The Strange (Test) Case Of Anna Stubblefield: The "Social Justice" World-View in Practice?
So there's this...
Does this tell us anything about the (misnomer alert) "social justice" crowd? Stubblefield is an outlier, of course...and such cases can't be relied upon to tell us much about the fat part of the curve... But what about the reaction to her case from the PC / SJW crowd and its penumbra of sympathizers in e.g. the arts? That is...what about this?:
Obviously I'm in no position to make such impressionistic judgments. My plausibility metric is all skewed to hell when it comes to the nutty left. But I'll just throw it out as food for thought. I rant and rave, you decide...
Does this tell us anything about the (misnomer alert) "social justice" crowd? Stubblefield is an outlier, of course...and such cases can't be relied upon to tell us much about the fat part of the curve... But what about the reaction to her case from the PC / SJW crowd and its penumbra of sympathizers in e.g. the arts? That is...what about this?:
A crowd of friends — mostly fellow travelers in the field of disability studies — watched the hearing from the gallery. A three-person documentary film crew gathered tape from the jury box. “I’m interested in this as a love story,” the director told me later. (Since publishing my article, I have also heard from playwrights, poets and producers. The other day, I met for tea with a composer, who described his plan to render Anna’s story as an opera, with the court transcript as his libretto.)One uber-crackpot doesn't tell us anything, really. But the fact that that uber-crackpot apparently has a gaggle of sympathizers/supporters... What about that? Here's one of their own, using utterly discredited pseudoscience...oh...sorry...rather, a method "rejected by the mainstream scientific community"...to commit the ultimate crime in their eyes: rape. Rejecting science is fairly commonplace on the far left... Defending accused rapists, however, is not.
Obviously I'm in no position to make such impressionistic judgments. My plausibility metric is all skewed to hell when it comes to the nutty left. But I'll just throw it out as food for thought. I rant and rave, you decide...
posted by Winston Smith at
4:02 PM
1 Comments:
This is like the penultimate moment of Neo-PC strategy: take claims to which no one wants to assent and throw them up your defense. They gain ground against opponents by circumventing reason in favor of desirable outcomes.
For example, the Neo-PC wants to say there are absolutely no distinctions between races, so they argue for its "social construction" or whatever. Those who observe factual differences between races are shouted down as racists. The only reason this works at all is that racism is so horrible that people are overly cautious about it and easily sucked into the idea that even readily observable, factual distinctions are instead harmful racist generalizations.
No one wants to be a racist, so people err on the side of the Neo-PC, accepting as plausible what would be, in any other set of circumstances, immediately identified as outlandishly implausible.
And the Neo-PC gets a lot of their power from this.
Observe the parallel in Anna's defense of herself; she IMMEDIATELY goes to claims about D.J.'s intellectual equivalence to her.
As with potentially unpalatable facts about distinctions between races, no one wants D.J. to be intellectually inferior to anyone. Cerebral Palsy is horrible, and here she is leveraging that horror against her detractors by basically making the situation out to be this: if you think she raped D.J., you're the one saying he's inferior. She's the one who respects and loves him.
Just like: if you think there are genuine differences between races, you're the one saying racism is legitimate, not the Neo-PC crowd.
And the strategy in which logic is circumvented with desire continues.
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