The Endwords, I Think, Are a Good Thing.

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The word ginger has a terrible history of being used to abuse, oppress and subdue. Just six seemingly harmless letters arranged in a way that will form a word with more power than the pieces of metal that are for to make swards. A couple of gs, an r and an e and i and an n, just six little letters jumbled together, have caused damage that we may never mend. It's important that we all respect that if these people happen to choose to reclaim the word as their own, it doesn't mean the rest of you have a right to its use. I think there's a a moral complexity in which we can actually acknowledge that america's racial history

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn’t practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

In this wide-ranging conversation Helen Pluckrose recounts the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.