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Race and gender goes here. Other stuff goes on SSC.
Thread is completely unmoderated. Read at your own risk. Neoreactionaries, please remember that the rest of my blog is a neoreactionary-free zone.
Current streak of threads with at least one comment explaining why we should commit genocide: 2
Happy Feast Day of C S Lewis! Celebrate with John Cleese reading the Screwtape Letters.
Those who argue for racial hierarchy, and especially neoreactionaries: What rights should subordinate races have that should be respected by those above them?
To put this in concrete terms: If we restore white supremacy, under what circumstances would you say that a black person is right while a white person is wrong? Or would you agree with US Chief Justice Roger Taney that black people are “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”?
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(I would be surprised if we had anybody here arguing for that, it’s one thing to point out existing biological differences, it’s another to say the law should impose a hierarchy)
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There are, too be fair important White Nationlaist groups that don’t argue for any sort of legal racial heirarchy. American Renaisance wants communities and businesses to have the legal right to exclude on the basis of race if they wish. So you could have all White (or all Asian or all Black if you wish) towns or companies.
American Renaisance, despite being popular and running highly attended conventions, is rather controversial within White Nationalism. Mostly because they ban discussion of the “Jewish Question” among speakers at their conventions and articles in publications they control. Their founder Jared Taylor is often quoted as saying “they look white to me” about the Jews. So it wouldn’t shock me if they are considerably more moderate than the mainstream white nationalist.
Just for Clarfication American Renaisance has terrible views. On top of being racist against Black people they are super strongly against immigration and say horrible things about Muslims. But it seems some white nationalists are worse than others.
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Not to belabor the obvious, but formal legal discrimination is not necessary to create the kind of inequality of results that makes progressives uncomfortable.
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A question from actual U.S. history: at which point would nation-wide law override local ordnances? E.g. if a black person outstays her welcome in a whites-only community, what restrictions are there on how she is to be treated? How does this change her status in the eyes of the state?
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@multiheaded,
The commerce clause gives the government final authority in all manners of interstate commerce, which courts generally interpret extraordinarily broadly; i.e. if I grow weed in my basement for my own personal use that affects interstate commerce because I’m dropping out of the black market which exists between states (yes that’s a real supreme court case, though my paraphrase may well be a bit off).
On top of that the incorporation doctrine means all of the provisions of the bill of rights apply to state and local governments as well as to the federal government.
Finally, congress likes to make highway funding and other subsidies to statestablish contingent on them having certain laws on the books or not, as MADD (mother’s against drunk driving) used to force most states to raise the drinking ages to 21.
In practice the US is federal to the exact extent that the government doesn’t care about the issue in question.
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If a race is actually superior then they will attain superior rights without need for government intervention, as the formerly Chinese upper classes of Malaysia and Vietnam or the formerly German upper classes of Eastern Europe and Russia did. A stable aristocracy can by definition only be a natural aristocracy, one such as ours which maintains power through legalistic sophistry media lies and corrupt finances is always going to be fighting an uphill battle just to maintain their position.
So my answer is basically that you have things reversed; restoring a natural hierarchy requires removing laws which give special privileges to certain races over others, such as affirmative action and the various hate-crime laws, not adding new layers of racist laws over them like we were trying to cover up tacky wallpaper. National Socialism is like any other form of socialism in that way; it stands in contravention of nature and thus is incompatible with a healthy society.
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I’m not just talking about government, I’m talking about custom, which includes law. Essentially, I am asking what is permitted in your “healthy society,” and what would not be tolerated, especially in the name of giving the underclass a more stable and predictable environment so they don’t rebel. IE, do the underclass get any protections from their ‘superiors,’ or do superiors get to do whatever they want to someone lower on the racial pecking order?
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They get whatever rights they end up with, depending on the particular circumstances of time and place and on the traits of the respective ruling and ruled classes. It’s not really possible for me to put forward a general rule which covers every possible set of racial relations. What worked between Aryans and Dravidians in Vedic India isn’t necessarily going to work between Boers and Zulu in modern South Africa, despite superficial similarities.
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You know what really grinds my gears? When people say “by definition” when they aren’t just substituting a concept for its definition. You can say the derivative of sin is cos “by definition”. You can’t say a stable aristocracy is by definition a natural aristocracy. OK? Good. You may now proceed.
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OT: you can’t really say that cos is the derivative of sin by definition. You can say that cos is add/hyp by definition, but the power series relationships are ex-post-facto. You could define cos that way, but that’s not how it happened: we learned that cos is the derivative of sin at least a thousand years after we defined it.
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well, ok, fair enough. If you take the one particular, ancient definition of sin to be The One True Definition, then the derivative is a theorem, not the definition. But there’s a number of ways you could define it that are all equivalent and just as good as each other.
* in terms of triangles
* define sin and cos as a system of real ODE
* define exp as a complex ODE and define sin and cos in terms of exp
* as a taylor series
It’s pretty normal to use any one of these that’s convenient and call it “the” definition.
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>They get whatever rights they end up with, depending on the particular circumstances of time and place and on the traits of the respective ruling and ruled classes.
So … you’re saying you’re OK with every possible society, including this one, since by definition they proceed from the circumstances and the traits of different classes?
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An ever-popular question to ask reactionaries; if you’re so stable, why are you so DEAD?
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@Mugasofer,
You’ll note the repeated use of the word “natural” and synonyms like “organic” in my descriptions. The implied, albiet evidently unclear, contrast being between systems which arose through immediate struggles between groups (whether on the battlefield or marketplace) in accordance with natural law and those which were imposed from outside by a third party according to merely human morality.
Let me save us both a lot of headache; we disagree, quite stremously, because you are a humanist and a materialist and I am neither. Neither of us is likely to move from those positions, so it’s more useful to try and comprehend one another (without implying an ethical or factual equivalence) than to persuade one another.
@Multiheaded,
There are two answers I could give, one serious and one snarky.
The serious answer is that this is the Iron Age, or Kali Yuga if you have an inexplicable phobia of the classics; the brief period of destruction at the end of every cycle of history. As has been predicted, natural law has been reduced to standing on a single hoof but in time this age will pass and Tradition will be restored at the beginning of the next cycle.
The snarky answer is that your heroes blasted apart a millenia old stone amd mortar bridge with dynamite and built a replacement out of scrap iron and driftwood which promptly fell apart in less than a single century, to the surprise of no-one but themselves: in other words, you are absolutely the last person who can reasonably complain about the stability of bridges.
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To put a bit of a Reconstructionist spin on what Morgenstern said, the ancient bridge was built and maintained by ultra-conservative medieval mason’s guilds, and when science started making it apparent that the bridge wasn’t going to handle increasing mechanized traffic and it wasn’t in the right place for economically efficient use and the toll was way too high meaning that communication was horrible, they just completely ignored it and tried to stop change and had thugs harass alternative civil engineering conferences. (Guilds in the Enlightenment period had this authority, more or less).
Then it got blasted apart by “move fast and break things” startup people who replaced it with shitty plastic materials that looked really nice when new, and then there was a composite bridge building boom that put all of the masons out of work, and then, several decades later when the composite bridge was obviously needing replacement, there was so much of NIMBY attitudes, overly restrictive enviromental regulations, etc. that not only could nobody recreate the original stone bridge, but it was extremely difficult to get any kind of bridge built except in the most inconvenient stopgap-ish way.
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Morganstern, are you claiming that Tsarist Russia circa 1914 and China from the end of the Qing Dynasty through 1936 were anything close to stable and well-functioning?
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Are you looking for an answer, or begging an answer? The way you phrased that question suggests you’re begging rather than looking.
Most folks you would classify as white supremacists do not Africans [Continential Africans or African Americans] sharing the same country; even if this means ceding American and European territories to areas which are predominantly African at this point. They feel the same way about Hispanics but are less emphatic about it. There a far less complaint with the presence of east Asians.
So if by “Hierarchy”, you mean a legal system within a country where rights and privileges of defined races are formally and differentially arranged [I.e in a hierarchy] There would only be one legal tier. The presence of multiple ethnicities within a state would never be large enough to radically affect the politics of that supremacist state.
[The only group that so-called white Supremacists are suspicious of even in very small groups are European Jews.]
If by Hierarchy you mean something relating to the developmental status of nations, that is not prescriptive.
The absolute worst you would expect from a White supremacist state would be akin to the status of Non-jews within the state of Israel.
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“The absolute worst you would expect from a White supremacist state would be akin to the status of Non-jews within the state of Israel.”
Excuse me while I laugh my ass off. I’m asking because I’ve been digging into the history of the pre-US Civil War South, a White Supremacist state if there ever was one. A state that wasn’t just comfortable with its racially different minority, it was *completely dependent* upon that people’s unpaid labor. Far from wanting the racial Other far away from them, they wanted to take *more territory* that they could populate with slave plantations.
This is a topic where I’ve had many arguments with NRx types in the Slate Star Codex comment section, and I distinctly remember a few of them – Jim I remember, and I really don’t want to dig through the Anti-Reactionary FAQ comment thread to find the others, and the general tone was something akin to “the black people were better off as slaves because they got food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, and never mind the fact that their “masters” could do whatever they wanted – up to torture, rape, and execution – with absolutely no consequences.
So I’ll ask again – in a society where there is a large and racially distinct underclass, that is effectively bound to labor for their “betters,” what rights should be accorded to the inferior? What protections should they get from their overlords, in the name of maintaining societal stability? Or do they have, in the words of Chief Justice Taney, “no rights which the [superior] is bound to respect?”
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“Excuse me while I laugh my ass off. I’m asking because I’ve been digging into the history of the pre-US Civil War South”
Maybe my putting white supremacist in quotation marks as opposed to saying Neoractionary or AltRight, or something else confused you. But are you asking what a person alive today who you would regard as a white supremacist believes, or are you interested in resurrecting dead confederates and asking about their own theories about what living in a multi-racial society should be like?
If you can’t conceive of any differences between the two, why ask the former what sort of system they envision if you’ve already established in your own mind that it will simply resemble the ideals of the latter?
This is why I accuse you of begging an answer, because that’s what you’re doing.
So you can’t claim ignorance, people alive *today* that you would call white supremacists, have views on race and politics slightly to the left of a Abraham Lincoln and the Republican party circa mid 18th century. I.E. that Abolition should be proceeded swiftly with repatriation of African Freemen, and that the United States proper should be, as much as possible, an all white country.
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the **black people were better off as slaves** because they got food, shelter, clothing, and medical care, and never mind the fact that their “masters” could do whatever they wanted – up to torture, rape, and execution – with absolutely no consequences.
This is an empirical question, and [note that the plural of anecdote is not data.]
I highlighted the important part of that above paragraph, unfortunately, it is to vague to answer definitively. So why don’t you instead try answering for yourself of the following questions. Note that “I lack sufficient data to answer this question one way or the other” is a perfectly acceptable answer.
1. How does one empirically measure “Better off” — I’m not trying to be a sophist here. It’s useful for someone such as yourself to have a very clear idea in your mind what “Better off” means before you accept or reject any proposition about a certain group of people in a certain period of time, being better off than another group of people at another point in time.
Contrast this with how you handled the issue, invoking “Torture, rape, and execution” You’re talking as if you think these people you’re debating never took a high school or college American History Class. Invoking a narrative has zero chance of appealing to anyone who does not already internalize that narrative and therefore agrees with it. It doesn’t matter whether that narrative is true or not, repeating what someone has already heard in a classroom and rejected will do nothing unless you take a few more steps.
So let me show you how take a few more steps…Better off *could* mean having a longer life expectancy, it could also mean happier [How does one measure happier]. It could also mean achieving salvation [Depending on your religious beliefs].
2. Are we asking whether Africans were better off as slaves as compared to Africans living in a 21st century post-industrial society?
3. Are We asking whether Africans were better off as slaves compared to Africans living in Africa, contemporaneously?
4. Are we comparing whether Africans were better of as slaves in the North Atlantic as opposed to Africans in Central America, South America, or North Africa / Arabia?
5. Are we asking whether Africans were better off as slaves compared to Africans living in the United States immediately following emancipation?
Before go and further, notice the difference between the kind of question begging statement you were given, and the kinds of statements you see me listing below. I’ve removed all ambiguity, and framed the question in such a way that it can easily be answered one way or the other with data.
Suppose I want to prove that slaves were worse off under slavery than as freemen in a hostile south. I then define better off in purely material terms and use life expectancy as a proxy for material well being. I then compare the life expectancy of Slaves to that of Africans post 1865. It turns out the life expectancy of Africans fell after the civil war.
Now I’ll play double devil’s advocate: There are any number of objections to what I just did. The first is that the collapse of the southern economy deprives us of an apples to apples comparison [Slaves vs. Freemen in a functioning economy]. The second is that life expectancy is a poor proxy for material well being. A third is that material well being is itself a poor proxy for ‘being better off’.
It’s really up to you to decide which of these questions you regard as most important.
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As for your last point. You are operating in a paradigm where significant amounts of inter-racial and inter-ethnic cohabitation [Within a given country] is simply treated as a given. Other people have commented on this issue more succinctly then I can. I think Morganstern answered your question.
Multi-ethnic states are not ideal conditions. If one literally treated every racial group equally before the law [Which is what most self identified conservatives want, and what SJW’s refer to as colour blind racism] You would have a socioeconomic hierarchy which for the most part resembles what it does now; European Jews on the top, followed by east Asians, then whites, then Hispanics, then blacks. That is not a prescribed order, that is simply what *WOULD* occur.
The disparity between different groups is ultimately what leads to calls for corrective action [EEOC, race quotas in universities, etc..], but since the laws cannot actually correct the non-environmental conditions which lead to the disparities, the disparities largely remain unchanged and the only [socially acceptable] response is to double down on failure.
Asking what should be done about an already multi-ethnic society is sort of like asking what should be done about drunk driving after the cars have collided. You’ve [probably on purpose] framed it to exclude the most obvious solution.
If you want me to put forward more *prescriptions* so that you can call me a demon or something, Here’s a bone for you to chew on:
Large multi-ethnic countries like the United States can handle ethnic conflict in two complimentary ways. The first way is to allow for a significant degree of local autonomy. Even in multi-ethnic states, ethnicities tend to cluster in geographic areas rather than disperse evenly across an entire country. The second is to take it one step further and construct states based on ethnic lines. The national governmental unit should recognize the right of these local units to include or exclude others at their own discretion.
Expensive taxpayer funded public services should *largely* be provided largely on the basis of these smaller political units. Local elections in largely homogeneous political units allows for issue based rather than identity based politics.
If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s more or less what progressives used to advocate [or gave lip service to] when self-determination referred to India, The middle east, the Balkans, Ireland, etc.
As I said, I personally support ceding the south west back to Mexico, or simply recognizing it as it’s own independent country; one that has almost nothing in common with places like Portland, or Boston, or Atlanta.
Now multi-ethnic city states are a separate issue. I think Lee Kuan Yew handled a multi-ethnic Singapore remarkably well. Here’s what he had to say:
SPIEGEL: During your career, you have kept your distance from Western style democracy. Are you still convinced that an authoritarian system is the future for Asia?
Mr. Lee: Why should I be against democracy? The British came here, never gave me democracy, except when they were about to leave. But I cannot run my system based on their rules. I have to amend it to fit my people’s position. In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion. Supposing I’d run their system here, Malays would vote for Muslims, Indians would vote for Indians, Chinese would vote for Chinese. I would have a constant clash in my Parliament which cannot be resolved because the Chinese majority would always overrule them. So I found a formula that changes that…
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Taney doesn’t assert this as his own view. Rather, he argues that it was the view of the founding fathers in the previous century.
He then goes on to argue that, since this was their view, they could not have intended for the constitution’s language about the rights of “the people” to extend to black people.
So, he’s making an Originalist argument for why black people ought to receive no constitutional protections. His arguments are not based on what he thinks ought to be the rights of black people, but rather on what he thinks the founding fathers thought ought to be the rights of black people, together with his belief that the founding fathers’ intentions determine the meaning of the law.
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Let’s not break that streak on Genocide!
So, human-biting mosquitoes, should we wipe them off the face of the earth? I vote yes! It’d be (fairly) cheap, everybody hates them, and probably wouldn’t have much of an ecological impact (sure, birds eat mosquitoes, but there’d be other non-human-biting mosquitoes left, and of course other small insects…)
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Does Chesterton’s fence still apply if the fence-builders are dark gods who have no concern for human welfare?
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The Chesternomicon.
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I think it only applies to human (or divine, implicitly) traditions. So the question is, is the existence of mosquitoes a divine tradition?
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Considering the problem of evil/suffering, “dark gods who have no concern for human welfare” and “divine tradition” are synonymous.
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This is a little bit like what neoreactionaries call Gnon (Nature or Nature’s God a la Deists), actually.
I’d say that you should overcome the fence, but that is a more complicated thing to do that just tearing it down, and every such Azathoth-erected fence that you tear down without a corresponding improvement in human coordination, power, and anti-fragility makes your ecosystem (social, enviromental, whatever) more fragile and more likely to fall in a nasty way.
Examples:
– World peace would be very nice, but it is much harder than simple disarmament. Disarmament means that a defector can have a lot of power and leaves you unprepared for unexpected threats. OTOH, if you achieve sufficient coordination, then you can have peace.
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They’re not just universally hated, they spread some extremely dangerous diseases, causing enormous amounts of misery and death among humans. As the Daleks would say, exterminate!
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Try it in a large-but-not-totally-genocidal area. If there are no effects worse than thousands of people suffering and dying from malaria, then begin the mosquitocide. Later, mount a mosquito courier next to the taxidermied smallpox virus on humanity’s wall.
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Corpse, not carrier. Petition for comment editing powers, also Jai should not comment from mobile.
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I totally support this, and since this is thread is supposed to be for controversial stuff, I’ll go a step further: We should be much less cautious about exterminating entire species – we’re already causing lots of accidental extinctions and won’t be making much difference. The one program like this I can think of that caused serious damage could be prevented by spending five minutes looking up what sparrows eat, and as long as we’re not being that over-enthusiastic about declaring a species to be vermin, things should work out fine.
Also I find it aesthetically pleasing – “this enemy of humanity has been forever defeated” has a much nicer ring to it than having populations under control.
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Does anyone know how much of an effect large apex predators like Tigers have on an ecosystem that would be relevant to humans and couldn’t be replicated by shooting some deer? Because I strongly suspect the answer is “not much”, and if so I say we should actively wipe out these sort of dangerous animals in the wild.
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Perhaps, but it seems worth noting that it’s fairly rare for large apex predators to attack humans; they’re a much, much, much smaller threat than mosquitoes.
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Me after watching an opera where the heroine (as usual) dies of tuberculosis:
“But now Pasteur marshalls armies, terrible to behold, and we are avenged a millionfold. Against external foes who take root, we strike hard, and destroy them and all their accursed kind.”
…
“Against the traitors from within who took my grandfather, our power grows daily, while nature’s strength remains the same. Soon my own blood shall be avenged.”
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Iluminatiinitiate, there is the example of wolves in yellowstone.
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…Many of you people seem confused about what race and gender means. :P
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What if we only exterminated female mosquitoes? Or held a competition to see who could kill mosquitoes the fastest? :P
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Well, the standard technique for mosquito eradication involves sterilizing (some) male mosquitoes. So, uh, how about this: “Sterilize males to ensure genocide!”
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I recall Bill Gates’ in-development anti-malaria laser was calibrated to only kill adult females, because male mosquitoes don’t bite people; only the females do that.
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I must confess that I don’t understand why eliminating a species is considered a particularly bad thing.
I’m an ethical vegan. I’m against killing cows and leatherback turtles. I don’t see why one’s life is much more important than the other’s.
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White nationalist finds some common ground with the Democrats on Obamacare.
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Possibly unreasonable etiquette request: a warning when linking to something actually terrible rather than something *about* terribleness.
(I expected a link to a non-primary source, now I have anti semitism in my history and I’m worried some cookie somewhere is going to start telling Google and amazon to recommend all the Nazi things to me. This is possibly an unreasonable fear.)
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Just clear your cookies, man.
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Um Ozy, my comments are marked as awaiting moderation for some reason.
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Hmm… It appears to be some weird thing involving my account where it used my username directly for the other posts. Maybe it thinks they are from a new commenter.
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Yep, it thought they were from a new commenter and I was at dinner.
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Umm, sorry about my neuroses but it sounds sort of like you might be implying that I was implying that you should be constantly checking your’e blog. I know that’s probably not what you actually meant and I’m sorry but just in case that’s not what I think and you should do whatever you like and are not obligated to check your blog constantly (or at all really, it’s up to you).
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Often it seems like feminists and the manosphere tend to focus on different areas (e.g., manosphere is more likely to talk about the selective service draft system, feminists are more likely to talk about the gender composition of Fortune 500 CEOs), but one area where they seemingly talk about the same issue, and come to completely opposite conclusions: is female sexuality shamed and male sexuality celebrated, or is male sexuality demonized and female sexuality celebrated? “Demonized” and “shamed” aren’t quite the same thing, while “celebrated” and “celebrated” are.
Are they both blindly feeling an elephants leg, and one insists that it’s rough as a tree and the other than it’s smooth as polished marble?
My tentative hypothesis is that it’s a matter of levels. (At the level of a newspaper op-ed or something, denigrating female sexuality faces more systematic pushback than denigrating male sexuality (although neither are really popular), while at the level of local interpersonal relationships, people have (often unarticulated) prejudices against promiscuous women to a greater extent than against promiscuous men.)
I’m not sure though.
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If nothing else, the ESA Shirt Mess demonstrated that “OMFG A MAN SHOWING SOME TINY INKLING OF SEXUALITY IN PUBLIC!” is not quite the feted, omni-acceptable thing many feminists seem to like to pretend it is.
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I think that male sexuality is consciously demonized and unconsciously celebrated, while male sexuality is consciously celebrated and unconsciously shamed.
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For the life of me I can’t decide which of the two ‘male’s is a typo :P … what counts as ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ almost certainly has a large [sub]cultural component.
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did you mean male… female?
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This distinction is important, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple.First of all, conscious associations vary across the board. My model of Radical Feminists would say that since male sexuality is backed by the patriarchy, it will be more ethically fraught than female sexuality. My model of a PUA would say that men have evolved to be promiscuous, that is the natural way of things, and so female sexuality is more shameful than male sexuality. My model of, say, Ozy or Scott or multiheaded would try to be as symmetric as possible, recognizing that some behaviors do vary in distribution across genders, but should be treated similarly regardless of gender. My model of someone generally uninterested in gender issues would say “There’s a double standard isn’t there? I mean, if you think about it, there’s kind of a double standard and that’s bad.”
Secondly, I think unconscious associations are a bit more complex. I’ve never been in anyone’s unconscious besides my own, but my general impression is that normative male sexuality is celebrated moreso than normative female sexuality, while non-normative male sexuality is more demonised than non-normative female sexuality. A sexually active, slightly promiscuous male college student is viewed as basically normal. A sexually active, somewhat promiscuous female college student is viewed as a slut. A man who cheats on his wife is viewed as a monster. A woman who cheats on her husband is viewed as a slut.
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I think a large part of it it that, female sexuality used to be seen as worse than male sexuality, but both were seen as bad. Feminism has made a lot of effort in fixing perception of female sexuality but views on male sexuality are still where they used to be. In communities and microcultures where feminism has had a lot of impact, female sexuality is now seen as better than male sexuality, but areas and microcultures that haven’t been significantly impacted by feminism, female sexuality is still seen as worse.
Using female sex toys among feminism impacted cultures is seen as acceptable and normal and women who use them are seen as independent, but very negatively in cultures not very impacted by feminism. Male sex toys in both cultures are seen as , weird and negative and men who use them are loses.
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Wow, I typoed.
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MM: oooh, that’s a compliment!
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I’m … pretty sure the feminists are right on this one.
However, in polite society some people are consciously aware of this and compensate – while feminism can indeed be somewhat hostile to male sexuality.
So I imagine some MRAs might experience more of this anti-male-sexuality-prejudice than the (creepily omnipresent) prejudice-against-female-sexuality. Whether because they are in exceptionally feminist environments, or because they are exceptionally blind to problems felt by other people.
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This, like pretty much everything involving “which gender gets it worse”, is massively confounded by the male gender role of “not talking about your problems”.
How the hell would we know if any given set of men are likely to suffer from anti-male-sexuality prejudice, when the entire set of people in question are actively being dissuaded from mentioning it on pain of status diminishment?
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Well, I’m male. I’m generalizing from my own observations, to a certain extent. I should be at least as capable of observing stud-shaming as slut-shaming in my own environment, presumably, if not more so.
With that said, I do observe a certain amount of stud-shaming from feminists – for reasons left as an exercise for the reader, because I’m sure as hell not writing a treatise here.
An additional source of evidence is people’s responses to social incentives. This is subject to more confounders, admittedly, but it is easier to observe. And, yeah, guys seem more worried about being rejected but less worried about being seen as a player in various measurable ways.
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Variability hypothesis. Wikipedia seems to mostly think it’s a thing, although not overwhelmingly strong, but I find counterarguments that much of what previous research had found to be an artifact of social, not biological, factors convincing: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/06/01/gender-gap-in-maths-driven-by-social-factors-not-biological/
2012 is the most recent year that Wikipedia gives me stats for the Gender Inequality Index. The “variability hypothesis artifact of social factors” hypothesis predicts that the 10 countries with the lowest gender inequality should be about 50/50 at the highest level of math. Checking out their International Math Olympiad teams, it’s 53/7. Can anyone explain this in terms of just social factors?
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I would expect the standard feminist response to be ‘even the most gender equal societies still have social factors pushing women out of maths. A better analysis to do would be correlation between gender equality and Olympiad team composition.’
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As time goes by, I’m getting more and more and more sympathetic to slippery slope arguments.
It’s not just the kind of thing Scott talks about in http://lesswrong.com/lw/ase/schelling_fences_on_slippery_slopes/ . It’s a more general issue.
I remember the basic elements of a lot of the more abused bits of social justice in their earlier forms. So, for example, about 20 years ago people used to talk about rape probabilities and the difficulty of telling potential attackers in advance, but they were always very careful to say “but of course no-one is saying all men are rapists”. (Some people were saying that crap, of course, but it was the radfem fringes, not anyone remotely mainstream.)
Now? Mainstream comedy-oriented media link to Schroedinger’s Rapist articles as though they were common sense rather than the argumentum ad absurdiam of two decade ago.
Going to the other end of the spectrum, 20 years ago I remember right-wing Tories here in the UK going to great lengths to explain that while they felt it was necessary to give people more incentives to work, it would be horrid for anyone to suggest that the unemployed were lazy or work-shy. Of course no-one’s saying that!
And lo, 20 years later, we get a Tory government that implements workfare projects because it’s clearly the only way to make work-shy layabouts do something for their money. After all, hardworking families demand that they be held accountable!
It’s getting to the point for me where if someone says “well of course we’re not saying X” while discussing a minor version of X, I just assume there’s an invisible “yet” waiting in the wings. I’ve begun trying to work out what the long-term goals are for everything, because it’s seems eminently likely I’m going to be living through most of them.
But the other thing about it is… I don’t believe ideologues any more when they disavow their radical fringes. Because the radical ideas of 20 years ago are mainstream now, and not only mainstream but practically sacrosanct. And I don’t particularly want to live in a world where mandatory hormone treatment for men “to protect women from Male Violence” is considered a mainstream idea.
And I know that there’s a lot of radical ideas from 20 years ago that never went through this slippery-slope process and I try to take comfort in that, but I then have to remind myself that there were people for whom gay marriage was as untenable 30 years ago as mandatory hormone treatment for men is for me now. A lot of them, in fact.
The mandatory hormone treatment thing is only an example. I’m aware that this is unlikely to happen because things that strongly adversely affect the elite tend t be the things that don’t slide down the slope. But there’s plenty of other shit hanging around in the fringes that’s just as bloody horrible. I have pretty much no idea if I’ll still have the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty 20 years from now. It’s a really scary thought.
Bah. I should probably get my own blog if I’m going to brainsplurge this much. But it’s the race and gender open thread, and where else is this going to go?
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The extreme radical fringe of feminism is a lot less extreme and radical than it was even thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, Mary Daly was lecturing at colleges and universities, lesbian separatism was a live issue, feminists were campaigning for (and passed!) laws that banned the sexualized depiction of the subordination of women, etc.
Also, Schrodinger’s Rapist is explicitly not about how all men are rapists. In fact, the second paragraph is “Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities,” i.e., the people she is explicitly writing to are men who are not rapists, i.e. it is explicitly working from the framework that men who are not rapists exist.
Can you provide a citation of anyone, even on the radical fringe, who supports mandatory hormone treatment for men?
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You know it’s out there. I know it’s out there. The difference between Mary Daly’s era and now is that the fringe is no longer the fringe, so they have to distinguish themselves even MORE. Your comment threads have seen links to people who think sex-selective abortion of males is perfectly reasonable. My inability to find a deleted radfem Tumblr from 9 months ago doesn’t negate this issue.
As regards the Schrodinger’s Rapist part, you missed my point; regardless of whether or not the author spent a single paragraph covering her ass before howling about how there’s no way if she can tell whether a given black person is going to be the one who stole her car, the entire area of discussion was utterly outside the mainstream 20 years ago and only referenced in a “it’s not like we’re saying !” way. And now it’s here, with apologia no less, and defended as though paranoia and labelling of others based upon non-selected traits was in some way a natural right (but only of women, of course).
I stand by my statement: as things stand and based upon the ongoing slippery slope of arguments used, every ass-covering “it’s not like we’re saying that men accused of rape should be considered guilty by default!” just serves to convince me more that for a specific segment of society that is the actual aim. And based on the last couple of decades, I have reason to assume it’s going to become mainstream and probably law within my lifetime. And the same applies to every other “it’s not like we’re saying…” and every other refutation of the fringes.
Just this last week I saw at least one “fringe lunatic” openly state they believe that men should be hounded out of tech jobs so that they can be held by women. This wasn’t a friendless hyper-fringe idiot, either, this was a relatively well-known if unusual figure.
20 years ago I would have assumed that was just frustrated noise. Now? I’m no longer nearly so sure.
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And as regards your Mary Daly reference: Catharine McKinnon is still teaching to this day.
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That’s interesting, Ozy. We read the placating intro to the Schrodinger’s Rapist post very differently. To me, it didn’t come across as a measure of reassurance, but rather a condescending “Now now, I’m not going to say you’re a rapist… but you Nice Guys usually are.”
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I suspect we read it differently because I am a highly socially phobic person who used to be read as a woman in public, and I remember my visceral terror when people started conversations or hit on me in public and refused to stop talking even when I said “please go away” or was visibly having a panic attack. And then I cut my hair short and started binding my breasts and wearing clothes that read as “teenage boy”, and suddenly no one was initiating conversations with me in public anymore.
I think the SR post is misguided, but I am highly sympathetic to its basic message.
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So it never occurred to you that maybe the people it targets on your behalf might feel rather differently about being targeted?
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FWIW, my take-away message from that piece was that as a person-targeted-as-potential-rapist (male + non-neurotypical and thus “creepy” body language and mannerisms) who is terrible at figuring out how to put others at ease, the best thing I could do would be to impose a curfew upon myself, because my presence in public spaces, particularly after dark, meant that women had one more reason to fear being raped.
So that was what I did.
It lasted for a few months, until a friend discovered why I had “disappeared” and convinced me I was probably taking it a bit too close to heart.
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Zorgon: I guess I’m going to have to unpack what I mean by the word “misguided”…
I am totally and 100% okay with shaming people who keep flirting with someone who is hyperventilating and flapping their hands (my panic attacks are… not subtle) or who call someone a bitch for saying they don’t want to talk to them. Those people are, in fact, doing something shameful and they should be ashamed of it. In addition, I think it’s helpful to tell people like me that this is a reasonable thing to be upset about and that those people are jerks, because that is a message a lot of people fail to hear.
As a practical matter, the advice in SR was not taken to heart by the assholes, because the assholes do not read feminist blogs and even if they did are probably not particularly concerned with not hurting people. It was taken to heart by people like moebius, who genuinely want not to cause distress to their fellow human beings. But because he doesn’t want to cause distress to his fellow human beings, he is already not interacting with people who are obviously panicky at the thought of interacting with him. So telling him “be more scared of hurting people!” just means that he is scared for no reason and does irrational behavior to avoid scaring people.
I don’t know how to tell people like me that it’s okay to be upset by harassment without making people like moebius absurdly scared of harassing people. And I don’t know how to get the harassers to stop harassing people. But I think SR is bad for both of these.
In addition, I feel like “rapist” is a bad framing. Most rapes are not stranger rapes. I will not be raped by someone hitting on me on a bus. It’s not Schrodinger’s Rapist; it’s Schrodinger’s Asshole. I dislike things that legitimate women’s fear of the stranger rapist; I think that is giving in to patriarchal control of women’s bodies through the fear of rape. While I am concerned about Schrodinger’s Rapist or Abuser (and, indeed, I think it is wise for everyone to be, regardless of gender), I am mostly concerned about it with my friends and acquaintances.
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My objections to it are twofold, with the first being the most important by far:
1) I do not, under any circumstances, accept the idea that labelling someone as worthy of suspicion due to non-selected traits is acceptable. Not ever.
2) There is a huge difference between antisocial behavior and being a potential rapist (or for that matter a potential anything except possibly “potential even more antisocial person”).
And your stated understanding that this isn’t about specific gender helps a bit with 1. But not much, because the materials it’s coming from gender it relentlessly. For me, saying you’re sympathetic to the SR argument is kind of like an anti-capitalist saying “I do appreciate the issues with bankers, but Mein Kampt is just too focused on the Jewish ones.”
I do sympathise with the problem of people being douchebags and refusing to stop being douchebags. People are often douchebags, often without actually meaning to be. By your description, one of the manifestations of your specific mental condition is that your ability to deal with douchebags is highly limited and the range of behaviours that produces the douchebag response is expanded. I’m similar in some ways. It’s fucking awful.
People are going to continue effectively harassing both of us, and for the most part they’re going to to be doing so relatively innocently in terms of intent. So until we can come up with a social technology that allows us to effectively broadcast our line of harassment to someone else, everyone else is covered in razorwire. All the time.
And that sucks really, really hard, and empathy is good, and it’s OK to feel like that.
But I’d like it if everyone involved could remember that no one asked to be covered in razorwire all the time.
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Inb4 neoreaction and Cthulhu
The problem with that sort of slippery slope type argument is that it becomes a fully general counterargument, at least for anything in which you think it is possible to “go too far”. You could use it on pretty much any course of action that wasn’t basically just an outright stated utility function.
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It’s not really a question of “going too far”, nor is it really very relevant to Moldbug’s Cthulu metaphor, since it applies to rightist positions too (as I pointed out above). The problem isn’t that things are going too far, it’s that groups pushing for political change keep establishing Schelling fences and then unilaterally abandoning them.
It’s like I’m stuck in a PD scenario with a hundred people that claim to always cooperate, talk about cooperation relentlessly, wear “COOPERATE FOR GREAT JUSTICE” T-shirts and have their names changed to Coop. E. R. Ate by deed poll, but when I look back I can see they’ve defected at every stage and it’s taken this many iterations of the dilemma for me to realise this fact because they’re just so insistent as regards the benefits of cooperation.
So it’s not really fully general except in the most vague TDTish sense, as it’s reliant on having watched people relentlessly defect over and over and over.
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Slippery Slope is not a fully general counterargument. It is specifically a rejection of postulates which generate conclusions we know to be false. That is basic proof by contradiction.
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InferentialDistance, that’s not quite right. Slippery Slope arguments are attempts at proof by contradiction with what’s called a Sorites series. That’s not logically valid.
10^7 grains of sand is a heap.
If n grains is a heap, n-1 grains is still a heap.
n-1 grains is a heap.
…
1 grain is a heap.
Well, obviously not. So 10^7 grains of sand aren’t a heap?
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Slipper Slope is an inductive proof by contradiction. A Slippery Slope argument is correct when the postulate pushes you in a direction without stopping. Usually people claim there is some Schelling Fence that will bound the consequences of the postulate, but that is an additional postulate that must also be proved. It’s important to remember that the society reached by implementing the postulate will almost certainly do and view things differently than our own, so “that’s too ridiculous” isn’t a sufficient argument because it only holds under our current view, and not the one of the hypothetical society.
The mistake in your example is that you aren’t correctly negating your postulates. You have two postulates conjoined (“10^7 grains of sand is a heap” AND
“If n grains is a heap, n-1 grains is still a heap”); the negation of a conjunction is a disjunction (“10^7 grains of sand is NOT a heap” OR
“NOT If n grains is a heap, n-1 grains is still a heap”), thus one or both of the postulates must be wrong. Given a definition of “heap” that has 10^7 grains of sand as one, but 1 grain of sand is not, by modus tollendo ponens the if-then statement (“If n grains is a heap, n-1 grains is still a heap”) is false.
Note that to properly understand this you also have to use set theory, because there’s a hidden “for all heaps” in that if-then statement, that becomes a “there exists a heap” under the negation, which is true at the boundary (the definition of “heap of sand” must denote some heap where removing a single grain of sand results in a not-heap, and that element makes the negation of the if-then).
An example of a good inductive proof:
Hypothesis: exp(x) >= fib(x) for all x in the non-negative integers
where exp(x) = 2^x and fib(x) = {0 when x = 0; 1 when x = 1; fib(x-1)+fib(x-2) when x >= 2}
Base Case:
x = 0; exp(0) = 2^0 = 1 >= 0 = fib(0); true
x = 1; exp(1) = 2^1 = 2 >= 1 = fib(1); true
Induction Step:
Assume hypothesis for x-1 and x-2, prove true for x (where x >= 2)
exp(x) = 2*exp(x-1) // by recurrence relation of exponents
2*exp(x-1) = exp(x-1) + exp(x-1) // by distributive property
exp(x-1) + exp(x-1) >= exp(x-1) + exp(x-2) // because exp(x-1) >= exp(x-2)
exp(x-1) + exp(x-2) >= fib(x-1) + exp(x-2) // by induction hypothesis of (x-1)
fib(x-1) + exp(x-2) >= fib(x-1) + fib(x-2)// by induction hypothesis of (x-2)
fib(x-1) + fib(x-2) = fib(x) // by definition of fib(x)
exp(x) >= fib(x) // by transitivity
Thus, by the principal of mathematical induction, exp(x) >= fib(x) for all x in the non-negative integers.
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Now I feel a bit stupid for seeing your name InferentialDistance and not realising that I was doing an awful job of bridging any inferential distance between me and potential readers. Let me try to do better.
What I meant to say that slippery slope arguments usually have the form of the argument I was presenting: both the unconditional and the step-wise conditional premise are very plausible. You apply classical logic to them and get a silly result. And then people infer that the unconditional premise can’t be true.
That, of course, is very fishy reasoning. There are, in particular, two reasons why it can be legitimately doubted. As you rightly say, it could be that the conditional premise is false after all. In the real world, it’s usually not an axiom like mathematical deduction that you can be certain of.
But the Sorites paradox opens up a possibility to be more charitable to the slippery-slope-arguer. Sometimes denying the conditional premise is really unconvincing. It’s just kind of silly to say that there are two collections of sand-grains that differ by 1 grain, and one is a heap and the other isn’t. What if it’s actually classical logic that fails? Vague predicates like “is a heap” just don’t seem to behave according to classical logic. You can have a non-classical logic in which both premises can be true and the conclusion that 1 grain is a heap just doesn’t follow. And predicates we talk about in relation to the real world are rarely non-vague…
This, I think, reveals why slippery slope arguments look like fully general counterarguments. Usually the predicates involved in real-world arguments are somehow vague. Usually, you can find a plausible step-wise conditional premise that you can use as the basis for a Sorites argument to seemingly derive an undesirable conclusion. So if the slippery slope argument, as applied to a Sorites series*, were valid, then you could construct arguments against everything.
*That is to say, a sequence of steps starting from a clear case, connected by a plausible step-wise conditional premise, and ending in a clear non-case.
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At least half of all federal and state legislators are on the record somewhere saying or insinuating the unemployed are lazy layabouts. That’s everyday stuff.
Your other example, the one you really seem to fear, that radical feminists may be forcibly draining your balls in coming decades hasn’t a germ of legitimacy from which to grow into a real threat.
How do you envision the government getting to that point? In your nightmare scenario how does that 35% of heavily armed right wing americans, the armed forces, and local law enforcement get neutralized and submit to chemical castration by this imagined feminist totalitarianism? There’s no way to get from A to B.
Meanwhile, extermination of the poor is something rationalized on hundreds of would-be warlord’s blogs anyday of the week.
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At least half of all federal and state legislators are on the record somewhere saying or insinuating the unemployed are lazy layabouts.
Perhaps the viewpoint is so common because it matches so many peoples’ lived experience.
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You did spot the bit where I said the hormone treatment extreme position was unlikely to come into existence because it’d affect the powerful, right?
And that the much more likely situation was that men (and only men) would lose the right to be considered innocent in specific criminal trials, since the powerful have access to elite legal representation and are much less likely to be accused in the first place?
Meanwhile, 20 years ago calling the poor lazy layabouts was near-verboten in my country (albeit probably not yours). Now it’s not.
Do you possess enough charity to actually read threads before you comment on them?
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Perhaps the viewpoint is so common because it matches so many peoples’ lived experience.
Yes, I’m sure lots of people have the lived experience of being told the poor are lazy, workshy layabouts.
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Zorgon: You know full-well that’s neither what I said nor meant. And immediately after you wrote about having enough charity to engage with someone’s actual comment, rather than what you wish they had commented!
Those nits aside, I normally very much enjoy your comments, and I am sad we first had to interact under these circumstances. ;)
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You posted a single sentence, while I’ve been posting horribly long rambles all over poor Ozy’s comment threads for the last couple of days.
It’s a slightly different request for someone to acknowledge that I’ve actively stated which my primary fear is and not pretend that it’s something else and another to request a specific interpretation of a fairly vague statement.
That said, my response was perhaps a little sarcastic, and for that I apologise. I can only blame my unfortunate tendency towards continuing to be British.
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“Do you possess enough charity to actually read threads before you comment on them?”
Do you have the self-awareness to recognize that you’re unceasingly consumed by unreasonable fears of persecution by feminists, characterized by a monomania that won’t allow perspective or proportion to do the work of settling your terrified self down?
You’re not delusional. There is some truth to your fears. But they are inflated and you hold onto them with indefatigable rigidity. Its my amateur opinion that you are in possession of some “overvalued ideas”.
“The overvalued idea, first described by Wernicke, refers to a solitary, abnormal belief that is neither delusional nor obsessional in nature, but which is preoccupying to the extent of dominating the sufferer’s life.”
Whatever’s the matter you need more than comment field charity to free yourself from the razor wire you wrap up yourself in.
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Given the increasing-over-time political power of feminists, such as the ability to get people fired with just a public accusation on twitter, such as donglegate, or the ability to reduce a person to tears because they don’t like their clothes, such as shirtgate, I don’t find Zorgon’s concern completely unreasonable. Given that the school system is predominantly left-wing, feminist friendly, and actively trying to indoctrinate children with specific views, there is greater-than-even possibility that future generations will be more amenable to what are currently unacceptably extreme positions. Given the left’s love of mind-killing rhetoric, such shutting down criticism of Rape Culture theory by calling it rape apology, or shutting down investigation into the validity of a rape accusation by calling it victim blaming, there is valid concern in the ability to defend against insane positions in the future.
So how does a society like ours slide into some crazy dystopia? By letting special interest groups get away with hateful, damaging behavior and dark side epistemology which they use to slowly expand their political influence. Until one day, you wake up and they’re everywhere and they’re voting to do bad things to you and no one listens to you when you say they shouldn’t because everything thinks the dark side epistemology is right because you didn’t stamp it out when it was small and manageable.
About the only things that assuage my concerns is the market’s resistance to things that cost it money, and Scott Alexander’s point that fashion is cyclical [*]. The market tends to (but not always) keep to light side epistemology because being wrong makes it harder to out-maneuver the competition. Fashion being cyclical means that eventually the pendulum will swing the other way, feminism won’t be popular, and as a result no one will give the insane fringes the time of the day. On the other hand, then I’ll have to worry about the now trendy Young Earth Creations messing with my science textbooks.
[*]
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
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Yeah, that’ll be the point where I stop discussing anything with gene marsh.
InferentialDistance – I read that article a while back, and I do agree with it. But this is kind of my point; I’m seeing the same formerly-extremist behaviour along with ever-escalating use of superweapons and other dark-side epistemology on both sides of the aisle.
Right now, in my country, there’s what amounts to a 5+ year witch-hunt for “shirkers”; disabled people who are in some fashion “wrongly” claiming benefits despite being able to work in some fashion. So strong is the push for this on the right that simply pointing out the DWP’s own figures indicating a fraud rate of less than 1% can get you attacked.
20 years ago that was as unthinkable and fringe as Schrodinger’s Rapist was. (Some people try to claim it’s a phenomenon of the Left due to the project having been started by the Labour Party, but the truth is that Labour have been center-right for decades and the witch-hunt is primarily carried out in our right-wing dominated press.)
So this isn’t just a case of fashionable swings of discourse, this is more of a spiral, with both sides getting further and further out each time.
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Inferential Distance- The power to reduce someone to tears? That’s power in your book? Like Jamie Dimon power? Like Halliburton power? Twitter firings? Like the thousands of people who get fired everyday for infractions like wearing the wrong shirt or taking too long in the restroom?
Can you name a single American politician beholden to the feminist internet?
Why don’t you list those while i list ones in who legislate in complete lockstep with wall street, with business or military interests, industrial agrigculture, christian evangelism or the prison-industrial complex and we’ll compare?
What’s your estimate of the ratio of political power split between, say, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Jezebel.com?
MRA’s. Always working the refs.
http://www.popehat.com/2014/11/06/is-the-right-mocking-victim-culture-or-adopting-it/
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Yes, the ability for total strangers to monster a person over the internet so thoroughly that they go through a humiliating act of contrition on TV is a form of power. Just like slut shaming and other forms of emotional coercion.
All those politicians who passed laws explicitly requiring equal treatment of women and men (i.e. no gendered hiring biases), assuming you follow the definition of feminism wherein its about treating women fairly, appear to be beholden to feminists. Affirmative action along gender lines, too. Though I probably use a different definition of power than you do, where the ability to achieve your goals is the only measure, regardless of methods. Which means that even if the majority of politicians are male, if female demographics can convince, coerce, or otherwise influence them to achieve their (the female demographics’) desires, they still have power (to the degree that they are able to achieve their goals).
I mean, the extremist left managed to get a CEO of Mozilla fired because they disagreed with his personal politics. Not any action of his as CEO, not any untowards workplace behavior. By what I can glean of your definition, he had power and they did not; yet they were more able to get him ousted from his job than he was able to keep it. I don’t see how that isn’t power. If a group of people has the ability to get me fired from a job merely because they don’t like me, I fail to see how they don’t have power over me.
You can make whatever arguments about magnitude you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that the far left has the ability to cause significant damage to my life, and the lives of quite a few people, if they so choose. At little cost to themselves. And I find it incredibly dishonest to call that “powerlessness”. The class of people targeted by the extreme left have valid concerns regarding the possibility of that power being misused against them.
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You’ve been reading about the UVA situation? Never once in over 150 years has a single UVA male been expelled for sexual assault. Your vision of real world feminist power is simply ludicrous!
Youre not alone. The Christian Right is claiming martyr status. Tom Perkins and Ken Langone, both Wall Street billionaires, compared criticism of the 1% to events in the leadup to the Holocaust.
Your world seems to be confined to the internet. People bleed and starve and cry and freeze IRL.
The Mozilla CEO case is an old saw. You should have hundreds of examples like it if the phenomenon was worth the amount of grief and resentment coming out of your camp.
AEI does more to fuck you over every day than NOW? the Barnard student council? ever will.
The day you stop scapegoating Oprah’s Book Club and face your corporate masters, if that day ever arrives, is the day you’ll become a man.
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The existence of injustices from side A against side B does not justify injustices against side B from side A.
I have opinions about a lot of things, and that I don’t take the time to write out all of them every single time I respond is not a license for you to make assumptions about what they are.
My world is not confined to the internet, and your argument therein cuts quite heavily against large portions of feminist media, such as Jezebel’s and Kotaku’s love of going after the trivial (compared to bleeding, staving, freezing, etc…) issue of unequal representation in video games, comic books, etc…
The Mozzilla CEO, donglegate, and current gamergate issues are particularly poignant for me because I’m in the tech field. The tech community (especially the parts of it that I’m interested in) are very dedicated to diversity, which I don’t have a problem with. What I do have a problem with is factual errors and harmful practices that get implemented because of them. But any attempt to discuss things along those lines risks being taken out of context or interpreted unfairly. I post under a pseudonym because I don’t want my career ruined because some asshole decides to run a smear campaign on me because I disagree with parts of feminist theory (which is all that it takes to be labelled a horrible, evil, misogynistic rape apologist). I live in the blue tribe, I am vulnerable to this class of threats in a way that I am not vulnerable to red tribe threats. Because the blue tribe will protect me from the red tribe, but not other blue tribe members.
I believe there are a number of problems imposed by the economic, legal, and political infrastructure of the modern world. That, however, was not the current discussion. Picking on me for being on topic is kind of a dick move. Just as an example, I think the minimum wage is important because unchecked competition results in ethically horrendous outcomes.
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The existence of injustices from side A against side B does not justify injustices against side B from side A.Asshole frat-boy rapes justify crazy feminist witch-hunts about as much as crazy feminist witch-hunts justify asshole frat-boy rapes. Neither of these things are justified.
If you want to talk about the problem of rape in youthful party culture, go ahead. But I don’t see how that necessitates my silence regarding the problem of over-zealous feminist ideologues using untested theories and dark side rhetoric to silence or harm dissenters.
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You’re mistaking a polemicist for someone interested in discussion, ID.
Right now in the US, primary aggressor policy states that if a man calls the police and reports that he is being attacked by his partner, he should be arrested if there is any doubt as to who is in danger. This policy was pushed for and got by feminist activists.
Right now here in the UK, I cannot accuse a woman of rape, only of aggravated sexual assault (which given I’m a rape victim is a bit of an issue for me). This is based on the Sexual Offences Act of 2003, which feminist groups were actively invited to assist the legislators in drafting.
Back to the US, the CDC are still insisting that forced envelopment is not rape, despite it being obvious nonconsensual sexual intercourse. The CDC have had a number of feminist advisors on sexual violence over the years, including noted male rape denier Mary P Koss. Clearly these two things are totally unrelated.
Everyone is frightened to say anything that might upset the feminist lobby, because it will get you fired, will end your career, will monster you in the press, will exert obvious and powerful control over your life. It has done so again and again and again. Pretending otherwise is ridiculous.
The idea that feminists have no real-world power is nothing more than an attempt at avoiding the issue. It’s not an unusual one. It’d be irrelevant to the discussion anyway were it not for the fact that when dealing with things like the ongoing problem of feminist entryism in tech journalism, this is the primary tactic of defence used – as seen right in this thread.
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Gene Marsh, rhetoric like “on that day you will be a man” is sexist, and the manhood ideology it references is harmful to many boys and men. I wish you’d avoid using it.
Regarding this thread, obviously feminists have some political and social power. But we are not all-powerful. Rather, we are one of a number of co-existing interests groups, some of which have interests that more-or-less coincide with feminist interests, and others of which have interests that place them in opposition to feminism. (Furthermore, feminism itself is less a single interest group than it is an collection of multiple feminist groups, some of which hate each other.)
So yes, feminism has some political and social power. No, feminists do not have unchecked power, nor are we the most powerful interest group operating. Nor are the various nightmare scenarios described by Zorgon anything most feminists want.
* * *
Regarding shirtstorm, the real problem here isn’t feminism, or MRAs. It’s that social media is inherently unhinged and I don’t think there’s any way to hinge it.
If I’m at home watching a news conference on TV, and an official spokesperson wears – well, that shirt – there’s nothing wrong with me turning to my friend on the sofa next to me and saying “wow, what a stupid, sexist thing to wear.” There’s also nothing wrong, in principle, with me posting that on Twitter. Or writing a measured column in a newspaper explaining why I think choosing that shirt to wear as a public spokesman was a mistake and indicative of larger problems.
The problem is, when a large enough group of people tweet and retweet “what a stupid, sexist shirt,” the sum of the parts can easily become overwhelming. A single comment of that sort – or a few dozen – may be reasonable, but the sum of thousands of critical tweets is a disproportionate response to wearing a sexist shirt.
I’m not sure what the solution is to this problem, but to put it down to feminist perfidy – as Zorgon and InferentialDistance seem to be doing – is misdiagnosing the problem.
Finally, I do think that unfair pressure on people’s livelihoods due to their political position is a real threat to free speech, and have said so on my blog many times, including in cases where I was criticizing feminists and leftists.
But I don’t think Brendan Eich is a good example of this.
He wasn’t forced out by vague “feminists”; he was forced to resign by employee revulsion for his views within his own company.
Being a CEO is, and should be, a position that not just anyone can perform successfully, which is one reason they are paid obscene amounts of money. In any decent company, it’s reasonable to require that the CEO be able to generate respect from the company’s employees. Successfully navigating shit like that is part of the CEO job. If he can’t do that, then he can’t do his job.
Nor do I think it’s healthy or reasonable to expect employees to shut up and not criticize their CEO, which is apparently what Brendan Eich’s defenders wanted the employees to do. That’s not a pro-free-speech position.
Suppose that Brendan Eich had resigned after it came out that he had supported a law banning racial intermarriage, and lots of key Mozilla employees were saying that they didn’t want to work for a man like that. Would anyone be defending his right to be CEO in that case?
There is no free speech right to speak without ever facing any consequences for your speech. There is no free speech right to be CEO of Mozilla.
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I appreciate your candour and willingness to engage, ampersand. Thank you.
I entirely agree that *most* feminists are not currently arguing directly for extreme positions and indeed probably don’t want them. That’s why they’re extreme.
But my entire point in beginning this thread is that things which are now considered relatively normal and even favoured by most feminists if not in some cases completely mainstream – the aforementioned predominant aggressor policies, the whole “Schrodinger’s Rapist” concept, and so on – were considered extreme and unfavoured by most feminists 20 years ago.
And it’s the same on the other side too – 20 years ago rightists in the US were trying to downplay corporate personhood as hard as they could. Now it’s the kind of thing Republican presidential candidates talk about.
I’ve reached the point where I no longer trust the “it’s not as if we’re saying X” response. Not because I don’t believe the person isn’t saying X – they aren’t – but because time has shown me that there’s an unspoken “right now” just after it.
Anyway, all that aside, I agree with you that the real problem with social media is social media. I think that what we’re seeing is a problem that has always existed due to issues like evaporative cooling, the affective death spiral and similar biases. But either the forces which previously served to prevent endless spiralling chases towards the fringe of this kind have been broken down or – more likely – there is a threshold of communication technology past which the capacity of ideas to travel brings the effect of social biases to the fore more strongly than can be managed.
So Twitter isn’t the problem, really. It’s that we’re all broken-firmware’d social paperclip maximisers that have suddenly found themselves in a context where we’re surrounded by paperclip machines all the time and chimp-brain does what chimp-brain does.
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There is a distinct difference between making comments in a private venue, like one’s home, and making comments in a public one, like twitter, or a newspaper. Public venues cross into defamation and insult territory, which is morally bad (though quite small in magnitude, in this case). Social media allows many small cruelties to aggregate into a large torrent of hate. But it is feminist perfidy that mobbing up like that is acceptable, let alone the unsupported empirical claims that said fashion sense are causally linked to the lack of women and science, and also unsupported empirical claims that it reveals a disrespect or hate of women.
Mere meanness is usually ignored because it falls within people’s pain tolerance, not because it’s a morally acceptable action.
I still disagree about Brendan Eich. You’re implying that the threatened boycott and general public outrage had nothing to do with his resignation, which I find highly unlikely.
You need to be careful with your argument about respect, because that justifies all kinds of horrible behavior, such as racists being justified in forcing a black CEO out of their company because they can’t respect a black person. I don’t think people’s private affairs are fair game for those kinds of judgements and actions, any more than sexual orientation or ethnicity are.
It has disturbing parallels with McCarthyism. You need damned good reasons to silence dissent, and that a number of Mozilla employees are too immature to put aside their differences and work together does not seem like one to me.
And yes, I’d still defend him if it had been about interracial marriage. So long as it stays in his private life, and doesn’t affect how he runs the company. Even if his actions are morally wrong, that doesn’t justify morally wrong actions being taken against him (two wrongs don’t make a right). So long as Brendan Eich was willing to set aside his disagreement with his employees personal politics and treat them fairly, they should reciprocate and do the same. I am not persuaded that it is morally acceptable to defect against people that cooperate in the prisoner’s dilemma.
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I don’t understand how slippery slope ever got called a “fallacy.” Have people never heard of legal precedent or natural law? Judges and lawyers base decisions/cases on references to previous decisions.
“Slippery slope” is also true on societal and individual levels. Take acceptance of transgender individuals. Any increase in societal acceptance makes it more likely society will become even more accepting. Once one accepts the logic of MtF and FtM transgender individuals it is harder to dismiss non-binary people. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss furries/animal-kin/trans-ethnic people (Though society has a long way to go on this).
Of course I think its good society is going down the acceptance slope. I wish we would slide faster. My opinion is that furry oppression is a very serious problem and I think its insulting to call being trans a psychological disorder (the issue seems physical to me). But I am not gonna call the slippery slope arguing conservatives crazy. I think their predictions of what will happen are basically right (Though not any claims this will destroy society via some ill-defined moral decay).
Drug legalization is another case of slippery slope. Once you set a precedent “society can ban X substance for safety reasons” you make it easier to ban more. And conversely the marijuana legalization in a number of states is going to make it much easier for other states to legalize. And for drugs other than pot to be decriminalized and eventually made legal.
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When I hear conservatives talk about stuff they don’t like eroding traditional family values, I think to myself “yes, yes, all according to plan!”.
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Personally, I consider my transness a psychological disorder, but I understand my disability politics are pretty far from the mainstream and a lot of people don’t have the ideas necessary to make “transness is a psychological disorder” not evil. (…To be fair, I’d argue most people don’t have the ideas necessary to make the concept of psychological disorders not evil.)
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Transness is the conflict between the state of the body and the state of the mind. In that sense, it is both a physical and mental disorder, and can be rectified by treatments focusing on either (or both). Changing one’s body to suit the desires of one’s mind, or changing one’s mind to be comfortable with one’s body, both solve the issue.
Statements that transness is exclusively a physical or exclusively a psychological disorder reveals more about a person’s political and/or philosophical views than it does any objective state of the world.
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So, does anyone know a good history of asian stereotypes in western culture? (Not simply declaring that the current “studious” stereotype is a direct consequence of higher genetic IQ – I’m interested in the actual memetic mechanics involved.)
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Wikipedia is always a goodplace to start . Doesn’t have much information on Europe, but in the US, it appears to go Little to no immigration: orientalism->massive immigration: yellow peril-> less and more selective immigration: model minority.
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Goddammit, I had links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_East_Asians_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority#Possible_causes_of_Model_Minority_status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleman_minority
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Almost no one is saying that today either. Did you mean “no-one is saying that all men are potential rapists”?
It seems to me that the strategy of many movements is to push public opinion, or opinions held by a certain portion of society (or the Overton window), one small step at a time and pretending at each stage that it is the end goal. Each step seems more palatable when dressed with the assurance that of course they’re not pushing for anything further. The Wedge Project is an example of a very conscious intention to use this strategy.
When such movements do wind up going further, it is a sign of prior success at least within some demographic. The problem is that oftentimes opposing movements are each successful in this way with distinct groups of people, leading to increased polarization and an even lower possibility of one movement being able to gain acceptance by most of the overall population.
I can relate. Every time I sit down to write a comment on a new topic that I’ve been giving some thought to (as opposed to replying to someone else’s comment), I have to fight to keep it from being a long, blog-post-size brainsplurge. But the idea of settling into an online community for the first time in my life, and getting an audience, still seems daunting…
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Oops, I meant that comment to be a reply to Zorgon’s.
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“But the idea of settling into an online community for the first time in my life, and getting an audience, still seems daunting…”
I simply can’t at this stage in my life.
I have quite complicated positions with multiple axes and a large degree of nuance and not only is this a combination which produces rather long and rambly posts which would require me to possess Scott-level writing skills (which I don’t have), but the positions in question are currently both politically untenable in my field of work *and* likely to garner me the kind of attention that would result in me very likely being identified by some means.
I don’t really want to find myself unable to work just because some asshole journalist makes it their business to ruin me. Kazerad’s post here explains it nicely: http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/103325934813/when-i-was-a-lot-younger-journalism-used-to-be … except unlike Kazerad I am in the specific area of work in which multiple journalists and editors etc have openly stated they will blacklist anyone who does not toe the line.
Essentially, right now I’m in pretty much the same position as film-maker in the McCarthy era who has a copy of Das Kapital in his study. That this is possible in the 21st century makes me want to punch something.
“Almost no one is saying that today either. Did you mean “no-one is saying that all men are potential rapists”?”
Yes. That would probably explain Ozy’s rather odd response, although I stand by what I said above – the original author is covering her ass with that paragraph. I do not accept the fundamental premise of the Schrodinger’s Rapist concept, because I do not believe it is in any way acceptable to assign suspicion on the basis of an unselected trait.
We spent a lot of time getting people to understand that this was not OK; that it was not OK to say that black people were all potential thieves, or that the Irish were all potentially alcoholics, or that the Chinese were all “inscrutable”. I am not willing to forego that advancement in society just because a tiny minority women want an excuse for their hate.
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Schroedinger’s Rapist has a weak version and a strong version. The weak version is that it’s sensible for women to be careful around men they don’t know well; I doubt anyone would argue with that. I’m a 6’3″, 200-lb man, and I’m careful around men I don’t know well.
The strong version is that it’s acceptable to treat every man one meets as a rapist until he proves otherwise, or that men should behave with the assumption everyone thinks we are rapists. This is where the “cross the street if you see a woman coming the other way” logic comes from.
Proponents of the argument love to pull a motte-and-bailey, making claims based on the strong version and then retreating to the weaker one when they are challenged.
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But the weak one is a general statement that applies to absolutely anyone. There’s good reason to be careful around *everyone*. It’s a completely meaningless statement; it’s kind of like saying “you can drown in water, so STAY AWAY FROM ALL FORMS OF WATER INCLUDING RAIN OMG DROWNING HAZARD WHY WON’T WATER JUST ACCEPT IT’S A MURDERER!”
Which is to say, it’s not just a motte and bailey scenario, it’s one in which the bailey is only remotely accessible from Hate Land. You can’t get to this situation unless you already hate the group under discussion.
(And that’s before we even consider the gendered-ness of it. But that’s a whole different argument where I have to mention that study that shows a reporting difference of almost the same proportion as the difference between the yearly and lifetime report incidence that has Ozy so puzzled.)
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@zorgon:
>You can’t get to this situation unless you already hate the group under discussion.
Empirically, this seems untrue, barring very strange definitions of the word “hate”. For example, this line of reasoning seems plausible to many men.
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@Zorgon
>But the weak one is a general statement that applies to absolutely anyone. There’s good reason to be careful around *everyone*.
Only if the risk outweighs the cost of being careful. Given current statistics, I am not convinced that the cost of being careful, including increased fear and the opportunity cost of friendships gone unexplored is proportional to the risk of serious harm.
Of course, if you place little value on meeting new people, and will accept only epsilon risk, your conclusion will be different.
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MugaSofer – abstract the group enough, and you can persuade members of the target demographic that this is only referring to those “other” members of that group.
After all, I know I’m not a rapist, so this completely unfair suspicion on the grounds of an unselected trait clearly can’t apply to me, right?
(Well, yes, of course it can. But no-one imagines themselves to be the villain in their own story.)
Richard – I agree, but then men don’t get told about the risk of male on male violence is again and again and again from every angle from early childhood onwards. Even though that risk is way, way, waaaaaaay higher than the risk of rape for women.
I think it’s best to eliminate the potential effect of gendered social pressures of that kind from the calculation, but the only way to do that is to ignore the risk factor entirely and consider only the cost of being careful, because outside the propaganda, *everyone* is a potential risk. Then it becomes the same choice you discuss, I agree.
All that said, I suppose if you’re going to have a motte, a completely meaningless truism is probably the best option if you can persuade people it’s actually Super Important.
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I have never *really* understood why it is bad to make hypotheticals, thought experiments, devil’s-advocate arguments, etc, on topics related to rape. I assume it’s either because of triggers or because it arguably normalizes/promotes rape.
The thing is, I mostly *follow* the rules without understanding them, because rape is really bad and I should err on the side of conservatism (assuming people are right about how harmful it is and assuming they have a good reason for believing it’s wrong to talk about rape in the abstract.) If you tell me making hypothetical statements about rape is tantamount to rape itself, I’ll go “Ok, I won’t do that then.”
The thing is, if those are the rules we should damn well enforce the rules on everyone. Whereas I think that the rules are ONLY enforced on people who engage with feminism, and (thanks to evaporative cooling) non-feminists get off scot-free.
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It isn’t bad to consider hypotheticals involving rape. Like usual, care should be taken in regards to your audience (i.e. don’t plan a kegger while at an AA meeting). But in general, the resistance you’re referring to is because it’s become a political tool, and politics is the mind-killer.
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Is the probability that feminists will see something and the probability that rape victims will correlated? If so, it makes more sense to go after the Robin Hansons of the world more so than some random Red Triber, on account of you can’t trigger someone who doesn’t read what you say.
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I have the subjective sense that rape and abuse victims are overrepresented among notable feminist writers, but I haven’t counted.
And my frustration is actually that Robin Hanson, who is libertarianish and distinctly not part of the SJ internet sphere, actually receives LESS hate than people who are earnestly trying to be good progressive feminists and get some of the details wrong. Ozy seems to have been much more harmed by internet hate from feminists than Robin Hanson, and Ozy is a feminist.
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Tribal policing is often much worse than undirected out-group hate.
Robin Hanson only gets hate when someone points at him and yells, while Ozy is there, being both feminist and rational, all the time, every day.
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srconstantin: it’s generally a place/appropriateness thing. People might tell you it’s not okay to construct those arguments; really it’s just not okay to construct those arguments *in most places*.
This is yes, because of triggers, and also because most places where rape is talked about on the internet are actively trying to be a safe space for survivors. For most survivors, yes we might want any discussion of rape to be trigger-warned, but also we are likely to read ‘academic hypotheticals’ type discussion about rape as hostile and bad, because we are used to having our experiences dismissed by people for whom it *can* just be an academic discussion – often with the added insult of being told off for getting worked up about it because it’s ‘just a hypothetical’.
In a place where it is explicitly okay to discuss socially unacceptable topics academically (like the rationalist community), and it is okay to talk about things that will get political (like not LessWrong or Slate Star Codex open threads) and either with warnings or warnings implied by the context (like right here, where you can advocate genocide if that floats your boat*), then there is nothing wrong with making those arguments, hypotheticals etc, and I’d probably be interested to read them.
*obviously Ozy is the arbiter of what is and is not okay here but my model of Ozy would not allow the racism is scientific dudes and not your rape discussion.
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But yeah, a TL;DR of *why* which is what you were actually asking would be:
* you were probably in the wrong place to do it but it was socially understood to be inappropriate rather than clearly labelled
* poisoned well: hypothetical, academic thought experiments/devils advocate stuff concerning rape is often done by rape apologists and thus associated with them (much like rape prevention tips for women)
* some people believe it is harmful in itself to say or suggest certain things about rape in the fear that some people might believe those things and/or those things will contribute to rape culture (for instance, a man who is a potential rapist could read your ‘devil’s advocate’ position, confuse it for a real argument, and feel as if his attitudes toward women are justified because someone who sounds smart agrees with him, he becomes some percentage chance more likely to commit rape in the future or behave inappropriately toward a rape survivor)
But, as a feminist and rape survivor myself I believe in there being places where such things can be discussed, so long as they are clearly labelled both for trigger warnings and point 3 above.
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Point 3 is an empirical claim which I have never seen backed by solid evidence. Or evidence at all; I’ve only ever seen armchair-theory “it stands to reason” justifications of it. Given how serious the allegation of “that action increases the frequency of rape” is, this is not something that should be claimed so flippantly.
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Good gods, why would anyone want to test the rape culture hypothesis in any rigorous fashion?
Much better to just state it as a truism and claim anyone who disagrees is a rape apologist.
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Also, I think there are two reasons that Hanson’s discussion of rape in particular was ill-considered.
1. Most rapes are not “gentle and silent.” Suggesting this as a possibility could seem like an attempt to reverse-noncentral-fallacy trivialize more typical examples of rape. (I think the usual logician’s term for the reverse noncentral fallacy is “converse accident.”) As Hanson’s “gentle, silent rape” essay is an attempt to defend his earlier writings, which push the cuckoldry-is-worse-than-rape line without the “gentle, silent” qualifier, this interpretation is even more plausible. I don’t think Hanson was trying to do this, but I can see how other people might think he was.
2. If you are a member of privileged group A, and you argue that crime X (which stereotypically happens to members of group A) should be punished more severely than crime Y (which stereotypically happens to members of unprivileged group B), you’re already on thin ice. If one of your main sources of evidence is an opinion poll that an enthusiastic defender of the privileges of group A, with some severely dubious opinions of group B, conducted of his like-minded group-A readers showing that they think X is worse than Y, you’re on doubly thin ice and should be covering yourself in caveats at the very least. Hanson can talk about offensive topics if he wants, but he should at least have acknowledged that they could be offensive.
The whole kerfuffle seems like a good case study in unexamined privilege, and one of the rare times when the usually silly argument that norms of rational discourse are tools of the patriarchy actually has a bit of merit.
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I’d like to see some statistical backings of the claims made here. I don’t know a huge amount about the raw statistics of it, but its my understanding that violent rape by strangers is a relatively small percentage of rape as a whole. Furthermore, Hanson may have been responding to broader definitions of rape that include a very large number non-violent acts (like the “too drunk to consent” occurrences). Similarly, my understanding is that, at least in recent times, rape (as defined by sex without consent) is perpetrated by men against women about as often as by women against men (see CDC 2010 survey of sexual violence, specifically the 12-month statistics).
http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf
(note: you have to count “made to penetrate” as rape for men, since the CDC uses the definition of rape wherein heterosexual intercourse initiated by a women without the man’s consent isn’t rape)
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@Inferential Distance
Hanson specified that the victim would have neither physical injuries (even bruises, presumably) nor any memory of the event. How common do you think that is? I don’t actually know, and I’m not sure where to go looking, but I’d imagine it’s far from typical.
And statistics aside, the notion of “gentle rape” is itself oxymoronic. Violating someone else’s body is pretty much ungentle by definition, and if I get roofied and then raped, I’m not going to think of my attacker as “gentle” however few bruises they left me. The notion that rape could be gentle seems straight from 50 Shades of Grey, and I think Robin Hanson’s choice of expression here is another consequence of his failure at privilege-checking or empathy.
(I’m cis male, FWIW, though you might have guessed that from my pseudonym.)
I also know about male victims of rape – thus why I said “stereotypically” rather than “typically” – and I agree that they’ve been wrongfully neglected. I think you’ll agree with me, though, that rationally or not, the fear of rape weighs more heavily on women than on men. It’s completely appropriate, therefore, to treat rape as a gendered issue in this context.
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And again, I’m not trying to say that Hanson (or anyone else) is too male-privileged to talk about rape hypotheticals, just that he failed to treat the subject with the level of tact that he should have learned in Feminism 101.
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By that definition of “gentle rape”, Robin Hanson is almost certainly wrong, except by one of the really bad definitions of rape (which would still make Hanson wrong, but for using a bad definition of rape). I wouldn’t say rape is violent by definition, because violence connotates physical harm, and the general definition of rape doesn’t require any physical harm to occur. A better word is “hostile” or “malicious”.
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>I have never *really* understood why it is bad to make hypotheticals, thought experiments, devil’s-advocate arguments, etc, on topics related to rape.
… is it? I’ve never heard that
That seems like it would be very bad for discourse*. I would endorse not using this rule. Although, mind you, it might be a bad idea to discuss rape for other reasons; maybe you have a poor grasp of the topic, or you’re in a place where people are trying to keep their minds off awfulness, or you’re talking to someone who has rape-related triggers (which is why we have trigger warnings.)
*[InB4 someone says “that’s the idea”.]
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Hey Ozy.
I started reading your blog back in the early “No Seriously, What About The Men?” days, followed you to the GMP, then away from the GMP, and was saddened by your disappearance.
It is funny, the day that I ran across Thing of Things, I was telling a friend how your blog was the only one so well written that I did not feel the need to steel man your arguments as I read them. Even if I didn’t agree with your arguments – which in retrospect was extraordinarily rare – your writing is well enough qualified, clear, argued, and thought out that I can take a mental break reading it and consume your arguments as you present them.
Gah, that was a whole paragraph saying that I am happy to see you back posting and I am happy that I found your blog. By luck too. Every once in a while I would do a blanket google search for “Ozy Frantz” and only get old posts/dead links. I just happened across a mention of your new blog after following some mind-boggling path of links and various blogs that, oddly enough, I think started with some tumblr off of Futrelle’s Boob Roll – why was I clicking those links you may ask, abject self hatred probably. Some person linked to a person who linked to a person who linked to a final person who had a specific critique of a common activist argument who linked to you.
Any rate I should stop babbling. I just wanted to add my voice as one more reader from the long lost days of yore happy to see you back.
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So, is the song “De Do Do Do De Da Da Da” by The Police politically incorrect now, since it makes metaphorical use of rape in the lyric “Their logic ties you up and rapes you”?
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Mostly they just get in trouble for Every Breath You Take, I think that an entire stalking ballad overshadows any particular shocking lyric. Plus it’s not like that line was considered conventional and safe back when they wrote it; the whole point of PC is supposed to be changing attitudes so it seems odd to target something that was just as (if not more) scandalous back when it came out.
Though it segues into an interesting comparison. I had the pleasure* of attending an open mic night this weekend and while it’s certainly not new the observation that rappers get a complete pass from PC is still odd to see in person. In particular I usually don’t follow underground rap, if I hear anything it’s mainstream radio releases, and so was greatly amused by songs like ‘Murder Murder’ (with possibly my favorite lyric “when I’m done with the body / imma leave it in the woods”) and the countless explicit claims to be a rapist mixed into the standard drugdealer / murderer boasts.
Anyway; putting aside the boring “why can’t white guys say nigger” level of complaining about double standards, why are feminists so completely uninterested in controlling black culture? I mean, I have my explanation but I doubt anyone explicitly thinks about undermining civilization in those terms. How do the feminists here justify it, especially in the context of things like the Catcall video or the enormous race gap in rape?
*Not saracsm, I legitimately did enjoy it. I’m not even remotely Red State in my tastes and also don’t subscribe to the psuedo-Marxist idea that all art must be political for me to enjoy it.
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Black culture is neither my circus nor my monkey. I am white and I live in a bubble of whiteness lightly sprinkled with occasional Asians and Hispanics. I don’t even listen to rap. Whatever opinion I have about sexism among black people is likely to be very uninformed; expressing it will do nothing to change anyone’s behavior, because it’s a community I’m not part of. I, of course, support efforts of womanists to eradicate sexism in their own community, in the same way I support the efforts of evangelical Christian feminists, anarchafeminists, etc. to eradicate sexism in their own communities.
As to why the efforts of womanists tend to be ignored: because the mainstream feminist media is, as ever, dominated by white, middle-class+, abled feminists with white, middle-class+, abled concerns.
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A noble sentiment but the two halves contradict one another.
Womanists (meaning black feminists presumably?) need middle-class white feminists to leave them alone so that their relative power doesn’t eclipse them. Womanists are largely ignored because they don’t have middle-class white women’s relative power.
Surely there’s some way for you to assist these women without turning them into your circus chimps? Maybe this is naive but I figured that was the whole idea behind ‘allies’ and intersectionalism to begin with.
(Of course if you legitimately don’t care about them that’s fine too. Only so many hours in the day and all that, better to help your own before strangers.)
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If I were in charge of a major feminist media organ, then of course I would have to make an effort to publish womanists (and Red Tribe feminists, and disabled feminists, and so on and so forth). But I’m not (I’m not even friends with someone in charge of one anymore). I’m just one random feminist on the Internet; what I control is what I do and don’t talk about. And I think it is wise for me to avoid offering opinions about shit I don’t know anything about.
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That’s an … unfortunate choice of metaphor.
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“Neither my circus nor my monkey ” were the opening words of the comment I responded to.
I am not the sort of person to resort to epithets.
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Because respecting the cultures of minorities is blue tribe, and criticizing/disagreeing with the cultures of minorities is red tribe. Feminists are predominantly blue tribe, so are hesitant to behave like the red tribe lest they be ostracized from their social groups.
I also feel like anti-racism is a very important value to blue tribe, so there’s a more serious taboo on doing things that others may interpret as racist than for criticizing other groups. Mostly because I’ve heard of more feminists complaining about gay men, or trans-people, than I have of black people. Though that may just be my limited exposure to feminist writings.
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So, the grand jury decision for Darren Wilson came out: no indictment. (This is very racially charged, so I’m posting here instead of at SSC. Also, have some words for other people doing searches on the page: Michael Brown, Ferguson, St. Louis.)
My liberal friends are angry. I have been unable to find reason to disagree with the grand jury, although I do disagree with practically every other aspect of the government’s handling of the whole affair.
Liberals who disagree with the jury: why? I’m interested in any answers, from single sentences to links to long articles with citations.
(I am much less interested in people speculating about liberal’s reasons for disagreeing when they themselves do not disagree.)
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He killed a person. He could have avoided killing a person, he should have avoided killing a person, and he didn’t. It’s a crime to kill people when you should not do that and don’t have a good reason to believe you should, so Darren Wilson should have been indicted for that crime.
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There seems to be pretty solid evidence that he had a reasonable belief that he was in serious physical danger and had no good alternative to stop it short of shooting, no?
So I’m not sure where you’re getting “he could and should have avoided killing a person”, unless you mean “he should have risked getting seriously harmed”, which, maybe, but he’s certainly not legally required to, which is what the grand jury was asked to decide.
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Also, it’s very rare for a grand jury to not indict someone. Especially when there is a dead body. I think it’s over 99%.
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von Kalifornen: It’s also very rare that the prosecutors bring a case for reasons other than because they think they can actually get a conviction. It doesn’t seem surprising that grand juries tend to find probable-cause when prosecutors think they can establish beyond-reasonable-doubt. Given that this case was instead brought due to political pressure, that seems like not a relevant comparison.
No?
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We have solid evidence Mike punched Wilson when he was in the car, and when Wilson got out to apprehend him then he charged at him and basically had to be put down.
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Von Kalifornian, see fivethirtyeight. Indictments against police officers routinely fail.
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In more civilized countries, policemen are expected to take risks to avoid killing people, even those that might be a danger to them.
The use of firearms is limited, either because they are not part of the normal equipment (UK) or because there are strict rules on when and how you can use your firearm (France, for example).
There is also generally higher accountability. In France, {some} policemen are allowed to fire on vehicles trying to force a roadblock to stop the vehicle. The first time a policeman killed a passenger during one of those cases, there was a large investigation to decide if he acted responsibly and ask whether the regulation should be changed in any way, and then a trial (where it was decided he acted responsibly).
In another case, a policeman (driving a motorcycle) was judged guilty for shooting (and killing) a car driver who attempted to drive him off the road. The rule is “absolute necessity” for the usage of firearms.
Also, we put down animals, usually, not people.
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thirqual, agreed on all points (especially the last, sigh). None of which argues that or particularly pertains to the question of whether the grand jury decided incorrectly, unless I’m missing something. (Though maybe you were just responding to Molin, in which case feel free to ignore this comment.)
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Two reasons.
First – and I’m not a lawyer, so please consume appropriate amounts of salt – a Grand Jury is not supposed to decide guilty or not guilty. It is supposed to decide if there is sufficient basis to believe that a crime MIGHT have occurred. Not that a crime did occur, but that it’s possible a crime occurred.
If the Grand Jury refuses to indict, they’re saying that there is no possibility that what happened was a crime. I don’t think that’s a fair conclusion from the evidence. There were a number of witnesses who – if what they said was true – witnessed Officer Wilson commit a crime. None of those witnesses seemed so extraordinarily beyond belief that I think a Grand Jury should decide there is no possibility they are telling the truth. Of course, there were witnesses who told contrary stories – most importantly, Wilson himself – but weighing conflicting testimony and deciding which is credible is a job for a criminal jury, not a Grand Jury. Given what the Grand Jury heard as evidence, they should have decided not that Wilson is guilty (that’s not their job), but that there was clearly enough evidence for a reasonable person to suspect a crime did occur.
Second of all (and less importantly, to me), although there’s the saying that a good DA could get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich, there is an exception to that: Statistically, Grand Juries are very unlikely to indict cops. Either this is because cops are extraordinarily good and virtually always innocent whenever they face a Grand Jury; or it’s because the legal system is strongly biased in favor of cops, and this bias is reflected in what Grand Juries decide. IMO, the second possibility is more plausible.
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(Point of clarification: the standard is not “is there a possibility there was a crime”, it’s “is there probable cause to think there was a crime”, which is a higher bar.)
> None of those witnesses seemed so extraordinarily beyond belief that I think a Grand Jury should decide there is no possibility they are telling the truth.
From comments made by the prosecutor, and from skimming the transcript, this doesn’t seem to be true. In the hearing, the only witnesses who were consistent in their own stories (and did not later recant) and who were consistent with physical evidence agreed with Wilson’s version of events.
It’s not (entirely) the grand jury’s job to weigh testimonies which conflict with each other. However, it’s another matter when testimonies conflict with themselves and/or physical evidence, or are later recanted. It is definitely the grand jury’s job to say whether or not there is sufficient credible testimony to establish probable cause.
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Anon:
1) Point well taken, re: probable cause.
2) “From comments made by the prosecution” is part of the problem. The prosecutor, very clearly, sees himself as there to protect the officer and make the case that the officer did not commit a crime.
There were inconsistencies in witness testimonies on multiple sides – including, by the way, in Wilson’s versions of the story (for instance, how many shots were fired in the car). But only witnesses whose stories didn’t help Wilson were questioned skeptically by prosecutors; contradictions in Wilson’s account were never pointed out. Meanwhile, Wilson was asked hardball, piercing questions such as “You felt like your life was in jeopardy?” and “Use of deadly force was justified at that point in your opinion?”
Do you really think a proceeding in which only the witnesses on one side are ever asked hard questions, while witnesses on the other side get nothing but softball questions, is fair?
I don’t believe you’re correct to say that all the testimony that contradicted Wilson’s account also contradicted the physical evidence, or their own earlier testimony, in important ways. But that’s besides the point, because we really can’t know at all when only half the evidence has been examined in an adversarial way, while the other half of the evidence was accepted unskeptically.
In effect, they turned a Grand Jury proceeding into a trial in which only one side – the pro-Wilson side – had lawyers in the room and got to ask questions. The conclusions that emerge from such a trial aren’t at all certain to be true.
Suppose that Brown had killed Wilson with his Demon Hulk Hogan powers. Do you think, in that case, they would have had a months-long Grand Jury proceeding in which only lawyers on Brown’s side were allowed to make arguments and ask questions? Or would they have had the usual short proceeding, in which the prosecutor presented his best evidence for probable cause in a couple of hours, and the Grand Jury voted based on that evidence? (Or skipped the Grand Jury altogether?)
Wilson got special treatment – treatment that no black kid would ever get, treatment that no murderer of a white cop would ever get. How can that possibly be fair?
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The law is specifically written so that cops are allowed to use deadly force in situations that other citizens are not. There’s a debate to be had about whether or not it should be the case, but that’s certainly the way it is now.
So, yes, Wilson got special treatment: he got a grand jury indictment, for a case the prosecutor knew had no legs (because in Missouri, for the case against Wilson to succeed, there must have been evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Wilson should not have feared for his safety). The normal thing to happen when a prosecutor knows a case is going nowhere is that it’s dropped.
Yes, Wilson killing Brown was treated differently than Brown killing Wilson would have been. But that’s because the law is written that way, and the disparity is cop vs lay citizen, not white vs black. This is not the fault of the grand jury.
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It’s exceptional that there was a grand jury proceeding at all, yes, but what would normally have happened would have been that the case was dropped, because the prosecutor knew there was no chance of a conviction under the law as written. It’s a bit much to damn the system for having a long grand jury proceeding when the only reason this happened was because it was called for by people like you.
With all of that said, I’ve read some more of the transcript, and it is fairly clear that the prosecutor was letting there was no case against Wilson seep through. This is unfortunate, but not surprising, and probably not racially motivated – prosecutors need good relationships with the police to do their jobs, and indictments of cops only rarely succeed – but is still unjust (although still not the fault of the jury).
And, yeah, that was bad. I don’t know how to avoid it – we knew he didn’t think that Wilson was guilty, and prosecutors aren’t really trained on how to bring cases they don’t believe in. But this seems like even more reason not to disagree with the jury’s decision: after the presentation of all of the evidence they would have had no reason at all to think there was a case to be made against Wilson.
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(Sigh. Typo: “it is fairly clear that the prosecutor was letting there was no case against Wilson” -> “it is fairly clear that the prosecutor was letting his belief that there was no case against Wilson”)
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“It’s exceptional that there was a grand jury proceeding at all, yes, but what would normally have happened would have been that the case was dropped, because the prosecutor knew there was no chance of a conviction under the law as written. It’s a bit much to damn the system for having a long grand jury proceeding when the only reason this happened was because it was called for by people like you.”
Nonsense. I never called for a fake show trial designed to get Wilson off, and I don’t believe anyone else did.
Protestors wanted a fair trial, with a case presented by a fair prosecutor. They didn’t get that.
You say that you have no idea what a prosecutor can do in a case like this. The answer would have been to allow a special prosecutor to be appointed to handle this case – as protestors were asking for. (With all due respect, it’s obvious you don’t understand what protestors asked for)
Meanwhile, video evidence shows that in another case, a cop shot a 12-year-old boy (who was holding a realistic-looking toy gun) to death less than two seconds after the patrol car arrived on the scene. Although the cop had previously claimed that the boy had disobeyed three commands to drop the gun, a claim that now seems extremely dubious under the timeline, I have no doubt that he’ll get off without any punishment. Just like the cops who chased down and shot to death a 22-year-old cosplayer carrying a toy samurai sword, who changed their story once it became clear he had been shot 4-6 times in the back.
Police are very nearly the only people in our legal system entrusted to use deadly force. Because the police are trusted with such power, prosecutors and courts should examine police shooters with extra stringency, rather than searching for opportunities to let them off without a real trial.
I don’t blame the grand jury; given the incredibly biased show trial they were part of, they as individuals probably made the correct decision. However,the outcome of a show trial does not have moral legitimacy or any plausible claim to represent the truth.
Was racism part of what happened, in this case and in the other cases I mentioned? Yes, I think so. Darren Wilson’s testimony describes Mike Brown as some sort of superhuman demon, with powers beyond that of an ordinary man, who suddenly went mad and savagely attacked an armed cop for virtually no reason. The story of the cops who shot the cosplayer (who was black) is virtually identical; for no reason at all, he went mad and attacked them, and they had to chase him down and kill him before he killed some innocent passerby. The cop in the other case mistook a 12 year old for a 20 year old man (studies have shown that people tend to see black kids as older and less innocent than children of other races)..
It’s impossible to say with 100% certainty what happened in any one case. But I think you’d have to be willfully blind to miss the pattern of racism formed over many cases.
(That’s not to deny that sometimes whites are unjustifiably shot by cops; nor am I denying that some shootings by cops are justified).
Just as importantly, however, there’s clearly a major deficit in how cops are recruited and trained, and how we expect them to act. Cops are not being trained as peacekeepers; they are not being trained in how to avoid escalating situations; they are not using tactics designed to avoid fatalities on all sides. Aside from race, there is a lot we can do to reduce cop killings – better training, better tactics, lapel and dashboard cameras, etc. But I don’t think any of that will happen without lots and lots and lots and lots of protests against police violence.
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For McCulloch to have recused himself, when not required to by law, would have been even more exceptional. I am in favor of rule of law, but part of what that means is that you don’t get to complain that the system failed to pervert itself to render your desired outcome.
You are of course free to complain that the system is broken, as you spend the rest of your post doing. You seem to have gotten the impression that I’m in favor of things as they stand, which I guess is an understandable mistake. I am not. I thoroughly agree that the system is biased in favor of cops (though that bias reveals itself in general trends), that cops are undertrained and over-incentivised to use lethal force, etc. I even agree that protesting police violence, at least in general, is one of the best ways to get the relevant law improved.
But that doesn’t mean I disagree with the grand jury’s ruling. Arguments are not soldiers. As much as I think that this killing is evidence of something being wrong with the law and the training of cops, for the grand jury’s ruling to have been wrong there must have been probable cause to think a crime was committed under Missouri law. And whatever else you may feel was wrong with this whole affair, I continue to see no plausible interpretation of the evidence which could suggest that this was so.
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Anon:
1. Your claim that a recusal would have been more exceptional than replacing the usual Grand Jury process with a multiple-months mock-trial is simply wrong. Recusals happen all the time and are not usually “required… by law,” if by that you mean the decision-makers (prosecutors and attorney generals, typically) legally had no other option. In context, the show-trial we just saw in Ferguson may be an entirely unique event in the last half-century.
2. You can’t favor show trials and also favor “rule of law.” They are exclusive of each other.
3. I’m not complaining “that the system failed to pervert itself to render your desired outcome.” I’m complaining that the system was perverted to deliver the prosecutor’s desired outcome.
4. I’m glad that we have some areas of agreement, and apologize if I’ve misunderstood your views.
5. I don’t think whether or not you “disagree with the grand jury’s ruling” is relevant. It was a show trial, and regardless of what you think of the outcome, show trials are a bad thing.
6. Under the ordinary grand jury system in the US – in which a prosecutor presents evidence cherry-picked to provide the state’s best case against the defendant, and makes arguments for the defendant’s guilt, and that is what the grand jury votes on – there was enough evidence for probable cause. (If there wasn’t, then the prosecutor wouldn’t have had to switch to a show trial in order to avoid an indictment.)
7. The point isn’t whether or not you see a plausible interpretation of the evidence which suggests a crime may have occurred. Your opinion is irrelevant, as is mine.
What should have happened is that the prosecutor should have presented the state’s best case and evidence to the grand jury. The grand jury should have voted based on that. Then, IF there was an indictment, there should have been a trial in which both sides were given the chance to present evidence and to question testimony.
Or, alternatively, the prosecutor could have just made a decision without the grand jury, and suffered the political consequences of that. Public officials do not have any right to avoid political consequences for their decisions.
What happened was an ad hoc perversion of the system, of a form that I can’t recall ever seeing before in the US, in which we had a show trial designed to fool the public into thinking an actual trial had taken place. Whether or not you agree with the grand jury’s decision, the process was corrupt and wrong.
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Sorry to respond twice to the same question, but I think Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker points out another reason that liberals are (rightly) angry with the grand jury verdict: It’s unequal treatment.
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I haven’t seen any people complaining about this, but I’ll take your word that it happens, so thanks.
That said, given that the prosecutor fairly explicitly thought there was insufficient evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Wilson did not have reason to think he was physically endangered, I think we know exactly what would have happened: no charges would have been brought. The only reason it went as far as it did was media uproar. Which liberals, by and large, seem to be in favor of, not opposed to.
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Yup, I do approve of media uproars in cases such as Mike Brown’s. Without uproars, cops will be even freer to shoot blacks down without cause, and no one will ever object at all.
There was never any chance, given how completely racist and pro-cop the system is, that Darren Wilson would face a fair trial for his actions. A media uproar isn’t as good as a fair trial, but given the choice of 1) a media uproar or 2) no pushback at all against Brown’s shooting, I’ll take option one.
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> A media uproar isn’t as good as a fair trial, but given the choice of 1) a media uproar or 2) no pushback at all against Brown’s shooting, I’ll take option one.
Sure, but you don’t get to then damn the system for responding to your demands by doing what you wanted (namely, pushing it further than they were inclined to).
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I’m a liberal and I agree with the grand jury. A friend of mine who’s a liberal and with whom I have never before discussed this case also agrees with the grand jury. I’ve been keeping my liberal family up to date with the facts of the case, and they agree with the grand jury. I just wanted to affirm that there exist liberals who agree with the grand jury.
(I also know liberals who haven’t kept up with the facts but have instead just read headlines and so on, and whose disagreement with the grand jury appears to be related to this. I know there are other liberals who disagree with the grand jury and *have* kept up with the facts–I’m not talking about them.)
Are there any non-liberals out there who disagree with the grand jury?
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(Couldn’t decide whether to put this here or in the Categories thread at SSC. Should I cross-post, or will everyone who ought to see this here?)
When the discussion of “cis by default” or “male/female by default” has come up, people have talked about whether they would take the opportunity to live in a different body if it was temporary and reversible. It has occurred to me that you may be able to test your “defaultness” without waiting for that.
I’ve previously mentioned that I’m not in the “default” category. I’ve also noticed that, when reading fiction, I’m indifferent to the sex of the protagonist when a story is written in the third person. But I get a jarring, uncomfortable feeling when I read a story about a female that is written in the first, or even worse, the second person (Charles Stross does the latter a lot, for example). There is a natural expectation of identifying with the protagonist when you see the story from their point of view, and it’s unpleasant to me when I’m made to do this with a female character. (The feeling is not so strong that I would stop reading a well-written story, but I’ll be thinking, “I wish this character was a guy” the whole time.)
As an atheist who is still strongly culturally Jewish, I think I’d also be bothered by reading a 1st/2nd person perspective story about a strongly Christian character, though I can’t remember if that’s ever come up. On the other hand, I’m clearly “white by default,” in that reading a story in 1st/2nd person perspective about a black man wouldn’t bother me at all. Race isn’t a particularly salient thing for me.
Anyway, it’s something you can test for yourself without waiting for the arrival of radical body modification technology. Just pick up a bunch of literature written in the 1st/2nd person about a protagonist that differs from you on various axes, and see which ones bother you.
————————————————-
As an aside, I’ve occasionally been other people in dreams, and sometimes the POV of my dreams is female. This doesn’t seem to bother me in the same way, possibly because I’ve actually dissociated and just see it as someone else. This requires further thought.
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I think that there’s a biological basis for gender identification, and this test seems too easily influenced by culture. Maybe you just don’t have as much exposure to fiction with female characters?
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What’s your opinion on My Little Pony?
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I’ve been exposed to a couple episodes (I have daughters) and… I’m totally mystified by the appeal to adults. (That’s not because it’s a cartoon aimed mainly at kids. I loved Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, for example.)
I’m not sure of the connection to my musings, though. MLP is 3rd person perspective.
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It’s because sometimes people suggest that women can’t empathize with male action heroes, and I point them to the large male MLP fandom.
Yeah, it’s a tenuous connection, but I figured maybe it’s just *some* people and I was being uncharitable.
I think a lot of the appeal of MLP is countersignalling, rather than it being exceptionally good. It’s pink, and yet not especially “girly” in it’s writing. [That said, I was briefly sucked in by the worldbuilding and fandom despite a completely “meh” reaction to the show itself, so maybe it’s entirely self-sustaining and requires no explanation.]
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First person from female characters doesn’t bother me, but then it seems that nothing bothers me in first person that doesn’t also bother me in third person equally.
I’m pretty sure i’m cis by default with a slight preference for female anatomy, though for me it seems that that really is in part a manifestation of some kind of autogynephilia.
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On victim-blaming and rape
Generally, crime prevention is done by both potential victims (private “avoidance”) and police (public “enforcement”). To get the smallest amount of crime at the lowest possible cost, I would guess that some mixture of the two is optimal. Some police interventions are really easy, and some avoidance tactics are also easy – for example, it’s usually easy for someone who doesn’t live in a high-crime area to avoid going there.
Since police services are free to users, each individual has an incentive to rely more on the police than would be socially optimal. Looking at it this way, victim blaming can actually be good thing if it discourages this sort of “free-riding” and makes people rely more on (cheaper) avoidance tactics.
Of course, the optimal mix of enforcement and avoidance depends on the crime. If Laws against rape, unfortunately, are difficult to enforce due to the difficulty of obtaining evidence. All else equal, this should make the optimal mix heavier on avoidance and lighter on policing, and increase the benefits of victim-blaming. Of course, all else is not equal! The cost of avoiding rape may be higher as well, and the ineffectiveness of law enforcement may make potential rape victims reluctant to rely on it. If potential victims don’t trust enforcement to work, then they’ll rely on avoidance even without victim-blaming.
Well, I just spewed out a lot of speculation with little evidence to back it up. Anyone have estimates of the relative cost of public vs. private rape prevention?
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Since stranger-rape is very rare, the private cost of prevention is very high relative to the payoff.
And preventing rape-by-acquaintances looks an awful lot like “don’t trust your friends”, which is also, I think, too high of a cost to pay (for society, not just for individuals). The other part of this is that a lot of victim-blaming is for behaviors which are statistically irrelevant, like wearing skimpy clothing.
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A point is often made that there is an anomalous amount of victim-blaming when it comes to rape. People seem much less skeptical of murder victims.
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I probably shouldn’t have laughed, should I?
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I’ve heard many people say that they think the reaction of neoreactionaries to Ferguson on twitter was “racist,” but I thought it was more than reasonable. Anyone else think that?
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Interested to read NRx perspective on racial policy, and I wondered: is all of that based on empirical evidence? If so, what in particular?
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if you are looking for somewhere to start, this is the blog I would recommend. What I find advantageous for your purposes is that the topics are all archived in a sensible manner, and the articles, while providing all of the link sources, are not terribly long.
http://arkaimcity.tumblr.com/
Menghu’s Blog is another source, but his articles are much tougher to read and are not well categorized.
This website has a lot more articles available than menghu’s blog or arkhaim city, but the quality of articles varies, and not all of them are references to actual scientific studies.
http://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com
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Thanks.
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Lizardbreath:
I wrote a long, rambling response to your thoughtful post to me over on the Zoe Quinn thread.
Perhaps we should move the discussion here (if there is any further to say), seeing as it has nothing to do with Zoe Quinn anymore?
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The last links thread lead me to Julia Serano on reverse discourses and appropriation. First let me repeat the recommendation with a specific warning to feminism-skeptics not to be driven away by the academic-feminist language; the former link in particular is an insightful critique of the aspects of feminism that are probably responsible for your skepticism.
But anyway, reading the above, I felt that they also applied to some extent to geekdom, explaining some of the nastier trends (c.f. “geek gatekeeping”). Are there any good explorations from the SJ side viewing geekdom as, at least in some ways, (displaying the behavior patterns of) a victimized group?
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It applies a lot to geek discourse. In fact, this is kind of a hobby horse of mine. That said, I don’t have my thoughts gathered in one place.
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So I saw somebody say on Twitter that nearly 2/3 of trans children are rejected by their families. That sounds too massive to me to be anything other than Bad Offhand Statistics©. The top result on google looks more like 40%, but that is all LGBT, not just trans. Also it might have been influenced by the spectrum of “rejected” from “get the fuck out” to “I don’t agree with your life choices.”
Does anyone know of any statistics and sources offhand?
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The National Transgender Discrimination Survey found that 57% are rejected by their families. However, I can’t quite figure out what they mean by “family rejection,” because only 40% experience family members choosing not to speak or spend time with them.
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If you look down in the survey, it turns out that 40% is the overall number of “rejections,” which means one or more family members refuse contact. I think they limit this to parents or children.
57% is the number rejected if they also lost their job during transition.
The report has many errors such as this, which is unfortunate. It takes a bit more work to dig down.
The thing about trans stuff, it is never about that one big number, which activists look for so they can big-scary stats at people to make them care. That’s a fine game. I can play it well enough. But that ain’t what matters. For a lot of us, it is the nagging day to day. Like, maybe your kids don’t reject you, but your spouse does, and then your brother does not reject you exactly, but he misgenders you on purpose and is just generally a douche. And no big deal, but it’s not going to stop. And if you complain then you’re being the jerk and then Mom has to play peacemaker, but then it starts to become clear that actually she really agrees with brother and all the nice stuff was empty fucking lip service. Then you find out your son is getting bullied at school — cuz of you.
And now you have to deal with that.
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Noah Smith has now made a post arguing economists are plausibly faking symptoms of Asperger’s in order to get social sympathy. Because people with Asperger’s get tons of sympathy, as well all know. But don’t worry, it’s okay, because he’s careful to specify that only conservative economists are doing this, not any of the good people on the left who agree with his ideas.
I’m on the autism spectrum, so this has me feeling violent right now. Need to go fight some mashed potatoes and work off this negative energy.
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Forgot link: http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/fake-asperger-guys.html
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I am on the autism spectrum *and* the political left, and it has me feeling incredibly frustrated. I am tired of being used as a political bargaining token by my political allies and enemies alike.
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One thing I notice: the argument “If we make allowances for neuroatypical people, some people might fake symptoms to get sympathy“ is precisely the same argument made against Tumblr trans folks, that they will “fake trans stuff to gain status.” I hear that garbage on SCC all the time. So, that means something I guess.
BTW, does Robin Hanson claim to be neuroatypical? Cuz I notice that the article is responding to Steve Sailor (said with a spit), who suggests he is. As usual Sailor is as condescending as a human can possibly be without opening a vortex of condescension. So this whole conversation is just fail on top of fail on top of fail.
Sometimes it is best to just back away.
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Zorgon,
“But my entire point in beginning this thread is that things which are now considered relatively normal and even favoured by most feminists if not in some cases completely mainstream – the aforementioned predominant aggressor policies, the whole “Schrodinger’s Rapist” concept, and so on – were considered extreme and unfavoured by most feminists 20 years ago.”
It’s hard to respond to you, because there’s too much to unpack.
For instance, your description of predominant aggressor policies is simply false; US law does not state “that if a man calls the police and reports that he is being attacked by his partner, he should be arrested if there is any doubt as to who is in danger.” First of all, there is no such thing as “US law” because each state has its own law; secondly, what you describe isn’t what predominant (aka primary) aggressor laws say in any US state.
So yes, only an extremist feminist would favor the law you describe. But the law you describe doesn’t exist anywhere, isn’t favored by most current feminists, and would almost certainly be unconstitutional anyhow.
(A more accurate version of your claim would be that in some states with primary aggressor laws, included among a bunch of factors police should consider is the relative size and strength of the people involved, which could easily enable sexist police to unfairly target the man in all domestic violence calls involving a heterosexual couple. This is a legitimate concern; however, it’s worth noting that for the police to act like that simply isn’t what primary aggressor laws call for.)
(My guess is that the majority of feminists simply don’t know what primary aggressor laws are – it’s a fairly obscure issue.)
I don’t see anything extreme[*] about “Schrodinger’s Rapist” – by which I mean, a good-faith reading of the actual essay, not the unfair distortions of it that are so common – and there’s nothing there (other than the analogy to the cat) that feminists weren’t commonly saying in the 1980s.So no, that hasn’t developed as you claim.
In the 1980s, feminists like the late Mary Daly and (the not-late) Catherine MacKinnon – and their ideas – were far more mainstream than they are now. There is simply no current-day equivalent of the MacKinnon Dworkin legislation of the 1980s, and that is not because their ideas have become mainstream, but because there was an enormous war of ideas within feminism and their side lost.
Other ideas within feminism that were once held by just a small edge group of feminists – such as trans rights, or affirmative consent – have become much more mainstream and accepted within feminism, while I think it’s fair to say that the influence of Janice Raymond’s ideas, while not gone (alas), are on the decline.
On the whole, American feminism was at its most extreme in the late 1960s and the 1970s. That’s when feminists like Mary Daly were first becoming known; that’s when the most extreme ideas (separatism, for example) flourished most; that’s why those list of horrible quotes from feminists MRAs pass around are dominated by 1970s feminists.
In other words, contrary to what you are arguing (if I’ve understood your argument correctly), there is no relentless process by which extreme ideas of today become mainstream tomorrow. Instead, there is a constant push-and-pull, within feminism, to persuade feminists that such-and-such an idea is right, while such-and-such an idea should be rejected. So if you think that an idea is bad, probably the thing to do is to put forward credible arguments against it.
( [*] I’m not saying I 100% agree with the Schrodinger’s Rapist essay, just that I don’t think it’s extreme. Certainly not compared to feminism of the 1980s.).
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When I wrote “First of all, there is no such thing as “US law”” I should have said “no such thing as US law in this area.” Of course there are many federal laws; however, “primary aggressor” laws are state laws, not federal law.
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eeeugh I ordered mealsquares and they’re horrible
I mean they’re edible if you nuke them for a minute and drown them in pancake syrup but
ozy why are these good to you
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I hated them the first time I had them too. They grew on me because NO COOKING.
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Does anyone else see parallels between some accusations of “cultural appropriation” in parts of the social justice community and accusations of “fake geek girl” in parts of nerdy communities? Because they seem to be making very similar complaints.
I find both these complaints to be dumb, though the latter bothers me more because gardens.
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There are some parallels, but I think its important to distinguish between cultural appropriation and signalling membership of a group to which one doesn’t belong. Geek cultural appropriation is more like the comic book movies, which are generally well received by geeks. “Fake geek girls” seems to specify a phenomenon that does occur (but not as often as the accusations do), wherein a female expresses membership in geekdom, but then is disinterested when geeks try to engage her in discussion of geeky things. Most communities are upset at individuals who falsely claim membership, justifiably so in my opinion.
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