This is a guest post by Alma Fazeli, a PhD candidate whom I have the pleasure of supervising. In the post Alma reflects on the events taking place in…
Guest post: For Woman, Life, Freedom
Rp As we do not understand in the West: For Woman, Life, Freedom
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41 responses to “Rp As we do not understand in the West: For Woman, Life, Freedom”
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I think that I would say that the emotions of rise because I can’t get rid of someone who has a different idea about the way things are than I do. If I disagree with someone and I can destroy them, it doesn’t matter what their opinion is. And never did 😁. The question that there’s some thing that would transcend that operation, that situation, to say that, indeed, that person did exist, and, indeed held some sort of component of the universe, that was merely just snuffed out, and indeed, had an effect on the other person, that’s just to say that that’s what occurs in reality, which is to say in human subjectivity.
It’s not that subjectivity is wrong. It’s just that it’s a particular containment. Like if I have some water in a jug, and I drop some dye into it, or some salt, or put a fish into it. Subjectivity is like that. Reality is like that. But the truth of that situation has very little to do with what goes on in the jug. It is a different epistemological domain. Indeed, the irony is that in the situation, where I’m describing the jug from outside of the jug, necessarily Hass to be considered within reality even while it resides outside of reality. Whereas, a subjective point of you on, it would say that at no time does anything escape reality.
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I feel it’s like, the “If you’ve got nothing to hide” mentality many Conservatives seem to have in matters of government spying on its citizens. There are women who believe that this is the way it should be. They are compliant, so others who have no shame should be punished and scapegoated. This is not materially different to the slut-shaming we see in the West or the reaction that “She was asking for it”.
The challenge is what to do with diversity? The Amish seem to have a decent plan, when the adolescents cum adults have a choice after Rumspringa where they have an option to remain and comply or bail. Unfortunately, in the Middle East, there is no safe counter culture, so the women who want something different are stuck. But that doesn’t change the point that some women as not stuck and they are there not only there by choice, but they wouldn’t want it any other way.
This is the problem when holier than thou Western women want to rescue these women and accuse the ones who don’t want to change as being brainwashed, as it they themselves aren’t differently brainwashed.
In a way as I witter about, it’s not unlike the Christian so-called gay ‘conversion therapy’, where families intervene to fix their non-hererosexual kids. It’s easy to judge. I do it all the time, but at least be aware that no everybody values what you do. And what one values only has value in context to themselves.
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There are universal values. But faith in one’s culture makes us believe there is not. One could very well say that Culture is a belief based of the Westrrn religion called capitalism , that evangelizes the rest of the world through the relativity that it enforces through convincing people they are different. It obscures that there are universal human values. For the sake of oppressed subjects who all get to believe what ever they would want, or could.
The point that gets obscured is that, yes believe whatever you want, but that value should be extended to include others, since it is that belief that is allowing you to survive my intolerance of your belief.
Cultural Relativity is a belief that brainwashes people now. Whereas before we thought “culture” it was just whatever happens. And, I’m gonna kill you if I don’t like you, and negotiate with you if I feel I get some benefit from it. And it’s all good. Because who would be around to say any different ?
Now, the negotiation is manditory, part of the global religion. The Cultures to Capitalism are like Lutheran and Methodist are both demonizations ofChristianity. Or actually: Catholicism is the literal sense. Since Protestant is really just a denomination of Catholicism.
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I’m not really following your argument though.
Help me out:
1). Women, Muslim in the Middle East are fed up with them selves, having to live under the threat of being beaten or raped or killed if they show their hair in public. And so they’ve had enough..2) it’s what they believe. I don’t think it has anything to do with what we are in the west think. And that’s my point that what I say, it’s something beyond our ability to understand, at least in America, because we do whatever the hell we want. We kill whoever we want just because I’m mad at someone. I see That’s different. For me to say it’s similar to what’s going on over there is indeed, a kind of evangelism, a kind of rescuing motion. My point is to say that what’s going on over there we simply cannot appreciate at least in America. We got really fucking good over here.
3) I’m not sure what you mean by “if you got nothing to hide”mentality of conservatives. I’m not really following what you’re saying. It seems to me like you’re just extending a general relativity over all things, that we are just a part of. I’m saying more that that’s just the way we think about the rest of the world. And actually it’s that these women are tired of being raped and beaten, and killed simply because they make a choice that men don’t agree with. I don’t think it’s “western”. I think it’s just human.
4) I just completely lost you when you started talking about gay conversion. I’m not really following what you’re saying.
5) what I am saying is, with reference to number two, that the idea of culture is some thing that is actually occurring as something innate to human beings: . I’m saying that from a sort of meta-analysis, it is a western construct, culture. But that is the rub, the irony discovered theougu the nature of capitalism when thrown upon the nature of economic exchange: human people just do that, regardless of what names we put to it, or describe it, as any sort of system. People exchange shit and people don’t want to be afraid: the exchange has nothing to do with their fear. The exchange is just what people dondespite emotion. And the emotion, The fear in this case, is what people do, despite what we’re exchanging. Or maybe, it’s a different economy. That’s the irony of the modern world.But tell me what you were headed to..
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I’ll respond separately, so the response doesn’t become all muddled.
I am arguing on technical rather than emotional grounds. It’s right at the start of your first premise, “Women, Muslim in the Middle East are fed up”.
This is SOME women. We might want to believe this is ALL women. This is a Western bias followed by a Liberal notion that we should save them by making them more like us.
Second, there is the notion that there is a single shared worldview of what US looks like.
The video linked from this post I made about a year ago sums it up pretty nicely. There’s even a nice essay by Sunera Thobani, who establishes this point.
Ref: https://philosophicsblog.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/western-feminisms-and-the-war-on-terror/
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“If you got nothing to hide” is a reference to the opt-cited by a certain cohort that only a guilty person would be concerned about being eavesdropped on by the government. I am not defending this comment.
I don’t think it’s “western”. I think it’s just human.
I think you are taking a corner case and making it the standard, though I don’t believe in universals in behaviour, so I don’t buy into ‘it’s only human’. I feel it’s common, and it is broader than solely Western, but it is also Western.
I mentioned Orientalism earlier. You are essentially claiming to be better or more modern or civilised than them. This leaves them as backwards or lesser, and we should elevate them to our standards. Sociologically, I feel this is problematic.
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It’s problematic because of the modern ideology. It’s not problematic from Putins standpoint in Ukraine. Unless hes losing. The human universal here is that humans do what they think is right. Another universal maybe is that humans think they are right in How they understand things. lol. Another is all humans live and work to keep themselves alive, even if they feel they are suicidal. The suicidal ideal is a manner to understand how to be living, serves the purpose of them living.
And : while I may have a ethics that all human should be allowed to live and (etc). And it makes me sad if they are not allowed to and I generally work toward the US ideal. nonetheless, we are indeed all (the whole world of humans) in this together, not separated as a developed and developing thing. In this case, humans argue thier “civilized” by How they actually show up. If that wasn’t the case, we would have no index to be able to argue that Should not be the case because it’s problematic. Indeed. Human beings have more and less educational level, ability to understand and engage with emotions, program computers, makes tasty meals, etc..
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I very much disagree. Personally, I am of the belief that the Ukraine-Russia conflict is a baited proxy way propagated by the US via NATO. I have many Ukranian mates and colleagues (ex-coworkers), some of whom support a Western-allied Ukraine whist others have mixed feelings. I also have Russian mates, ex-pats who are supportive of Russian policy as a defence mechanism, feeling their soverignty has been encroached to the point of it being an existential crisis.
And maintining perspective, recall that the illegal post-11 September aggression by the Bush regime and supported by their poodle, Blair, committed many more and more eggregious warcrimes that Putin has even close to committed. Perspective and context are everything.
I even feel the suicide bit is not universal. They wouldn’t have to stigmatise it if it were. I’ve commented on this in several posts a few months back.
Even the items in that trailing laundry list is steeped in Western bias. I could touch on each one at a time, but I know if you investigate each one and reflect, you’ll see that none of these is universal and without controversy.
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I guess I’m. It that knowledgeable politically.
And perhaps: it depends how far down the political occurrence we wish to go; ultimately any subject yields a point where no knowable influences occurs: any view is another pit of subjectivity and reason for political action.So it is I say: that is a universal fact: this is the way subjects are truly.
I pull back from the subjective opinions to find what is actually occurring: humans being humans as they are humans, just as cups are cups, tanks do tank things. People try to live, etc.
Despite what relative subject we woul wish to debate: the women (yes the women who are they) are tired of living under thread. Fact. What that threat is is only important in the modern subject context, to which all things fall. But the thing itself is: as a white man I can only encounter what is truly happening with them vicariously and support them even though it’s just “opinion”. The opinions ultimately argue that we cannot, and should not do anything, since it’s all just relative opinion, and there is no basis by which I should have any justification, except that I do have it.
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My opinion as such is a factual aspect of what it is to be human. The content of that fact is the modern subject. The fact is that I simply do not engage with the world, as though we all just have opinions. Indeed, it is through my opinion, that I am able to understand anybody else’s opinion, which, utterly and ultimately argues that my opinion means nothing at all, and so I shouldn’t even have any reason to continue living. And yet I do. So whatever sort of political subjective negotiation, I might argue for is utterly empty. And I’m just saying that for me to continue on in this way, justifying myself to this political subjectivity in my opinion, is inauthentic.
And as well, I say that once I realize the conundrum of my existence as a modern subject, I no longer can justify myself to say that I have an opinion on something that I cannot possibly understand. And really, that’s what I’m saying about the women over there with the burkas it’s not all relative. They indeed are involved in an experience that I have no justice in breaking it apart into 1 million pieces such that they have no justification for their experience. Their experiences utterly foreign to my ability to understand it. That’s really what I’m saying in my post their. And so what is justified is that I allow them the dignity of having their own experience and reactions despite but my opinion is, I just support them ethicallyLikeLike
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Where was I going with the gay conversion?
I remember. I am saying that imposing our ‘correct’ worldview on others is not materially different from the ‘conversion therapy’ advocates the declare that they are the arbiters of what is right and impose this on non-heterosexuals.
You are saying that we hold some moral high-ground position, and we should impose it on these sovereign people. Of course, from their perspective, they may see many things they would prefer we change, but we wouldn’t welcome their imposition.
Perhaps, I’m just not an interventionist.
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For some. Conversation works. For some it is abuse. But as to US ethics: it is wrong. Those who think it is right are indeed less education and in a certain sense les civilized; but they all contribute to the motion of being human necessarily. Or I’d skin them and make a coat out of them. People who would indeed make a coat from them are, indeed, less intelligent and civilized necessarily. Because. Like I said: Putin is an idiot not matter how intellectually relative I want to grant him. His idiocy is that in fact, he appears on the scene to be able to be known. And behave.
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I already commented on Putin. I think if you research the events of 2014 and the lead-up, you’ll see that this conflict was entirely predictable (in fact, predicted by many) and preventable. This is not what the US wanted.
The US has made many foriegn policy errors in trying to cement its hegemony, and this is one. In practice, this has the likely effect of strengthing and extending BRICS to the detriment of the United States that is constantyl innovating more ways to fail and piss off people in other countries, not to mention its own.
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This just came across this short video my social media network. This is an American woman with Iranian, who decided to adopt her cultural attire (and whatever else) whilst living in Oklahoma.
I’ve cued it. Listen to her experience.
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Cule. What are your thoughts on it ?
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My key point is that she was (and is) trying to live in the US by her cultural preferences but was chastised and acosted. Sure, there is no offical morality police because some people are more than willing to pick up the mantle (or cudgel).
Also consider Matthew Shepard and other such targets with lethal outcomes.
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So. In a way. It’s like she said: context. Her experience here is not the same as living in a society where such rebuke of norms is allowed. In the US, maybe, it is more ignorance. In the sense that the acosters are doing so out of a sense of being marginalized from the larger, more “educated” and “accepting” society. Where as maybe in Iran. …It’s like convergent or parallel evolution: it looks the same, but different elements inform the event.
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In my mind, it’s like in organisational behaviour, you’ve got formal and informal power structures.
In the case in Iran, the violence was state-sanctioned. In the US, the state either turned a blind eye; allowed it with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge; or performatively chided the purportrators. And even if they took action, say to convict the offenders, they still allow the system problem to live and fester.
Extending this just a tad further, this activity is not some minor anomoly. It may be anomolous, but it’s a large portion of the population who feel that—to remain topical—Muslim women are an oppressed species and that Muslims are inherently less human and deserving of rights in their native countries or whatever judging country.
While in their “oppressive” native countries, they need to be saved from their backwards culture. If they emigrate to another country, they had better adopt the “superior, forward, and modern” local culture or be condemned.
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I can see that. Formal and informal. And: Everyone is oppressed. We all receive violence upon our selves in one way or another. The same action could evoke hatred. Trauma. Empowerment. No response. Depression. No care. I feel like we make groupings to inform us about who we are as real ethical beings. I might get picked on because I have big ears and develop suicidal ideation around it. Someone else, use it to become rich and famous.
Context. Yea. -
One other thing I thought of: it is easy to sit in my life and analyze the difficulties of other people who do not have the luxuries I have, as though thier life fits so snugly into my wonderful ideas.
This is not a relative thing; this is humility upon alterity thing.
I am intimately involved in the ideal I hold even to the extent that what I consider good enforces what I feel is bad onto others.
Reality, I see is this and inescapable.
However. One can come upon a truth that changes the way I understand reality.
Ideology is the set of ideas that form the very ability to know anything at all. There is no changing ideology, there is only changing the configuration of semantics.
There is, though, a changing of how one is oriented upon reality as to what one thinks they believe and what is happening in this situation. However. Most do not want to change their orientation upon ideology because ideology grants them thier political identity, that it is how they know themselves. This then is the description of the modern subject. Who chooses to stay oppressed as part of thier orientation upon what it is to know.
Allow people to have their experience justified to their own experience and actions in a way that does not hold a requirement to make sense to me, is how subjectivity loses its absolute power, and defines what it is to be oriented in reality.
That’s my deep ordering of phase-terms. 💊🪠
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From my perspective, you are describing Prescriptivism or at least suggesting that you prescribe your personally-held (and perhaps more broadly, socially-held) morality, and that’s common.
For me, that extends Ayer’s Emotivism, which is to say that morality derives as an emotional reaction, and these morals are then prescribed, per Hare’s (and, I suppose, Stevenson’s) Prescriptivism.
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Late add, but David just released another topical commentary : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dujn3jMeXl4
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Dictating while I’m driving. So try and excuse the auto correcting. I will try to enunciate for the computer. I watched that video. I think I like some of his other bit videos a little bit better. However, I didn’t watch the whole video, but I would say I watched more than half and then I kind of skipped. And I’m not really sure I by this universal cultural, relativity narrative. I’m not sure that it’s really credible to say, well in America, we have these cultural norms, but in other societies, we have they have different cultural norms. And so it’s not right, it’s not ethically, right, to impose our ethical standards of behavior and address, and mannerisms upon another culture. I do agree with the savior ism, yes, I think it’s a limited, or myopic liberal view that moves along are ethical, continuing to assume things about some other culture, say that they’re not liberated. However, I’m not really sure that his discussion about liberation really holds much water. if the point is education, then our efforts are valid. The point is not to say oh, we are liberating you in this effort, or in this way, but we’re not giving you the full support, and so what does that really say about liberation or emancipation from our ethical standards. I don’t think that argument holds water. I think it only holds water if I’m thinking intellectually about things, and not really participating in the actual on the ground involvement with human beings. Because on the ground with human beings, more often than not, all one hast to do is open, a persons, eyes, and then they will kind of naturally move in a certain direction. And this direction really is that The liberation that comes from the capacity to say, you know what, I don’t want to have to worry that I’m gonna be beaten or shot because of the way that I dress or the way that I think. I think that is a natural tendency of human beings and it’s not just a western construct. And so, yes, there are many people many liberals, many white liberals that want to save the world. And yes, that’s ridiculous and they need to be corrected. But I’m not really sure is that an analysis that takes that as a unilateral “western“ position is really valid. I understand that that philosopher of the website is Foucault and Michelle Foucault. I’m not sure how the auto correct is really putting that because I can’t really look at the words that it’s posting. But I’m not sure that Foucault really was can be taken to the extent that people like to take him to. Michelle Foucault said that if a 12-year-old wanted to have sex with a 30 year old then that should be OK and that shouldn’t be defined by government. I’m not really sure that’s the case, and I think that kind of liberal application of these theoretical constructs really miss on the ground application of human beings, actually being involved with one another. OK I hope this auto correct translated decently enough where you can understand what I was saying.
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It’s good to remember that Foucault was a signatory to the Open Letter to the Commission for a Revision of the Penal Code Governing Relations between Adults and Minors, but so was Simone de Beauvoir and about 80 other notables. In the case, it wasn’t about paedophilia. In fact, it would have been hebephilia or ephebophilia, but these terms aren’t sensational, so some use paedophilia for the uninitiated subject to knee-jerks.
Philosophically and legally, the argument was that age is a poor arbiter for anything, but they were targeting age of consent. Without going (too far) down the rabbit hole, their point was that there is not some magical thing that happens at whatever age is established as a threshold, be it 14, 16, 18, or 20. In all cases, there are people who were ready (whatever that translates to) and those who are not. There are some over 20 still not ready. I’m not going to 12 because the unlogical emotional reactors will come out of the woodwork.
In fact, historically (and in some cultures), 12 and 14 year-olds are considered ready by their own cultures. If one is to take the Christian Bible as Gospel (and I’m pretty sure that’s the idea), then Jesus’ mother, Mary, was between 12 and 14, so there is certainly precedence and Christian values in play. (I’ll ignore the rapey-ness of it all. That’s fodder for another day.) And you can argue that was a different cultural moment, and I’d agree, but it only makes my point that cultures differ categorially.
As we know, brain plasticity remains a factor into one’s thirties, and some have argued that it never really fully settles in and matures. The argument tends to be a Sorities challenge. Was the 18-year-old not ready the day before their birthday?
And you mention the case of age difference. If a person is sexually active at, say, 16 with other 16-year-olds, and that is considered to be acceptable? In what world would sex with a 30-year-old be different? It make no logical sense. I get the emotional arguments, but they are ill-considered.
I could say that I don’t care because I am not seeking 12-year-olds, but by the same logic, I could say that I don’t care about race issues because I am not a particular colour; I don’t care about sex and gender issues because I am a CIS male; I don’t care about LGBTQ+ issues because I am non of these; and I don’t care about striking busdrivers because I don’t drive a bus. I don’t even ride the bus.
But I do care on an emotional level—on an empathetic level.
As David says, what if North America were overrun by some culture who insisted that woman go topless in warm weather because men can. “Remove your tops!” is the battle cry. This mirrors calls of “Remove your hijab! Remove your Burka! Don’t allow your culture to rule your life.”
In fact, humans as a social species. We are more part of culture and society than we like to believe, and we protest in the name of individual autonomy and freedom. Of course, no man as an island. No woman is either.
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What If. What if never happens.
What is in evitable is the fact of the matter, as it exists now. We can speculate all we want about why things unfold, and the way they did, but ultimately, and a very Faucautian manner ironically, we are speculating about why things unfold it in this particular way because of the limitation involved in what we understand as consciousness. Our consciousness is not coming upon any totality, or understanding that can trace things back to, even as. Foucault would say that it did. He is ultimately analyzing texts, in the context of the context that we are reading them now. The limitation that is not only granted to our eyesight, or our hearing, or our ability to make sounds, or our ability to feel things through touch, is likewise mirrored in consciousness consciousness is likewise a sensation, mediated by all the other is just as much as all the others are mediated through what we understand, is consciousness.The What If, is that feature of consciousness, as it is now, presently, only right now, not as some Buddhist Zen yes, we’re going to meditate and float on our Zen cloud of peacefulness, kind of present, but as the present, as it is exactly now unfolding and presented as it is actually now. Any sort of understanding I may have another culture is again not only mediated, but contained, buy this understanding that I have that is myself that cannot be contained by the word “myself”. For the same reason.: subjectivity arises in every subject that can be known. It is not just knowledge, like human knowledge, that we have some sort of privilege, but indeed, the knowledge itself. knowledge is also a subject.
And besides, the French idea of freedom is, in my opinion, somewhat delusional . Lol.
We could argue about the what if we want all we want about in some cultures we can see breasts, and be perfectly OK with it. However. The fact of the matter is whenever I see your breasts. I want to suck on them and I get a Boner. I’m not sure how much that is culturally mediated. But it is a manifestation of some sort of culture in so much as culture is subject. In so much as subjectivity is contained in culture. In so much as what is contained, is the knowledge known by the limitation that I understand as myself. But also culture as its self a thing unto itself.
There is no accounting for the stupidity of humanity in a true sense. There is only subjects, limited, as they are in their a ability to understand things. And that is not limited by some umbrella culture. The idea that culture is somehow informing human beings to their own subjectivity, it’s just another subject. We could just as easily say that it is culture that is informed by one’s subjectivity. Whether it be a subject of a guitar, or a subject of a Burka, or a subject of an iguana , we could just as easily argue that the subject of sand is containing the American culture such that women wear material over their breasts.
No matter which angle we take it, it only makes sense in so much is that is just how I see it. When we analyze it together, when Everly must come to the conclusion that pretty much nothing that we talk about how old any water at all.
And so it’s not to say that we live in some sort of meaningless relative universe, but I did this is exactly how the universe is absolutely in so much that we did have to deal with it. And in so much as my subjectivity demands that I understand things and just that way that I argue.
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Personally, I feel that many North Americans are repressed. I feel this is an extension of Christian doctrine.
As for breasts and boners, as I wee lad, I remember seeing plenty of indigenous breasts in National Geographic but no indigenous boners magazines. I feel that this is an acculturated behaviour.
Besieds, I’ve been to topless, nude, and clothing-optional beaches, and I can assure you, it was no boner-fest.
I don’t want to go full-on Rousseau, but in the state of nature, this does not appear to be a problem. This is a problem of faux civilisation.
In the end, I feel that a good anthropologist can divorce their core culture and be a disinterested observer, but this needs to be conscious decision to flip off the judgment switch.
I am not saying it is easy or foolproof, but I can see, in theory, the ability to observe without imposing, Heisenberg be damned.
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I would get a boner at a nude beach. That’s why I don’t go. 🤠. And I’m educated and enlightened to individual rights. Like: I do t get to go hold a woman down and put my binder in them whenever I want. But other men, despite culture, feel they should be able to.
And it’s easy to a point to another culture and say oh, they are not getting boners. But the fact is that the rest of the 80% of the humans in the world do. So what are we talking about when we talk about human beings? is not this in assumed group just like when I talk about Islam women as a whole group?
And so likewise, it’s not to say that the group of human beings is divided up into cultural manifestations Also a fallacy in reasoning, by that very understanding of what we’re understanding as a group is a necessary misunderstanding of what is actually occurring. ?The idea of culture is just a sort of excuse for my feeling that I’m having a whole picture of something. Very idea of culture is like an exception to reason. It’s like some sort of term that falls out of reasoning in order for me to reason about culture.
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And it’s all good that the 30 or 40 people whatever signed onto this highly academic and intellectual thing back in the 60s. People took way too much psychedelics, and the proximity to the psychedelic experience was too close for them to really understand what was happening. Basically, it was like a generation of people just being totally high off substances in getting vicariously hide from the people around them have these incredible experiences on LSD and all sorts of mind altering substances. lol
It’s been a while since I watched the videos or whatever and read the things commentary about whatever it was going on with the French back in that time. But what I understood about it was they were just arguing from there over intellectualization of reality to say that everyone should have an understanding of whatever sexuality that they have an understanding of. To say that we are ultimately controlled by cultural mechanisms of power at whatever level, is an assertion of normative. And what they were saying wasn’t just saying like hey as a metaphor. And some utopian fantasy 12 year olds should be able to have sex with 50 year olds they were saying that absolutely we should redefined the age of consent in light of these highly intellectual ideas. The fact of the matter is, though, that when this happens, people, get abused, regardless of culture, people get hurt, people go, insane, etc..
It is not against some cultural, norm that they go insane, it’s a deed that they behave in a certain way. But ultimately once a seed of choice is put into peoples lives, they begin to say, hey, I don’t wanna be treated like that. And ultimately we have to look at the 50 year old men that want to have sex with 11-year-old girls, and say, you know what, something is severely wrong with you regardless of what culture you have, because there is no culture that does that, regardless of what we want to say. It’s ultimately a fantasy. Even if there was a culture that allowed that, they don’t allow that now without producing people that are fucked up and they are fucked up in an absolute human sense, not just in a relative cultural sense. -
One could adopt an appeal to nature argument here. In all other animal species, the onset of estrous marks reproductive maturity. Call it fucked up if you will. I’m aware the naturalistic fallicies are lame, but much canon is based on such nonesense, so precedence prevails.
I know we already trod Emotivist ground, and here we are again. haha
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Well, yes. I get that. Women who are mature enough to have babies, probably in the scheme of things, should be able to have babies. And there is something to say about that “modern civilization” has gotten out ahead of our minds, ability to get away from evolution, and are more animal nature.
However, the plain fact of the matter is the plain fact of the matter. Regardless of what we want a reason about it, it is that. And honestly, we could get into the whole discussion of oppression, and actually just from my own growth: it’s only been somewhat recently, that I’ve been able to see women and men are just two shapes of the same creature. Even though I’ve had respect for women, and all that equal rights and all that stuff, I still looked at them as a sexual object. And indeed, when I see a woman’s body, I get aroused, and I like looking at them. I like touching them sexually. But it’s only been somewhat recently that I’ve been able to see through that for sod. To see that all human beings are just the same creature whether their male or female color of skin or anything. They’re all the same creature. regardless of clothes and culture and skin and hair, and whatever.
But presently, I’m not allowed to say that, because we all have to realize everyone’s cultural identity and individualism, and all that stuff. Yes, I agree with that, only because that’s the situation that I must live in. There is no other reality that I live in to still be a person, to still be a human being, that I can live with in myself. There’s no point in arguing these points just for the sake of some intellectual curiosity because at no time do I ever encounter these things in my real life, if I want to be honest with myself .
And so I feel, that the intellect is just like a tool, just like anything else. Just like a shirt is a tool, or house paint is a tool. sure I can appropriate it for whatever I want to, I could appropriate House Paint as a nutritional supplement, if I wanted to, and no one could prevent me from arguing the validity of House Paint as my nutritional substance. But it just is ridiculous. And I think some of the intellectualism that goes on it’s just a ridiculous application of the tool of the intellect. it’s like we create our own fantasies, and then we go live in them, because, the post, modern idea, if it makes sense to me, then it must be real, and it must be true. But that’s just pure nonsense and I would argue that’s why the world is fucked up in the way that it is.
I don’t know there’s much more complexity to what I’m really saying there, but anyways … 🤖
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….I think overall I’m saying that arguing from a cultural relative standpoint misses the cultural relative nature of the cultural relativity: it is self contradictory.
We avoid this contradiction by pointing out attention away from this contradiction to then say that ideology is something that arises “outside” such that we are determined by these outside forces absolutely. Yet, when we do not revolt from the emptiness that lay at the center of modern existence we find completely the opposite:
Less zen meaninglessness. And more the totality that is the ideology: the modern subject in all its relativity.
However. A relative relative is just a repetition of modernity with a contradictory center from
Which to revolt to find out transcendental nirvana of self: another modern fantasy.The truth is that which arises to grant us what we know at all times. The ideology is the real negotiation where alterity is what is never ethically allowed, or only allowed as the ethical mandate by which we are able to know what we are as a transcendent subject.
Like you seem to have said: there is no “them” to say freedom from oppressive burkas. However. There is real women who, if they do not wear it, live under threat of, not just social stigma or paying a fine, but indeed threat of physical harm that has no legal recourse to defend against.
Cultural relate all one wants: it a fantasy of western idealism.
We could also talk about the Hindu rite of Sati in this light. It is nothing at all like women wearing bikinis in the US. That is, it is only similar in his much as we assume that we are so enlightened. Four, don’t we have nude beaches here in the United States as well?
Indeed, there is a law on the city of Santa cruz’s books as we speak that says that people can walk around naked if they want to. And I bet in Santa Cruz, if they did probably not very many people would say very much of it.
So I’m not really sure that this huge intellectual discussion about women, depression, and the wearing of the traditional Muslim garb for women has any relation to what goes on in the United States so far is wearing clothes.
I agree with you that some people did not have this kind of awareness, and so much is people in the west might feel that they need to go over and save these other people. But the intellectual debates, to say that the intellectual debates are arguing against that kind of savior, ism, is to assume that “the west“ thinks this way .
So it is another example of western academics for getting the privilege that they have in thinking that they can think beyond their little intellectual sphere. As if their theories are really addressing these other cultures, or these people over there or wherever, whether it be Los Angeles, California or Anchorage Alaska , or New Delhi, India.
At every instance that we argue beyond the preordained limits inherent the ideology from which we are making the argument, we find nonsense. We find that the argument itself doesn’t hold water because it’s ignoring itself, it’s exceptionalizing itself from the discourse.
This is what makes a modern subject, a modern subject as opposed to subjectivity in general. It is only the modern subject, that exceptional lyses human thought to have to do with anything beyond itself, as if we are involved in cultures of power and shit like that. But subjectivity itself occurs at all levels, whether it is the shirt on the hanger, or the floor tiling, or the jet plane flying overhead , or the glasses I’m wearing…. All of these are subjects, they all arise as subjects in themselves, including thought. Thought is another subject. Thought is a subjectivity that behaves by the same rules as every other subject that we may talk about. And indeed we could even go so far as every subject that we talk about has agency in the extent that in order to talk about anything, we must be talking about some thing that the word contains in order for her to have any meeting at all.
Lol. Sorry, I’m reading a book about intellectual stuff, and so that reminded me to dump a bunch of intellectual stuff on our little discussion here. 🤓
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Here’s the thing. We can discuss oppression until the cows come home. (There’s one now.) In the parts of the US and UK, a woman who wants an abortionmay not be able to get one. In fact, this may put her life in as much risk and those oppressed because of burkas, so Pot, meet Kettle. The moral of the story is to get your own house in order. As Gandhi never said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Yet it makes a good quote.
Also, as the Christian Bible notes, in Matthew 7:3-5: “Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”
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I think that #5 is a recapitulation, extension, and exposition of the priors. I’m actually not sure how to interpret this. My first intuition is to go to David Graeber’s book Debt, the First 5,000 Years to debate the narrative of Capitalism and exchange, but I may be just reading it wrong. Perhaps I’ll defer this one for now. I’ve written a lot already. Alrighty then…
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I think our whole conversation here goes to why I say that ethics is logistical, it’s not a innate “feeling“ that human beings have. It’s purely logistical, in the sense that the reason why I have my ethics, at root the reason why my ethical situation has formed thus, is because I can’t go and kill all those and remove all those people that disagree with me. It’s just not logistically possible. But if it were possible, I would have no reason to think ethically in the relative modern way that I do..
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I think that this becomes a framing issue, where one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. If one doesn’t fully understand the entire picture from all perspectives and check their personnal and unconscious biases at the door, a fair analysis is all but impossible.
I still can’t quite grasp the schism. Women are no more a monolith than is the West or any other larger cohort. Through a Neoliberal lens, we may want to impose our ‘modern’ ways on these ‘backward’ people, but this is myopic Orientalism. There is not just one homogeneous worldview, and the West is certainly nothign to right home about, though there is a certain comfort zone for those who have been steeped in its ways.
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The Veritable Counsel 
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