Thx for this. It's something I've wrestled with in trying to work out my own politics. I find myself getting very frustrated by the people who insist revolution is the only path forward and anything less is being a sellout. But also understand the frustration of feeling like incrementalism dilutes and drowns actual change. It _is_ a fundamental tension that doesn't have an absolute resolution. And I think history tends to say that actual revolution is a) rare, b) bloody, and c) has as much chance of backfiring and making things worse as it does improving anything. Every Marxist revolution I can think of seems to have resulted in an authoritarian state, ultimately. But conversely: the conditions that sparked those revolutions were repressive and awful and deserved to be overthrown. I kind of hate it but am forced to conclude that slow, incremental, and perpetually insufficient progress is usually better. But as the essay says: "The challenge, then, is developing forms of political engagement that resist capture by either pole – that can work within existing conditions while maintaining sight of radical horizons."
The other issue brought up here is tribalism. I think it's hard to avoid that. And I think there is genuine danger in the seductive powers of disingenuous arguments, and looking at the speaker and not just the speech is an entirely legitimate way to assess motive and legitimacy. Feature not bug. Sure, you also have to resist the impulse to stay in echo chambers, but political actors (well-funded and platformed, usually) abusing the idea of the public square and good-faith debate to smuggle in propaganda is a much bigger problem. Refusing to rehash faux-arguments in favor of political talking points is a good thing that defends the utility and integrity of the public square; it's not a priori evidence that free thought and legitimate debate have been stifled.
I cannot applaud loudly enough in a purely text-based comment, but you can imagine it.
I am struck by how well this article examines many different aspects of binary this-or-that arguments about trans existence, and from them both distills a generalized pattern and observes that the pattern itself is the problem. That's not easy to do.
I arrived at a similar "radical thinker" position in an article I wrote a while back on the narrow question of trans women in sports (https://sonjamblack.substack.com/p/what-nobodys-asking-about-trans-women) and am more than a little jealous that I did not spot the generalization Freya has identified and articulated here.
Thx for this. It's something I've wrestled with in trying to work out my own politics. I find myself getting very frustrated by the people who insist revolution is the only path forward and anything less is being a sellout. But also understand the frustration of feeling like incrementalism dilutes and drowns actual change. It _is_ a fundamental tension that doesn't have an absolute resolution. And I think history tends to say that actual revolution is a) rare, b) bloody, and c) has as much chance of backfiring and making things worse as it does improving anything. Every Marxist revolution I can think of seems to have resulted in an authoritarian state, ultimately. But conversely: the conditions that sparked those revolutions were repressive and awful and deserved to be overthrown. I kind of hate it but am forced to conclude that slow, incremental, and perpetually insufficient progress is usually better. But as the essay says: "The challenge, then, is developing forms of political engagement that resist capture by either pole – that can work within existing conditions while maintaining sight of radical horizons."
The other issue brought up here is tribalism. I think it's hard to avoid that. And I think there is genuine danger in the seductive powers of disingenuous arguments, and looking at the speaker and not just the speech is an entirely legitimate way to assess motive and legitimacy. Feature not bug. Sure, you also have to resist the impulse to stay in echo chambers, but political actors (well-funded and platformed, usually) abusing the idea of the public square and good-faith debate to smuggle in propaganda is a much bigger problem. Refusing to rehash faux-arguments in favor of political talking points is a good thing that defends the utility and integrity of the public square; it's not a priori evidence that free thought and legitimate debate have been stifled.
I cannot applaud loudly enough in a purely text-based comment, but you can imagine it.
I am struck by how well this article examines many different aspects of binary this-or-that arguments about trans existence, and from them both distills a generalized pattern and observes that the pattern itself is the problem. That's not easy to do.
I arrived at a similar "radical thinker" position in an article I wrote a while back on the narrow question of trans women in sports (https://sonjamblack.substack.com/p/what-nobodys-asking-about-trans-women) and am more than a little jealous that I did not spot the generalization Freya has identified and articulated here.