That entire back and forth about the Facebook moderation is literally a response to Facebook's incremental attempts to address critiques that it allows it's platform to be used to maintain institutionalized oppression. #breakupbigtech
Now, I view that back and forth as important because of the ways that it illuminates how these politicians view moderation of hate speech as moderation of conservative speech, which is telling in very serious and important ways. #breakupbigtech
Which is to say that they know what is being said on these sites and in these Facebook groups and are committed to defending it because it is essential to their politics. That they've become concerned should tell you what they mean by "ideological diversity." #breakupbigtech
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I agree with Helen here and want to go a step further: much contemporary philosophy lacks the tools to do this. Further, many philosophers whose cultural presence could be leveraged to make change lack the political will or the conceptual rigor to do something.
The piece gives a great example with Singer: Singer is famous for saying that the field whose professionalism he is almost directly responsible for, the field of bioethics, should not advocate for people, for partisan interests. Taken as a field-wide position, this is telling.
On this view, bioethics (and the field of philosophy if we’re being metonymic) does not have any moral responsibility to comment on Palestinian genocide, on Sudan, on Trans genocide, on fascism because of the purported neutrality of the discipline re: contemporary events.
At some point I hope my colleagues whining about the preservation of academic freedom from students realize that the students who're protesting have long since seen the failures of the academy to foster the kinds of good faith engagements these colleagues assume will be lost.
That is, people have tried refutation in print, they've tried addressing the "merits" of arguments, they've tried pointing out the harms and the bad faith of it all and still nothing changes. So the only recourse left is literally deplatforming bigots.
I mean, how do you even have a "good faith" debate when the context of the debate is your very humanity? How do you have a good faith debate when you7r interlocutor has decided that every piece of scholarship that doesn't support their position is a "mistake?"
Truth. Goodness. Beauty. We've given up all chance at objective truth. We've made the life of mind a practical space. We share our dreams with ghosts. We wake up every day to a maxim Pierce wrote 150 years ago from which there's only one conclusion, We're damned for what we do.
Our anger, Our ego, Our unwillingness to do abstract inquiry, they set us on a path from which there is no escape. We yearned to return experience to philosophy without contemplating the cost and by the time we looked down there was no longer any ground beneath our feet.
What do pragmatists sacrifice? We're condemned to use the tools of philosophy to defeat it. We burn epistemology for someone else's future inquiry. We burn objectivity to discover a truth in experience that we know we'll never see.
The assumption that some of us have a choice between activism and scholarship is hilarious to me.
For some of us, just being in the room, let alone the discipline, is an activist act or the product of a history of activism. Some of our sub-fields are built on activism.
Not to bring the "privilege" discourse into it, but to assuming multiply marginalized scholars have a fucking choice in whether we become activists in the academy means that they have no idea what our experience is like. At some point every marginalized scholar is an "activist."
I'm using quotes here because the form our "activism" might take is as diverse as we are. Shit, merely publishing something that says "this is my experience and I'm going to theorize about it" is an activist act in some* disciplines.
I am reminded of how Peter Singer has drawn the line between activist and scholar where the activist is unwilling to be moved by argumentation and the scholar is willing to consider every possibility, even those deemed abhorrent, so long as the argument is sound.
There's absolutely no daylight between Singer's scholar/activist divide and HLS's tweet, so I'm going to talk about this as a general principle of philosophy which is used as cover to treat people's humanity as open questions because that's, apparently, what philosphy does.
On Singer's view, the unwillingness of the activist to compromise on certain positions means the work they do, nor matter how well researched, is neither scholarly nor eligible for consideration in scholastic debate. All because the activist's position precludes some questions.
I really think a lot of senior folks in philosophy underestimate just how much they're showing their asses with this whole Byrne publication thing. Just putting that shit on full display for all the world to see.
Many of these same people gave no thought about the rejection rates of marginalized or non-anglo centric philosophy within the discipline. Worse, a quick trawl through the Daily Nous reveals that these folks are usually the first to push back against expanding the canon.
Further, the way in which they doubt that Byrne's book was rejected on its merits demonstrates their steadfast determination to preserve a status quo, a kind of patronage, where publication can be eased through clout and alignment with the "traditional" form of the discipline.