Skip to main content

It was a parody, folks


 An odd post is making its way around social media. 

It purports to be a post from someone calling herself "Ann Lesby, Ph.D.".

It reads:

"Misgendering a pet can result in serious microsubconscious distress. Pay attention to clues. Your pet will let you know his/her/their/cir identity through things like body language, toy preferences, and reactions to gendered pet clothing."  

Conservatives in general fall for it and re-post it with expressions of disdain for these insane liberals. 

But the author is almost certainly ... one of their own.  A conservative seeking to parody 'those crazy liberals.'  Consider the name. Presumably "Ann Lesby" often ends up signing her name as "Lesby, Ann."  That possibility might give us a clue as to the parodic intent. 

The term "microsubconscious" is evidently targeted at the cultural-leftists' all-too-common use of "microaggressions." This means, My action, X, will be taken as aggressive unless I can portray it as self-defense.  I can't really do that with a straight face -- I can't say you aggressed against me.  So I'll say instead that you "microaggressed against me." Either way, it ends up the same -- I'm right and you are wrong.    

In this instance, the microaggression is aimed at the microsubsconscious of, say, a female dog on whom the human (owner? no, companion!) puts pink clothes even though the female pet identifies (to itself, or by its body language, or something) as a male pet. 

My understanding is that dogs can't see color, but ... Actually, a bit funny and somewhat sophisticated.  Too sophisticated, it appears, for the MAGA crowd, who don't get the joke.  

BTW, Ann Lesby should not be confused with Ann Nesby, the Grammy award winner whose photo I have put above. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more