Mandy: “What if your mother had been pro-choice?”

Actually, my mother was an abortion provider.

Thanks for trying, though.

Cleis: oy gevalt. Susan Haack ought to be there as well. And the failure to include Philippa Foot is frankly just flabbergasting. But I’m not sure whether that’s Honderich’s fault or Leiter’s fault for (apparently) assuming that no living philosophers were born before 1930. (Edmund Gettier’s still alive too, but he’s not the list that Leiter culled (!!))

logicnazi: The point here isn’t just about quality of work (although it is about that). If you’re just looking at citations there are plenty of philosophers that Cleis mentioned who could go toe-to-toe with almost anyone on the list—Foot, if she is missing, is the biggest example; Baier, Card, Anderson, Haack, etc. also ought to be there.

As it stands, I sincerely doubt that Honderich made any substantial effort to determine who is and is not “influential” by examining citations. As is usual when men draw up these sorts of lists, he seems to have made it up on the spot, e-mailed a few of his buddies for suggestions, and cobbled it together. There’s nothing intrinsically objectionable about carrying on in this way, but these kind of lists are always going to be biased towards what the author and his (or her) buddies know and care about. This isn’t weird or unusual, and it’s not weird or unusual (although it is unfortunate) for male philosophers, like most other men in our society, to think along boys-club lines. It seems pretty silly to rush in and insist that ad hoc Top 42 lists like these are really carefully objective reflections of the state of the discipline.

Well, Debbie Stoller and Bust magazine deserve mention, even if I infinitely prefer Bitch and the late, lamented HUES.

I still just don’t get the demand for declaring a “Third Wave” though. I mean, quite independently of the worries about “waves” to begin with, if you take those historical categories perfectly seriously, it just hasn’t been long enough. The “First Wave” as conventionally dated refers to at least three generations of feminists who had lots of internal differences and some pitched fights over tactics, organization, goals, class, race, sexuality, ideology, etc., and those conflicts often took the form of intergenerational conflicts between the older leaders and young upcoming activists. Whenever the “Third Wave” language gets brought out I always just wonder why we can’t at least put a good 72 years of work into the Second Wave before we declare a new one.

Well, it sounds like there was a lot interesting and worthy of attention in Shiva’s talk. But I’m getting a bit hung up on this:

“There are 25 different written languages in India. Each region has its own newspaper. Thus Indian citizens aren’t subjected to media saturation of constructed political issues. Dr. Shiva notes how, according to the U.S. media, abortion and gay marriage are more important than the war and the economy. Television serves as a tool of distraction from the concerns of our real lives.”

I mean, since when is abortion (for example) not a concern of our real lives? Real women need abortions every day and legislators who push an anti-choice agenda want to point real guns at them if they try to get one. It’s no less a matter of life and death than the war, and certainly more of one than, say, “the economy” — a nebulous statistical construct that clusters together some issues of immediate, pressing significance to our everyday lives (the kind of jobs that are or aren’t available in your or my hometown) and a lot that are just as remote as, well, the price of tea in China. I know that a lot of people on the Left are leaning these days towards thinking that if they could just try to play up class and downplay “cultural issues” then they could bring in white men who might otherwise drift toward the pseudo-populist hard Right, but it seems like every time this strategy gets spelled out it seems like something that ought to make feminists (for example) feel really queasy.

“We’re not going anywhere. Push back. Push back.”

I couldn’t agree more. We’ve been resting on our laurels for too long, with many of us assuming that we won the culture war back in 1992 and from here on out we don’t have to worry about such matters as democratic politics, because it’ll all work out somehow. I hope that if anything comes from the late unpleasantness, it’ll be the recognition that that was wrong, wrong, wrong.

In every voter initiative and referendum campaign dealing with gay rights issues, we’ve been on the “NO” side—NO on special exclusion from anti-discrimination legislation, NO on banning gay marriage, etc. Why are we always on the defensive, and why aren’t we pushing for our own initiatives and demanding the kind of laws that we want made? The Right has been following this strategy for years now because they know that (i) it energizes their base and boosts grassroots turnout, (ii) because of (i), it’s often effective, and (iii) it allows them to pose as the mainstream while painting gay rights advocates as being afraid of democracy. But there’s no law (yet!) that says only the Christian Right can petition for voter initiatives. So what are we waiting for? There are good laws that need to be made at the state level—including bashing under hate crimes laws, including sexuality and gender identity in antidiscrimination laws, and so on. Nearly half of the states in the country let us bypass lobbying and go directly to the people on these issues.

What are we waiting for? Let’s get started.