@beadsland

I have expressed in the past a serious discomfort with rejecting that TERFs are feminists.

They are not intersectional feminists, but we fixate on second-wave feminists and retroactively revoke their membership in a way we rarely do for first-wave feminists. Despite first-wave feminists having all the same issues as second-wave feminists and more.

People will point out these issues, but they do not revoke their feminist card.

This is dangerous because failing to remember that there are many feminisms keeps us from remembering that not everyone who supports a cause is my ally.

Not all feminisms are good. We must remember this, if we want liberation for all.

@beadsland

Combining some previous posts on the topic:

The issue with Radical Feminism is not whether or not it is a feminism, but that it is itself a dangerous and oppressive framework.

It is not interested in systems.

In radical feminism, oppression is personal. It is violence. It is men hurting women directly.

So, someone showing up to the meeting just being male is, in this framework, violent by essentially bringing the ghost of the oppressor along. I don't matter in this equation.

Radical feminism is a with any means necessary ideology. To understand this, consider another by any means necessary ideology: anti-fascism.

Anti-fascism states that fascism is such a threat that any means necessary should be taken to ensure it doesn't flourish.

Radical feminism states any means necessary must be used to take power from men to keep them from oppressing women.

Taking away their "feminist card" does not engage with the extant danger of Radical Feminism as a theory - in any of its variants.

@deilann

"In radical feminism, oppression is personal. It is violence. It is men hurting women directly."

Ah, so this is the point of reference!

Having a very different relation to radical (yet also Hanischian personal), as historicized root, as rhizome even, hadn't tied it back to a specific claim to rootedness of violence in an ahistorical essentialism.

Perhaps because any essentialism of violence as definitively gendered is a very antefemimist, even ante-Hobbesian, patriarchal commitment.

@beadsland

radical in this case, is in reference to how to address this belief

a liberal feminism cannot address this power structure

@deilann

Well, yes, but per this description, there is, accidentally or otherwise, also an ontologically radical cosmology, a dispositionalism, even.

A metaphysics of irreducible necessarity of causation (here, the gendered necessarity of violence) would of course brook no argument that anything would be sufficient but the cutting away of those so-disposed.

Root, here, is not to be dug up, ground planted with new growth, but rather as a Yggdrasill tap, a stump remaining even if ever felled.

@beadsland

yes! which is why i find adams, as mentioned in my other reply, so fascinating

what happens to radical feminism if you reject essentialism?

@deilann

[Wrong link (see next toot), though perhaps useful for context, so keeping, if for no other reason than to preserve flow of conversation.]

apropos:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03847-z

(Also came upon just now.)

@deilann

Sorry, wrong link:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-022-03554-9

@beadsland

i'm trying to remember a time when sophie from mars was discussing a situation where the far-right person she was discussing accepted dispositional realism (which is less common, so remarkable) but disagreed on an aspect of phenomenology that caused the sharp divide. I wish I could remember.

@beadsland

yeah, just making me want to dig that up at some point because we far too rarely engage with when far-right folks engage with anything but claims of objectivism

@deilann

My only comment here is that, while the question of a schism vis-à-vis dispositional realism sounds tetrapyloctomically juicy, the territories of engagement of overt conservatism are far less interesting to me...

When it is the covert conservatism that is liberalism that is handing out the crayons with which everyone is coloring their respective lines.

@beadsland

i think there is value in recognizing it because it's often used and not recognized by liberals in the same way -

yes, your reality exists, which is why you must be eliminated

@deilann Perhaps.

Nonetheless, am far more often confronted by the covert conservative who does not recognize the overt conservative as legible, as coherent, as makeable-as-sensible.

So disconnected is the covert conservative even from the concept of premises, of postulates, without which the very notion of an ontology, let alone an ontological schism, is purposefully beyond their ken.

Bringing us back to the challenge of (that is, the challenge presented by) feminisms.

@beadsland

my personal is often confronted with what i will now call trickle down rationalist bigotry

the person who holds enough liberal sentiment to be swayed by the covert conservative and then i get the diluted and reprojected bigotry framed in an objective obvious truth a la rationalism

@beadsland

so they take the scraps and post hoc form the justification from what they think they remember but in terms of their own adherence to rationalism and refusing to engage with the possibility it was never coherent to begin with because it felt coherent when they heard it

@deilann

Okay, but that's just Enlightenment as read through a Usian's haze-filled crystal ball passing for primary school history.

@beadsland

and we're back at why grand narratives are powerful, but in a destructive sense

@beadsland

i find the ability to smell grand narratives descending incredibly useful because they are the moment to pivot back to "hello, i'm here. you're here. we're talking about something that affects me. and you. this is real"

@beadsland

i am also getting increasingly frustrated at the use of capitalism as a grand narrative as a thought terminating cliche and should start doing this to everyone

@deilann

This is the second time "thought-terminating cliche" has come across my radar in past few days.

Construction feels, as before, so much less nuanced than exploration in Mending Wall.

Indeed, such TTC, as construction, begins (in that it opens) with a rationalist premise, an idealism, regarding thought, as such, as virtue.

Thus anyone who would attend to their wall is without virtue—for refusing to think, to discuss, to argue. There's a sealion energy here that feels very 90s Skeptic.

@beadsland

and 00s skepticism (scientific and political - think 9/11 trutherism)

and 10s new athiest skepticism and associated anti-feminism

and 20s skepticism

@deilann

Same house, different name on the mailbox.

You see then, my unease at TTC as a thing we'd contemplate saying, let alone deploying by way of rhetoric.

@beadsland i see them as useful and good, but easy to misuse in ways that hurt us and others

we can't engage with all the contradictions of reality and our own contradictions and how those often contradict with the contradictions of reality at every moment and take action

@beadsland

"i am safe" is a TTC that I use quite often, so i can take action rather than fully reason out how safe i am.

if i were not safe, it would likely hurt me to use it.

@deilann

Does that truly terminate thought, qua thought, though?

Or instead terminate rumination?

Does one take action thoughtlessly?

Were that is even possible (and arguably, it is not, baring, perhaps, such as somnambulism), would it safe, let alone advisable, to act at the terminus of thought?

@beadsland

living with narcolepsy makes it hard for me to engage a lot of times with these concepts because people use my lived experiences as metaphor

@deilann

Somnambulism, here is no metaphor, although does rest on premise that "thought" is conscious.

That is, my question is to literality of TTC. Does one, literally, act at the termination of thought?

Or does one stop the action of rumination so to conduct some other, non-ruminative action, that nonetheless entails consciousness, thus thought?

Danger of TTC is liberal presumption of a reality in which anyone acts thoughtlessly. Rather than, say, without consideration of others' premises.

@beadsland

yes, i took it as literal, but then realized it's hard to discuss without the metaphorical (which i have found is difficult due to narcolepsy)

i would say TTC are baton tossing

handing over active thought to heuristic

@deilann

As a programming-as-language arts person, would say a heuristic is still thought. Thought as optimized subroutine, but thought nonetheless.

@beadsland

yeah, thought terminating cliche is not terminating thought, but a targeted thought

so ending the active specific thought and delegating it to an optimized subroutine

@deilann

So, graceful exception handling pattern.

@beadsland precisely

keeps us from seg faults

@deilann

The axiom being that even in the event of seg fault, the processor is still Turing machining.

@beadsland

the trouble is that we don't want to exception handle warnings that really should be thrown and we can use the same patterning to do both

"that's capitalism" can help you move towards praxis, disengage from theory

but you can also use it to disengage from theory and not engage in praxis, accept it as a just-so

@beadsland

"i'm not an expert" can be used to recognize i don't have the time to get a PhD in every sub field and i need to rely on expert consensus

or it can be used to say "so i don't need to know that"

@beadsland

capitalism as a grand narrative starts becoming mythos

just the way the world is

so the grand narrative form tends to lend itself more towards the abuse of "there is no ethical consumption" line of reasoning as a moral excuse, to not consider what is unethical about this consumption vs that.

at the end of the day, we do have to consume, so we do have to reconcile at some point

hence, concern about it being used that way as a TTC, as a way to break, rather than continue

@beadsland

we have to identify the semiotic specter

@deilann

Nah, the floating spectre, the empty phantasm, is identified with each signification, each invocation.

We have to mind our language. Stop taking a demi-demiurge's name in vain. Less swearing in lieu of speaking.

Is not a TTC, but common vulgarity, that stymies action.