Martial artist, motorcyclist, and comics philosopher. Areas: Japanese phil, race, gender, disability, and tech/AI. Pragmatic Dragon. He/Him/His 🏳️🌈
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Apr 17 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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.
May 18, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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.
May 11, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
May 11, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
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."
May 11, 2023 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
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.
Apr 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
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.
Apr 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I've read more of the shit on the Byrne rejection letter and I'm like what the fuck? I've had rejection letters and critical reviews of work that are far, far worse than what Byrne got.
Like, there's no apparent ideological bias there, just a critique of shitty work.
I've also gotten R&Rs about some more controversial work I've written that were much harsher than Byrne's rejection letter and I've taken up their critiques, revised the piece, and resubmitted it.
I didn't throw a tantrum across the internet nor did I accuse reviewers of bias.
Apr 3, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I'm going to put this out there: perhaps we're seeing an uptick in adult ADHD cases because many children with ADHD grew into adults with ADHD whose professions, personal lives, and living spaces provided them with the necessary scaffolds to manage their ADHD.
Then they were thrust into a global pandemic, forced to adapt to a new living situation, new caring responsibilities, new social or political challenges, and disconnected from the scaffolds that helped manage their ADHD. So they went looking for a diagnosis, or got rediagnosed.
Apr 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
So, here’s some bullshit @AmericanAir put me through. My flight from DCA gets cancelled and there are no other flights available. Next earliest is from BWI to BUR, 6am Monday. I was annoyed but agreed ONLY because reservations said they’d get me a hotel.
(Mistake one)
Me, being the fool I am, go to BWI because that’s where they said I should go to get my hotel voucher. I get there and the gate folks are like “nope, no hotel. Don’t know why they told you that. But you should call reservations because they could authorize it.”
(Mistake 2)
Mar 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is only false if you assume that I'm restricting my commentary to twitter.
As you are no doubt aware, Lawford-Smith and Stock, prior to publishing their books, developed much of their material through posting on medium and in periodical publications.
In both contexts, they have advanced anti-trans sentiment that has been taken up as legitimate scholarship to shape policy and public discourse. In fact, this was the subject of Christa's talk that got Stock and others quite upset.
Valcore, Jace, et al. "Building an Intersectional and Trans‑Inclusive Criminology: Responding to the Emergence of “Gender Critical” Perspectives in Feminist Criminology." (2021).
Mar 15, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I am sick to death of this as a fucking defense. "Biological male," like "biological sex" is so redundant as to be definitionally meaningless. Further, biology as a field of science, like all inquiry, is grounded in culture. It is neither objective nor neutral.
This is not to say that it does not point out specific features of bodies in the world, but it is to say that the way that you and the Terven hordes deploy it ignores the reality and complexity of biology. As I said to Lawford-Smith, there is no consensus on the biology of sex.
Mar 15, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Fine, since you haven't explained what a "sex class" is, I guess I'll do it for you.
Let's follow Fausto-Sterling (1993). On this view, the "sex class" of women you describe is maintained by the disciplinary structures of medicine (and I'd add science), law, and the state.
Let's look at Law, since you and your ilk like to claim that trans women are stealing your rights. At least in the US, the Bostock ruling is applicable here. Bostock determined that discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation entails sex discrimination.
Mar 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I'm going to state this clearly: I am asking you as a philosopher to demonstrate the ways in which some members of a class are not counted as part of the class within the theoretical position that you hold.
I am asking nothing of women, unless you presume to speak for them.
That said, the move to accuse me of demanding that "women" as a group demonstrate to me that trans women are indeed women is the worst kind of rhetorical bullshit intended to present a challenge to a philosophical position as a challenge to the autonomy of women.
Mar 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I understand the distinction, though not in the way that you've used it in your responses to me.
That said, in the problem you lay out, it is not self-evidently the case that what you're saying is true. Especially given the way in which you've left "minority group" undefined.
For example, a non-disabled woman trying to determine what's best for a disabled man without bothering to take seriously his needs or his embodiment as a disabled person is such a case where it is not self-evident that women should trump men.
Mar 14, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
There's a lot of slippage between "woman" and "female," and even further slippage between "gender identity," "gender," and "sex" such that all five terms become indistinguishable within the argument, which makes it far more difficult to parse what is actually being argued.
If I'm going to make sense of it, it seems like the position is that "female" is a natural kind with an immutable essence that makes it what it is, and "woman" is the social category that proceeds from this immutable natural kind, which then makes "gender identity" a pantomime.
Mar 14, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
There are a couple of ways to understand this. If we take Mills seriously, really chew his thesis down to bone, the only way we can have good faith rights talk is by first recognizing that our formulation of rights and who can possess them is shaped by histories of colonialism.
I'd also add histories of ableism (cf Tremain), heterosexism, and other forms of oppression which shape our modern political contexts. Insofar as this is the case, we cannot assume that rights are experienced and possessed equally.
Mar 14, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Communications theory, actually. Let's do this again with philosophy.
The kinds of comments you've made, embodied in the tweet below, belong to a class of speech acts that position the target of the act as infantile or engaging in something other than legitimate scholarship.
Sara Ahmed describes similar speech acts in her work "Against Students" wherein the speech acts of educational institutions reframe the demands of students as in opposition to the "appropriate" object of education. In doing so, these acts also frame the students as a threat.
Mar 14, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
To the first point about moral and political philosophy. While you're correct, how this discourse is carried on actually matters, as does the starting point from which you approach the lives and rights of other people.
Here, I'm reminded of Charles Mills' first chapter of The Racial Contract wherein he lays out the conditions within political and, by extension, moral philosophy that precluded genuine engagement with the issue of race and racism as an organizing political force.
Mar 14, 2023 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
I said I'd come back to the "twitter cop" thing, and I'm taking a moment to do so.
To be clear, I don't actually care about "twitter cop" or "uwu widdle grad student" or "tweeting pretty compulsively," I care about how these things position grad students who push back.
By "don't care," I mean that I don't view these as legitimate critiques. Rather, I view them as a way to position a graduate student as incapable or unworthy of engaging with on the issues, regardless of the amount of research they've done.
Mar 14, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The irony here is that this has actually happened and faculty responded in exactly this way with very few people holding them to account.
But let's be clear here, Jesse: you're not talking about a criticism of metaphysics, or the veil of ignorance, or Dogen's interpretation of pratityasamutpada, you're talking about criticisms of gender critical positions. Let us not pretend we're speaking abstractly.
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