So... fat chicks.

[Eyclonus]

I'll just make the obvious analogy that this thread has ballooned out of proportion, like a fatchick at a 24/7 sushi train.

 

[Joeshie]

That's the whole point of critical theory, which serves as the basis of a lot of modern feminist theory. Everything is open to analysis and (dare I say it?) deconstruction. It's about understanding why we think what we think.

Unfortunately, as a consequence of a variety of issues, the academics who serve as the gatekeepers of modern critical theory and literary theory are often too busy circling their wagons against uninformed external attacks (like this bullshit XKCD strip [http://xkcd.com/451/]) to deeply criticize some of the fundamental elements of their own fields.

-- Alex

Holy shit, thank you for that XKCD comic. It's absolutely beautiful.

 

[Alex_P]

I think you've misunderstood Alex_P's point (assuming I understand it). He wasn't talking about an "us" or "them": he's talking about how our *culture* indoctrinates the *people* (male OR female) who share that culture.

But his implication is that the point he makes is correct whilst people attuned to the same culture are incorrect. That's having your cake and eating it, if you'll pardon the analogy.

Rephrase, please. Which point? I don't have a single unifying point. The post that started that little set of comments is an explanation of the basic, archetypical "feminist" response to "But a woman drew the picture so how can it be sexist?" Which is simply that sexism can be institutional and unconscious as well as personalized and malicious.

Do you disagree with the fundamental idea that culture strongly influences not only what we think but how we think? If so, I'm willing to have that discussion somewhere, for kicks.

If not, what don't you like? The idea that modern gender norms are "damage," as I've described them?

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

Holy shit, thank you for that XKCD comic. It's absolutely beautiful.

But fundamentally flawed. I haven't taken any formal lit-crit and I can spot the mistake in the last panel from a mile away. "The deconstruction"? Bzzt, automatic lit-crit fail!

Dress up the words on the other panels with just a little bit more fancy jargon and most of XKCD's readers wouldn't get them, either.

(And, yes, I have heard of the Sokal Affair. We can talk about that if you want.)

-- Alex

 

[reizza]

I'll just make the obvious analodgy that this thread has ballooned out of proportion, like a fatchick at a 24/7 sushi train.

I would BECOME very...obese if there was a 24/7 sushi train, I hope it is never invented.

also I concur.

 

[Joeshie]

Holy shit, thank you for that XKCD comic. It's absolutely beautiful.

But fundamentally flawed. I haven't taken any formal lit-crit and I can spot the mistake in the last panel from a mile away. "The deconstruction"? Bzzt, automatic lit-crit fail!

Dress up the words on the other panels with just a little bit more fancy jargon and most of XKCD's readers wouldn't get them, either.

(And, yes, I have heard of the Sokal Affair. We can talk about that if you want.)

-- Alex

Your bullshit detector seems to have gone off because of a problem with the grammar of the sentence, rather than having to do with problems of the content.

I dunno. I could bullshit my way out of a thousand mile maze in high school and what few courses I took in college. It always seemed to me that deconstructionism, (which is the area of literary critique I was laughing at, rather than the whole) seems more concerned with how the ideas are presented rather than the ideas itself. Big words and stylish explainations.

Likewise, even if I grant that somehow, it is concerned with the content, it's a pointless activity. Any bit of argument you make can easily be countered by any sort of deconstructing I do. Real knowledge seems to be rarely gained in the activity and ultimately seems to come off as some sort of pseudo-intellectual circle jerk. I remember reading that terribly self-involved article on the feminism behind Portal rolling my eyes the entire time. I can't help but feel that deconstructionism actively pursues the meaning behind the meaning even when there is none. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I too have heard of the Sokal Affair and have already discussed it to death before. I would rather not get into that kind of discussion again.

 

[Raicheal]

Entirely beside the fact of whether or not Sony is being stupid, I am pretty sure princesses back in the day and age when princesses were common, were fat. After all they got whatever they wanted to eat and didn't have to work. Not all princesses are like the Disney princesses for heavens sake - in fact I doubt any were. And lets not forget that you normally don't save a princess out of love and romance, you do it cuz her father rules the frickin' country and if you want to gain his favor you do what he wants.

In essence they are adding a cute spin to something that seems entirely normal. It is the romanticized ideal of a princess that is sexist/biased, and that ideal comes -heaven forbid- from society in general!

 

[Eyclonus]

Oh it has been invented reizza...

 

[Joeshie]

And like I keep saying, the longer this thread goes on, the less wacky she looks.

Does she really look less wacky? Seeing spawn of the internet come out of the woodworks to cackle at her fat face does not really give any sort of substance to her original position.

No no--good questions. Let me give an example of the difference between education and indoctrination:

Indoctrination: You should believe A.

Education: You should believe A because you already agreed with my demonstration that if B is true, then A must be true as well. And you yourself told me that you believe B to be true, so, it logically follows from your own beliefs that you should add "A is true" to those beliefs.

Is that much of a difference? It's a bit longer, but education ultimately boils down to appealing to authority.

Education: A bunch of guys did a bunch of research to figure out why this is the answer. You could do it yourself to find out how to do it, but you're just going to take our word for it.

 

[Joeshie]

And like I keep saying, the longer this thread goes on, the less wacky she looks.

Does she really look less wacky? Seeing spawn of the internet come out of the woodworks to cackle at her fat face does not really give any sort of substance to her original position.

How does "seeing spawn of the internet come out of the woodworks to cackle at her fat face" not give substance to her original point that people 'cackle at fat faces'?

Well, I didn't actually read her post, but from what I gathered, her complaint was that this game will influence people to cackle at fat faces. If her point was to say "people cackle at fat faces" I must agree, but I was under the impression that she placed blame on the game for increasing hate against fat people, which she gives no real reason to suggest why this would be the case.

Some people will always cackle at fat faces, regardless of social pressure. Having those people come out of the woodworks doesn't necessarily give any support to her original arguement.

 

[Altorin]

from what I can see, it's basically just a puzzle game, where you have to move a ball (a fat princess) through a maze (the enemy castle).

all that aside, who the hell cares? If this were on the NES, and it probably could have been, it would have been worth a laugh, and then the gameplay would determine if it was good or not.

and if it were on the NES, girls wouldn't play it, cause girls didn't play the NES

duh.

 

[Alex_P]

from what I can see, it's basically just a puzzle game, where you have to move a ball (a fat princess) through a maze (the enemy castle).

Well, a multiplayer team-based puzzle game about controlling resources and developing tactics and counters? That kinda sounds like the "strategy" genre.

-- Alex

 

[Joeshie]

Where do you see any appeal to authority in my description of Education?

Sorry, I was having trouble understanding what point you were trying to get across. In which case I now say that your description was not a very good description of the educational process. My original point was to say that a large part of our education system relies upon appeal to authority to make it's case. Your description of the education rarely plays out like the way you described, nor should it. To have each student work through the logic of other peoples discoveries, would be ridiculous.

To give an example: The education systems still teach Newton's Three Laws of Motion, despite them being technically incorrect. The education system effectively tells them that you have to take our word for it that these values work over a range of set values to be approximate, but I can tell you that most people will come away with the understanding that Newton's Laws of Motion are indeed correct.

Education and it's knowledge are based upon logic, but imparting that knowledge to others requires that the learner often use an appeal to authority. Not to say that there is anything wrong with appealing to authority under certain circumstances or that education doesn't use the above method you described.

That's not at all what I described. How does "you already agreed with my demonstration" or "you yourself told me that you believe" or 'if B is true, then A must be true...B is true...A is true' (which is called modus ponens in logic) equal "you're just going to take our word for it"? How is applying logic to the beliefs people accept to show they should believe something new an appeal to authority? Isn't an appeal to logic and a person's own beliefs the exact opposite of an appeal to authority?

As long as we're bringing out our favorite xkcd strips: Unscientific [http://xkcd.com/397/]

Sorry, I was just trying to explain (poorly) that that is what I had meant by education and indoctrination being similar.

Really, the only big difference between education and indoctrination is that when forced to examine and prove the doctrine which they have been told, they usually can't. Education is supposed to allow you the tools to critically examine what your told, but sometimes many people can't do this with many things they are taught.

I think that when it comes down to it, we pretty much agree with each other, just that I'm really pointing out the big similarity that education and indoctrination have with each other.

 

[Alex_P]

Holy shit, thank you for that XKCD comic. It's absolutely beautiful.

But fundamentally flawed. I haven't taken any formal lit-crit and I can spot the mistake in the last panel from a mile away. "The deconstruction"? Bzzt, automatic lit-crit fail!

Dress up the words on the other panels with just a little bit more fancy jargon and most of XKCD's readers wouldn't get them, either.

(And, yes, I have heard of the Sokal Affair. We can talk about that if you want.)

-- Alex

Your bullshit detector seems to have gone off because of a problem with the grammar of the sentence, rather than having to do with problems of the content.

I dunno. I could bullshit my way out of a thousand mile maze in high school and what few courses I took in college. It always seemed to me that deconstructionism, (which is the area of literary critique I was laughing at, rather than the whole) seems more concerned with how the ideas are presented rather than the ideas itself. Big words and stylish explainations.

Likewise, even if I grant that somehow, it is concerned with the content, it's a pointless activity. Any bit of argument you make can easily be countered by any sort of deconstructing I do. Real knowledge seems to be rarely gained in the activity and ultimately seems to come off as some sort of pseudo-intellectual circle jerk. I remember reading that terribly self-involved article on the feminism behind Portal rolling my eyes the entire time. I can't help but feel that deconstructionism actively pursues the meaning behind the meaning even when there is none. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I too have heard of the Sokal Affair and have already discussed it to death before. I would rather not get into that kind of discussion again.

Well, grammar is content. Talking about "the deconstruction" is talking about some kind of distinct, individual instance of a thing. Which is something deconstruction clearly is not. (As much as deconstruction is "clearly" anything. Fuck Derrida.)

I'm pretty sure I could think of some suitably obscure phrase that most XKCD-reading laymen would think made perfect sense in context, too. Hell, even total bullshit like "Have you tried Fourier analysis?" or "Which language has the most glottal stops?"

I really wish lit-crit wasn't under attack for a while so that it actually had time to clean house instead of being forced to close ranks around bad ideas. Maybe then Derrida's obscurism would get the boot.

Still, most of academia is a circle-jerk by my standards. Just look at how every experiment has to be turned into a really fancy formal paper loaded with ridiculously overblown claims about the novelty of what was attempted and the significance of the conclusion -- how much of that is useful work and how much is pointless pro-forma posturing? I can tell you about some horribly manipulative statements from CS papers I've read, if you're bored. (Or we could beat the decades-old dead horse of "String theory: useful or pointless math-wank?")

-- Alex