The skeptical mythology of postmodernism

Ever since I started blogging in 2007, one of the boogeymen of the skeptical movement was so-called postmodernism. Postmodernism, as skeptics understood it, was an ideology where anything goes. It was extreme moral relativism. It was the idea that truth itself was a social construct. It was the idea that no one could know anything, and yet people could have their own personal truths, which may differ from one another. In short, it was one of skepticism’s antitheses.

Transcript: You have your truth, and I have mine. All knowledge is theory-laden. All perception is internal to the perceiver. There is no meaningful "reality." In the shadow cast by this knowledge, I decide for myself what is good and what is not. Caption: Postmodernism is the only explanation for black licorice.

Source: SMBC. I think the best way to describe the skeptical concept of postmodernism is by showing how skeptics choose to portray it in parodies.

Even in 2007, this seemed kind of sketchy to me. I recall writing a post titled “What’s with postmodernism?” wherein I complained that the term was inconsistently defined, and trusted sources offered a completely different picture of what postmodernism really was. Now that I have more experience in academia, and a much greater degree of cynicism about the skeptical movement, I feel more confident in simply calling bullshit. Postmodernism is a villain invented by skeptics, originally based on a real thing, but so far abstracted from reality that it may well be called mythology.

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Link Roundup: December

Poisson has blessed me with many links this month.  I’ll start with a few plugs and followups.

Plugs

The Ace Community Survey Team (which I co-lead) released our big report on the 2016 Ace Community Survey, alongside a shorter report on the 2015 survey.  If you’re interested in data, or want to know about the kind of diversity we talk about in ace communities, please take a look!

I wrote a summary of a scholarly article on asexuality and race.  Yep, I’m reading about critical race theory now.

Followups

After I wrote about the Tumblr ban, there were several other takes in my circle.  Brute Reason talked about how awful this is for sex-positive communities.  And Marcus Ranum put it in context, as an example of a cloud service exercising monopoly power.

I was saying over on Tumblr, that the widely mocked “female presenting nipples” is strangely appropriate.  There’s no way to tell someone’s “real” gender, you don’t know how people identify, and you’d like the policy to depend on whether the person wants to appear female or not.  On the other hand, “female presenting” is ambiguous whether it refers to intended appearance, or simply appearance (and the latter is likely more accurate to their real policy).  Anyway, they clearly put some thought into it, and the problem is that it’s attached to a discriminatory policy.

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Classifying sexual violence

Readers may recall earlier this year, when I wrote a practical guide to sexual violence terminology.

Now I’ve written another article, as part of the Ace Community Survey Team, explaining how sexual violence is classified by the CDC.  Go take a look.

Although the CDC’s definitions of sexual violence are publicly available in the NISVS report, few lay people would sift through over a hundred pages in order to find them. The lack of easily accessible information concerns us, because it deprives some victims of tools they need to understand their own experiences. The goal of this article is to explain the CDC categories and their use in the 2018 Asexual Community Survey.

A tumblr ban hot take

Anyone remember that time that Google tried to ban adult content on Blogger, and then took it back three days later?  No?

Tumblr announced that they are banning adult content, starting on December 17.  According to their policy,

Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.

The policy includes additional exceptions for breastfeeding, health-related situations, political speech, and nudity in art.

This morning I saw a lot of doom and gloom about the ban, which I would deem justified.  Most obviously, this hurts sex workers and erotic illustrators, who may be using tumblr as a source of advertising or income, and are now being evicted.  But more broadly, it’s a big concern for fandoms.  Although not all fans are interested in erotic art, fandoms are interconnected communities, and you can’t just excise the adult content without affecting everyone.  It is likely that entire fan communities will just get up and leave.  There is precedent for this in Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal.

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FTB is back up

FTB was down for most of yesterday, and Matthew Herron explains why.  Short version: technical difficulties.

Anyway, for people who follow me using RSS, you should know that the RSS feed might behave a bit strangely.  On my RSS reader, the post I had scheduled yesterday about origami spirals doesn’t show up.  Some of the recent Pharyngula posts don’t show up either.  Maybe it will sort itself out later, but in the mean time I wanted to give a heads up.

Origami: Spiral creases

A square sheet of silver foil paper, with 4 spiral creases radiating from the center

Four 45 degree spiral creases

This is going to be one of those origami posts where I talk way too much about math.  But before I get to the math, I will explain how you can make one of these things entirely with ordinary arts and craft tools.

“Ordinary tools” is the relevant bit here, since my understanding is that experts in curved-crease origami don’t use ordinary tools, they use things like vinyl cutters.  When I first tried making these, I could not find any instructions for how to make these models using ordinary tools (I later found an article by Ekaterina Lukasheva), so when I finally figured out a method, I wanted to share it.

Making a template

Before we draw the creases directly on the paper, we need to make a template.  The template ensures that each of the four curves are identical to each other.

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Some aromantic basics

I don’t do enough ace blogging around here. I zipped right through Asexual Awareness Week without saying a thing! But let’s not talk about asexuality, let’s talk about something a bit different: aromanticism.

I don’t like to think of myself as writing a definitive guide to aromanticism, since I’m not aromantic myself, so I’m just going to keep this casual in tone.

Romantic orientation

“Aromantic” is constructed in an analogous way to “asexual”. Asexual means not experiencing sexual attraction, and so aromantic means not experiencing romantic attraction. Alternatively, “aromantic” might just mean not wanting romantic relationships, the definition is a bit flexible like that. Either the noun or adjective form is fine, and “aro” is a common abbreviation.

Aromanticism as a concept has had a long history, since the beginning of online asexual communities in the late 90s (although terminology may have changed since then). Once you get a group of asexual people talking to each other, two of the very first narratives to appear are: asexuals who want relationships and don’t want anything to do with sex, and asexuals who don’t want anything to do with romance. It’s natural to make a distinction between these two experiences, and the name for that distinction is romantic vs aromantic. (In some places, they use “alloromantic” instead of “romantic”, in the same way that “allosexual” is a common term for “non-asexual”.)

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