Comments for Extraordinary Insignificance

Comment on Oh, What A Beautiful Rape Baby You Have! by Scyllacat

Scyllacat — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 18:39:09 +0000

powerful stuff. Thanks. (TW: Right Wing Thought to follow)

Also, because “know my enemy,” I posit the reason they say things like this is because one of their “moral” values is purity. The “potential person” is a pure and innocent entity. No matter how innocent of sex the uterus-bearer may have been in this case, they are definitely less innocent than the “potential person” because its very potentiality makes it free of sin! It’s a wonderful, beautiful, God thing whose purity elevates it over its human bearer. Until it’s born, and then it becomes automatically a sinful human thing. (I’m starting to feel really sarcastic – by which I mean, bitter and angry. I’ll stop here.)

Comment on This is how you discourage entry into a field by Dave Churvis

Dave Churvis — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 22:47:00 +0000

Also, you’re seriously twisting what I said here. Immediately before what you quoted I said: “That failure to call him out is going to discourage entry of gay students into the field.” So it had nothing AT ALL to do with the content of the arguments and everything to do with the idea that gay students are going to be less likely to want to get involved with a field when they see clear evidence that nobody has their backs when offensive things are said about them.

Comment on This is how you discourage entry into a field by Dave Churvis

Dave Churvis — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 22:43:04 +0000

The idea that a gay person is incapable of long-term thinking is at core wrong, offensive, and completely unredeemable for the reasons I’ve outlined in my post. The article to which I responded “fuck that guy” was at the time that I wrote this post deeply offensive to me, and having calmed down, it is perhaps less so, although I find his assertion that Keynes’s homosexuality made him more likely to engage in experimental thinking completely ridiculous.

Comment on This is how you discourage entry into a field by Dave Churvis

Dave Churvis — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 22:38:07 +0000

I am not making that argument at all. I am talking about the tribal effects that accompany all human behavior (please refer to the literature surrounding Thomas Schelling’s sorting models), where people with even a slight preference to be around people like themselves will begin to separate. I also never said anything at all about people of color here, and I definitely didn’t say anything about people of color not being able to understand – that would be extremely offensive and wrong. I’m talking about large-scale effects here.

Comment on This is how you discourage entry into a field by Jose

Jose — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 22:45:41 +0000

I mean, I dislike the article itself, if that’s what you mean. But judging from context, it’s hard to tell whether you’re attacking the person who wrote the article alone or if you’re also attacking the very idea that there might be something redeemable in Ferguson’s admittedly terrible statements.

Comment on This is how you discourage entry into a field by Jose

Jose — Sat, 22 Nov 2014 22:43:12 +0000

What’s your problem with the guy saying that Ferguson wasn’t entirely wrong? I don’t have children, but it seems reasonable to me to think that people with children will be predisposed to think about the long term more often that others.

I don’t like this trend where anyone who tries to redeem a bad statement somehow becomes seen as THE ENEMY and gets demonized for even remotely associating themselves with the source of the controversy. With us or against us is stupid, even if your enemies are terrible awful horrible no good very bad people.

Comment on This is how you discourage entry into a field by I dont understand

I dont understand — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 23:23:07 +0000

As person of colour, I find it *extremely* offensive when someone makes the accusation that I am more likely to consider an idea because the person who propagated it was the same colour/gender as me, as you did here: “It’s going to keep economics a club mostly for straight white males, and as a result the field will rot and die as it loses relevance to anyone else.”

To me, that quote says that I’m too stupid or too tribalistic to consider an idea that didn’t come from someone with the same skin colour as me; that I’m such racial partisan, the only ideas that are relevant to me are those that are propagated by someone of my own race; that as a non-white person, I cannot possibly think about the merits of an idea unless that idea was developed by someone of my race.

In other words, that argument is bullshit – the merits of an economic argument do not depend at all on the author’s race, nor does its logical validity or cogency change based on the race of the audience, and saying so is racist and offensive.

But I’m sure *you’re* not a racist – heck I bet some of your best friends are people of colour!