It's great when you're straight

[luka]

Well, that didn't take long

er, i'll be off now. more into my time barrier thread anyway.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The problem with the whole focus on Cathy Newman's performance as a journalist is that it lays bare double standards of the most obvious kind. The issue is not whether she's a good interviewer or not; it's why this is even considered an issue in 'evaluating' the abuse she received.

It's fine and barely ever remarked on for Paxman or Snow to do badly researched, leading, hectoring interviews (and the standards they keep to are generally low), but as soon as a woman does the same thing, suddenly everything else drops away and the focus is all upon her, with the alarming subtext, sometimes articulated and sometime non-articulated, that the misogynist abuse directed at her is something she brought upon herself/her fault. As if misogynist abuse is something that is regrettable and horrible, but sometimes, y'know, if a woman doesn't perform an interview very well, that's just what happens and is kind of a result of her not being good at interviewing.

And then when this is pointed out, well of course that's not the case, of course we're not justifying the abuse in any way... but hey... there does still seem to remain some mysterious, ineffable connection between CN's skill as a journalist and the fact that men are making rape threats against her and calling her a bitch. And that's just life isn't it, nothing to do with us, no way...

Horseshit. The double standard here is the one you're arguing for by insisting she should be treated with kid gloves because she's (only! merely!) a woman. I thought I'd made it abundantly clear that personal abuse and threats are never justified, but that doesn't mean she should be above all criticism. And the point about making herself a target (for criticism, if I have to spell it out for you, again) is totally valid. If you were a right-wing satirist trying to write a sketch poking fun at a stereotypical 'stupid, irrational, aggressive feminist', you couldn't do much better than the performance she gave in that interview.

Paxman may be a hectoring bully but I've never seen him do an interview anything like that flatly farcical. You're not stupid, you'd be able to see this yourself if you watched without the preconception that you were witnessing a battle between avatars of Good and Evil.

 

[john eden]

John Humphries is properly shit morning after morning on The Today Programme. 600k salary and no criticism until recently.

He was shit with Nick Griffin, he was shit with Farage, he was shit with Tommy Robinson.

No outcry, except from weirdo lefties on twitter like me.

 

[baboon2004]

Horseshit. The double standard here is the one you're arguing for by insisting she should be treated with kid gloves because she's (only! merely!) a woman. I thought I'd made it abundantly clear that personal abuse and threats are never justified, but that doesn't mean she should be above all criticism. And the point about making herself a target (for criticism, if I have to spell it out for you, again) is totally valid. If you were a right-wing satirist trying to write a sketch poking fun at a stereotypical 'stupid, irrational, aggressive feminist', you couldn't do much better than the performance she gave in that interview.

Paxman may be a hectoring bully but I've never seen him do an interview anything like that flatly farcical. You're not stupid, you'd be able to see this yourself if you watched without the preconception that you were witnessing a battle between avatars of Good and Evil.

"She's (CN) going out of her way to set herself up as a hate figure." That's not making it clear that personal abuse and threats are never justified - it suggests the opposite but in obfuscatory language (what does 'setting herself up as a hate figure' mean if not 'inviting hatred'). And no-one said Cathy Newman should be above all criticism - diversionary tactics.

"Treated with kid gloves" = not being subject to misogynist abuse and rape threats for doing a poor interview? That's a bit alarming, isn't it.

And the "only! merely! a woman" bit is a spectacular refusal of reality, by pretending that responding to oppression is 'patronising' those who are protected by such a response. Men don't face rape threats for going on TV and saying something that some men deem upsetting or annoying. Women do.

I honestly don't see what's so difficult about recognising that women have a completely different experience from men because of structural oppression/constant discrimination/whatever you want to call it, but a lot of men seem to find it more perplexing than quantum mechanics/the rules of rugby union. Weird.

 

[thirdform]

am watching this now, Newman is well composed, 1:56 and I'm already getting riled up at his order and chaos dualism, its crass religious sociology for people who want to set emselves above the plebeian hordes. These people will do more harm to materialism than idpoliticers ever will.

Am a guy for what that is worth.

 

[thirdform]

here we go with the rigid colonial gender demarcations, as one can deduce a male essence and a female essence, rather than looking at the actual substance of gender lived.

 

[Benny Bunter]

am watching this now, Newman is well composed, 1:56 and I'm already getting riled up at his order and chaos dualism, its crass religious sociology for people who want to set emselves above the plebeian hordes. These people will do more harm to materialism than idpoliticers ever will.

Am a guy for what that is worth.

She did just fine.

Lol wait til you get to the bit about lobsters :crylarf:

 

[thirdform]

He states his positions and then backs them up with arguments and evidence. And every single time, she contorts his words into something totally different, or even inverts them completely, to try and make him look like biggest arsehole possible. "Men and women are exactly equal in average intelligence." "So you're saying women earn less because they're stupid?" - for half an hour. It's a travesty. You might have picked up on this yourself if you'd actually listened to what each of them was saying instead of seething at your TV through a red mist.

he doesn't tho does he, he wheels out vague and generalised statements, common sense, and then says its complicated over and over again. there's absolutely zero serious materialism, nothing about production and social reproduction, just a few stats, as if they hermetically exist in an isolated vacuum, as brute strength and determination of men determines the success of a company or workplace, nothing about the circulation of capital at all, it's all in the head. and then he has the audacity to completely screw up the history of modern philosophy like a classic whig, lumping everything under postmodernism. and then we go back to 1950 where totalitarian theory is in vogue, never mind that the imperialism that these people would defend as a civilising mission killed far far more than the communist developmentalist big push industrialisation states (not that i support ranking capitalist atrocities left wing or otherwise on a scale.) group identity? has he even opened a copy of a philosophy textbook? actually let's offend him further, would he even dare to read someone like Ibn Khaldun, or is this man too brown? and then he takes some blank slate pop evo psych assumptions to claim that our present day environmental hierarchies have nothing to do with capitalism or patriarchy, and runs with them, even though the discipline is far more contested and ambiguous than he gives credit for. It's just crude transposition of gray's anatomy. nothing about frequency dependent selection in psychological evolution as distinct from anatomical evolution, some essentialist pseudoscience about a universal developmental programme, I.E: there is a natural state to which the variations in species should occur, and anything that deviates from that is abnormalised.

Cathy Newman sounds like an establishment feminist but i wouldn't expect anything else from c4.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Skimming the last few pages of responses I see the old 'common sense' canard has cropped up again. The irony is that from POV of the orthodoxies of modern liberalism, it's Newman who is presenting the common-sense view ("Exactly half of engineers would be women but for sexism", ignoring women-dominated areas of employment etc.) and Peterson is the voice from the wilderness.

No point responding in any more detail while you're all pretending I'm championing Peterson's every opinion, that he's somehow responsible for the actions of abusive dickheads on YouTube or that Newman doesn't spend the whole interview mangling everything he says into a ridiculous strawman.

Seriously, have any of you even watched it with the sound up? And listened to what Newman says, rather than just admiring her composure?

 

[thirdform]

there's no voice from the wildeerness there's just an amateur hack who thinks that his discipline is a positivistic science with disembodied truths that exist outside historical substance. he wouldn't understand a word of foucault if he even tried, hence his laughably absurd lumping him in with postmodernism and id politics.

and no i don't think newman was the best person to interview him. far from it. But expecting a trained philosopher or historian on c4 is a bit much.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm sure he would take great pleasure in not understanding a word of Foucault. It's a style of discourse so totally different from his that using it to counter him or vice-versa would be like an argument between an English person who speaks no Chinese and a Chinese who speaks no English.

 

[Mr. Tea]

And is it 'absurd' to associated Foucault with postmodernism? Genuine question, not a philosophy graduate here.

 

[entertainment]

there's no voice from the wildeerness there's just an amateur hack who thinks that his discipline is a positivistic science with disembodied truths that exist outside historical substance. he wouldn't understand a word of foucault if he even tried, hence his laughably absurd lumping him in with postmodernism and id politics.

and no i don't think newman was the best person to interview him. far from it. But expecting a trained philosopher or historian on c4 is a bit much.

It would be great if you could provide an example from the interview of what you're talking about and why exactly the statistics that he quotes are misleading. I understand what Foucalt is about, but you can't just use him to automatically discredit basic inductive reasoning unless you point out the bias.

 

[Mr. Tea]

But expecting a trained philosopher or historian on c4 is a bit much.

And no, it doesn't need to be a professional philosopher but someone who can string together a cogent counterargument instead of just spewing out strawman after strawman after strawman like a faulty computer would have been, you know, nice.

 

[Benny Bunter]

What about the LOBSTER though?

 

[Mr. Tea]

They're delicious, but I fully support killing them quickly before cooking them. No strong opinions on them other than that.

 

[thirdform]

I'm sure he would take great pleasure in not understanding a word of Foucault. It's a style of discourse so totally different from his that using it to counter him or vice-versa would be like an argument between an English person who speaks no Chinese and a Chinese who speaks no English.

Discourses and languages aren't the same, failed analogy.

Fine. then he should be more focused on his actual discipline rather than thinking he's suddenly entitled to be a political scientist historian and philosopher all at once. polymathery is good but some humility would be in order, not I've got the truth and radical leftists are all liars.

 

[thirdform]

It would be great if you could provide an example from the interview of what you're talking about and why exactly the statistics that he quotes are misleading. I understand what Foucalt is about, but you can't just use him to automatically discredit basic inductive reasoning unless you point out the bias.

You know why his stats are misleading, usual social science reasons.

But actually white rad feminism and terfism should take responsibility for this binary man/woman crap.

 

[thirdform]

And is it 'absurd' to associated Foucault with postmodernism? Genuine question, not a philosophy graduate here.

he's on the cusp of an embryonic post-marxism and post-structuralism. He's more concerned with how transgression IE prison/madness/sexuality is discoursively constituted by power, rather than arguing that grand narritives no longer exist and all we have is perfformative plurality. he called his philosophy/teaching history of the systems of thought.

but you know he's the 'same philosophy as mao' so whatever m8.

 

[CORP$EY]

The Undergraduate Degree as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement
BY CORP$EY

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to read Foucault was bloody torture!