Leslie Green: Germaine Greer is right about trans-women
Feminist Philosophers Social Construction And Gender Identity

I wrote a comment; Green posted half of it. I wrote a second pointing out that although rejecting comments is his prerogative, editing without the right of refusal is a particularly sleazy form of censorship. Obviously that one didn't show up at all. I posted a two comments at Feminist Philosophers, but they were rejected as well. Credit to Green for at least leaving in the question about Dolezal, which still no one has answered.

On both sites, my comments restated points I've made before, see below, on intentional communities and hypertrophied individualism. Liberals, Oxbridge philosophers, Israelis, and transgender feminists: "I am what I say at I am. Take me at my word!" "I'm an artist!" "I'm a poet!" "I'm a scientist!" Bruno Latour and David Chalmers.

"No baby... please... I understand you... you're a part of me! I have an extended mind!"

We are judged by others. Understanding that, fosters self-awareness; ignoring it is dangerous.

Peter Ludlow, a Northwestern University professor of philosophy, resigned his position effective Monday, Nov. 2, 2015, and is no longer employed by the University.

Richard Prince retweeted a link, deadpan: it's been 25 years since the Mapplethorpe fiasco in Cincinnati. The working class Catholics who were horrified by the photographs were horrified because they understood them as Mapplethorpe did.  I remember howling with laughter at the time reading descriptions of the expert testimony for the defense: "the arc of the urine being directed into a man's mouth...  a classical study of symmetry".  "Art is good for you".

The peasants got schooled by their betters.

The defense brought in art experts from across the country to testify about Mapplethorpe’s technique.

“He was a classical photographer most of the time, all about lighting and position of the model. He wasn’t radical in that sense,” Barrie said. “The flowers were a lot more sexy than the X Portfolio,” which contained the S&M photos.

The prosecution said the pictures would speak for themselves, but “there were no experts in the art world saying this was pornography,” said Richard Meyer, an art history professor at Stanford University and the author of “Outlaw Representation.” The jury deliberated for less than an hour before acquitting Barrie and the CAC.

The trial was “a PR disaster,” said Vice Mayor David Mann, who was a City Council member at the time. “It kind of made us the laughing stock of sophisticated communities.”

Things got worse before they got better. A 1993 city charter amendment made Cincinnati the only U.S. city to ban enactment or enforcement of gay rights laws until 2004.

“We didn’t know it then, but” the Mapplethorpe case “was the last stand of the organized West Side Catholics, led by Marine veteran and Sheriff Simon Leis, against the inevitable transition from a city with a Roman Catholic ascendancy to a city where power was up for grabs. Still is,” said Albert Pyle, who was a staff writer for Cincinnati Magazine at the time of the Mapplethorpe case. “The West Siders were shocked that the city wasn’t ashamed of itself. The non-Catholic whites were embarrassed for the city to take a hit in the national press. Black Cincinnati, who had no stake in the CAC but who were social conservatives, thought it was a lot of white nonsense.”

And critics who don't try to reclaim Mapplethorpe for some sort of banal liberalism try to recast him as radical.

His self-portrait with a bullwhip up the bum, like the master-slave couple in a bourgeois apartment, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979), shows self-evident irony that inevitably complicates the issue of what a portrait portrays. However, in her lurid accounts of the sex that is supposedly expressed, documented, or otherwise depicted, Morrisroe opts for a horrified literalism that comes to defend a barely disguised sense of disgusted fascination. 

At this point, Mapplethorpe takes over as the dinge-queen from hell. In her descriptions of rather hopeless affairs with black boyfriends, Jack Walls and Milton Moore (who, it turns out, was Mr Polyester), Morrisroe confirms every worst fear and fantasy. ‘It has to be racist,’ Mapplethorpe says knowingly at the height of racist chic. When he fails to find a black Adonis in Kellers bar he goes to a yacht party only to be disappointed. ‘You’re looking for an intelligent, successful black millionaire who wants you ­ a white man ­ to call him “nigger”?’, a black female friend asked. ‘I wouldn’t call him “nigger” all the time,’ he replied, ‘Only during sex’.

I'm living in a silent film
Portraying
Himmler's sacred realm
Of dream reality
I'm frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain't got the power anymore
No I ain't got the power anymore

In American intellectual life it's impossible to treat people with any respect at all without also being obliged to celebrate them. So prostitution can be only a mortal sin, a rebuke to bourgeois hypocrisy, or something everyone's daughter should try. Academia follows the same logic, minus the option for sin. Technocracy is Aristotelian. American culture on the other hand is conservative and pessimistic, or the optimism is so bright that the perversity is plain to see.

If you assume your own rationality then you're free to trust the opinions of those you see as kindred and dismiss the opinions of outsiders. It's up to you to define what's offensive and what's not, according to your own objective reason.

"The American has got to destroy. It is his destiny"

Kaurismaki, Kiarostami, Spielberg, and Samuel L Jackson on violence in American culture.





My second attempt at Feminist Philosophers. I've used the Ludlow quote often enough, but without going back to the source. The reference to Kristeva slipped by. That was a mistake. The full paragraph is even more damning because even more absurd.

I'll try again. Why no defense of Dolezal? If she hadn't tried to hide her background but still made the same claims, would anyone take her seriously? Eminem doesn't claim to be black. Why should a man be accepted as "being" a woman?

In related news, Peter Ludlow just resigned. Here's Ludlow interviewed in 2013

Well, I think that 'philosopher' is an honorific term that we hand out to people whose thinking about foundational issues we admire and approve of. It's like putting a gold star next to someone's name. I guess your question then is this: When did I decide to try and get the gold star? I started college as a business major, but existential trauma propelled me into courses on Kierkegaard and so forth. Those courses didn't help with the existential trauma but they did help my GPA. After rny junior year I took a summer school graduate course at the University of Minnesota. It was taught by Herbert Hochberg and it was all about Quine and then Kripke. That's when the existential trauma lifted. That's also when I gave myself the gold star. But you know, many years later I was at a dinner with Julia Kristeva and I told her the story of how Quine and Kripke cured my existential trauma. She didn’t talk to me the rest of the meal, so, you know, I don’t think everyone has the same ideas about who should get the gold star. And I’m o.k. with that!

Three passages, three points
1- 'philosopher' is an honorific term
2- I decide to try and get the gold star
3- I gave myself the gold star.

Ludlow gave himself an honorific. He calls himself a philosopher and therefore is a philosopher. Germaine Greer says men should not be able to say that they're women. Perhaps in both cases the designation is best left for others to bestow. Ludlow and McGinn rationalize their absurd behavior. Zionists do the same thing. "Liberal Zionist" is a logical contradiction, but the Palestinian experience has been ignored. Maybe we leave our political designations to others as well. Am I a liberal?

"It's no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other"

Leiter treats that statement as a joke. Obviously it's not. Things get messy when people who identify themselves as "others" have an "other" of their own. But that's how the world works. We are each other's "others". That's a problem philosophers don't face very well, because they want to come to terms with otherness, if they do at all, only to escape it.

Again I'll repeat what I said before: gender reassignment surgery is the most extreme of extreme rnakeovers. Are there other forms of such behavior feminists accept with so little question? What sort of body horror drives people to work so hard to go against their own biology? And this has nothing to do with those born intersex. 

The blindness to Zionist ideology and behavior is based on affiliation. "I'm a liberal and rny friends are liberal" Therefore they can not be illiberal. There can be so self-hating Jews, who identify with white Europeans as they torture and kill their own closest relations. Jews are now white. Transgender self-hated? Impossible. That's for desperate housewives not drag queens.

Radically intentional communities are artificial: over-designed, over-theorized, overdetermined. The politics of phobia is reactionary. But reactionary desire isn't the problem. The desire for utopia is the problem.

Six posts now on Greer, Jenner, Dolezal, Caster Semeya, Candy Darling.
A tag I've wanted to make for a while: Utopia and Intentional Communities.
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added a few months later: Transhumanism and Transgender