> Bill Bartlett on $pread Mag:
>
> 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.
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