I for one welcome our new robot comrades
Human intelligence was already artificial. Communists should embrace our cyborg comrades under a framework of neurodiversity, disibality justice, and Marxist feminism.
Category: Political Philosophy
Ambivalent women don’t have to turn TERF
TERFs aren’t wrong to say that sex is material and that womanhood is a political class. Where the TERF analysis goes wrong is in where it locates the boundaries of that class. There is no singular, universal experience of what it means to be a woman – for any biological criterion TERFs put forth, there will be some cis women who don’t meet it. For every social experience of marginalization that has a gendered component to it, there are some cis women who do not experience it. The common thread in defining woman-as-a-class is not any essential quality – it’s the inherently social and political act of identifying with that class, and therefore being seen (at least intermittently) as part of that class.
Against Bipartisanship: The Three Kinds of Swing Voters
There are three major parties in U.S. politics: Democrat, Republican, and None-Of-The-Above (e.g. not voting). So really there are three types of swing voters: N-D swing voters (left of democrat), D-R swing voters (“moderates”), and R-N swing voters (right of republican). In competitive races, the None-Of-The-Above voters are the ones who see Democrats and Republicans as so similar — and unpalatable — that it isn’t worth jumping through the hoops necessary to vote for one or the other.
The far right has achieved its electoral success through a combination of making it harder for N-D swing voters to vote, and mobilizing R-N swing voters with more and more extreme right wing Republican candidates. Sure, a few D-R swing voters swung D in this election. Those are the swing voters the far right could afford to lose, for the sake of mobilizing the R-N swing voters. So the Democratic Party’s strategy of compromising with moderates at the expense of the base (the margins), is a losing strategy.
Against Arrogance
Deciding that my “thinking very hard” is better than yours either requires more specific (externally observable) criteria, or an arrogant assumption that I am smarter. Any argument that depends on the objective superiority of one person’s subjective internal processes over another’s, is arrogant. I claim that arrogant arguments should be avoided, on both ethical and epistemological grounds – and any framework that can only be justified with arrogance, should be discarded. Where there are multiple narratives that are equally “true” (in predictive value and inter-subjective evaluation), I propose we break ties by looking at what is more useful instead of resorting to arrogance in a quest for Truth.
A Difference of Values: “This is by design” does not refute “This is wrong”
Fact: “our government was not designed to be a democracy where everyone has equal say.”
Fact: “our government was designed to be a federation of states, all with their own government, which is why every state gets the same amount of Senators”
Those are both facts. They are both true. They are not opposing arguments any more than “the sun is a star” is a rebuttal to “the earth is a planet”. This is not a question of ignorance. The difference is in the implicit assumption about political imagination.
Honest Libertarians Support Reparations. Why Do Some Turn Fascist Instead?
Nozick’s Libertarianism had a Principle of Rectification that sounds a lot like reparations. Most of his fans ignore this, and many turn to fascism or white supremacy rather than accept that liberation can’t be capitalist.