I’m listening to the new Rise Against album and this shit slaps. Some lyrics:
“They break us like horses
how long will we drag their plow
what will continue to be
is what we allow”
“It’s your trail to blaze
or your bridge to burn
or your bridge to burn”
“If everything you knew
was a goddamn lie
would you up and explode
like it’s the Fourth of July?”
“And for your sweat, you’ll be rewarded
They told us every day
There’s a land of milk and honey
And it’s not that far away
But the finish line kept moving
And the promises wore thin
And the smoke on the horizon
Was the burning promised land”
“So good at speaking out of turn
And talking back I have some nerve
If I said all this to your face
Forgive me, sometimes I forget my place”
Just all of “Monarch.”
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
If you use sexual violence as a metaphor to describe a theory, that's a blockin', full stop.
I'm happy to build my moral high ground on the corpses of the trolls I've slain, but some shit is beyond the pale and not worth the engagement.
Sexual violence is not trivial, and theoretical positions that you disagree with are not acts of intellectual violation on par with sexual violence. Using sexual violence metaphorically or analogically to describe theory trivializes the real trauma of sexual violence.
Using sexual violence analogically or metaphorically in this way also contributes to the ongoing permissibility of sexual violence in our culture. It treats the violence as "normal," rather than as a sign of an expansive social problem. It's also really fucking callous.
Nobody tell the anti-CRT crowd but “woke” scholars have been critical of CRT, and much of it’s deployment in education, for well over a decade.
The crucial difference is in the outcomes and objectives.
Anti-woke grifters see the permanence of race, counterstory telling, and critique of liberalism as indoctrination and anti-American or as reverse racism.
They also see it as existential threats to liberty and a vision of America as a post-racial fantasy land.
Fun fact, anti-CRT assholes: Bell and many founders of CRT reject what they call a “world upside down” and they do so vigorously in text. Also “post-racial” ideology is nothing but a neo-liberal fantasy to avoid doing the hard work of anti-racism.
To this, I would add the following: too fucking many leftists are comfortable with the inaccessibility of their "radical" spaces and fuck is it disgusting. Especially when they brand themselves as "inclusive."
Inclusive of what? Neurotypical, able-bodied radicals?
Further, leftist analysis that reduces ableism to a class problem misses the whole fucking point. Your class revolution might resolve some economic burdens, which is awesome, but it will not make for a more accessible society unless you consider ableism beyond a class framework.
Aside from work in Disability Studies and Philosophy of Disability?
Sami Schalk - Bodyminds Reimagined
Dewey - Experience and Nature
Dogen - Shobogenzo
Sara Ahmed - Queer Phenomenology, Cultural Politics of Emotion
Shelley Tremain - Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability
If I were in a Phil Mind/Cog Sci program, or advise students in said program, they would have to have a thorough grounding in Disability Studies, Philosophy of Disability, and some non-western tradition to broaden their assumptions about "the mind" and how we have "minds."
For example, look at what Mark Johnson has done with "mainstream" Phil Mind/Cog Sci and pragmatism: he gets his Dewey "mostly" right, but when he brings neuroscience to the table, he ejects all of Dewey's thinking about how diversity of bodies leads to diversity of minds.
Since my book deals with affect and gender, one of the things I've been thinking about is sexual orientation as a description the direction of one's affective (not necessarily sexual) desire. That is, how one is affectively oriented towards some people and not others.
Now, I'm not so concerned about the origins of such things as, for me, the only reason to consider the origin of sexual orientation is if you want to impose control over it. Further, origin often has little to do with the existing direction unless you're thinking in process.
Putting origin aside, I do want to acknowledge that regardless of the starting point, the direction of our affective desire and the shape that it takes emerges in transaction with the environment. I say in transaction because people make misguided claims about such things.
Second, the ongoing abuse of students by faculty is not a "moral panic:" it is a pattern of behavior enabled by institutional collusion through ineffective policies and the treatment of complaint as a threat to the image of the institution, rather than a threat to student safety.
To be clear, when I say "student safety," I don't just mean undergraduates, who are our typical image of the student preyed upon: I also mean graduate students and post-docs. They, too, are vulnerable to predatory behavior of faculty.