Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.
Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.
Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.
I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.
Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.
Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.
Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.
I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.