• edwardligma [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      nah that i can live with, but when youve got stuff like this on literally page 2

      The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn't true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left.

      it really starts to feel like a ranting polemic from some student-group newspaper rather than a serious scholarly work, which is fine if you just want to be entertained by some ranting but then when he starts throwing out statistics etc its very hard not to question whether the sources were chosen because theyre the most accurate or because they align best with the story, and frankly the whole thing felt very very flimsy to me

      like yeah maybe theres some unexamined ideological baggage of scholarly authority coming from a very white and classist approach to using the right words to show youre in the club, but it is literally physically impossible to read that paragraph without rolling your eyes

        • edwardligma [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          who gets to decide what “serious” and “scholarly” work is?

          me. i do.

          maybe its all impeccably and even-handedly sourced, i dunno. but when someones on a rant but also wanting me to trust a bunch of historical statistics theyre throwing out im gonna be suspicious of their sourcing and whether theyve made a serious attempt to engage with all the relevant historical evidence to build the most accurate picture or whether theyve picked the most extreme numbers they could find that best suited their case and maybe massaged the context to give a more extreme implication from them to boot. so im gonna go spend my theory-reading time reading something else instead cos theres unlimited theory to read and i have limited time and im not gonna spend it reading stuff that gives me untrustworthy vibes

            • edwardligma [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              yep exactly, it triggered my bullshit detector and he absolutely didnt convince me that he had done the research to properly lay the groundwork for his assertions at the start, so i decided it was a more productive use of my time to read something else instead, i dont think thats an unreasonable thing to do at all. and that something else at the time happened to be fanon, which did not trigger my bullshit detector (despite also not being written in a conventional western academic style)

              is my detector faulty? maybe, but theres a million bits of theory to read so im gonna read the ones that seem like theyve done their homework instead. i havent read all the theory and neither has anyone else, we all have to make judgements on which theory is worth our time. im making no judgements on the concepts in it cos i didnt even get that far, im saying "he did a shit job of convincing me it was worth reading further instead of reading something else"

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Eh. It's a different voice for a different audience from a different time. Roll with it.