IQ issue

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Sun Feb 7 11:18:01 PST 1999



>> oh come off it Paul, I argue that you cannot distinguish between
the
>> form and content, and you read this as an assault on rationality,
or
>
>Sure I was doing a reductio there, so what?

not a reductio, but a confusion.


>You WEREN'T arguing that you cannot distinguish between form and
>content, you were just SNEERING.

sneering would be saying something like 'any first year student would know....'. it would be calling you babe and girl. if you want someone to play infant to your adultness, then you should go elsewhere.

this is an fragment of what i was arguing, and i see no sneering here:
>i think he [chomsky] wants to make a distinction between the formal
rules of
>speech and the propositions/judgements, as if the formal rules
>themselves are a good thing and only need to be applied more
>rigorously, as if they can be (or should be) separated from the
>propositions themselves.

if you want to bring up lakoff, by all means do, he sounds interesting, as does james. if they offer some other way of thinking the relation between form and content, or a not-so-cartesian way of presenting reason, then i'm all ears.


>> nor was there implicit here an argument that Chomsky agrees with
>> his target - i don't see how you get this implication.
>
>I READ, Angela, I read.

no, you do not. i did not implicitly or otherwise accuse chomsky of being a racist. the only subtext at work here for me was why is it that anti-racist arguments so often fail, or even fail most of the time. presenting racism as something that flows from the realm of values, rather than from the rules of validity, is a neo-kantian move of a particular kind. neo-kantian, not kantian. there are other neo-kantians who privelige validity; but the hallmark is to distinguish validity from values.


>you still just LOVE your own straw men:
>
>> part of the difficulty with establishing concepts like biphobia is
>> that they take little account of the terrain, that is that we are
all
>> referencing ourselves first and foremost against heterosexuality
>> (which I hope not even those who are het actually practice, how
dull),
>
>How comforting but not finally interesting or helpful
"heterosexuality
>(which I hope not even those who are het actually practice, how
dull)"
>is.
>
>Get a CLUE girl.

wow. you're not reading, you're sneering - and accusing me of sneering just so's you can blithely infantilise 'in good conscience'. remember the post? i made a distinction between what people actually do with other people and the politics of naming. i also gave a nod to the clinton impeachment spectacle for publicly unsettling the reigning definition of heterosexuality - in your words: the straw man that actually works to do a lot of policing and set the terms of political engagement and conflict, for hets and others alike. do you think hets only have procreative sex, or only do coitus? i don't. but who am i to know what most or all people who regard themselves as het do? it was thus expressed as a hope.

angela



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