Hi @shusha, just read your introduction and found it very interesting.

Let me present myself: I'm can be described in several ways, but for sure I'm father of three wonderful daughters I love most and I'm a hacker.

You can read something about me on my website http://www.tesio.it and on my operating system http://jehanne.io

Why I annoy you, you ask?

In your introduction you mention topics I care a lot: programming as expression (see http://www.tesio.it/2019/06/03/what-is-informatics.html ), epistemology, data (you find a lot in my site), politics ( see http://www.tesio.it/2020/09/03/not_all_hackers_are_americans.html ) and so on...

I would like to know your take about this: https://qoto.org/@Vectorfield/106028146945688229

Not much about the attacks against RMS and FSF (unless you want to talk about that too, obviously), but about the epistemic approach that @Vectorfield described and that, as far as I can say, describe quite well the activists I've talked with.

To be fair, they argue that "manifacturing" truths is what the hegemonic class ("the whites", "the males", "the straights"... curiously, never "the rich") do all the time with marketing and all other forms of propaganda, so they perceive themselves as fighting back on the same ground.

They argue that people won't try to understand long explanations or deep and complex models of reality anyway, so trying to argue with facts won't change things for the better.

Yet models that misdescribe reality on purpose, an epistemology not based on the search for truth but in the search for changes, is doomed to be abused by the oppressors who have better means and more resources to meld the public opinion (and even turn it to a weapon to enforce their own interests, as RMS story shows)

Anyway, sorry for this wall of text linking several other wall of texts.

If you'd like to talk about this, I'd like to access your perspective (dialogue is always a way to access and understand perspectives that are preclused to us by our limits).

Otherwise... just let me say nice to meet you! 😉

hey @Shamar, I finally found time to read the thread. phew... first: thanks to @Vectorfield for his exhausting overview of traditions of critical thinking. second: what I observer is a shifting of argument from a very specific problem (sexism in free software communities) to a very distant position of reflection (the history of critical thinking in general). And I belive this is a significant move, an attempt to restore a position of oversight, to escape the messiness of struggle. And I tend to be with Haraway here, and her distrust of what she calls the "god-perspective", the disembodied perspective from above and its claim of oversight, which is normative because it enables this exact shifting of focus away from the struggle, to other discourses, and we end up talking about universalist concepts of truth (like standpoint theory never happened - even in discussing standpoint theory).

And let me put two things straight: the shift away from the struggle is the tendency of the whole thread, and starts well before @Vectorfield and @Shamar joined the discussion. And second: I am not a philosopher, my knowledge of the traditions of thinking is limited, this is why enjoyed the excourse by @Vectorfield very much.

but then for me (as an embodied female in computer culture), it is the struggle that is central. the discussion started with sexism, and not with philosophy. and I would love to find a way back to the struggle, through philosophy, that is not explaining away the struggle as some function in a model of society.