5261029

I regret nothing...

Your story must feature a predominantly POC cast to be considered.

...except your usage of color.

5267610

So while the requirement for only POC or LGBT characters might very well be political, it might not be, and it's unfair and incorrect to unilaterally assert "this must be political."

This is like saying that someone who says today that Trump is an idiot is not making a political statement.

Someone making that statement in 1990 would not have been making a political statement. Someone making that statement today would be aware that we're in the middle of a presidential election and that the impact of their statement will be political.

I don't care if the publisher secretly wants to cash in on pretending to take the favored side in a political struggle. Half the people in the movement may be doing that anyway. They still intend it as a political statement, even if they don't care about the politics. If statements had to be sincere to count as political, what political statements would we have left?

5267675
Which brings me back to the questions I originally posed to you:

I like lesbians. While I'm aware that this matches up with the diversity fad and political motivations of other people, that has nothing to do with my interest. If I started a publishing company, is it fair and/or correct to ascribe a political motive to my request for stories about lesbians?

If you think it is, you're going to be wrong about my motives; if you think it's not, you should consider that there might be other people like me out there, and it's also unfair to assume you know what they think and why.

I don't care if the publisher secretly wants to cash in on pretending to take the favored side in a political struggle. Half the people in the movement may be doing that anyway. They still intend it as a political statement, even if they don't care about the politics. If statements had to be sincere to count as political, what political statements would we have left?

Well, that's why we rarely ever actually accomplish anything politically. When people abandon the cause for the next flash in the pan, what the cause was doesn't matter in the end. So if you believe that, give it a few years and we'll be on to robots or banshees or something.

5267683 I believe I already tried to answer that question. In this case, it's a magazine publishing a special POC issue.

If you think it is, you're going to be wrong about my motives; if you think it's not, you should consider that there might be other people like me out there, and it's also unfair to assume you know what they think and why.

Let's defer this conversation until a case comes up where one of us has some reason to make a judgement, and then use whatever criteria are appropriate for the purpose of that judgement. In most cases, I wouldn't care about the person's motives. I would be counting magazines that have POC requirements and seeing what the numbers say.

Motives have, recall, been repudiated as irrelevant by the activists. If someone says "I am publishing a lot of science fiction by men because they happen to write the kind of science fiction that I like," they don't say "Oh, all right, then." If you found a publishing house to publish lesbian stories because you like lesbian stories, and enough others do that, then by the same logic now used to call for POC stories, you should all be pressured to give more representation to other types of stories.

Society is made up of individual preferences. The fundamental debate is between the Marxist-based ideology that says we should have a command aesthetics (a centralized committee who decides what people should like, or monitors what people are reading and fixes it if they're reading things that lead to wrong-think, or that they decide give poor overall social utility), versus free-market aesthetics (people should be allowed to publish what they want to publish and read what they want to read). If you make the argument that you should be allowed to publish lesbian stories just because you like lesbian stories, you're opposing the social justice movement.

5267794

If you make the argument that you should be allowed to publish lesbian stories just because you like lesbian stories, you're opposing the social justice movement.

Interesting. Then how does Sanguine Press, whose request we're talking about here, feel about the social justice movement?

From the About page:

My reasons for wanting to start my own publishing house are numerous, but it boils down to wanting to provide a platform for the kinds of stories I like to read, while reaching out to others to help make those stories a success in a wider marketplace.

I believe that elevating stories about people of color into the mainstream adds to the discourse of society in important ways, and at the same time makes it easier for people who are interested in these unique perspectives to find and enjoy them.

(Edit: I mean, I assume since it was the specific subject of the political nature of the request by Sanguine Press in the original post that sparked the question, this would be a relevant judgement to try to make here.)

5267833 Do I need to get excruciatingly rigorous?

The belief that people should be allowed to publish what they want to and read what they want to is at odds with the theory that governs the actions of the social justice movement, which is that "what people want" is a social construction deserving no respect, and instead, what should be done is to rationally decide what people should want, and centrally control what is published to manipulate society and change those social preferences and beliefs.

That people join the movement because the things they want to read are aligned with what the movement wants to publish does not change the underlying theory.

5269179
What. Makes. You. Think. This. Person. "Joined the movement."? She provided a perfectly good reason for publishing stories about POC; one that you said is opposed to the movement: it's what she likes. I saw no statement about her solidarity with the movement.

I'm not doubting there's a movement. I'm not doubting that the movement would be happy with what she likes. But I have no idea if she supports them.

All I know is she publishes stories she likes, and I cited that. So where are you getting this info about how she feels about the movement?

5269179
Comment because I forgot to hit reply the first time.

5267675

I dunno, I could argue the two separately. I think Trump is an idiot, by and large, apolitically. I've thought that for years and years back when he was just running his mouth off and running the Apprentice, and if he came up then, I'd say such. Now he's high in the national discourse, my opinion on that hasn't changed at all.

Of course, there's a political element beyond that when I begin discussing him because the idea of him having the power of the Oval Office frightens me, but I'd consider an idiot unqualified for office kinda...apolitically?

5269179

I'd define the Social Justice movement as 'A movement seeking to increase the political/social/economic capital of traditionally marginalized minorities, and end existing discrimination both conscious and unconscious that occurs against said minorities'. Now, there is a subset of that movement that is...rather indecorous in their methodology, but turning the entire thing into a Bugaboo is like saying everyone in Russia is a Communist, which is clearly untrue.

5272979 I distinguish between the larger progressive movement and "social justice". This is how I see it:

There are 3 main traditions leading into the Western progressive movement: the Christian, the rational, and the Marxist. Special interest groups--the people it's supposed to benefit--enter the movement over time, like slaves, feminists, blacks, & LGBTs, but as they don't have long philosophical traditions prior to that, they get sucked into one of those big 3 philosophical movements without realizing it, because they're arguing over tactics while the people in the long traditions are arguing over philosophy and definitions. The terms and assumptions get settled in ways that presume some philosophical tradition before the tacticians are even aware there was a debate.

The Marxist tradition begins with Hegel, who rejected rational thought in favor of rhetoric, yet, unlike Nietzsche, pretended that his rhetorical style was still logic. That initial move was the birth of what we now call continental philosophy. The rejection of rationality (and empiricism) while still claiming the mantle of logic was the critical move, because that is what made possible the development of an irrational, even anti-rational, philosophical tradition that was invulnerable to criticism, for the simple reason that it pretended to still have the power of logic, and hence be true until proven false, yet no longer recognized the rules of discourse that allow things to be proven false. (The deconstructionist theory of meaning is merely the admission, articulation, and justification of that anti-rationality.)

The Marxist tradition attracted modernists in the 1920s. Both were anti-rational, and the anti-technological aspect of modernism fit well with the anti-capitalist aspect of Marxism. Both had vague romantic notions about the pre-industrial era. Both were anti-foundational, meaning they denied the existing foundations: Marxism denied God, human nature, and the importance of human ideas (other than Marxism); modernism denied God, the transcendental, the notion of progress, and the validity of human ideas (other than modernism). Both were deeply dissatisfied with the status quo. Both fetishized revolution: Marxists never considered the idea that good political change could be brought about gradually, and modernists never considered the idea that good art could be made by doing something similar to something someone else had done, but better. Both saw themselves as an elite avant-garde destined to be misunderstood and demonized by the masses they were trying to free. Both often had totalitarian politics. The key difference was that Marxism was another grand narrative, and modernism was the renunciation of grand narratives. A lot of people were caught between the two, hoping that maybe this grand narrative would work out.

Modernism had the upper hand, because it existed in humanities, where logic and empiricism were weak, while Marxism claimed to be a type of economics. Economists eventually got fed up with Marxism and kicked Marxists out of economics departments, and they were able to land in humanities departments owing to the philosophical similarities I just listed above.

By the time post-modernism came along, Marxism was just a branch of modernism; nearly all remaining Marxists were art theorists or sociologists, both types were structuralists and then became deconstructionists when post-modernism arrived. Marxism and post-modernism go hand-in-hand everywhere now, even though there are some remaining contradictions between them, and many post-modernists aren't Marxists.

In the 1960s, the Christian, rational, & Marxist branches of the civil rights movement were all largely in agreement. As they drew nearer to their goals, the Christian and rational branches became less motivated to press further. The Marxist branch, however, only became more motivated, because their goal never had been to attain equality, but revolution. We see this today in the rhetoric of the social justice movement, which sounds like Marx with the global search-and-replace "bourgeois" => "straight white male" and "proletariat" => "women / POC / LGBT".

You can still find progressives who aren't in the Marxist tradition, but the phrase "social justice" suggests that they are in that tradition. People from the other tradition preferred "civil rights" or "equal rights". The "sons of Marxism" prefer "social justice" because it's more malleable, and they explicitly don't want to stop at equal rights. The people who are informed by the long philosophical tradition want to deconstruct all culture and social conventions. Their tradition is one of what Nietzsche would call ressentiment, or let's just say resentment.

There are other people in the social justice movement, but they don't have 170 years of tradition, philosophy, and activist culture keeping them united and on target, and they'll probably just be white noises that cancel each other out in the end. If you read a summary of a debate over factual matters within the social justice movement, matters that should be decided by checking with reality or with social convention--I'm talking about questions like "what do we mean by race?" or "is gender socially constructed?"--you'll see the same disregard for empirical tests or facts on the ground that you see in Marx, Saussure, Althusser, and Derrida. It is simply assumed that the way to resolve these issues is for everyone to say what is most politically expedient for them, then form factions and see which faction wins. The base determines the superstructure.

Where does socialism stand in all this? I don't think socialism is considered part of the social justice movement. It's linked with Marxism, but the social justice movement tends to suppress talk about poverty, because programs that addressed poverty in a race-and-gender-blind way would take a lot of the wind out of their sails. Mention of economic class is conspicuously absent from most social justice rhetoric that I've seen, except when it's specifically linked with a race, e.g., "poor blacks."

5273060

There's a few pieces of that I'd reject - the big one being that 'The groups got content in the 60s', whereas what I'd argue is that the groups fell apart in the 60s because their morale finally shattered after their major leaders were assassinated; losing Kennedy, King, and Kennedy in particular was a triple-whammy against that, and then 1968 Chicago was the final deathblow; that and the Vietnam Albatross gave Nixon his way in and after that the US went through 12 years of soul-searching before Reagan took over the cultural conversation and dominated it until recently; it's arguably only in the past decade that the Reagan Social Era has finally come to a close, as the Bush-Clinton-Bush years remained mostly dominated by Reaganite orthodoxy on the cultural scene with the first disruptive force being the GLBT movement; and what really kicked it all off was a new war albatross in Afghanistan/Iraq, and then 2008; yet again we're seeing a cultural realignment, although the exact shape of things to come remains in the air.

There may well be philosophical marxists out there but the vast majority I see active in such things are angry teenagers or 20-somethings; or, if they are older than that, that's only due to length of immersion. Perhaps in academia some of that is there but what's galvanized the modern 'SJW' crowd is social media. Academic theory I suppose provides a backdrop but I've seen very few in the more rabid camp on either side who can actually argue it while citing anybody in that regard.

5273221

There may well be philosophical marxists out there but the vast majority I see active in such things are angry teenagers or 20-somethings; or, if they are older than that, that's only due to length of immersion. Perhaps in academia some of that is there but what's galvanized the modern 'SJW' crowd is social media. Academic theory I suppose provides a backdrop but I've seen very few in the more rabid camp on either side who can actually argue it while citing anybody in that regard.

Fair enough. I think that's always been the case, though--even while Marx was alive, few Marxists understood him. But OTOH you could argue that Leninists weren't really Marxists, that Paul wasn't really a Christian, that the revolutionaries destroy the revolutionary doctrine.

If they don't have a theory, though, then they can't really be said to have a position. Then I can't even talk about them.

BTW, I kept editing my comment for a half hour after you read it, not realizing you'd already replied. :P

I really think the assassinations united the groups in the 1960s, rather than making them fall apart. Little was achieved until after JFK & Malcolm X were assassinated. Their major movements and victories were after all 4 assassinations. Feminism & the anti-war movement barely existed in 1968. The Civil Rights Act was signed a week after King was shot. Woodstock was in 1969. Gloria Steinem was almost unknown until 1969. Kent State was in 1970. The ERA passed Congress in 1972 (but was never ratified by enough states). I'm mixing in the war movement, but the war movement was how the social justice movement took over English departments in the US.

5273283

Hah. Had no idea you'd kept editing! Tsk, tsk. A Bad Horse indeed

But yea; the timing isn't exact but if I were playing 'How did that all work out' I'd speculate it's a case of 'Assassinations gave a short-term boost, but eventually the lack of leadership caused it to fall'. The Act may have been signed a week after Dr. King was shot, but it was the culmination of over a decade of movement leading up to it. The Anti-War movement definitely existed, since Vietnam was why LBJ didn't seek to run again. Feminism really started more with Betty Friedan in 1963 than Steinem I would argue, but even then if we look at our history portrays it, there's none of the aspirational high-minded rhetoric we assign to the Civil Rights era.

My greater point, I think, is that the Civil Rights movement began to die with King, and that era of revolution was put into the ground with Bobby Kennedy. Anti-War itself still had steam, but activist progressivism as a whole pretty much went into hibernation for nearly 40 years; there were victories over time but I'd call that more generational change than any major civic movement. OWS is the first time we've really seen something fan up in the US since that era, and part of why it got nothing done was that it had no leadership or structure; 'leaderless movement' sounds good until you need to get things done.

5273497 Bleah, I was really over-simplifying. I like to reduce everything to theory, but it's kind of silly.
I don't even know whether most people in Occupy called it a "social justice movement". Micah White does.

5273521

Some do, but Occupy at least from what I saw was principally an economic movement; the main reason I'd say there's a lot of overlap is just because young active people who support one camp tend to be at least sympathetic to the other, so the Occupy economic thought is oft comorbid with some form of belief in social justice (Which is yea, kinda a crappy phrase and probably ready for a new reframing to shed the tainted SJW label at least among those of us who care more about trying to not alienate the opposition)