If Mort Divine ruled the world

Not sure if it indicates on the link but they are set to play right at the point where thing is said, you won't have to spend but a few seconds (unless you want to skip back a little).

They started at the beginning for me.

By a strict definition of "the action of taking something for one's own use, typically without the owner's permission." Baldwin has no claim to these other experiences. I'll provide an analogy (although these seldom seem of use): Despite my status as a USMC veteran, I cannot speak up for "veterans rights" and in the process claim that "I CLIMBED MOUNT SURIBACHI, I STORMED KUWAIT, and I CLEARED FALLUJAH", despite the fact that A. I am a vet, B. I was in the USMC, which did those 3 things, and C. Was even in Iraq, although not in Fallujah. It's a common type of rhetorical device employed by the left, and has no basis in fact and evidences either delusion or guile.

Well, probably needless to say I think this is off-base, and I think it falls back on a quasi-positivist of what it means to speak for others.

As best I can tell, your claim is that because someone didn't have the same experiences as someone else, they're unqualified to speak about the other's experiences. But no one shares the same experiences with anyone else, if we take your point to its logical conclusion. Maybe we both have been pulled over by police, but that doesn't make my experience the same as yours. By extension, no one is qualified to speak for anyone else's experiences no matter how similar they are.

This is the same logical impasse of communication. Ultimately, I can't know what's going on in your head; I can only understand what you tell me. Communication can't be verified factually or definitively. It can only produce agreement or disagreement. This doesn't mean communication is pointless.

Likewise, we do share some sense of communal understanding about certain circumstances, and people of particular communities develop narratives about their circumstances and about those that preceded them. Speaking for others' circumstances isn't pointless, and communities and groups sanction a speaker's "appropriation" of their experiences by either accepting what s/he says or rejecting it.

I disagree that Baldwin can't speak for others, and that you can't speak for veterans' rights. There's nothing factual that says you can't do so; others will simply affirm or deny what you say.

Different doesn't indicate more/less sociopathy, nor one that is "race" based. I appreciate that he's an American concerned with America, it's just that he's noticed a cluster of symptoms and grossly misdiagnosed and also (maybe or maybe not subsequently) prescribed or subscribed to a wildly ineffectual treatment plan, to put it mildly.

I have a very different reaction to his words. And I'm not sure I'd call anything he says a "treatment plan."

But was that the primary goal of the struggle?

Well, goals imply a linear approach, and feedback models are nonlinear. The point of resistance is change; I'm not sure they had specifics in mind, beyond those immediately posing a physical threat.

And today's discourse is a different story for sure.
 
Last edited:
They started at the beginning for me.

Weird. Well, just to cut to the quote I imitated below, you can go to the 21:50pt and listen for a minute or so.

Well, probably needless to say I think this is off-base, and I think it falls back on a quasi-positivist of what it means to speak for others.

As best I can tell, your claim is that because someone didn't have the same experiences as someone else, they're unqualified to speak about the other's experiences. But no one shares the same experiences with anyone else, if we take your point to its logical conclusion. Maybe we both have been pulled over by police, but that doesn't make my experience the same as yours. By extension, no one is qualified to speak for anyone else's experiences no matter how similar they are.

This is the same logical impasse of communication. Ultimately, I can't know what's going on in your head; I can only understand what you tell me. Communication can't be verified factually or definitively. It can only produce agreement or disagreement. This doesn't mean communication is pointless.

Likewise, we do share some sense of communal understanding about certain circumstances, and people of particular communities develop narratives about their circumstances and about those that preceded them. Speaking for others' circumstances isn't pointless, and communities and groups sanction a speaker's "appropriation" of their experiences by either accepting what s/he says or rejecting it.

I disagree that Baldwin can't speak for others, and that you can't speak for veterans' rights. There's nothing factual that says you can't do so; others will simply affirm or deny what you say.

I'm not saying he can't speak for others, but he cannot speak as others, which is what he does on more than one occasion in this relatively short debate, and what he does as a writer. I wrote that out as I did to mimic what he says in the above referenced clip.


I have a very different reaction to his words. And I'm not sure I'd call anything he says a "treatment plan."

Well, goals imply a linear approach, and feedback models are nonlinear. The point of resistance is change; I'm not sure they had specifics in mind, beyond those immediately posing a physical threat.

And today's discourse is a different story for sure.

I would imagine that African Americans would like, to put it simply, peace and prosperity. All the handouts and handups and victimization rhetoric in the world have made nary a dent in the problem of prosperity for the majority. Haven't helped in any post-colonial nations either to my knowledge. None of that is to say that there isn't some amount of truth in some of the rhetoric, or that some haven't been helped by policies meant to assist. Just that it's not providing any sort of mass conversion to a new paradigm, if you will. Tripling down isn't a move that's supported by the evidence at hand.
 
Cool, I'll listen to the clip a bit later.

I'm not saying he can't speak for others, but he cannot speak as others, which is what he does on more than one occasion in this relatively short debate, and what he does as a writer. I wrote that out as I did to mimic what he says in the above referenced clip.

How do you define "speaking for" versus "speaking as"?

His essays are intensely personal affairs; he's hardly speaking as someone else. He writes as others in his fiction... but then, so does literally every author of fiction.

I would imagine that African Americans would like, to put it simply, peace and prosperity. All the handouts and handups and victimization rhetoric in the world have made nary a dent in the problem of prosperity for the majority. Haven't helped in any post-colonial nations either to my knowledge. None of that is to say that there isn't some amount of truth in some of the rhetoric, or that some haven't been helped by policies meant to assist. Just that it's not providing any sort of mass conversion to a new paradigm, if you will. Tripling down isn't a move that's supported by the evidence at hand.

For the sake of winding this down, I'll concede the apparent futility of current discourses on race relations.

But that doesn't necessarily mean Baldwin misdiagnosed anything, or that his words at that time were unimportant. He's arguably one of the most important thinkers/writers for drawing the questions and contradictions of racial identity to the surface.
 
Cool, I'll listen to the clip a bit later.

How do you define "speaking for" versus "speaking as"?

When you get a chance to listen to the clip, you'll see what I was talking about. Baldwin had his own battles to fight, but picking cotton and building railroads or whatever wasn't one of them.

In other news, in defending her "Green New Deal" magic unicorn cloning program:

https://twitter.com/RealSaavedra/status/1093702448231804928
 
  • Like
Reactions: rms
He's been saying similar stuff for a while now. I've mostly stopped paying attention to him, but not because of any objection I have to what he says in that video. I stopped paying attention because the vast majority of what he says is stuff he's already written about twenty years ago.

I completely understand the accusation he's highlighting, and I don't think that my knowledge or education means that I can tell those whom I identify as victims how to self-identify. That said, I maintain that there's a difference between talking about individual experiences and structural patterns/theories. It may not be the case that structural patterns and theories always correspond to individual experiences; in some cases, they may be directly opposed to experience and may even offend those who had the experiences. Furthermore, identifying structural patterns doesn't mean that those patterns can then be used to label or identify the individual experiences of those we claim to be affected by structural issues. Between individual experience and structural function lies a phase shift that warps every correlation we'd like to make. In some cases the correlations may hold and come through clearly; in others, they might look entirely counterintuitive.

I don't think this misalignment--if not contradiction--is cause for abandoning structural theories altogether, or even for significantly augmenting structural theories of disenfranchisement. To do so would be to commit the same kind of empiricist error that people make when they believe that getting contradictory experimental results means we need to abandon theoretical claims. When scientists get results--even repeated results--that refute theoretical premises, they don't throw the theory out altogether. Newtonian mechanics didn't become obsolete when Einstein published his theories of relativity, and are in fact still important for things like going to the Moon. Contradictory results mean that other theories can come into play that help us refine older ones. If anything, I'd say that the professed experiences of "victims" (however we apply this term) signal not the obsolescence of structural theories, but ways in which our understanding of structural effects can be sharpened.

It will almost certainly be the case that structural theorizing will never account for individual experience. Žižek's right to point out that academics need to be cautious in presuming their theories allow them to communication with those they identify as "victims."
 
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yale-f...-at-fraternity-events-ask-to-integrate-women/

I like this, instead of saying that women are lame, rather spin it and claim you're a great hero attempting to fix frat culture

"A fraternity party wasn't any of our first choice, but it was kind of the only choice for the first couple of months at school," McNeil said.

:lol: :lol: :lol:
Women should be able to join fraternities instead of just having the sororities throw parties, WTF happened to USA??
:rofl::rofl::rofl: