I'm reading books by SJWs, not books about them. I'm not a total masochist. I have no desire to give that dude money but if I ever feel like reading more of his opinions he has a blog :P

Nope. I happened to catch Brian Williams going on about fake news a few weeks back. I started to get get light headed and lose consciousness. I worried that I was going to stroke out. So that seemed like a good point to take a little break from the politics.

Dear diary,

I did finally finish this book like a week and a half ago or something. And it turned out the joke's on me, because I can't think of anything from it that would be interesting for this thread, or at least not without a lot of exposition. It's so Inside Baseball there's not much point in reading it unless you're deeply interested in byzantine disputes between Humanities professors on the relative merits of Foucauldian vs. Althusserian formulations of "ideology", and stuff like that. The background question about who feminism speaks for, how "woman" or the feminine point of view is constructed, and similar questions are interesting and important, but this isn't really the book to read for an introduction to them.

I have to say though, there's a section that considers feminist Standpoint Theories and it's the clearest chapter in the book. I think that's simply because the sociological theory is way less obscurantist. Social Sciences 1, Humanities 0. :P

I'm thinking about veering off course and making this the SJW Youtube Report Thread for like a week, since I've never gotten around to watching Lord's videos and now he's posting here.

If only there was a poster here who wrote books on these sorts of books for a living. I don't know of any such poster.

If only I had linked you to this thread before!

I read the wiki webpage for Feminist Standpoint Theory. And it is your fault. I demand the 10 minutes of my time it took to read and think about it back - but time is an arrow that only goes forward. Still, you should be ashamed of yourself for making me waste my time. But thanks overall for not posting about that book.

You need to read Suetonius. You are off base on what is important.

Sounds like it's your fault for choosing dubious sources :P

This is true. I was lazy. It was near the top in the google search.

The SJW BookYoutube Report Thread

So, I watched Lord's first three videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiVj...JSr5IE&index=1

Perhaps it would be better to watch all of them and then offer thoughts, in order to avoid criticizing him for something that gets clarified later, but I'm not that nice so I'm live blogging. I can always correct myself :P

Video #1 - "Anti-humanism"

Lord asks "what is liberal humanism?" and answers the question first by suggesting that it's "the set of ideas against which practically all of the theories which SJWs hold dear established themselves". Then, we get a definition (in reference to the work of Clive James) which posits a belief in "human nature" as the centrally important tenet of liberal humanism. This belief in human nature is then placed in opposition with various theories of social construction in order to assert that SJWs who hold social constructionist positions are anti-humanist.

I have several objections here, one of which ties in to a general objection I have with the style of argumentation common to all three of the videos I've watched so far. The rhetorical purpose of framing this video as an opposition between Liberal Humanism and SJWism is clear, just as the purpose of framing SJWism as an inherently Marxist movement in the following videos is clear. At the end of each video, Lord disclaims that he is not going to actually critique or "pull apart" the ideas he's presented as SJW ideas. But the insinuations are nevertheless obvious. Humanism and Capitalism are presumed to be good, Anti-humanism and Anti-capitalism are presumed to be bad. Lord is relying on the existing ideological or emotional views of his viewers to fill in the arguments that he's not making, and I find that a bit dubious, even though I'm neither a Marxist nor particularly entrenched in the intellectual traditions he posits as central to SJWism.

So the rhetorical strategy of insinuation immediately jumps out at me, but it would hardly be important if the claims being made were clearly true, but I think the opposition between humanism and social constructionism presented in this video is mostly a straw-man. I'll criticize the descriptions of ideology and culture when I get to the second and third videos.

My first problem is with the answer to the question "what is liberal humanism?" Citing James, Lord defines it as the belief in human nature. But I think this is so over-simplified as to be false. Here, for example, is an article called The Myth of Liberal Humanism which I think provides an example of some of the objections I would also raise. Note that the author of this essay (Habib) is making an argument that's tangential at best to my point, so I don't mean to endorse every point he makes. First, I would agree with both Lord and Habib that a lot of "SJW" theorizing begins with opposition to elements of Liberal Humanism:

No objection there. He goes on:

I would suggest that Habib is editorializing a wee bit, but the point I'd make is that he's right to pay attention to the variety of perspectives that fit under the umbrella of "Liberal Humanism". One of these perspectives is the idea of "human nature", but it's not the only one, nor is it a foundational one:

The point being, I think it's wrong to make "belief in human nature" stand in for Liberal Humanism in order to make the idea of social construction anti-humanist. It's also, in my view, incorrect to say that the concept of social construction entails the complete rejection of the idea of human nature (cf. this explanation by an anthropologist). Just as it would be incorrect to suggest that a belief in some universal human tendencies is equivalent to pure biological determinism. Note that I am more interested in defending the concept of social construction than I am in defending any specific use of it. There is no doubt that sometimes people reduce these theories to caricatures and misuse them, more or less as Lord says at the beginning of this video, they are half-remembering lectures. But one does not have to reject empiricism, democracy, capitalism, or the belief in shared humanity across national boundaries in order to see the value in theories of social construction. Historically, theories of social construction were formulated against ethnocentric tendencies, not in favor of them.

But beyond that, one can also recognize a value in Marxist or Feminist social theory without rejecting humanism altogether. Rather, certain elements of Liberal Humanism are being challenged, like capitalism, or imperialism, or certain elements of positivistic science. One can recognize the validity of ideas about social construction without embracing the flawed idea of a human being as a "blank slate". Lord implies that this is impossible, but he's wrong, and the implied conclusion -- that one should entirely reject social constructionism -- is also wrong.

Just seen this. Certainly looking forward to your responses to the others. Will have a good look at what you've said here.

Videos #2 and #3, "Ideology" and "Cultures and Sub-Cultures"

Video #2 begins with "SJW ideas are MARXIST" (re: what I said before about insinuation as a rhetorical strategy) and ends with "MARXIST SJWs are silly because they assert that EVERYTHING YOU KNOW AND THINK IS WRONG". In between we get a brief introduction to Althusser's concept of ideology. Video #3 re-asserts this point about ideology, and extends it to social-constructionism, i.e when Lord contends that social construction (which he now casts as "anti-humanism") means that "everything you know and think is socially determined." Following this is a description of Gramsci's concepts of hegemony and the war of position, which is associated to identity politics.

I don't have any major problems with the description of Gramsci, although I think some more enterprising deconstructionist would venture to muse on the whiff of disdain at the sub-cultures used to illustrate the concept. As I've said before, I also think the choice not to actually comment on the usefulness of concepts like ideology and hegemony is interesting.

But what really jumps out is the complete caricature of the use of the concept of ideology at the end of video #2. If you ever find yourself having a conversation with someone who begins by telling you that EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG BECAUSE OF IDEOLOGY", you have my permission not to take that conversation too seriously, and I'm sure examples on Youtube might be found. But, as with video #1, what strikes me is the use of these caricatures to discredit ideas. It's the ideas I'm more interested in defending, and not their potential misuse.

To this end, the description of the concept of ideology in the middle of video #2 is worth considering. There are two main points:

1) "Ideology" isn't a conscious construction of an oppressive class, elites are as caught up in ideological forces as anyone else. The power (so to speak) of ideology is felt in the regulation of the beliefs and behaviors of all of society.

2) Ideology entails the belief that "this entire way of life is absolutely natural and normal".

One of the more striking features of this description of ideology is that it doesn't require any explicitly Marxist framework to be useful. It is easily exportable beyond the goals of socialist revolution or the intellectual framework of Marxism generally speaking, and because of that these ideas (and similar from other sources) have been influential well beyond Marxism. This can also be said about Gramsci. You don't have to be a Marxist to be interested in the ways that how people understand the world and discuss that understanding intersects with social structure and inequality.

Point (2) makes this very clear, because this aspect of "ideology" is nearly identical to anthropological definitions of "enculturation" or sociological definitions of "socialization".

As with "social construction" in the first video, the value of these ideas is challenged by reducing them to a caricature and then putting them in opposition to a valorized "humanistic" conception of human nature. Neither the caricatures of "ideology" and "social construction", nor the presentation of "liberal humanism" are reasonable imo. The rhetorical purpose of the opposition is obvious, but I think it's substantively flawed. The usefulness of ideas about social construction or the role of discourse and ideology in society are not limited to Marxist plots or social justice activism. These are mainstream concepts established in relation to empirical research in the social sciences. The necessity of a concept of social construction (which again is neither the "blank slate", nor the absolute denial of objective knowledge about human beings) arises from empirical data, not just socialist ideology.

I apologize in advance for being unnecessarily verbose :P

Okay, I can respond with a few key things.

1. My purpose in these videos was to encourage the viewer to draw their own conclusions about these ideas. I was very much trying to exercise the suspension of judgement and let the ideas sit by themselves without editorialising. Originally, there was an intro video explaining this, but I ended up taking it down because there was a bit of it I wasn't happy with and then figured I'd just let the series speak for itself.

What is interesting to me is that this strategy of pulling back from critique myself has illicited different responses based on who has watched them. Many anti-SJWs have said to me that I "don't go far enough". But I really want people to think about these ideas themselves.

2. You have to remember that these are massively dumbed down and highly condensed videos. I imagined a crossover audience that may also watch videos by Laci Green or Bearing. They aren't designed to give anything more than a sketch. In that, some nuance will be lost.

But Althusser et al very much saw themselves as anti-humanists and it was the Clive James type idea of liberal humanism they were opposing.

Of course, I understand the long history of humanism and its many different forms. I've made the point myself in print that the version of humanism charicatured by anti-humanist theory is not very accurate and elides many different types of people, which I think is the point Habib is making.

You are correct to say that social constructivism doesn't have to be total or anti-humanist, but the thinkers I am talking about were those things. It is important because it was these very thinkers who were influential, not some other thinker who has a more in between view. It was these ones.

3. I think concepts from Althusser and Gramsci and indeed Williams and others are still useful and still have value. I think there are flaws but there is still value.

Again, I wanted viewers to come up with their own critiques. If people watched it and were persuaded of the ideas, so be it. I am not an ideologue, I like people to think for themselves.

4. As I continue in the series, you will see various points in which my feelings are so strong that I cannot maintain the suspension of judgement. I do take positions at key moments. But in these early ones, I was honestly trying not to be that polemical but just providing a kind of service.

5. One of the reasons I made these videos was to fill in blanks for many of the other anti-SJW video guys. Like Sargon obviously didn't do a degree in the humanities and hasn't got a clue about any of these things. Various different ones of them spend agonising time trying to figure out really basic concepts using just wiki and google.

So in a sense, I was trying to put the info out there plain in a form that would speak to them very easily and accessibly, not a hour lecture they were never going to watch. That part of it worked, Sargon subscribed. Those guys did appreciate it.

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But anyway, I think you detected rather more insinuation than intended. And I get it, I can be sneering and supercilious so you get the impression I must be "up to something", but my motives were somewhat less sinister.

I couldn't resist mentioning my reaction to those elements of your videos so far because it was fairly strong and I don't think I'm completely imagining it (and as you say, sometimes you couldn't suspend your judgement). Beyond that, if you acknowledge that the videos are "massively dumbed down", and if the reason for that is to match the knowledge of the audience, then I think it's highly unlikely that your viewers understand after watching your videos that social constructionism isn't necessarily anti-humanist, or that there is actually value in Althusser or Gramsci. You may think that you want people to think for themselves, but when your main audience is already anti-SJW, then your style is certainly not prompting them to actually do so. That's because you're not challenging their existing views, you're really just reinforcing them.

I don't think any of the people either of us is likely to cite are very well known outside of academic circles, and the influence they have despite being relatively unknown is a diffuse kind of influence. No doubt lots of people outside of the academy are influenced by Foucault and Althusser (or Berger and Luckmann for that matter), but they don't adopt their exact views.

Mostly though, I think the danger is in conflating the concern with social justice in a broad sense with some caricature of a post-modernist post-Marxist tumblr warrior who took too many semesters of literary criticism. It's not just people quoting Foucault who get called SJWs when they say "black lives matter". The making of the caricature reinforces and legitimates the opposition to social movements which are by no means pure ideological expressions, but which deal with real social problems. There is certainly a point about how "ideology" works to be made about this process. In any case, I don't want people to adopt absurd formulations of social construction, or to reject science entirely (re: video #4), but I do argue that the world would be improved if people -- SJWs anti-SJWs alike! -- understood the ideas and the science better.

On the topic of video #4, I think if started 20 seconds in it would be lovely, and could be extended into an interesting discussion of criticisms and defenses of science, and especially the distinction between "science" as a set of institutions and processes which occur in a social context, and which are subject to the kind of "meta-narrative" building you discuss, and "science" as epistemology which is worth defending despite historical failures like scientific racism. You introduce such a discussion brilliantly, but you poison the well by spending the first 20 seconds asserting that "SJWs" totally reject science. If you want to criticize people who do in fact totally reject science then I'm down with that. What I don't agree with is the way in which you talk about SJWs without ever defining the scope of the term, which creates the exact problem of conflation I described above.

I am interested to see any counter arguments from you when the videos get a little more polemical.

On science, the distinction you draw here between meta-narrative and epistemology is excellent.

Hey, I'm really glad you're doing this WN.

Looking forward to more back and forth. One note I would make, that I've made to OriP in the PC thread, and that you two touch on here, is that many of the internet social justice crowd and the rest of what Lord classifies as "SJWs", do not have much more than perhaps a class or two on women's studies or a book that references CRT, and they make up the majority (I think?) of people out on the front lines promoting the social justice movement.

So it follows that, even if these videos present a "dumbed down" version of the scholarship behind the movement (and I'd like for WN to explain how they are off-base, because they would give me more hope for the future of social justice), they still could represent the gist what is happening on the ground today, what ideas are actually filtering down to the majority of activists. This seems to be Lord's point.

For example, if WN successfully defends the movement from Lord's critiques of "SJWs", and I hope he does, I assume that will also involve defending the movement from illiberal ideals that seem to be taking it over at the moment, like restricting speech, even going so far as using violence to do so.

Arguments From the Left #5 - Moral Relativism

My first reaction was: who are these leftists who refuse to form moral judgements about ISIS on the basis of a philosophical commitment to moral relativism? It seems like an obvious straw-man. I was perplexed by this, but after thinking about it for a while I have a theory as to how this video came to be made, and it goes like this...

"Moral Relativism" has been a bogeyman for conservatives for decades, so it's not surprising that it would show up in a video series criticizing the left, but it seems rather out of place in a video series which mostly offers criticisms of so-called SJWs. Most recently, lord has offered a definition of SJW-ism which emphasizes "self-righteousness", and that's a pretty good summary of the usual complaints. In other words, the complaint is not about a lack of moral foundation, but about misplaced or overly strident moralizing, which is almost exactly opposite to complaints about "moral relativism". Whatever the flaws of "social justice warriors" are supposed to be, it's pretty obvious that an emphasis on justice does not spring from a worldview that rejects moral propositions altogether.

I'm not the only one who notes this distinction. In 2016, The Atlantic ran a piece making a similar distinction between older conservative complaints about moral relativism and the new front in the culture war, which the author refers to as "shame culture". In the article, Merritt accepts uncritically the idea that moral relativism was popular, but I think that is also somewhat dubious: there's a difference between denying a normative importance to questions that are traditionally seen as centrally moral (e.g. sexuality and sexual orientation) and denying the relevance of moral questions altogether. SJWs are still mostly happy to treat the same topics as culturally relative that the hippies were, but they are obviously not "moral relativists". It's pretty common to invoke relativistic arguments or deny moral importance to what women should wear in public. It's pretty uncommon to make the same arguments about domestic abuse. I don't think that's actually changed very much.

So, how did we end up with a claim in this video that moral relativists on the left refuse to make moral judgements about ISIS? I think it's basically an attempt to shoe-horn commonplace arguments about how liberals perceive Islamaphobia into a framework that doesn't really fit. That is, the usual claim is that liberals stubbornly refuse to criticize Islam or Muslims realistically or sufficiently, for example in the arguments about whether Obama should have used the phrase "radical Islamic terror". Lord seems to accept that criticism of the left, but is explaining the alleged refusal of liberals to criticize Islam as a consequence of embracing moral relativism.

The first part of the argument -- the premise that liberals refuse to adequately criticize Islam -- is quite debatable on many fronts, but even accepting that on some occasions some liberals are overly hesitant to recognize issues involving Islam as a religion in some fashion or other (which is not to endorse typically conservative positions...), it seems obvious to me that this isn't a consequence of moral relativism. Instead, it's a consequence of relying on a theoretical lens through which the world is viewed primarily in terms of dominant and oppressed groups, which can obscure as much as it reveals (and it reveals a lot of useful and interesting things...). But one way or another, the lens of critical theory is not a morally relativistic one.

The problem with WN's post is here is that he's assuming that the ideas I'm attacking are in some way coherent rather than just a rag tag of disparate things that people on the left pick and choose from as the situation dictates.

I stand by my claim that the left are hopelessly moral relativists and we see it virtually every day in The Guardian. It's a hopeless double standard.

Ergo, people can virtue signal about Donald Trump being a raging sexist while at the same time turning a blind eye to Islam's horrendous treatment of women.

Incidentally, that right there is why the left is doomed.

Arguments from the left - Part 1: Anti-Humanism

Tried give it a listen. Honestly. However, the first utterance is wrong in such a backward way that I predicted more of the same to follow and had to stop right then. He starts of with "This is how ideas work in a culture. They originate with the intellectuals, then they filter down through politics and culture before some half baked version of them disseminates in the mainstream."

That's actually not how ideas work in a culture- at all. That is a cartoon version of that process which plays in the heads of some "educated" people who never stop to question it. The intellectuals/intelligentsia learn the ideas they are told to learn from the existing or emergent power structures. That's the way it is and that's the way it always has been. Whatever social program there was/is, from slavery, to genocide, to globalization, the intellectuals have been right there to justify it. Their job is to, after their own deep indoctrination, teach the rest of us what to do. Their job is not, and never has been, to independently think and come up with helpful ideas which then, lol, filter down to everyone else.

Ideas come from struggle, from the masses, in consideration of history, technology, and circumstance. To take one example (but you can choose literally any to make my point), slavery was certainly intellectually defended by the first educations of higher learning in this country. The chain of events was not let's study black people, and then based on the forthcoming opinions of intellectuals, enslave them of not. The enslavement was the will of the powerful, and the intellectuals provided cover for that. This was done to justify policy, and the pseudo-scientific bull**** that this motive inspired is beyond farce. Or take the preceding counter ideas considering liberty and democracy- they also came from struggle, not from some learned wizard who took a **** into a printing press and changed how people think lol. Movements also have their intellectuals, but they are responding and interpreting much more so than driving.

My first reaction is you seem to be doing a decent job distancing the left from the "SJWs", and that may help save liberals and social justice advocates like yourself from Lord's criticisms. But you know by now nobody is claiming "SJWs" are very consistent in their beliefs, nor are they thought to be particularly liberal. Hence the "illiberal left" or "regressive left."

It often seems like the new "shame culture" (and that's a great name) are adopting tactics of the Church and the Tea Party, and trying to use them to promote traditionally leftist positions like tolerance and inclusiveness. This has such a mindbending effect I can't tell if it's genius or utter stupidity, but I suppose you know how I'm leaning.

The above would make good substance for a stand-a-lone thread. I think I agree somewhat with your comments. With an important caveat: as to your term "Islamophobia" . That term alone is worth a thread discussion. I currently don't feel I have the adequate time required to start such a thread but perhaps in the future someone will. I would certainly try and contribute.

You're being too generous here. All major Democratic politicians, and nearly all US major leftist organizations or intellectuals, etc. have or are willing to condemn ISIS's actions. The idea that they aren't is a fantasy. There is a real disagreement about the responsibility that Islam has for ISIS, but everyone is agreed that what ISIS is doing is awful.

Right. In the paragraphs you quoted I was talking about the moral general debates about Islam that are common right now, and I assumed that Lord's claim about ISIS is more or less a hyperbolized reference to those debates, since I couldn't figure out how else he would come to make the statement he did. But I agree that the claim that anyone on the left fails to condemn ISIS is indefensible.

Fair enough.

You've yet to provide any evidence for this claim, and I'm skeptical that you can point to any articles in the Guardian that support a claim that the author is a moral relativist.

The behavior you're describing here, setting aside the veracity of your claim for a moment, is not moral relativism. It's not "moral relativism" to focus on some moral issues over others. Just because you disagree with someone's moral priorities doesn't make them a moral relativist. I provided an alternate explanation for why some on the left might err on the side of prioritizing some moral questions over others, but of course it's not the only possible explanation.