Hardly anyone is going to openly defend muddled thinking or disrespect for evidence. Rather, what people do is to surround these practices with a fog of verbiage designed to conceal from their listeners – and in most cases, I would imagine, from themselves as well – the true implications of their way of thinking. George Orwell got it right when he observed that the main advantage of speaking and writing clearly is that “when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”

Further to this, this, this and any number of things in the archive, the following may be of interest. Here’s Alan Sokal, speaking in Stockholm, May 2009, on the scientific worldview – and its opponents. Targets include practitioners of pseudo-medicine, theologians and the priestly caste of postmodernist bamboozlers. It’s a long speech and Sokal’s own leftist reflexes intrude a little too often, especially towards the end, but there are nuggets to be had. There’s an amusing schtick involving the substitution of theological fuzzwords with something more direct, and this, on religious truth claims:

Michael Yon is in Afghanistan with the British military. 

  

Some people say the Taliban are cowardly for planting bombs, but I do not believe this makes them any more cowardly than the A-10s, Apaches, B-1Bs and Reapers make us cowardly. We didn’t come here for a fair fight. We came to win. Some troops even say that if you show up to a battle and find it’s evenly matched, you didn’t plan well. What most of us find cowardly and despicable are the enemies who hide behind children. The bombs they plant for us are fair play. But males who hide behind children are not worthy of respect.

His site really should be in your blogroll. Via Mr Eugenides. 

A reader, Vaclav Lochmann, points us to an announcement for the Meet Animal Meat international conference, organised by the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University. Here’s a taste, as it were:

Informed by feminist investigations of embodiment and bodiliness, we ask: How do we understand our bodily relationship to other animals? How do we embody animals, and how do animals embody us? How are carnal modes of incorporation, intimacy, and inhabitation kinds of contacts forged between “HumAnimals”?

How indeed.

If, as Donna Haraway writes, “animals are everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with,” then how do embodied encounters with animal matter necessarily constitute categories of “human” and “animal”?

Wait for the clever bit.

What is the meaning of meat, and the meat of meaning?

Oh, there’s more.

Sadly, the opportunity to participate in the conference has come and gone. Readers are left to imagine the dizzying insights offered by the keynote speakers. Among them, Carol J. Adams, a “feminist-vegetarian theorist” and author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, in which she “explores a relationship between patriarchal values and meat eating by interweaving the insights of feminism, vegetarianism and literary theory.” The book has been described by the New York Times as “a bible of the vegan community,” and in it Ms Adams advances her belief that,

What, or more precisely, who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture. Patriarchy is a gender system that is implicit in human/animal relationships… Manhood is constructed in our culture by access to meat eating and control of other bodies.

Also sharing wisdom was Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and Gender Studies at USC and author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, in which she “proposes a conception of time and space independent of the influence of normative heterosexual/familial lifestyle.” Halberstam’s areas of, um, expertise include “examining queer temporality – queer uses of time and space that are developed in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” And one can only tremble with regret at missing Richard Twine’s pithy contribution: Embodying Posthumanist Intersectionality and Resisting Transhumanist ‘Enhancement’ Through Feminist Veganism?

Hush now, dry your tears.

I don’t generally think that women are too feeble and befuddled to know what they want. I tend to assume that the women I meet are autonomous and know their own minds, much as I know mine. Others, however, disagree. Radical feminist Margaret Jamison, for instance:

I know I’ve said before – here and elsewhere – that female “heterosexuality” is not a meaningful concept to me. That is, politically, and with regard specifically to radical feminism, I don’t believe that whatever a woman feels in her head (influenced so mandatorily as it is by male supremacy) about her own sexual inclinations really matters in the grand scheme.

Hear that, straight ladies? Your heterosexuality – sorry, your “heterosexuality” – isn’t meaningful. The male supremacy has you duped. Whatever it is you feel – and by extension whatever it is you think – is of no consequence in the “grand scheme” of Margaret Jamison:

An internal self-assessment just really doesn’t matter in comparison with the external interactions, and the way those interactions reflect and perpetuate male supremacy.

Ah. Compared to “external interactions,” your feelings are irrelevant – indeed they most likely aren’t your own. Cynics may already be amending the object of Ms Jamison’s assertions and pondering the likely reaction: “Female ‘homosexuality’ – so-called ‘lesbianism’ – is not a meaningful concept to me. I don’t believe that whatever a woman feels in her head about her own sexual inclinations really matters in the grand scheme.”

Readers may recall similar sentiments being expressed by the Guardian’s Julie Bindel, who insists desire should be reconfigured to comply with ideology. And it’s no use protesting to the contrary. Whatever you might say, you’re collaborating with the oppressor:

Women wanting what men want – the subjugation of women – doesn’t mean that women’s subjugation is now a female desire. It simply means that some women want what men want. They are men’s women. 

If your desires should coincide with those of a man – who, like all men, desires your subjugation – you become his property. I do hope you’re following this.

Dr Caroline Lucas, Green MEP and “acknowledged expert on peace issues,” displays her usual clarity of thought:

I am delighted that European foreign ministers have finally approved a ban. It’s a real victory for the global campaign against animal cruelty, and a victory for democracy… By closing the door on fur and other seal products, the EU has taken meaningful action to reduce the scale of commercial seal killing and prove to governments that barbaric annual displays of animal cruelty will no longer be tolerated.

Barbaric. Cruel. No longer tolerated. Got that?

In an aside to this, it’s also worth noting that the Green MEPs were keen to ensure that products from traditional hunts by indigenous peoples in Canada and Greenland will not be covered by the ban.

Ah. Evidently, the barbarism, cruelty and refusal to tolerate depend not on the act itself but on who’s doing it and how traditional and indigenous they are. Traditional, indigenous cruelty is, it seems, something Dr Lucas can live with. In fact, her colleagues are “keen” to do so. Those deemed sufficiently indigenous and traditional will no doubt be immune to the activity’s “de-humanising” effects.

(h/t, sk60)