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Well, because I don't know what you mean by either semantic sidetracking or sophistry. Semantic sidetracking I would normally assume to mean sidetracking about the meanings of words, but in a sense this entire *thread* is a semantic sidetrack, and the only irrelevant part of it (this particular discussion here) is entirely non-semantic. "Sophistry" would be using rhetoric or capricious logic to "make the worse argument defeat the better", I assume, which is tricky because frequently subjective; it's rare that somebody believes their argument to be the worse.
I think the Invisibles thread you are talking about is here and, at the risk of being crucified by my PC labelmates, it was a larf, reacting to Count Adam's statment that I kept saying the Invisibles was sexist (can't think where, offhand, but hey). I said that Boy was a character with little character development who punched people a lot, in the same vein that I said that Fanny gets far less consensual sex than King Mob and Jolly Roger gets killed - it was an experiment to see how much people had invested in the idea of the Invisibles, and one based in some places on what turned out to be my imperfect recollection of some of the episodes I was describing. Others who know more about these things seem to think that it was useful to have somebody suggest that the Invisibles was not the right-on unit of perfect political reasoning that it was occasionally represented as being, because it stimulated debate. As it happens, *nobody* is accused of racism in that entire thread, except possibly "The Invisibles", a collection of comics which does not regularly post on Barbelith. If there is another thread where I accuse somebody of being a racist for disagreeing with my opinion of Boy, please do tell me where. That might show a severe lack of decorum.
As for the baby-killing Bengalis - well, if somebody tells me that there is an "unspoken rule" not to tell Bengalis in Whitechapel that their baby is showing up as female in an MRI because they will abort it, and then somebody else "proves" this by directing me to a study they have not read which says that Punjabis who are not in Whitechapel are known to kill babies after they have been born if they are female (that is, the only thing that is in common between the two situations is the colour of the skin of the people involved, the fact that at one point they or their parents or grandparents shared a continent and possibly their religion), then I am not going to be convinced that this is not lazy thinking. But in fact I did not call anyone a racist. I called Torqsidriver an unreliable source and a regurgitator of man-in-pub prejudice, citing his views on homosexual parents and Jews, and called Nick on not actually reading the sources he sought to use to prove that it made perfect sense a) to assume that Bengalis in Whitechapel aborted children shown to be female on their MRIs and b) that doctors were entitled to withold information about the sex of the parents' baby on the grounds that if they told them they would probably abort the child, because they are Bengali. It was *Nick* who said "I suppose that makes me racist", in a Godwin's law backhand, that is a move meant to make the person (in this case, me) back off and stop pressing the issue, because it plays on the liberal white middle-class (and either PC or anti-PC, depending on how you cut it) fear of being seen to accuse somebody of something as terrible as racism lightly. I don't think I much mentioned race, only misleading information, unsupported rumour and bad evidence.
(What I didn't mention at the time, and probably should have, is that I don't think you can tell the sex of a foetus with absolute certainty by MRI - if you can see the penis, you can tell it's a boy, but if you can't it could be either a boy or a girl because the penis may be concealed. I think this is the case right up to the 28-week mark when a foetus could legally be terminated. So the original fact was itself, I think, pretty dubious. Which was kind of the point.)
So, I don't know - does that make me PC? It's difficult, since the only definitions of PC we have tend to be written by people who see PC as a) monolithic and b) bad and wrong. It does, in passsing, mention that accusing people of throwing around terms like "racist" without due consideration (without due consideration) is actually pretty offensive in and of itself. |
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