I never said that disabled people were not people. I said that sightedness is preferable to blindness. Tell me otherwise. How many blind people confronted with the choice would reject the chance to restore their sight? How many sighted people willingly give up their sight? You make an entirely false logical step from my rational proposition that blindness is worse than sightedness, to the false conclusion that the blind are morally inferior to the sighted. That's the step that you choose to make. I don't. I take no responsibility the conclusion you draw. It is a discriminatory value judgement you make when you say that preference for sight over blindness implies a preference for the sighted over the blind. When you make that value judgement what you are doing is reducing the disabled to their disability. But people who have lost limbs, mobility or senses are not reducible to their disability. They are persons in spite of those losses. By contrast you seem to want to derive their status from those disabilities. That seems wrong to me.
In message <Pine.GSU.4.03.9811161913200.4118-100000 at panix.com>, Doug
Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>I just started reading this silly book before leaving town. Kristeva,
>Lacan, and the entire gang misuse math! Well, yes they do, but what about
>anything else they have to say? Sokal & Bricmont are silent on that score
>because they really don't know. I'll concede that if you use math
>metaphors you should know what you're talking about, but, on the other
>hand, if you want to write about philosophy, psychoanalysis, or critical
>theory you should also know what you're talking about. And S&B don't.
I've leant my copy out so I can't refer to it, but I think Doug's affection for lit. crit. is making him unduly defensive. There is some very useful discussion of the way that some thinkers essentialise womanhood, how scientific metaphors are extended beyond their natural- science object, and what that means for logic. Much has been made of S&B's proper qualification of their own expertise, but you should bear in mind that these things are relative: Sokal and Bricmont's expertise might not satisfy the standards they have learnt in their own discipline, but their knowledge of philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory stands up against a lot of people who work and write in those areas. And I do know what I am talking about.
All in all the sandstorm of whining that the defenders of Lacan et al have kicked up is just a pathetic attempt to cover up the fact that they got caught with their pants down. No amount of pomposity about 'you don't understand' is going to cover up the fact that they understood the idiom well enough to pass of a parody that gulled Social Text. -- Jim heartfield