Just received my copy of Cynical Theories by @ConceptualJames and @HPluckrose. I’m gonna dedicate a thread to simply quoting things I find interesting, and I’m gonna try to ignore the dumpster fire that is the news until I’m done reading it.

“The movement that takes up [postmodernism] presumptuously refers to its ideology simply as ‘Social Justice’ as though it alone seeks a just society and the rest of us are all advocating for something entirely different.” (p. 14)

“[simulacra] evinces the postmodernists’ tendency to seek the roots of meaning in language and to become overly concerned with the ways in which it shapes social reality through its ability to constrain and shape knowledge—that which represents what is true.” (p. 27)

“The scientific method...is not seen as a better way of producing and legitimizing knowledge than any other, but as one cultural approach among many, as corrupted by biased reasoning as any other.” (p. 32)

“...postmodern Theory seeks not to be factually true but to be strategically useful: in order to bring about its own aims, morally virtuous and politically useful by its own definitions.” (p. 39)

“...the speaker’s meaning has no more authority than the hearer’s interpretation and thus intention cannot outweigh impact. Thus...there is no space...to insist that [one’s interpretation] followed from a misunderstanding of what had been said.” (p. 40)

“‘[Q]ueer’ is...that which falls outside of categories...the ‘queering’ of something refers to the destabilization of categories and the disruption of norms or...truths associated with it. The purpose...is to liberate the ‘queer’ from the oppression of being categorized.” (p. 54)

“It is therefore, in [Social Justice’s] view, a moral obligation to share the prestige of rigorous research with ‘other forms of research,’ including superstition, spiritual beliefs, cultural traditions and beliefs, identity-based experiences, and emotional responses.” (p. 62)

“Colonizers justify their oppression of the subordinated group by regarding it as a monolithic ‘other’ that can be stereotyped and disparaged. Strategic essentialism [likewise]...it defines a particular kind of identity politics, built around intentional double standards.”(p. 73)

“[M]ost rigorous, empirical historians attempt to mitigate the tendency of history to be written from the bias of the writer by seeking disconfirming evidence of their claims, to help them get at the truth—which they, unlike Theorists, believe exists.” (p. 80)

“‘Research justice’ amounts to judging scholarly productions not by their rigor or quality but by the identity of their producer...It is hard to see how scientific theories that don’t correspond with reality and consequently don’t work can benefit marginalized people, or anyone.”

“[W]ith enough motivation and creativity, anything can be problematized. Intense sensitivity to language and the reading of power imbalances into all interactions...are common to all forms of applied postmodern Social Justice scholarship.” (p. 88)

“Sex is to gender as man is to manly or woman to womanly... If the sentence ‘She is a very masculine woman,’ makes sense to you, you already distinguish sex—a biological category—from gender—behaviors and traits commonly manifested more in one sex.” (p. 92)

“People generally do not appreciate being told that their sex, gender, and sexuality are not real, or are wrong, or bad—something one would think queer Theorists might appreciate better than anyone.” (p. 110)

“[C]ritical race scholars are discontented with liberalism as a framework for addressing America’s racial problems...[Liberals] believe in...equality, especially equal treatment for all persons, regardless of their different histories or current situations.” (p. 115)

“The number of axes of social division under intersectionality can be almost infinite—but they cannot be reduced to the individual. (People often joke that the individual is the logical endpoint...but this misunderstands the fundamental reliance on group identity...” (p. 127)

“[Axes] all have to be understood in relation to one another so that the positionality each intersection of them confers can be identified and engaged...It reduces everything to...one...focus & interpretation: prejudice, as understood under the power dynamics asserted by Theory.”

“Because of it internal complexity and single-minded focus on oppression, intersectionality is riddled with divisions and subcategories, which exist in competition with—or even in unrepentant contradiction to—each other.” (p. 128)

“Critical race Theory’s hallmark [paranoia]...[is] a kind of reverse...(CBT), which makes its participants less mentally and emotionally healthy than before. The...purpose of CBT is to train oneself not to catastrophize and interpret every situation in the most negative light...

...and the goal is to develop a more positive and resilient attitude towards the world, so that one can engage with it... If we train young people to read...prejudice into every interaction, they may increasingly see the world as hostile to them and fail to thrive in it.”(p. 132)

“[T]he focus on the relevance of one’s standpoint to one’s access to knowledge...results in large sections of academic papers dedicated to scholars performatively acknowledging their positionality and problematizing their own work, rather than doing something useful.” (p. 157)

“This idea that disabled people have a responsibility to use their disabilities to subvert social norms—and even refuse any attempts at treatment or cure—in the service of the postmodern disruptions of categories is yet another alarming feature of disability studies...” (p. 165)

“Given the current problem with the rise of victimhood culture, which assigns superior status to marginalized identities, there may be an increased temptation to become more rather than less disabled and to focus overwhelmingly on one’s disability.” (p. 171)

“Fat studies spends a great deal of time trying to associate...with forms of activism and scholarship that address prejudice against people on the grounds of immutable characteristics...this is frequently unconvincing due to the evidence that obesity is a result of overeating.”

“[M]arginalized people can be oppressed to the point of psychic death by not being understood, but their right to be completely incomprehensible should also be respected.” (On the concepts of hermeneutical death & privacy, derivatives of epistemic injustice—p. 190)

“A problem arises...when any school of thought refuses to submit its ideas to rigorous scrutiny, rejects that kind of examination on principle, and asserts that any attempts to subject it to thoughtful criticism are immoral, insincere, and proof of its thesis.” (p. 199)

“While some scholarship...could help redress imbalances in society, it is undermined by that which is not... In no serious discipline do we so plainly see a drive to be morally right (or righteous) instead of factually and theoretically correct.” (p.218)

“Calls for the punishment of...prominent individuals who have spoken against Social Justice, often unwittingly, are often referred to as ‘cancel culture’. This chilling practice involves the utter destruction of someone’s career and reputation...” (p. 222)

“[Social Justice] objections [in art] usually fall into one of two sometimes contradictory categories—not representing minority groups on the one hand, and appropriating aspects of minority culture, on the other.” (p. 223)

“In victimhood culture, status comes from being seen as victimized and therefore eliciting support... [I]t tends to read power imbalances and victimization into many interactions—and even occasionally, invents them—to exploit...’the natural currency of victimhood.’” (p. 229)

“The increasingly interpretive, Theoretical analysis of discourses found within Social Justice approaches is a direct reflection of the radical reduction of social injustice.” (p. 231)

“The postmodern knowledge principle exhorts us to do a better job of 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 and 𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨. However, we are under no obligation to ‘listen and believe’ or to ‘shut up and listen.’” (p. 252)

“We all live in the same world and are all humans first and humans from particular cultures second, thus most of what is true about the world has nothing to do with us and most of what is true about us is true about us as humans and not as members of any particular culture.”

“Believe what you will, but, in exchange, you must allow others to believe what they will—or won’t, as the case may be. This is accompanied by the inalienable right to reject the moral injunctions and prescriptions of any particular ideology without blame.” (p. 263)

Aaaaand, done. It was a nice read, perhaps repetitive at times, though probably necessary given the topic of Social Justice (ideology) itself is abrasive and oppositional to coherence, comprehensiveness, and reason. I’ll certainly be RTing from this thread of useful explanations.