Yeah, irresponsible is the best word for it.
It's very tiresome to observe at length.
jonion
joined 1 year ago
The main crit lit course was undergrad and at a European uni (with an American professor) so it was all pretty superficial, but the prof didn't exactly volunteer the ugly sides of these thinkers (as he most certainly would have done with a Carl Schmitt or a Heidegger). The other course (also undergrad) was even less rigorous, just a quick once-over of the basics of oppression and yada yada, namedropping Marcuse/Foucault/Derrida but never dissecting them.
The point of mentioning this wasn't to say that I'm some kind of particular expert on these thinkers (I am not) but rather that my experience with their presentation is that they are left as likeable as possible (there were years between me hearing of Foucault and realizing he was a nonce, whereas people usually learn that someone like Heidegger was a nazi before they even know how his name is pronounced).
I 100% agree on the uselessness of the left/right-dichotomy as it stands, particularly because the radical right gets lumped in with liberal individualists like Adam Smith/Ayn Rand/Ronald Reagan etc., which makes no sense at all.
Still, there are some essential axioms that can be used to distinguish the left and the right, those being equality+liberalism vs. disparity+illiberalism. There is a natural reason that the pedophiles aren't garnering support among the ranks of the far right and that white nationalists won't find much love among the far left.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article263759218.html
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/transgender-sex-offender-who-attacked-29765751
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1651861965235539969?lang=en
There you go, now hit me with the priests of the past month.
Yeah I get where you're coming from but this all hinges on the concept of Popper's Open Society taken to its most extreme.
Have you ever considered why this whole "children must be able to see drag shows" notion didn't show up just 20 years ago?
Idk, this kind of devil-on-the-wall "this is trans GENOCIDE" rhetoric when it comes to shit like increasing penalties for indecent exposure and not allowing children to attend drag shows really just says the quiet part out loud.
Survived just fine through Judith Butler though.
When I took a couple of critical theory oriented literary courses at uni these were the names that came up again and again, but there was no mention of their ultimate transgression. This is how the myth of an entirely dangerous right and an entirely harmless left is propagated. Just don't mention the bad parts of the left and create one continuous antagonist group out of everyone from Ted Cruz to Heinrich Himmler. Every rightist is implicated in the actions of their most radical thought leaders, but leftists are afforded the luxury of not associating with characters like Foucault, Lenin or Mao at their own leisure.
And I know that you know this but a "thought leader" doesn't need to be alive, so that's not really an argument. These people are tremendously influential and popular in our time (and Butler and Rubin aren't even dead), as demonstrated by the negative response to the Derrick Jensen lecture clip linked above.
Salafism kind of requires you to be intolerant of people for who they are, but let's not pretend these people would lend the same "live and let live" thinking to a Catholic bishop who espoused the views of a Salafi mullah when it comes to homosexuals.
But I get where you're coming from and your position is entirely reasonable. The problem is just that your attitude is not that of this thread and the OP. If you actually look at this 10A guy's posts you'll find nothing that merits the response you see in this thread. I'd say there's a long way to overstepping the threshold of civility on that part, but in this thread people already want heads on spikes, so to speak.
Nonsense, we most certainly can. In fact, most countries "worked out" without ever needing to be tolerant in the first place.
Popper doesn't even acknowledge that this notion can be universalized, and then you're just back to square one with Carl Schmitt and the Concept of the Political.
Take your LGBT example. For that to work, you must be intolerant of, say, Salafis. Then the Salafi can respond that his in-group (the faithful, true to God, whatever) are being threatened by those who must necessarily be intolerant of him by nature of their own allegiance.
Thus you still end up with a value judgment despite Popper's veneer of neutralization and depoliticization. That's where the real philosophizing begins. How do you justify allegiance to one side of the friend/enemy distinction over the other?
Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler aren't just "some people", they are three of the most influential thought leaders of the (post-)modern Left. Foucault of course being joined by heavyweights like Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Barthes etc. etc. and so on and so forth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws
The point of course being that this thread is full of idiots who have never even heard of the likes of Foucault or truly appreciate how badly they jumped the gun here (turns out there was still some "intolerance" left). Your cult of transgression and tolerance is not philosophically sound.
the far-right
who?
messages of hate, violence
such as?
intolerance
the tu quoque is almost too tempting here
pass legislation to justify their views
this is a joke, right?
Oh, and I didn't know people like Henry Ford and the 2nd Baron Trent were "far-left". I guess the horseshoe really does exist after all.
Stop beating strawmen, your ideological muscles are only gonna atrophy further.
How predictable. Do you have any actual arguments beyond smearing the sources? Don't believe your lying eyes, right? Can you point to any factual inaccuracies in the articles linked or does your reasoning end at "they report inconvenient facts that don't show up on the NYT/CNN/MSNBC/BBC front pages so they must be biased".
And here's the source for the tweet. Didn't take a whole lot of effort to find (not that you even bothered ofc): https://www.cronicaviva.com.pe/pnp-arresta-a-sujeto-vestido-de-alumna-en-colegio-de-mujeres-en-huancayo-videos/