They sound like typical freedom-loving Americans, in the noblest traditions of your great nation. I suppose in the old days there were similar noble organisations of chattel slaves, defending their self-evident right to choose for themselves the best way to pick the master's cotton. Perhaps they would not have been so audacious as to demand the right to determine what they do with their own bodies, those bodies being self-evidently their owners to do with as he pleased...
..................
Time is short and I must write quickly for there is much to do. I'm in a small room, surrounded by flat screens, the lights are low. The vast machine dreams of 400 billion dollars of assets...streams of data are flying around me.
It's oddly beautiful.
..
What's wrong with your slave analogy? Why is it so offensive?
Consider...
The women of $pread are saying, in so many words: 'we've reviewed our lives, we've reviewed the capitalist system, we've reviewed sexism. We've reached certain conclusions about this contentious business, this work that so vexes supposedly well-meaning people. Our conclusions are different from yours, Bill Bartlett.'
That's what they're saying, in so many words.
But then you reply that their conclusions, their ideas, their POV, aren't simply on the other side of the aisle from yours - that is, something worthy of debate. You compare them to slaves who foolishly (perhaps unconsciously) glorify their masters.
What does it mean to compare someone to a slave? It means you think they have zero ability to determine their fate, no 'agency' as some put it. And if they have no agency, their ideas and their conclusions are null and void. They don't exist.
You dismiss their ideas and, by so doing, elevate your own above them.
You say, in so many words, 'your ideas aren't ideas at all; merely the deluded mutterings of a slave who doesn't know she's a slave.' But somehow, YOU know. Indeed, you know more about them than they do themselves.
You dismiss them. You dismiss their ideas about their own lives.
This is what I meant when I wrote hours ago:
Again, the point here is not that Joanna/Bill are necessarily wrong and $pread and co. are absolutely right. Rather, the point is to dissect and reveal the assumptions of greater moral vision which are tightly helixed with Joanna/Bill's dramatic pronouncements.
[...]
I should have written "reveal and dissect", that would've flowed better. Oh well, back on topic.
How could this have been handled in a non-dismissive way?
You could've listened to what they say, read their essays and, if you're going to object, do so from a basis of respect, not from a presumed perch of, as I wrote before, "greater moral vision" and misplaced paternalism.
.d.