism has just become another PoMo buzzword but I'm not ready to give up the definition to The Idiots yet.

Can anyone clarify why? Not being a feminist certainly doesn't mean someone isn't worth listening to but feminism would seem to fit with her views I've seen

When I wrote this, I added "in my experience." Sorry this is going to be brief, as I have an afternoon of online tutorials till about 7pm ... last day of university term and students needing handholds.

I encountered her first on Twitter, when I got a quite brusque (I'd even say aggressive) response to a tweet in which I'd said something about the sex pay gap. She and a number of her friends piled on to tell me (over about 20 tweets from around 10 people) that I was wrong. I even remember coming in here to get some moral & statistical support!

She then blocked me - this was about 2 years ago maybe?

Then there's the whole prank she & others did to debunk post-structuralist scholarship. I think that Julian Vigo & Heather Brunskell-Evans discussion of this is really interesting:

savageminds.substack.com/p/heather-brunskell-evans-s1e2

I know that a lot of posters in FWR think that post-structuralism is part of the problem especially around Queer theory and transactivism, but I teach some of this stuff, and honestly, the version that is trotted out by TRAs , and the version of it that Ms Pluckrose & her colleagues understand & think they're debunking, is a very much third-hand version, and pale imitation. It's actually possible to teach queer theory from a [rad] feminist perspective ... (I do it!).

The broad movement in philosophy & cultural enquiry that we label post-structuralism is, at base, a reasoned & interesting critique of the Enlightenment and its focus on rationalism, and things such as assumptions about human minds as tabula rasa and capable of being formed entirely by the exercise of reason.

Of course, just as there are multiple 'feminisms' there are multiple aspects of post-structuralist critical theory.

The fundamental post-structuralist view is to be sceptical of this assumption of pure rationality, and a scepticism also about the way culture works ideologically (Foucault talks about power/knowledge in this respect). For me, although I have a fundamental commitment to rationality & the power of argument and reason, I also see that we also need a critique of reason. Particularly as an ideological concept. It enables a feminist position, for example - the work of French feminists such as Helene Cixous (sorry re proper French accents to her name).

I think that Ms Pluckrose et al. are in danger, basically of throwing baby out with bathwater. I thought their prank re "fooling" journals with fake articles was in bad faith - instead of properly arguing their ideological position, they sought to make fools of serious scholars.

It is possible to make cogent arguments against particular post-structuralist positions or approaches - my own approach tends to be a materialist approach (Raymond Williams is my guiding theorist) - I would say that some versions of post-structuralism recede so far from an engagement with the concrete materiality of lived experience, that they cease to have relevance to any political position, such as a feminist position.

Not all scholarship stands the test of time - I doubt my books will be read in a 100 years. But out of the myriad ideas, arguments, scholars' research - all that chaos - eventually argument & debate refine ideas. It isn't done through mockery - it's done through reasoned debate & the following up of difficult ideas, in detail through hard thinking work.

Anyway, that's a kind of random collection of thoughts re Ms Pluckrose and feminism. I would just advise caution ... Just because she & her colleagues are tilting at post-structuralist ideas which would appear also to support a feminist position vis a vis a (to me rather threadbare) understanding of Queer theory and transactivism, doesn't necessarily mean she's likely to be a "safe" ally ...

except to think the grievance studies thing was clever. Could you elaborate?

As I've tried to summarise above (you really don't want a full on academic essay here, I"m sure ) I don't think it was clever - I think it was a pretty shabby trick, and in bad faith.

Yes, there''s dross in a lot of published scholarship, but pranking it is not the way to respond, in my opinion.

That Areo article was interesting. I don't recognise the absolutism of radical feminism that she and her mother both rejected. There's a broad spectrum of radfem women in my experience, including lots of heterosexual women. Yes, you always get the extreme voices — and that's what they are, extremists. I would have expected her to see beyond that.

Disappointing. I've seen a number of her talks and interviews and nothing she said gave me any reason to think she wasn't a feminist. I hope Counterweight can make headway. Perhaps it's actually useful to have a project that isn't coming from a feminist perspective but is making many of the same criticisms of postmodernism and queer theory that those of us on the terfy radfem team are saying.

@SunsetBeetch

Capitalism is a theoretical model of how money works. Wanting to abolish capitalism because of exploitative corporations is like demanding the abolition of time as a means of opposing zero-hour contracts.

Having seen the whole "2+2=4 is white colonialism" debate, I wouldn't be surprised if some CRT proponents thought this was a good idea.

Can I ask what you and others oppose about critical race theory - which is really just an understanding that racism, and by extension inequality, is structurally embedded as opposed to just an indivdual failing (or a naturally occurring product of inherent biological racial differences which I suspect is the view many of the most ardent critics of critical race theory are attemptoing to foster).

That’s really interesting, alethiometrical. When I first came across the grievance studies prank, I thought it was an awful, mean spirited thing to do- in the same way that I can’t watch Borat- I’m not really a fan of trying to catch people out like that, then laughing at them. Like you say, it’s a bad faith engagement and I dislike it.

But I have then read and listened to a bunch of stuff by Helen and James Lindsay and I find a lot of it persuasive, so I’d wondered if maybe I’d missed the point of the hoax. I was struggling to articulate why, and your post has helped a bit.

I do think that it’s not the content of the ideas that is the problem- there are good, bad and indifferent ideas in all the manifestations of the critical theories. It’s the enforcement, the hegemony and the religious fervour with which they’re being applied in the real world that’s the issue

I’m unbothered by whether women call themselves feminists or not. To be honest, I often find describing myself as a woman’s liberationist avoids all the tedious time wasting over what equality might mean and look like.
.

I think that Ms Pluckrose et al. are in danger, basically of throwing baby out with bathwater. I thought their prank re "fooling" journals with fake articles was in bad faith - instead of properly arguing their ideological position, they sought to make fools of serious scholars.

If it's so easy to make fools of "serious" scholars, then the problem is with the scholars, and not those who expose questions about the quality of their work. And there is a serious issue when it is, for instance, impossible for academics involved in peer review to distinguish between "serious" scholarship and non-sensical parody.

It’s the enforcement, the hegemony and the religious fervour with which they’re being applied in the real world that’s the issue

Indeed - I was writing my PhD during the Anglo-American 'culture wars' of the 1980s when, if you weren't a Derridean or a Lacanian, you were nothing - according to some thrusting young men who were my postgrad contemporaries. I preferred Cixous and Irigaray, myself, but really Raymond Williams & John Stuart Mill were my foundations.

I think that what I find to be the issue is the third-hand nature of a lot of what passes for post-structuralism. People preach it, or slag it off, without having read, say Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (for me, that is his most comprehensive critique of aspects of the Enlightenment), or various works of Derrida - who is a much "easier" read. The thing is, the foundation stones of post-structuralism are NOT easy reads.

And I don't imagine that the stereotypical "blue-haired enby" who sends anime memes on Twitter saying "STFU T*" has actually read Foucault (I could be wrong - I hope I'm wrong, and people are arguing from a position of knowledge!) I don't see people getting into the discussion that, for example, Julian Vigo & Heather Brunskell-Evans have in the podcast I linked to above.

I think there's a 'vulgar' post-modernism - a very "right on' student once tried to argue with me that if truth is endlessly deferred (a sort of understanding of Derrida's notion of deferance) then we couldn't assume there's any historical truth, and all views are equally valid.

My answer to that is, on the contrary, of course there are historical truth, but we recognise that none of them is absolute, and that we have to have more evidence for our arguments and statements, rather than less. He didn't like that answer, because it asks for more work, and more careful, nuanced thinking ...

This was in the mid-1990s, so this debate is not new, but it's being weaponised differently now.

I think that what I find to be the issue is the third-hand nature of a lot of what passes for post-structuralism. People preach it, or slag it off, without having read, say Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (for me, that is his most comprehensive critique of aspects of the Enlightenment), or various works of Derrida - who is a much "easier" read. The thing is, the foundation stones of post-structuralism are NOT easy reads.

However, some of us have read Foucault, and are still not that impressed. In regards to Foucault, I would argue that he works are not an easy read, not because they are particularly sophisticated intellectual explorations of the world, but because his ideas are confused, his arguments are poorly constructed, and his language detracts from straightforward readings of his books. Foucault is the classic example of post-structualism in that his works are relatively light-weight pieces of writing, masquerading as heavy-weight intellectual explorations of the world.

Take, for example, Discipline and Punish. Leaving aside the teleology, Foucault struggles with the history, and the context of the history which he is dealing with. There is a persistent misreading of the theoretical writings of the past, and their relationship with material reality, plus quite a bit of selective selection of evidence to support his teleological narrative. The fact that he regularly refers to the writings of a literal saint without acknowledging or understanding why religion might have a bearing on certain aspects of his subject matter is incredibly telling. In short, it's not a terribly good book, but because it fulfils a certain function within academia (particularly amongst those academics who don't really do history), means that his status persists.

So, yes, I don't think the average blue-haired keyboard warrior on Twitter has much practical exposure to post-structuralism, but then I don't think they're missing much.

Alethiometrical

Thanks. Really interesting. I have no claim to great understanding of post-structuralism but I've said similar about criticisms of all post-modernism. I don't really think the PoMo idiots I deride understand (the original basis of) post-modernism at all.

Still I think HP et al highlighted a genuine problem within the social sciences- the willingness to publish attention grabbing claims with insufficient evidence.

This leads to a kinds of arms race amongst ambitious researchers to produce ever more novel and outlandish 'results' rather than cautious, diligent research which may go unnoticed.

This is a problem in even hard Sciences but (as you say, third hand) it appears to have turned some areas of academia into cargo cults of the Scientific Method.

Given that uni's are certainly churning out a lot of people who practice 'vulgar' PM- while this debate is perhaps as old as PM itself I think the balance has changed considerably in recent decades.

LOL. Social justice is a bad thing now.

@FifteenToes

LOL. Social justice is a bad thing now.

No, I think it’s divisive, right-wing politics, masquerading as social justice, which is what people object to.

@JohnRokesmith

I think that what I find to be the issue is the third-hand nature of a lot of what passes for post-structuralism. People preach it, or slag it off, without having read, say Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (for me, that is his most comprehensive critique of aspects of the Enlightenment), or various works of Derrida - who is a much "easier" read. The thing is, the foundation stones of post-structuralism are NOT easy reads.

However, some of us have read Foucault, and are still not that impressed. In regards to Foucault, I would argue that he works are not an easy read, not because they are particularly sophisticated intellectual explorations of the world, but because his ideas are confused, his arguments are poorly constructed, and his language detracts from straightforward readings of his books. Foucault is the classic example of post-structualism in that his works are relatively light-weight pieces of writing, masquerading as heavy-weight intellectual explorations of the world.

Take, for example, Discipline and Punish. Leaving aside the teleology, Foucault struggles with the history, and the context of the history which he is dealing with. There is a persistent misreading of the theoretical writings of the past, and their relationship with material reality, plus quite a bit of selective selection of evidence to support his teleological narrative. The fact that he regularly refers to the writings of a literal saint without acknowledging or understanding why religion might have a bearing on certain aspects of his subject matter is incredibly telling. In short, it's not a terribly good book, but because it fulfils a certain function within academia (particularly amongst those academics who don't really do history), means that his status persists.

So, yes, I don't think the average blue-haired keyboard warrior on Twitter has much practical exposure to post-structuralism, but then I don't think they're missing much.

Who benefits from teaching this stuff apart from the people teaching it? Would it make the slightest difference to anyone other than the people teaching it if it was completely dropped from universities?

I'm really not persuaded by whinging that it was so mean to publish faux academic gibberish which was taken seriously. If the people complaining about this are half as clever as they think they are they shouldn't have fallen for it.

I also don't understand the "oh so and so's not a feminist" as if that somehow lessened the validity of their ideas.

Who benefits from teaching this stuff apart from the people teaching it? Would it make the slightest difference to anyone other than the people teaching it if it was completely dropped from universities?

I have no idea. When I was working in academia, I would feel like a published paper was a failure if there wasn't at least one article in the press talking about my work on the basis that it was interesting. The idea of universities used to be that they were expanding human knowledge, and I still think that people at large should be able to understand why the production of a piece of work is worthwhile, even if they can't understand the specifics. Once you reach the point where it is no longer possible to distinguish between serious work and satire, and even people with PhDs think that most academic publishing is pointless navel-gazing, then you have a problem.

If the people complaining about this are half as clever as they think they are they shouldn't have fallen for it.

IIRC one of the articles HP managed to get peer reviewed and published argued that the penis is a social construct and another was just excerpts from Mein Kamph and PoMo buzzwords stitched together into an article.

This thread got derailed a bit. Does anyone have any examples of social justice ideas/ woke / postmodern ideology invading real life/their workplace that could send ( or have sent )to Counterweight?

I am freelance and not vulnerable to workplace hierachies in the same way so my objections/ concerns are mostly theoretical and formed due to what I am witnessing online and hearing second hand.

Helen is really well respected and has a powerful platform to effect change.

Can I ask what you and others oppose about critical race theory - which is really just an understanding that racism, and by extension inequality, is structurally embedded as opposed to just an indivdual failing (or a naturally occurring product of inherent biological racial differences which I suspect is the view many of the most ardent critics of critical race theory are attemptoing to foster).

My issue with critical race theory is that it is incredibly divisive- see grifter extraordinaire Robin DiAngelo's 'White Fragility'- which can be boiled down to 'All white people are racist." It offers zero solutions.

I also have a big issue with America exporting and imposing their views on race and racism onto other countries and cultures with vastly different histories. This is something which Kemi Badenoch talked about. The UK, is not a perfect place for minority groups BY FAR- but we aren't a nation built by importing millions of enslaved people, we didn't have a civil war about whether it's okay or not to own other human beings; and we didn't have lynchings or the KKK. So I don't think US ideas about racism are very helpful when analysing the issues of racism in the UK.

The UK, is not a perfect place for minority groups BY FAR- but we aren't a nation built by importing millions of enslaved people, we didn't have a civil war about whether it's okay or not to own other human beings; and we didn't have lynchings or the KKK. So I don't think US ideas about racism are very helpful when analysing the issues of racism in the UK.

No, we just had an empire that helped build the slave trade, brutally crushed any resistance and oversaw preventable famines in which millions of people of colour died. And you're right we didn't have lynchings, but we did have violent racist attacks from the British Union of Fascists to the National Front. When I was growing up nearly every Asian shop was boarding up due to having windows smashed and daubed with swastikas and National Front logos. So yes, racism has manifested differently in the UK to the US, but at least parts of the States are making some attempt to examine and overturn the legacy of their past, unlike the jingoistic celebration of Empire that sill persists in the UK - a country where incidentally it would be near impossible to have a head of state who was a person of colour and where ethnically diverse representation in politics, the judiciary, culture, the police, industry and all power based hierarchies is significantly behind much of the US. Structural racism may look different in the UK, but it still very much exists.

Social justice techniques (critical race theory and post colonial theory) are not about civil rights, they don't flatten power hierachies, they invert them.

Justice necessarily insinuates retribution for the historical crimes a white society committed against a black society. That society no longer exists, it is now a blended multicultural society, so inextricably genetically and socially linked that to pick out genetically white skinned individuals as privelleged by that society is in itself racism.

Pre colonial societies themselves were faily racially homogenous but were not socially homogenous, they were massively top heavy and hierachical so a tiny percentage of the elite aristocracy and industrialists were in possesion of the majority of wealth and power. Thus to implicate the people for the sins of their fathers is not really logically possible and if a society has benefitted in wealth terms, then everyone in that society has benefitted one way or another.

To ask not "was that racist", but to assume that everything is racist by default and just needs identifying is not helpful and denys the goodness of most people and the universal nature of humanity.

Where overt racism is evident, that needs addressing, where statistics show disadvantage of course address that, but no one can help the color of their skin. Teaching a generation of white kids they are either racist, or too fragile to admit they are racist and inherantly priveleged will not sit well with poor white communities who have next to nothing.

Teaching black kids that they can expect poor outcomes regardless of merit because of structurally embedded racism is setting them up for failure.

Discuss, debate, teach the facts and slowly overtime the trajectory is towards equality. Do not impose the conclusion.

CRT is also too simplistic, doesn't actually propose any solutions and isn't really backed up by the stats in the UK which show that 44% of black pupils now go into higher education versus 30% of white pupils.

www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/higher-education/entry-rates-into-higher-education/latest

The preponderance on skin color also oversimplifies the other cultural aspects to economic attainment and representation in certain spheres.

Obama, Megan Markle, Vice president elect Kamala Harris, and a shit ton of talented, awesome black academics, businessmen, top lawyers and entrepreneurs all prove the glass ceiling doesn't really exist with respect to the amount of melanin in the basal layer of a person's skin.

I don't pretend racial bias doesn't exist, in the same way that though there have been female primeministers I don't pretend sexism doesnt exist, but I don't want to achieve sexual equality by disenfranchising men. That's how men's rights movements gain momentum. Everyone has a stake in the society we are trying to build.

Since reified postmodern theory had not really gained momentum until the last 2 or 3 years, it can hardly claim credit for any of the advances in any of the social arenas. It is devisive in the extreme.

Where overt racism exists, liberal democracy and it's laws deal with it as it arises and legislates to make things fairer, increasingly so over time.

The SJM and all it's subsidiary ideological children (CRT, Queer Theory, post colonial theory) are idealistic and populist (after all, who wouldnt want social justice) but they are also totalitarian, intolerant, use manipulative and coercive strategies and are subsuming the center, (which is inherrantly accepting of diversity in a way that the SJM is not)

This strengthens rather than weakens the far right and disables the mediating effect of secular liberalism.

The new identity hierachy that would replace it is not fit for purpose.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” Audre Lorde

Be in no doubt that what is behind the SJM and identity politics is the intent to destroy the house, and whilst some people may be alert to the ideology they are subscibing to, most people are just sleepwalking into something they think is harmless liberal, kind and inclusive. Plus, I don't happen to think the house is too shabby. It's got hot and cold running water, the roof works and most of us are not hungry plus winter is coming and if you pull it down, you need to know what is going to be erected instead.

So has anyone got any examples for Helen?
She is looking for people from the UK to send her descriptions of the ways in which critical social justice ideas have been imposed upon you at work, university, children's school etc. As detailed as possible in terms of what was said to you, required of you etc.
She clarifies what counts as critical social justice ideas.
Any of it. Postcolonial/decolonial stuff, queer theory/trans activism, critical race theory/intersectional feminism, disability/fat activism, generic "Social Justice" stuff. Anything that takes that authoritarian/ideological approach.

Send to
[email protected]

If you are forcing a rebuilding of society based on close readings of French philosophers that require a PhD to understand, you shouldn't be surprised at the push back

Just seen that counterweight has launched.
Their Web site is here. I haven't had a proper look yet but it might be useful to people who sometimes come on here asking for help with things going on in their work places. Worth knowing about anyway.
counterweightsupport.com/