Some Links: Ideological Diversity

Nick Kristof on ideological diversity: A Confession of Liberal Intolerance

Nick Kristof follow-up on ideological diversity: The Liberal Blind Spot

Response to Nick Kristof on ideological diversity: What Nicholas Kristof gets wrong (and right) about conservatives in academia

From earlier, Arthur Brooks on ideological diversity: Academia’s Rejection of Diversity

Representation vs. Tokenism in Media

This post and the posts to which it links contains a very interesting discussion, mostly between George Takei and Simon Pegg, on whether it's better to, for the sake of greater representation of traditionally marginalized communities in the newest installment in the Star Trek franchise, create an entirely new character who is gay or include in the script demonstrations of an existing character's gay identity?

The former option, preferred by Takei, seems to accord best with prioritizing the faithfulness of the new movie to the original franchise and vision of its creators.  On the other hand, the latter option, preferred by Pegg, seems to risk "tokenization" in the creation of a new character for whom it will be hard to avoid the perception that his creation was because he was gay; following this line of thinking, making an existing character known to be gay (in a way that does not contradict any previously established Canon) would better portray his sexual orientation as just one of his characteristics and not the entirety of who he is, as well as making the political purpose of greater representation more effective since the gay character is already known and liked.

Free Speech: Speech vs. Action and Intentional vs. Accidental Offense

Leiter’s paper arguing for the limits of free speech and against the speech-vs-action distinction—> 

—> leads to —> 

—> idea that incidental/accidental offense is ok and/or must be tolerated, but not intentional offense.  

The fact that accidental/incidental vs intentional offense matters is why Milo is indefensible and not a good character for my vision of free speech.

—for example, in this case, I think the protestor has the better of the argument than Milo does, since Milo has previously admitted to speaking purposefully to offend and shock—sometimes as a means to fight PC and sometimes for its own sake, it seems—which does go against the school standards:

““With that, I’ll leave you with a quote from DePaul’s guide of Freedom of Speech and Expression, the bylaws that say ‘we accept that there’s a distinction from being provocative and being hurtful. Speech whose primary purpose is to wound is inconsistent with our Vincentian and Catholic values. The university community must meet these situations by reasserting our fundamental values and by fostering educational opportunities, where appropriate.’ Thank you.”” (http://depauliaonline.com/2016/06/05/students-express-anger-demand-change-town-hall-holtschneider/)

Thus, Free Speech activists should wait for a case of dispute/controversy on one on which they have substance in their offensive speech, not just whatever offends. (which also, as noted, contradicts his idea that he’s just/people should just say whatever they want without consideration of other people’s taking offense at it).

---

Of course, I need to get into Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance".

"Am I Cisgender?"

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper does something really clever here that enables her to essentially argue that the concept of a transgender identity is incoherent--in other words, articulate the "terf" position with a priori arguments alone, and so without relying on any contestable value or faith claims, or personal animus--while talking only about and for herself and thus without writing about and criticizing other people and their beliefs.  She does this by beginning her path to an analysis of the trans concept with an analysis of how she identifies and whether, not believing herself to be trans, she should identify herself as cis.

Of course, this doesn't prevent her from being attacked as anti-trans and a positive threat to trans people anyway.

"The link between language and cognition is a red herring"

"The link between language and cognition is a red herring".

"Gender is Not a Spectrum"

Rebecca Reilly-Cooper argues that "Gender is Not a Spectrum", and an Aeon Conversation results.

One issue this raises that I must think more about is the difference between concepts that have an essence and can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and concepts of family resemblance or "cluster concepts"; while I think that the idea of being transgender is incoherent because of how it empties the concept of "trans" or of "man" and "woman" of any intellectual content when proceeding from the essentialist framework, maybe the cluster/family resemblance concept framework can salvage this whole schema.