This entry will make no sense unless first you read these:
Hodes, C. (2023). A Settler Colonialism Induced Feminist Snap: A case study in IRS denialism and institutional violence in Canada. Feminist Asylum: A Journal of Critical Interventions, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.5195/faci.2023.107 , https://feministasylum.pitt.edu/faci/article/view/107, accessed September 15, 2023. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Not The Sharpest Pencil in the Box, July 22, 2023: https://paulosophicalvimplications.org/2023/07/22/not-the-sharpest-pencil-in-the-box/
The Hodes article is a bit rambling and tedious, but eventually she does get to the point. The question is, does she make one?
I teach the Philosophy of Religion. And one of the first things I acknowledge in that class is that absence of proof is not proof of absence. That there’s no proof, decisive or otherwise, for the existence of God doesn’t prove there isn’t one. Likewise, then, that there’s no evidence that Frances Widdowson is a racist doesn’t prove she’s not. But then neither does that she still could be establishes that she is. If it did then the same inference could be made about any of us. Victor Rodych is reporting that he hasn’t found any evidence that Widdowson is a racist, and he’s simply demanding of Caroline Hodes that she provide evidence that she is. Hodes counters that this demand makes Rodych a racist too.
This, apparently, is what the emerging discipline of (what Hodes calls) Discourse Analysis is contributing to academia, though I don’t think it’s particularly new. In my first-year critical thinking classes I teach that “Is the pope Catholic?” is not a question. It’s an affirmative response to the question that precedes it. But an historian asking how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust – was it six million, five, or seven? – is not Holocaust denial, and any ‘discourse analyst’ who thinks it is is just an idiot. As is anyone who thinks I’m an antisemite because I’m critical of the State of Israel.
This kind of sloppy, not to mention dangerous, reasoning is precisely why we need Kangals like Victor Rodych. Caroline Hodes is on record as wanting to breed them out. If she and her ilk succeed, it’s going to be a feast day for the wolves.
Categories: Critical Thinking, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Why My Colleagues Are Idiots
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