The "Black Hole" of woke....

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The fact is that some people with uteruses are not women, and some women do not have uteruses.

Would you prefer, “men, women, and non-binary people with uteruses”?

The latest drama over academic politics is unfolding in the American Historical Association. A column by association president James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has come under fire for warning against “presentism”.

Sweet’s article, his monthly feature in Perspectives on History, the association’s official publication, offered a rather mild critique of the "1619 Project,".

He noted that tours in a castle in Ghana that served as a hub of the slave trade were geared to American (mostly African American) tourists and so focused on the evil of American white supremacy that they erased some highly relevant facts. For instance, most slaves were sent to Brazil and the Caribbean, not to the United States and the colonies that preceded it, or that Ghana and other African kingdoms were deeply complicit in the slave trade.

Sweet’s critique was not limited to ahistorical history on the left: He was also scathingly critical of conservative Supreme Court justices for what he argued was the misuse of Second Amendment and abortion-law history in recent rulings on abortion and gun rights.

In response, Knox College history professor Cate Denial posted a tweet urging professors to email members of the association’s executive board to express their outrage. Critics accused Sweet of having claimed that history should be discussed as if it has no current relevance and cannot be analogized to the present (something he never said). Others claimed that Sweet’s critique of social justice-oriented scholarship was a standard way for white men to dismiss the struggles of racial minorities and other disenfranchised groups.

Under the wave of outrage, Sweet posted a contrite note at the top of his column, apologizing for failing to “convey what [he] intended” and calling the piece a “ham-fisted attempt at provocation.”

Some of Sweet’s critics were particularly incensed because they felt that his column was handing a weapon to Republicans who are currently seeking to regulate the way history is taught in many “red” states to impose rules to ensure that lessons on the history of civil rights do not collectively blame whites for segregation. Such attempts, particularly when applied to college-level teaching, are indeed worrying as an infringement on academic freedom and freedom of speech in the academy.

What Sweet’s detractors don’t realize is that they, not he, are handing a weapon to those who want to regulate academic speech: They can easily point to Sweet’s mobbing as evidence that today’s academy is intolerant of even the mildest dissent from left-wing dogma on “social justice,” and there is a need for government intervention, which will protect speech, not restrict it.

No, the mobbing is not the same as state diktat.

Sweet’s apology mentions the “harm” his column has supposedly caused. But the only harm to the discipline has been done by the mob.

I wouldn’t want to be called “a person with a penis.”

I'm not a very "political" person at all.

But when things go too far....they go too far.

I feel this when I have conversations with people who are full-throttle "woke." I might agree with 14 of their tenets; but if I don't agree with the 15th, all hell breaks loose. It's as if I was some sort of fascist.

Howbout...."a penis, with a person attached". ?

It probably comes down to the specific criticism and how much nuance the other party is actually recognizing.

There's plenty of issues on which one can make the basic case 'centrists are just the softest of the reactionaries', but one needs to at least be mindful that many of those centrists are open to change, either individually through debate, or over time as the culture's norms shift.

Yes, on the one hand they're almost certainly the majority of the people making the reactionary arguments but they're also likely to be the least invested in them compared to people to their right.

Plenty of centrists were anti-gay marriage until it became safe, centrists tend to be the slowest to take the threat from the far-right seriously, centrists are often more willing to support more investment in policing vs. investments into poverty reduction, etc. There's plenty of issues where centrists are the obstruction and their obstructionism leads to more reactionary positions finding success.

In all of those instances it's perfectly fair to condemn them as part of the problem since that's absolutely what they've demonstrated themselves to be.

There's a substantial base of trans posters on here, which should be expected given that transgender individuals seem to be over-represented among autistic individuals.

When posters are allowed to openly invalidate their identities it harms not just those posters but also the rest of the userbase because eventually decent posters get fed up with being insulted and leave. It's happened before, otherwise the case to take it seriously wouldn't be so clear-cut.

Your comment wasn't grounds for a discussion, it was just an insult so it was addressed like an insult.

I wouldn’t want to be called “a person with a penis.”

Continuing from the mod thread.



OK, I'm sorry.

My points still stand though with the issue of women being invalidated. It's like the language is changing to delete them from existence. It is genuinely scary for me. We should still have Men and Womens' toilets, separately, because men who disguise themselves as transgender can easily go into a womans' toilets and assault a woman. Transgender people confuse this as women being against genuine trans people entering a toilet.

It's as if womens' rights and freedoms that were so hard fought for are disappearing because of a minority of people. It seems very sexist.

Name calling me a TERF or whatever is stupid, and so is shutting down discussion. People get angry at me and don't listen. I'm hoping you're not going to do the same, or blame me in any other way. It just wastes everybodys' time.

The people who you are describing as centrists are conservatives whom were described as such until the the rise of the MAGA’s and the wokes. Now they are the pejoratives “RINO” and “neoliberal”. “Neoliberal” is that proof that people with radically different worldviews can agree on one thing most every problem is the fault of the neoliberals.

Often centrists and moderates are conflated viewed as weak people too willing to compromise on everything. While that describes some more often then not I have found that these people have strong opinions but they are strongly for or against an issue associated with the right and strongly for or against another issue associated with the left. In other words the only common ground us “centrists” have is dislike of the woke and MAGA movements and the polarization they are causing.

“RINO” and “neoliberal” are insults. “Centrist” is not accurate. What should “we” be called? “Politically homeless” has found some agency among us. “Politically non-binary” acknowledges the variety among us and is contemporary sounding. But it does not have the emotional pull of those other colloquial terms, and majority rules when it comes to colloquial terms, oh well.

Is it unreasonable to note that someone who doesn't consider transwomen to be women is excluding them? If you're called a TERF because you exclude transwomen from who you deem to be women it seems fair that they might label you as Trans-Exclusionary, no? The RF part seems more open to debate then the TE part (as in, the TE part is always openly admitted, but TERF is often applied to people who aren't radical feminists as well)

I agree that some of the issues you mention are valid, but men seeking to sexually assault women isn't a good argument against letting some women piss in privacy in the gender-appropriate room.

So far people seeking to exclude transwomen from the correct public bathroom have been better at harassing ambiguous looking cis-women than doing anything about sexual predators.

As long as people who wish to align themselves with feminism make excuses for people engaging in..

As long as people who seek to exclude transwomen keep seeking to conflate them with male sexual predators (as you're doing) it will be clear that transphobia and a lack of respect for their identities is the core motivator.

If people who are trans-exclusionary would like to be viewed differently they'll need to prove they deserve to be viewed differently from how they have so far presented themselves.