I'd also like to point out that part of the problem with these discussions of good and bad masculinity is the constant sliding back and forth that we do between "masculinity" and "men." We can argue over how much of a market share different versions of masculinity have amongst men, but the heart of the problem is not one of market share, but rather of which version(s) of masculinity are treated as if they are representative of the gender as a whole. Toxic masculinity is increasing its market share and has tremendous traction and influence among younger men who are anxious about their gender status.
And I think it's important to let young men know that when we criticize a model of masculinity as toxic, we are not saying that men as a gender are all toxic, just that particular ways of being a man in the world are toxic to both the world around them and to the men who are practicing that way of being. Everyone involved is damaged and depleted by it.
"Not all men" doesn't seem to me to be a good tactic for combating the flood of online influencers who are poisoning society with their zero-sum, competitive, dominance-focused, deeply insecure and damaging version of masculinity. We need a compelling alternative that is not based in zero-sum, winner-take-all dominance.
2 weeks ago
My first response to the question of what to call a non-toxic masculinity was "feminist" And it's true. It is also, however, a sure way to lose the very men to whom you are trying to give an alternative way of being.
I blame the patriarchy.
I would also say "non-toxic masculinity," but an evangelical author has already built a brand around that one. Strike two.
I'm leaning towards "regenerative masculinity" - analogous with regenerative agriculture: a masculinity that builds up the other beings in its environment rather than depleting the others around it.
Something like that...
Masculinity needs to be sustainable. Toxic masculinity isn't. It harms every being involved and leaves all of them depleted.
2 weeks ago
The version of Grok I’m using is 4.20 (Beta). It’s made up of four agents, one of whom fact-checks the results. The claim is that it reduces hallucinations by about two-thirds. So, progress is being made.
And what would you say if you were teaching a research class and one of your students told you that they had two friends helping them find sources and a fourth who was checking to make sure that none of the other three were making up quotes, and that the one in charge of checking was now able to find two out of every three references that one of the others had made up or misread?
I'd rather have a student who actually read his sources, understood them, synthesized them in productive ways, and could be relied upon to manage his attribution transparently, accurately, and ethically.
None of the four agents can do those things, and the research is built on the hope that at some point of scale that sort of thing will just emerge, spontaneously, out of scale and a momentary spark of genius. They think their agents are all little synthetic Hellen Kellers just waiting for their water pump moment.
But their agents are not beings. What is there that they hope will miraculously self-actualize?
2 weeks ago
Sorry, CharlesWT, but LLMs are incapable of doing research or of taking a critical perspective on the research that it is parsing, sampling, and remixing. At best it can assemble a preliminary reading list and gather a sampling of annotations for that list. It's potentially a powerful research tool in the hands of an expert, but can't be relied upon to summarize even a single text without hallucinating material and misrepresenting information.
It does, however, assemble very convincing imitations of scholarly research, for those who want to scratch an authority itch without having to go through any of the actual work of building expertise.
2 weeks ago
Grok says - Research suggests that, on average, boys in traditional US public primary (elementary) schools exhibit more externalizing behaviors—such as higher activity levels, impulsivity, restlessness, and disruption—compared to girls.
That's a lot of qualifiers for that research (boys in 1) traditional 2) US 3) public 4) primary schools). How does that compare to boys in other countries? How much of this is influenced by the US public schools being the school of last resort for students with behavioral issues? Are their issues related to family socioeconomic status or socialization patterns rooted in those socioeconomic groups? And not specified - when were those studies done? Do we have data over a span of years, decades, or were all these studies done over a relatively short span of years or months? Were they pre- or post-pandemic? Do we have data that compares those periods? Are all of these studies from the standardized testing era? Are they from schools that still provide recess and physical education, or from those who have done away with those two things in order to maximize test prep time?
Not questions that I expect anyone to answer, just the sort of questions I think need to be looked into in order not to bake in some leading assumptions.
Also, I automatically bracket anything that comes from Grok, especially where it concerns gender studies. I think it prudent always to wonder if Musk has tried to tweak the algorithms and training to pander to his own biases on gender issues. We know he has a whole host of those issues.
That aside, I would never call any synopsis that any of these LLMs put out a survey of the research. At best it is what I'd call a "preliminary pre-search." At a minimum, I'd have to go through every one of the sources that Grok "cites" to look at its parameters and methodology, and see if those studies said anything about the questions that I ask above, or express any uncertainty about their own conclusions, etc..
2 weeks ago
Pro Bono - I'm not getting into your first diagreement since that was with GftNC's comment, and I'm not going to assume that I know all the particulars of her critical perspective and would rather not distort her position. But the other two...
It’s not exclusively about sex. But it’s a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
Standard warning I would give if this were a class in which the conversation turns to subjects that can be difficult for survivors of sexual violence to manage - mediate your engagement with this as necessary for your own wellbeing...
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual or gendered violence do not at all have to be about sexual desire on the part of the person perpetrating the violence. A heterosexual man can rape another male with an object and feel no sexual arousal. Likewise, rape during war often has less to do with any sexual desire than it does with "spoiling" the enemy's women, which is why, again, it can often involve inanimate objects. The purpose of such things is not the sexual pleasure of the attacker, but rather for the person subject to the violence to be penetrated against their will - preferably in front of witnesses - to demonstrate to them their powerlessness and lack of agency, to reduce them to the status of a woman if they are male, or to demonstrate to any males that the woman "belongs to" that they were powerless to protect their women from harm.
(Disclaimer - this conversation assumes a patriarchal society. People who do ethnography in matrilineal cultures say that the individuals in those cultures have a hard time making sense out of these attitudes because none of those assumptions about personal agency and dominance have a place in their worldview - and those societies have very little in the way of sexual violence. I've just read about this in the last couple days since this conversation came up.)
It's for these reasons that I said that rape was not about sex. Rape often has more in common with torture than it does with sexual desire gone rogue.
I don’t think that’s true of Epstein’s associates – those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious.
If I had to try to make sense of the Pelicot case in relation to my points above, I'd posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been "shared" with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
----
That was unpleasant, but hopefully helpful for understanding the positions I've taken on both patriarchy and sexual violence. I don't necessarily want to discuss more, but I've had to put in the time to understand all this in my research on war and violence, and in all those classes where we read and discussed the history of feminist thought. I'm happy if any of this can move our collective understanding more towards the direction of those non-patriarchal cultures I mentioned above.
3 weeks ago
Thanks, wj, that is what I thought you meant to argue. Glad I was following you correctly.
When I (and I assume GftNC, though she can confirm this herself or qualify it if assume incorrectly) talk about patriarchy, I'm not assuming that it only governs relationships between men and women; I'm talking about a system in which masculine men are afforded more status and power than less masculine men, women, and children. An all-male prison is, by that way of figuring, still a patriarchal society, as is an all-female prison because the larger society in which they exist is patriarchal in structure.
Keeping this in mind will help you to understand where I am coming from with my comments.
3 weeks ago
wj - For a test case, consider prisons. Rape among inmates is pretty much never about sex. It about establishing and demonstrating who is more powerful.
Getting rid of patriarchy, while desirable in itself, won’t address the problem of rape. At most, it will shift the mix of who gets raped.
I'm not sure that I'm following your line of thinking as you intend it. Are you trying to use prisons as an example of a non-patriarchal culture or is the connection you are working from here something else? I'm trying to understand where you draw the line between patriarchy and "men seeking status and dominance."
3 weeks ago
Ah yes, those halcyon days of my youth, when boys were allowed to run wild in the classroom, fidget, yell, and ignore the teacher.
But remember to also leave room for "Kids these days have no discipline and teachers need to crack down on these spoiled brats."
...and also "How dare these teachers present any material to my child that is not pre-authorized by me, the parent."
3 weeks ago
Yep, patriarchy. And also, yep, it's not about sex, but rather about status and power and hierarchy within the patriarchal structure.
This dynamic is also of a piece with our decline into authoritarianism, and it's a force in the conservative Christian subcultures. Patriarchy puts men under psychological pressure to seek status through extreme means
This study is about authoritarianism, but I think there is enough overlap with what we have been discussing (especially given the context of the Orange Julius administration) to put it in the discussion:
The two researchers document a recurring pattern: when their careers stagnate, people working in the regime apparatus choose one of two strategies. Either ‘detouring’ – joining units tasked with repression to demonstrate their value to the sitting ruler – or ‘forcing’ – participating in coups to secure a better future under a new leader.
‘It is not only the leader's inner circle that determines the character and fate of a regime. The career anxiety of those on the middle and lower layers can be enough to trigger both violence and regime collapse,’ explains Adam Scharpf.
I'd not be surprised to find that this sort of behavior has some genetic elements, but my experience suggests that these elements are not deterministic and inescapable. Patriarchy is just a particularly nasty environment in terms of how it interacts with those traits to create systems of violence, insecurity, and inequality.
3 weeks ago
Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
3 weeks ago
I'm constantly surprised and repulsed by the number of classic rock and pop songs I hear still being played today that are about jailbait (even on the satellite feed in Trader Joe's). I don't think rock and pop really started to reckon with that legacy until the grunge era. It's still around in the music mainstream, but mostly in rap and hip-hop.
3 weeks ago
If any of y'all are interested in the larger context in which Chomsky said that, it's at The Harvard Crimson:
Chomsky is saying there that yes, he met with Epstein, and Chomsky places that in the context of institutional donors, noting that MIT has taken money from all sorts of horrible people, and that some have had buildings named after them (which Chomsky opines is worse than meeting with such a person because naming the building gives the person cultural prestige).
He appears to be saying something akin to the oft quoted "There is no ethical consumption under [late] capitalism."
True enough, but a dodge nonetheless.
Chomsky's relationship with Epstein went beyond that context of official meetings on campus. They were chummy in emails, and the substance of those emails gets pretty noxious. Not Lolita noxious, but more elitist Bond villain noxious - elites spreading their genes far and wide to improve society because they are genetically superior...that Bell Curve bullshit that Epstein and Musk and the rest of the insecure billionaire class eat up, and that the edgelord academic fringe love to dabble in whenever they want to prove how free-thinking and liberated from ideology they are.
Chomsky has always struck me as saying things that sound morally satisfying and have a kernel of truth, but doing precious little to try and effect any change. It's like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
3 weeks ago
No arguments here, novakant. I struggle with the same questions about the institutions and culture. I'm struggling with those things on an ethical level at my own institution in this moment.
On the French front in particular, I've had a ringside seat while my graduate institution dealt with the passing of Derrida, and with the fallout from his having defended a friend and colleague of his for having coerced a grad student to sleep with him. Derrida (and his estate after his passing) threatened to move his archive elsewhere if his friend faced any discipline. I believe his friend ended up taking a position at another university. Meanwhile, his grad student left the program the year before I started my Ph.D.. I don't know if she continued her studies elsewhere or if she left as an ABD. The wrangling and fallout from all that were background noise as I settled into my graduate work. Most of the people I was in class with had known all the involved parties.
Not as problematic as Foucault - at least everyone involved was an adult - but part and parcel of the same culture, and I can't read Derrida without thinking about those things as well.
3 weeks ago
novakant - As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
Foucault is a tricky one for me. It's hard to see anything at all positive about a monster like Epstein. Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy. There's also the crucial difference between people weaponizing Foucault's monstrousness in order to further demonize the LGBTQ+ community, and the elite circling-of-wagons around Epstein to protect those already well insulated by their wealth, power, and privilege.
Foucault being decades dead also takes a lot of the urgency out of the conversation. He can't do any more damage than he already has.
And on a much lighter note, the post title immediately made me think of the Kuricorder Quartet's version of the Imperial March.
I'd also like to point out that part of the problem with these discussions of good and bad masculinity is the constant sliding back and forth that we do between "masculinity" and "men." We can argue over how much of a market share different versions of masculinity have amongst men, but the heart of the problem is not one of market share, but rather of which version(s) of masculinity are treated as if they are representative of the gender as a whole. Toxic masculinity is increasing its market share and has tremendous traction and influence among younger men who are anxious about their gender status.
And I think it's important to let young men know that when we criticize a model of masculinity as toxic, we are not saying that men as a gender are all toxic, just that particular ways of being a man in the world are toxic to both the world around them and to the men who are practicing that way of being. Everyone involved is damaged and depleted by it.
"Not all men" doesn't seem to me to be a good tactic for combating the flood of online influencers who are poisoning society with their zero-sum, competitive, dominance-focused, deeply insecure and damaging version of masculinity. We need a compelling alternative that is not based in zero-sum, winner-take-all dominance.
My first response to the question of what to call a non-toxic masculinity was "feminist" And it's true. It is also, however, a sure way to lose the very men to whom you are trying to give an alternative way of being.
I blame the patriarchy.
I would also say "non-toxic masculinity," but an evangelical author has already built a brand around that one. Strike two.
I'm leaning towards "regenerative masculinity" - analogous with regenerative agriculture: a masculinity that builds up the other beings in its environment rather than depleting the others around it.
Something like that...
Masculinity needs to be sustainable. Toxic masculinity isn't. It harms every being involved and leaves all of them depleted.
The version of Grok I’m using is 4.20 (Beta). It’s made up of four agents, one of whom fact-checks the results. The claim is that it reduces hallucinations by about two-thirds. So, progress is being made.
And what would you say if you were teaching a research class and one of your students told you that they had two friends helping them find sources and a fourth who was checking to make sure that none of the other three were making up quotes, and that the one in charge of checking was now able to find two out of every three references that one of the others had made up or misread?
I'd rather have a student who actually read his sources, understood them, synthesized them in productive ways, and could be relied upon to manage his attribution transparently, accurately, and ethically.
None of the four agents can do those things, and the research is built on the hope that at some point of scale that sort of thing will just emerge, spontaneously, out of scale and a momentary spark of genius. They think their agents are all little synthetic Hellen Kellers just waiting for their water pump moment.
But their agents are not beings. What is there that they hope will miraculously self-actualize?
Sorry, CharlesWT, but LLMs are incapable of doing research or of taking a critical perspective on the research that it is parsing, sampling, and remixing. At best it can assemble a preliminary reading list and gather a sampling of annotations for that list. It's potentially a powerful research tool in the hands of an expert, but can't be relied upon to summarize even a single text without hallucinating material and misrepresenting information.
It does, however, assemble very convincing imitations of scholarly research, for those who want to scratch an authority itch without having to go through any of the actual work of building expertise.
Grok says - Research suggests that, on average, boys in traditional US public primary (elementary) schools exhibit more externalizing behaviors—such as higher activity levels, impulsivity, restlessness, and disruption—compared to girls.
That's a lot of qualifiers for that research (boys in 1) traditional 2) US 3) public 4) primary schools). How does that compare to boys in other countries? How much of this is influenced by the US public schools being the school of last resort for students with behavioral issues? Are their issues related to family socioeconomic status or socialization patterns rooted in those socioeconomic groups? And not specified - when were those studies done? Do we have data over a span of years, decades, or were all these studies done over a relatively short span of years or months? Were they pre- or post-pandemic? Do we have data that compares those periods? Are all of these studies from the standardized testing era? Are they from schools that still provide recess and physical education, or from those who have done away with those two things in order to maximize test prep time?
Not questions that I expect anyone to answer, just the sort of questions I think need to be looked into in order not to bake in some leading assumptions.
Also, I automatically bracket anything that comes from Grok, especially where it concerns gender studies. I think it prudent always to wonder if Musk has tried to tweak the algorithms and training to pander to his own biases on gender issues. We know he has a whole host of those issues.
That aside, I would never call any synopsis that any of these LLMs put out a survey of the research. At best it is what I'd call a "preliminary pre-search." At a minimum, I'd have to go through every one of the sources that Grok "cites" to look at its parameters and methodology, and see if those studies said anything about the questions that I ask above, or express any uncertainty about their own conclusions, etc..
Pro Bono - I'm not getting into your first diagreement since that was with GftNC's comment, and I'm not going to assume that I know all the particulars of her critical perspective and would rather not distort her position. But the other two...
It’s not exclusively about sex. But it’s a biological fact that, for a man, rape has to be partly about sex.
Standard warning I would give if this were a class in which the conversation turns to subjects that can be difficult for survivors of sexual violence to manage - mediate your engagement with this as necessary for your own wellbeing...
Rape, sexual assault, and sexual or gendered violence do not at all have to be about sexual desire on the part of the person perpetrating the violence. A heterosexual man can rape another male with an object and feel no sexual arousal. Likewise, rape during war often has less to do with any sexual desire than it does with "spoiling" the enemy's women, which is why, again, it can often involve inanimate objects. The purpose of such things is not the sexual pleasure of the attacker, but rather for the person subject to the violence to be penetrated against their will - preferably in front of witnesses - to demonstrate to them their powerlessness and lack of agency, to reduce them to the status of a woman if they are male, or to demonstrate to any males that the woman "belongs to" that they were powerless to protect their women from harm.
(Disclaimer - this conversation assumes a patriarchal society. People who do ethnography in matrilineal cultures say that the individuals in those cultures have a hard time making sense out of these attitudes because none of those assumptions about personal agency and dominance have a place in their worldview - and those societies have very little in the way of sexual violence. I've just read about this in the last couple days since this conversation came up.)
It's for these reasons that I said that rape was not about sex. Rape often has more in common with torture than it does with sexual desire gone rogue.
I don’t think that’s true of Epstein’s associates – those men had widely acknowledged power and status. Nor can it be true in the Pelicot case, where the rapes were largely secret, and the victim was unconscious.
If I had to try to make sense of the Pelicot case in relation to my points above, I'd posit that, yes, all of the men involved were feeling sexual desire, but that the attraction in that case was to be doing something secret about which the woman had no knowledge and over which the woman had no say. The men were demonstrating to each other their power and control over a woman who had been "shared" with them by the man to whom she belonged, and that sharing was a secret that was withheld from any of the women in their lives.
That makes it a moment of homosocial bonding in which they violate a societal taboo, and there is a type of in-group status that comes with that sort of secret violation, as many fraternity brothers might whisper to each other when in private.
----
That was unpleasant, but hopefully helpful for understanding the positions I've taken on both patriarchy and sexual violence. I don't necessarily want to discuss more, but I've had to put in the time to understand all this in my research on war and violence, and in all those classes where we read and discussed the history of feminist thought. I'm happy if any of this can move our collective understanding more towards the direction of those non-patriarchal cultures I mentioned above.
Thanks, wj, that is what I thought you meant to argue. Glad I was following you correctly.
When I (and I assume GftNC, though she can confirm this herself or qualify it if assume incorrectly) talk about patriarchy, I'm not assuming that it only governs relationships between men and women; I'm talking about a system in which masculine men are afforded more status and power than less masculine men, women, and children. An all-male prison is, by that way of figuring, still a patriarchal society, as is an all-female prison because the larger society in which they exist is patriarchal in structure.
Keeping this in mind will help you to understand where I am coming from with my comments.
wj - For a test case, consider prisons. Rape among inmates is pretty much never about sex. It about establishing and demonstrating who is more powerful.
Getting rid of patriarchy, while desirable in itself, won’t address the problem of rape. At most, it will shift the mix of who gets raped.
I'm not sure that I'm following your line of thinking as you intend it. Are you trying to use prisons as an example of a non-patriarchal culture or is the connection you are working from here something else? I'm trying to understand where you draw the line between patriarchy and "men seeking status and dominance."
Ah yes, those halcyon days of my youth, when boys were allowed to run wild in the classroom, fidget, yell, and ignore the teacher.
But remember to also leave room for "Kids these days have no discipline and teachers need to crack down on these spoiled brats."
...and also "How dare these teachers present any material to my child that is not pre-authorized by me, the parent."
Yep, patriarchy. And also, yep, it's not about sex, but rather about status and power and hierarchy within the patriarchal structure.
This dynamic is also of a piece with our decline into authoritarianism, and it's a force in the conservative Christian subcultures. Patriarchy puts men under psychological pressure to seek status through extreme means
This study is about authoritarianism, but I think there is enough overlap with what we have been discussing (especially given the context of the Orange Julius administration) to put it in the discussion:
https://politicalscience.ku.dk/about/news/2026/banal-but-brutal
I'd not be surprised to find that this sort of behavior has some genetic elements, but my experience suggests that these elements are not deterministic and inescapable. Patriarchy is just a particularly nasty environment in terms of how it interacts with those traits to create systems of violence, insecurity, and inequality.
Animal House is honored in the Library of Congress, the National Film Registry, and the American Film Institute's 100 best comedies. Everyone I knew in the '80s thought it was funny, but watching it now makes me squirm because it is so deeply embedded in rape culture. My squeamishness now is a good sign for mainstream culture, maybe, but I think its presence on these lists needs to be given some serious critical re-examination, especially in the light of all of the manosphere influencers trying to tell their confused adolescent viewers that this behavior is natural, manly, and nothing to be ashamed of. Nope. These views and behaviors are toxic to everyone.
I hardly even know where to begin with my male first-year students. There's so much online misogyny bullshit to cut through. They aren't bad at heart, but they are so misled and so heavily propagandized by the toxic grifters who can monetize their young viewers' insecurities.
I'm constantly surprised and repulsed by the number of classic rock and pop songs I hear still being played today that are about jailbait (even on the satellite feed in Trader Joe's). I don't think rock and pop really started to reckon with that legacy until the grunge era. It's still around in the music mainstream, but mostly in rap and hip-hop.
If any of y'all are interested in the larger context in which Chomsky said that, it's at The Harvard Crimson:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/5/3/epstein-nowak-chomsky-meeting-2015/
Chomsky is saying there that yes, he met with Epstein, and Chomsky places that in the context of institutional donors, noting that MIT has taken money from all sorts of horrible people, and that some have had buildings named after them (which Chomsky opines is worse than meeting with such a person because naming the building gives the person cultural prestige).
He appears to be saying something akin to the oft quoted "There is no ethical consumption under [late] capitalism."
True enough, but a dodge nonetheless.
Chomsky's relationship with Epstein went beyond that context of official meetings on campus. They were chummy in emails, and the substance of those emails gets pretty noxious. Not Lolita noxious, but more elitist Bond villain noxious - elites spreading their genes far and wide to improve society because they are genetically superior...that Bell Curve bullshit that Epstein and Musk and the rest of the insecure billionaire class eat up, and that the edgelord academic fringe love to dabble in whenever they want to prove how free-thinking and liberated from ideology they are.
Chomsky has always struck me as saying things that sound morally satisfying and have a kernel of truth, but doing precious little to try and effect any change. It's like he aspires to be Cassandra because that relieves him of the responsibility of actually being a change-maker.
No arguments here, novakant. I struggle with the same questions about the institutions and culture. I'm struggling with those things on an ethical level at my own institution in this moment.
On the French front in particular, I've had a ringside seat while my graduate institution dealt with the passing of Derrida, and with the fallout from his having defended a friend and colleague of his for having coerced a grad student to sleep with him. Derrida (and his estate after his passing) threatened to move his archive elsewhere if his friend faced any discipline. I believe his friend ended up taking a position at another university. Meanwhile, his grad student left the program the year before I started my Ph.D.. I don't know if she continued her studies elsewhere or if she left as an ABD. The wrangling and fallout from all that were background noise as I settled into my graduate work. Most of the people I was in class with had known all the involved parties.
Not as problematic as Foucault - at least everyone involved was an adult - but part and parcel of the same culture, and I can't read Derrida without thinking about those things as well.
novakant - As a sidenote: interesting and shocking what has been revealed in France since MeToo. The sense of entitlement and the sheer depravity of anyone from Foucault to Duhamel is just astounding.
Foucault is a tricky one for me. It's hard to see anything at all positive about a monster like Epstein. Foucault, for all his manifest monstrosity, made important contributions to philosophy. There's also the crucial difference between people weaponizing Foucault's monstrousness in order to further demonize the LGBTQ+ community, and the elite circling-of-wagons around Epstein to protect those already well insulated by their wealth, power, and privilege.
Foucault being decades dead also takes a lot of the urgency out of the conversation. He can't do any more damage than he already has.
And on a much lighter note, the post title immediately made me think of the Kuricorder Quartet's version of the Imperial March.