No, he was an actual specific powerful person, who’s living word could set human beings into action.
The kind of “power” canvassed in the kind of ideology I’m talking about is a vague and usually unfalsifiable idea about social relations. It is precisely the same sort of extension of terms that you get in every ideology of this kind, where a term like “exploitation” or “harassment” has on the one hand a specific, concrete, falsifiable meaning in ordinary discourse, and on the other hand a more esoteric, unfalsifiable, speculative meaning, in terms of the Theory.
As I said, none of those kinds of ideas are entirely without merit, it’s the context in which they’re taken for granted as true, and in terms of which people give themselves license to pre-judge other human beings, and set their individual choices at naught, that’s problematic. It’s when such “critical theories” become untethered to reality testing, when they become “gospel”, that they are dangerous, and lead to exactly the same utterly predictable purge->removal of moderates->bastards taking charge type of situation, each and every time, without fail.
You keep tacking this on there.
And you keep being uncomfortable with the possibility that it belongs there.
It’s like you think any word with an -ism at the end automatically constitutes some sort of evil thought-framework that is undesirable.
Don’t be silly. I like capitalism. But I still wouldn’t “raise my son to be a capitalist” BECAUSE THE VERY NOTION IS A LUDICROUS AND QUASI-RELIGIOUS IMPOSITION ON A CHILD.
Of course it probably doesn’t help that you keep redefining feminism to suit your purposes instead of just using it’s basic meaning. I mean you would agree that you should raise your child to beleive that all people are equal regardless of the race colour or creed, so I guess I don’t know why you would exclude gender.
Christ soapy, we’ve been through this already: the dictionary definition is irrelevant. The “basic meaning” of the WORD is a different thing form the “basic meaning” of the ACTUAL LIVING SYSTEM OF HUMAN INTERACTIONS, of thought as it plays out, as it acts in the world, as it behaves, as people talk amongst themselves in terms of their theories. The way feminists behave is very often illiberal and inegalitarian: they seek to police speech, to alter the judicial process in an illiberal way; they purge their own, they prejudicially condemn any criticism as necessarily ill-intentioned on account of the bare gender of the critic, or if the critic is of the same sex, on the basis of an idiotic notion like “internalized misogyny”. Everything that happens proves to them that their analysis is correct, nothing could possibly prove them wrong. This is the mode of intersectional “social justice” all-round. Consider a particularly ludicrous example in recent times, the young lady who wore a hijab to test reactions. Everyone was nice to her. Did that lead her to modify her hypothesis? No, the nice behaviour was rationalized away as “overcompensating” for innate racism. The theory was saved! The same kind of doublethink is rampant in every part of the movement, with race, with gender, just as it was earlier with the strictly Marxian versions, with socioeconomic classes (e.g.every criticism is “bourgeois” and therefore to be discounted automatically).
I think you might not have very good perspective on the real world. I think maybe you are breathing your own exhaust.
And I think you are infected by a sort of memetic flu that leads you to rationalize away everything I’m saying, that urges you to intuitively seek for false intellectual equivalences and false moral equivalences, that urges you to intuitively seek to “heresy hunt” and peer into the necessarily black heart of any doubter. All because you’re afraid of being called names - that’s the hook the virus has in your mind. More properly speaking, these kinds of bad replicators hook onto social shaming as their main mechanism of spreading - social shaming that would normally be attached to a specific, falsifiable sense of a boo/hooray word (e.g. “equality”, “rape”, “harassment”, “exploitation” etc.). One doesn’t want to flag agreement with something bad, or disagreement with something good. The mind-virus hooks onto that by smuggling in the broader, Theory-laden senses of these words, while retaining the same social shaming weight to them as was formerly attached to the specific, falsifiable senses of the terms. Bait& Switch (or Motte & Bailey).
Liberalism is just another ideology. Of course government should operate pragmatically for the benefit of society rather than slavishly following some fixed idea. Is the constitution a good starting point or a holy document, for example? Were the founders demigods? Is taxation fundamentally evil? Hmmm.
The considerations I outlined are deeper than that. There has to be some basis of agreement before society can begin, just as there has to be some basis of agreement re. logic before conversation and argument can begin. Democracy as a system of voting people into positions of “authority” on the basis of bare majorities, has to have a foundation of a much bigger majority of people who agree on ground rules. Those ground rules are the basic “negative” human rights. If a large majority don’t agree on those prior to setting up government, then government is just the biggest bully with the biggest guns. If there’s any sense that can be gleaned from Rousseau’s concept of the “General Will”, it’s this, there has to be this basis of deeper, tacit agreement, or the political process can’t even get going.
And if an ideology like feminism seeks to break those ground rules (e.g. “listen and believe”, which stands in blatant contradiction to “innocent until proven guilty”), then it’s no longer liberal and no longer about equality of treatment by any treating agency, any more than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is of the people, democratic, or a republic. It’s a dangerous ideology (or rather, of course, potentially dangerous - although feminist nonsense memes like “1 in 5” and “Wage Gap” have managed to get as far as using the President of the United States as their mouthpiece, it is of course mere virtue signalling at the moment, and it would probably take a lot more termite-dining to become clear and present danger, but that’s why I said: early warning).
Of course liberalism is an ideology in a loose sense, but it’s not an ideology in the specific sense I’m talking about, in the sense in which ideologies all share the same quasi-religious Manichean structure in relation to a speculative, airy-fairy “source of power”.
