Here is the abstract (with my paragraphifications and emphasis) from the peer-reviewed paper “The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality” appearing in Political Geography by someone named Sultana.
The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways.
The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts.
Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions.
This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.
You might not have believed it, but now you see the evidence, you have confirmed for yourself that the NPR crowd really does talk this way. On first reading, it seems each individual word is English, but when they’re strung together the whole becomes something else. Academese. The language of people with nothing to say, but who must disguise this nothing by saying it at great length, and with deep shades of purple.
Then, on second reading, you become aware the author is mad about something, but you’re not sure what. Something to with the weather, that it isn’t identical everywhere. Or maybe it’s the world ending, women and minorities hardest hit (yes, we now see this joke almost daily).
Incidentally, before I come to the main point (yes, I have one), let’s examine one of the woke’s favorite phrases, lived experiences. Are there unlived experiences? Can one experience something without living it? Obviously not. What is the point of gluing the lived to experiences?
Like with all advertising, it is to describe what the product is not. The lived experiences held up as exemplars are not, in fact, lived. They are imagined. They are fantasy, stories added to dull Reality in the desire to be a Victim. Our highest moral being.
On to epistemic violences! Though I have traveled the world and can cuss fluently in four languages, I had never heard this phrase before. Does “epistemic violence” occur when a man is forced to believe nonsense as if it were true? Cf. this Abstract. Or any regime media product.
Turns out, no. It’s more of a synonym for mansplaining (which for you angry female academics and soyboys means when a man explains a difficult subject). In this case, it’s when somebody with superior knowledge (I use that word in its technical, old-fashioned sense, and not in its modern use, which is a substitute for mere belief) tries to explain a thing to somebody with less knowledge.
Or somebody incapable of understanding the thing.
From the mouth of academics:
Epistemic violence in testimony is a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance. Pernicious ignorance should be understood to refer to any reliable ignorance that, in a given context, harms another person (or set of persons). Reliable ignorance is ignorance that is consistent or follows from a predictable epistemic gap in cognitive resources.
It goes on that way for some time. It’s a lot of words to describe “talking down to someone”; or, rather, being perceived as talking down to someone by the someone. Or it means a person not accepting an explanation as fact even when the explainer is really, really earnest or the fact is wrong but desired.
In other words, it’s all about the feelz. As many things are in our effeminate culture. Feelz explains the violence. Those suffering from pernicious ignorance really can feel like they have been attacked when Reality is exposed to them. That they haven’t been attacked, and the violence is risible fantasy, completes the circle of proof.
Now the article from which this quote was pulled is critical of “epistemic violence” (angry female academics and soyboys: that means they say bad things about it). The article says we can blame the “Theory of Critical Social Justice” for inventing the term.
You won’t be surprised to learn that white supremacy is at the root of all this. As are “patriarchy, cisnormativity, heteronormativity,” and similar horrors.
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You are missing the point entirely, which is the the Climate Change Cult, which is part of Wokeism, is a fundamentalist religion. As such, its True Believers care not a whit whether what they believe makes sense or not, and arguing that it does not make sense has no effect whatsoever
.
If you don’t believe me, try arguing with some other cultists who believe that consuming small wafers of bread and sips of wine turns them into cannibals, eating the flesh and blood of a man who died over 2,000 years ago. You will get the same result.
Did James Lindsey and his pals write this??
Pernicious ignorance. Now that’s a new one, but very much in the vein of “malign creativity” (making jokes about people they don’t like). Now all they have to do is “weaponize” that “pernicious ignorance” — which, of course, is what they are themselves doing (refusing to learn facts and turning that refusal against anyone who does know facts and tries to teach them). But true to form they will accuse others of what they themselves are doing.
It is fitting that they even have a whole lexicon of different “ignorances”. The true ignorance level on display is breathtaking.
When your eyes glaze-over reading this coloniality nonsense, is that a bug or feature? Asking for a friend.
@JDaveF – I tend to side with Bruce Charlton on this – I think it’s more of a *anti-Christianity* than its own religion.
“In what sense is this New Religion actually any kind of ‘religion’? Well, only by superficial analogies and not by any deep beliefs or assumptions.”
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-supposed-new-religion-of-leftism-is.html
Briggs: ”…I have traveled the world and can cuss fluently in four languages…”
Interesting that every culture has profanity. No doubt a consequence of the Fall — Eve, you gullible, dim-bulb pea-brained bitch! — Adam, you mewling, motherless bastard! Would be an interesting and funny bit of ethnography cataloguing the diverse and vibrant world of cursing. Briggs travels the world with a video production crew doing half-hour shows exploring local curses, insults, and spicy rhetoric. Would be a YouTube sensation.
What I find interesting is that some cuss words, the most prolific, are now common in most languages.
I just want to thank Briggs for “sharing” this. I might not have been exposed to that lunacy and it is funny, in a Monty Python sort of way.
THE TOWER OF BABEL 2:
______Trying, trying again._______
“This time, a triumph, for sure!”
“A lived experience you don’t want to miss!”
“Chilling! An assault on all of your senses, including the common one!”
Consensus of Critics and Experts agree!
BUY TICKETS EARLY!
Now playing at every local academic and expert facility in stunning HFR IMAX Stereoscopic 3-D! Book now for a limited available number of shaky-shaky seats!
Cornell West is involved somehow.
I, for one, love the term “mansplaining”. Instead of merely asking a male coworker for help on a topic about which he is knowledgeable, I ask “can you mansplain this to me?”
Is there a similar term I can use when I ask female coworker for help? Femsplaining doesn’t seem quite right.
You ask, “What is the point of gluing the lived to experiences?”
The point, of course, is to substitute Feelz for Reality. Experience, with no modifiers, might easily be confused with (or serve as a proxy for) Reality. My experience when I step outside during a rainstorm is getting wet. Given that my experience is a direct result of the phenomenon ‘rain’ then we might rationally conclude that rain is wet.
But if we say instead that my assertions (my ‘testimony’) is ‘grounded in LIVED experiences’ then the necessity to tie my assertion (whatever it may be) to actual Reality as a form of proof ceases to exist. I don’t need to. I only need to tie it to my (or someone else’s) Feelz! Thus if I say, my lived experience when I step outside during a rainstorm is sadness, then YES, sadness becomes a ‘real’ (as real as getting wet!) outcome of rainstorms.
My lived experience of reading Briggs is hunger, more specifically hunger for a warm cinnamon roll. Therefore we can conclude that reading Briggs creates cinnamon roll hunger….and yet no one is giving me cinnamon rolls. I’m thinking we need some Activists to address this problem.
For Milton and his question about ‘mansplaining’…
No, you’re doing it wrong.
Femsplaining can’t exist. Much like so-called reverse racism can’t exist either. Why? Because the Woke categorically define racism ONLY as White against Black. To reverse that dynamic is to be no longer racist. Rather — per Ibram Kendi — it is to be Anti-Racist.
Using that same logic, Femsplaining, if it actually were to exist, would most probably be defined, per Kendi, as Anti-Mansplaining.
Reminds me of HL Mencken’s takedown of Thorstein Veblen.
My take is the concept of “reliable ignorance”. It carries a flavor of sustainability, the comfort of something settled…
BDavi52 and Milton
It’s like Ricky used to say: “Lucy … you got some splainin to do”
So it is just “Splainin”
Or Splain
As soon as I read “differently-located people” I knew this guy was full of shit as a Christmas turkey. It turned out I was right, as the aca-babble and woke-speak poured forth, and in only a few paragraphs. I remember learning to imitate this nonsense when I was in college. Some professors didn’t care much for simple, clear prose, particularly in the social “sciences”.
When I see the term “lived experiences” I know that I need pay no attention to anything the person saying or typing it has to say. To answer your specific question, I think “experiences” are for everyone, “lived experiences” are only for those oppressed by the white, western, capitalist patriarchy.
An acquaintance of mine came up with the term “Ovarian Logic.” This is an observation on the female and girly boy method of thinking which is to view everything in relation to the personal emotions engendered. Countering this with actual logic and appeals to causality is entirely irrelevant or at best marginally orthogonal since it is almost entirely disconnected from rational, or even conscious, thinking of any form.
I have read it 3 times, thats all they get.
I still don’t inderstand it.
It reminds me of a Louis Farrakhan speach. The guy makes up 15 letter words to sound intelligent.
Hell Mandarin Chinese is easier.
Are you sure this piece wasn’t jumbled together by AI (artificial ignorance)? It reads like a wokism generator spewed it out. There are many pomo (postmodern) generators on the spidery Web, but none for wokism that I could find. Great project for a stewdent. Build your own. Mockery is funny! Gap your cognitive resources.
I’m no academic and trying to read this made my head hurt. However, I think I might have a different take, although I didn’t understand it in the first place. In my first read I took it as the “mansplaining” to be epistemic violence committed on the ignorant audience. but when I read this sentence again…
“Epistemic violence in testimony is a refusal, intentional or unintentional, of an audience to communicatively reciprocate a linguistic exchange owing to pernicious ignorance”
it sounded like the “violence” is actually, if passively, committed by the “ignorant” audience on the “expert”. In other words, the person “with superior knowledge” cannot be questioned or disagreed with, and if you do it’s considered to be violence against him because Stupid and he gets the added bonus of being able to claim he’s the victim.
Phil R: you are right, “epistemic violence” is an accusation leveled against the audience by the expert. Setting aside the astonishing arrogance of such accusations, I find them interesting inasmuch as the expert here is clearly projecting. When a narcissist is accusing others of something, we should pay attention because what he’s really doing is describing himself.
SB,
Thanks for your response. You stated much more clearly and concisely what I thought I was thinking but wasn’t sure because the original was so confusing. I’m becoming more and more convinced that it’s not money but academia that is the root of all evil.
On a side note, we have a good friend in academia (head of a history department at a fairly well known school) who I once said to, “academia is well past its use-by date.” I thought about it later and thought I probably shouldn’t have said that, but got no comment in response (probably being “academic”).
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