katamari Damassi wrote:Steersman wrote:jimthepleb wrote:Excellent article on gamergate and the larger Social Justice debate.
http://gamergate.me/2014/11/war-on-humanism/
The author frames the opposition as Post-Structuralist rather than Post-Modernist.
Interesting read so far.
Interesting read - at least on skimming.
But maybe of some interest, and not known by all and sundry, is the fact that most of the individual tweets quoted in the article were by one Jonathan McIntosh who
Milo Yiannopoulos identifies as Sarkeesian's producer.
It was good. I have to admit that I often confuse or conflate post-modernism with post-structuralism.
Can't say that I've got a good handle on either - pretty convoluted at the best of times if not outright idiocy, at least the former as a review by
Dawkins suggests.
But what seems "problematic" is that both still seem to have some currency - as the GamerGate article suggests, and as does the article linked in this tweet exchange I had recently:
From the article:
Elizabeth Smith wrote:The women’s narratives are viewed through a postmodern lens that draws on the work of Foucault and his feminist contemporaries. Specifically utilising Butler’s notion of overplay and Foucault’s later work on ethics, I argue that there are possibilities for women in the sex industry to (re)create their ethical substances – or senses of self – in ways that allow them to resist appropriating dominant and stigmatising discourses about who they are, both as sex workers and as women.
:?
Though there is maybe a grain or two of truth in some of their blatherings. For instance, consider this tweet from that GamerGate article:
http://gamergate.me/wp-content/uploads/ ... age-16.png
The implication there being, apparently, that the culture itself is some sort of autonomous entity that is capable of imposing or inducing certain behaviour patterns on its members - a perspective or philosophy that is apparently prevalent in sociology, and which Pinker elaborates on in some detail in his
The Blank Slate. While one might argue that that is a misapprehension or reification - asserting that the abstraction of the behaviour of all individuals has substance and reality on its own - there is maybe some remote possibility that that collection is an
emergent property of sorts that has some limited causal efficacy of its own - sort of like the coupled metronomes I've discussed in some detail here earlier. Or sort of like consciousness itself that seems to "emerge" - as if by magic, so to speak - out of the supposedly unconscious operations of "simple" neurons. Curious & curiouser as Alice used to say .... :-)
