Sunday, March 31, 2019

For the Record: Alexandria Duet

Ancient Alexandria as imagined by the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Maarten van Heemskerck, via Short History.

Wingnuts went crazier than usual when Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez seemed to be saying that after overwhelming Democratic majorities pushed through the New Deal the Republicans stopped FDR from winning a third election by passing term limits, which makes no sense (how could they, if Democrats had overwhelming majorities?) and is also historically not true (that's the part the wingnuts noticed). Hahahaha, is your cute congresswoman really that ignorant?

Sadly, no, as a great blog team used to say. She's not perfect, but what she did was to blow a line she's been using correctly since well before her election:


@AOC also gave me an opportunity to introduce the Radio Yerevan joke to Twitter, thanks to Some Dude's interpretation of a group temper tantrum by Jordan Peterson and colleagues over the famous dictum from the introduction to Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, eds., 1992, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology,
the idea that objectivity is best reached only through rational thought is a specifically Western and masculine way of thinking -- one that we challenge throughout this book
—which may be good feminism but isn't good postmodernism, by the way, with its presupposition that some kind of pure objectivity is attainable and desirable, or good Popperianism either, I think, in which we believe objectivity is a mirage, not a property of humans at all, and the aim is toward a kind of perfect intersubjectivity where we all agree on what is definitely false and the standards for further progress.

Peterson, of course, is unaware of any modern or postmodern epistemology at all, to say nothing of the intellectual context of this statement or its origin in the Reflections on Gender and Science of Evelyn Fox Keller, 1985, who had no intention of repudiating objectivity, quite the opposite:

Ruth Watts, 2013, Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History.
Some Dude, anyway, who turns out to be a fairly notorious climate change denier called Ned Nikolov, decided to bring together Peterson's rage over a slightly exaggerated feminist position statement of 27 years ago with AOC and the Green New Deal:
I responded:


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