The problem with motte and bailey is that it refers to two totally different things.
The first is when someone gives a definition of a word that no one could argue with– “God is just the happiness in your heart when you see a sunrise”, “rationality is systemized winning”, “feminism is the radical notion that women are people”, “my food philosophy is to eat food, not too much, mostly plants”– and then proceeds to argue using definitions in which God is omniscient and omnipotent, rationality involves perhaps dubious game theoretic and Bayesian claims, feminists believe that sexism exists and is bad, and your food philosophy won’t let anyone buy foods with more than five ingredients. It is good to point this out: “hey, you said I should be rational because I want to win, but now you’re going into all this Bayesian epistemology which I really don’t buy.”
The second is about group dynamics. It is the claim that groups tend to have members that are more palatable and less palatable to the general public, and that the latter tend to borrow credibility from the former. If you are used to “patriarchy” meaning “the overall system of gender roles”, then you may give unwarranted credibility to someone who uses “patriarchy” to mean “men universally hate women.” If you are used to Thomistic theologians, you may take Josh McDowell too seriously. If you are used to people who use “rationality” to refer to a series of heuristics that help you come to the correct conclusion, you may pay too much attention to Singulatarians. Et cetera.
The problem is that group dynamics have literally nothing to do with whether ideas are true.
Imagine a creationist arguing with an evolutionist. At the end of the argument, the creationist pulls out her trump card: “a lot of the people reading this argument don’t care about science at all! They don’t understand anything about evolution; I could easily beat them in an argument. They’re just looking for their ingroup to triumph over their outgroup and signalling that they’re rational and science-minded individuals.”
Forgive the evolutionist if he responds with “So?”
The creationist’s point is true: this is, in fact, an accurate description of many people who read creationist/evolutionist arguments. It also doesn’t matter. Evolution would still be true even if all creationists were disinterested yet misled searchers for truth and all evolutionists were motivated by their ingroup winning. This is pretty obvious.
And yet the second use of motte and bailey borrows credibility from the first use. “Motte and bailey” is filed in the “logical fallacy” part of people’s minds. It feels like saying that someone is using a motte and bailey is a devastating counterargument, even though in reality it is just making a statement about how social movements work that is true of literally every social movement that has ever existed or will ever exist.
This is bad practice. Reserve observations about social dynamics for conversations about social dynamics. Do not attempt to use them to win arguments about object-level issues.
Thing of Things 
I see what you did there, Ozy.
I do think the first kind of Motte-Bailey does point to misleading and invalid argumentation, not that you were disagreeing with that. It’s a form of equivocation to discredit opponents or to manipulate people who agree with the “bailey” to agree with the “motte”, too. Doesn’t Scientology basically do the latter? Suck people in with ideas that, to some, are seemingly harmless and nice sounding about depression and stuff, and then when they’ve been in for a while and are committed reveal the weird and highly implausible beliefs to them.
You’re right about the second one, and I agree that any intellectual view that has a significant following will have the dynamic.
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manipulate people who agree with the “bailey” to agree with the “motte”, too
Other way around—a motte is defensible but otherwise of little use; a bailey is highly profitable to hold, but mostly or entirely indefensible.
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I think the word “equivocation” is fine for the first one. Better, in fact, because “motte and bailey” is familiar only to people who have read SSC or an obscure paper about postmodernism
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I’ve come across it elsewhere, but no-one explains what it fucking means – which I concede is the purpose of using it as shorthand, but since the terms are archaic, the meaning isn’t apparent in the way that a good idiom should be.
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See it explained here http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/ and here http://philpapers.org/rec/SHATVO-2
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I know what it means after hanging around here and on SSC for a bit. Doesn’t change the fact that it fell into jargon elsewhere.
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Most instance of #2 I have encountered haven’t been used to attack the basic arguments a group makes. They have been used to attack people who are defending the unpalatable members of their group. For example:
Q: Many online feminists are cruel, abusive, and hate men.
A: No they aren’t. Feminism means equality for everybody! Feminists are people who believe in equality! A person who believes in equality wouldn’t act cruel, abusive, and mean.
Q: You are correct that some members of the feminist movement are nice people who believe in equality. But the crazy ones I’m talking about also exist, and they are borrowing credibility from the nice ones. Stop defending them. You are being misled by their credibility-borrowing.
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This. When I talk about #2 as motte and bailey, it generally means one of two things:
2.a I believe that the bailey-holders are deliberately engineering a de facto equivocation and/or drawing on motte-based emotional resonances in order to get people to support their position. This seems to me a perfectly sensible use, even if the bailey-holders themselves never actually state the motte definition, because they are intentionally making use of it nonetheless.
2.b I think that motte-holders are defending their bailey-holding allies or co-belligerents, either for strategic gain or because they themsleves have been taken in, and don’t realize that the bailey-holders are not, in fact, in the motte with them. This also strikes me as a sensible use, since it’s still a defense of the indefensible based on equivocation.
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Could you give an example of someone saying “a feminist wouldn’t act cruel, abusive, and mean” or something along those lines? I don’t recall ever seeing that said, in the sense you intended (I’ve seen it in a “no true feminist” sense, but that’s the opposite of defending them, obviously).
What I’ve seen is more like this [dramatized]:
X: Some feminists believe that all men are rapists! That’s just more proof that feminism is evil. They demonize men to gain more power.
Y: Wait, I’m a feminist and I don’t think I’m evil. I don’t want to take over the world, and I don’t think all men are rapists. Can we at least agree that women are people and our society has some issues with sex and gender?
X: Ha, did you really think I’d fall for that? It’s the old motte and bailey trick! What a conniving creature you are, using the Dark Arts on me when I was trying to start an honest discussion.
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I think that Ghatanathoah’s example is a bit explicit; often the denial is more tacit. For example, here’s something (cw: misandry, extreme transmisandry, encouraging suicide) I found on Tumblr in Action.
It’s true that cishetsnowflake does not explicitly say “that hateful person couldn’t be a feminist, since feminism is about equality and love!” They just pointedly ignore the explicitly (asshole) feminist rationale for the ichigolee’s incredibly hateful comments in order to accuse team-rocket-against-sjws of “mak[ing] it about feminism,” as if it wasn’t already.
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@ osberend
Thanks for the example.
Here’s how I see the discussion:
A: Oh no, transmenhate on Tumblr 😦
B: Yay, transmenhate! Men are evil, so transmen should die!
C: B is a trans-phobic piece of shit.
D: I agree with C.
E: Me too.
Anti-SJW: See, current feminism is about hating men!
F: WTF?
The position espoused by B doesn’t represent “current feminism”. If anyone’s representing “current feminism” here, it’s A, C, D, E and F. Basically, current feminists come in two flavors: supportive of trans people (the dominant mainstream faction) and outraged at trans people (the angry fringe minority). “Trans women are OK, but trans men should die” is such an unusual opinion that people suspect trolling (see the notes).
So, the next question is: should C, D, E and F have accused B of hating men instead of / in addition to transphobia? Perhaps. But the rant was filled with accusations specific to trans men:
– “they choose to identify with the oppressor class on a level that cis men never could”;
– “they willfully change their own bodies just to gain male privilege and engage in toxic masculinity”;
– “they take up valuable resources and limited safe space away from trans women and amab non-binary trans people”;
and the final paragraph can be construed as a call-to-action against trans men because they are “systematically more vulnerable” (i.e., an easy target), so I’m not surprised that people focused on the trans angle.
Now, of course there’s room to argue that this instance of transphobia is rooted in a toxic worldview. But whether it should be called misandry, prejudice or taking the class struggle too far is a controversial question — good for starting a discussion, but not for “calling someone out”.
Whether trans people should be driven to suicide because they are vulnerable and “watching them suffer is pleasurable and fun” is far less controversial, so people lean on that for call-outs.
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It’s pretty clearly misandry (“just as evil as cis men”), with the focus on trans men being because trans men are less able to protect themselves to cis men. In fact, the most precise term is transmisandry. This is specifically the intersection of transphobia and misandry. Admitting the latter half shouldn’t be so difficult for feminism, but it is. That’s what osberend means by “tacit denial”; the part where you say “The position espoused by B doesn’t represent “current feminism””.
No, you don’t explicitly say feminists can’t be cruel or mean. You just refuse to acknowledge that feminists caught behaving especially viciously represent “current feminism”. So “current feminism” never has to address the problem of vicious feminists.
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Like I said, “misandry” is a controversial term. This is due to the structure of the models of social power and inequality that many SJ activists rely on. Now, I think these models can be more harmful than helpful, but (as far as I know) that’s not the mainstream opinion yet.
So, saying “boo, transmisandry!” would result in a debate among the potential shamers. For effective shaming, they had to say “boo, transphobia!”.
There are plenty of vicious mainstream feminists, but a rant by a non-mainstream feminist is not evidence of that.
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@Nita: The position espoused by B is clearly a product of feminism/SJ, specifically the application of a Marxist class-warfare analysis to gender issues. Keywords: “misogynistic,” “oppressor class” (referring to men), “toxic masculinity,” “safe space,” “toxic masculity” (again), “misogyny.”
I think you’re right that ichigolee’s is a distinctly non-central position (although a little poking around suggests that weaker forms of it (i.e. hostile, but not necessarily exterminationist) definitely exist, mostly limited to feminist-identified trans women and non-binaries (especially, but not exclusively AMAB)). But it is a non-central position rooted in several more central ones (again, class-warfare analysis of gender issues, along with double standards for “oppressors” and “oppressed,” concern for “safe space,” and belief that men’s issues get too much attention). Claiming that it “doesn’t represent ‘current feminism'” seems to obviously be conflating group-centrality with group-membership: “You position is unusual for our group, and we don’t like it, so you’re not really a member.”
How is that at all controversial? Ichigolee’s position is just asshole feminism + acceptance of transgender as such + hatred of “traitors.” Remove the asshole feminism (i.e. the idea that men are intrinsically the enemy), and it ceases to exist.
Whether trans people should be driven to suicide because they are vulnerable and “watching them suffer is pleasurable and fun” is far less controversial, so people lean on that for call-outs.
But ichigolee doesn’t (professedly) want to see trans people driven to suicide, they want to men driven to suicide, and their particular desire to see trans men driven to suicide is a special case of that.
Unrelated side note: I finally posted some replies (beyond my initial “huh, lemme go check”) in the creepiness thread, which I doubt anyone is still checking. Note that one of them has screwed-up formatting, and is followed by a fixed version (oh for a delete button).
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Well, unless you think that crafting a theoretical structure in which misogyny is everywhere but misandry doesn’t even exist in the presence of explicit slurs is an excuse for, cover for, and normalization of misandry. If you think that, then your post just indicted mainstream feminism far more effectively than anything else expressed in this thread.
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@Nita: So, saying “boo, transmisandry!” would result in a debate among the potential shamers.
The original post is tagged #transmisandry, and is (in the context of the OP’s other posts) clearly at least partially about feminist/SJ-inspired hostility. That debate is already there.
For effective shaming, they had to say “boo, transphobia!”.
I don’t think anyone, including team-rocket-against-sjws, is crticizing C, D, or E for the focus of their shaming (team-rocket-against-sjws is nominally replying to E, but pretty clearly commenting on B, which is dumb in principle, but seems to be pretty common on tumblr in practice). TIA is/I am criticizing F for trying to frame the narrative as “team-rocket-against-sjws is trying to make this about feminism,” thereby implying that it hasn’t been about (asshole) feminism from the start.
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I like how Scott Alexander tries to stick to widely-read feminist publications for his anti-feminism, you know, instead of utterly-and-complerely marginal opinions cherry-picked from Tumblr.
Which is to say, you *actually can* find recent comments by widely-read and respected feminists that are problematic. Which is no surprise. Feminism is a large movement with much internal critique. I’m a feminist who is not afraid to say that feminism has some problems.
Like, not just the TERFs. Even feminists I very much like have said stuff I thought was poorly thought out. Like, if you scour Laurie Penny’s oeuvre you can find things I disagree with. You can find a few things that were outright hostile, which I assume were made off-the-cuff and without due consideration. On the other hand, you can find much that is quite thoughtful. I like her very much and find her worth reading.
Like, cuz feminists are people.
But this post!
Good grief this is weaksauce. Do better.
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Which, that ichigolee person seems to have like a total of 10 posts on Tumblr (unless I’m misreading). Her (?) latest post is this:
Yeah. I would suggest she delete her Tumblr and start over.
After spending some time sitting in the corner and thinking about what she has done!
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@veronica: Well the accusation I’m making of motte-and-bailey in support of (a slightly more restrained version of) Ghatanathoah’s claim is targeted as cishetsnowflake, rather than at ichigolee herself.
But the real truth is that I draw examples from what I read, which is mostly what I see linked by people I know on Facebook, because I need to read them in order to respond to what people are saying about them. I don’t routinely read Amanda Marcotte (for example) because doing so can easily make me angry to the point of non-functionality. I do routinely read Ozy, because they generally don’t (and props to them for that), but SJ-wise, that’s about it.
Occasionally, I read John Scalzi as well, because he has intelligent things to say about a variety of things, although much less so (IMO) on gender- and race-related matters other than toying Vox Day. He’s not really an SJ blogger, though, just a blogger who sometimes talks about SJ issues.
And yeah, I also occasionally read TIA. Because, already being infuriated by what I see on Facebook, I find point-and-laugh links to short snippets of SJ stupidity soothing. I probably spend less time on there than I do reading Facebook-linked stupidity, though.
Who knows, maybe the pro-SJ people I know on Facebook, despite being disproportionately well-educated and intelligent, link (approvingly) to disproportionately stupid SJ stuff. I’m not sure why that would be, though.
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Labeling clear and unambiguous hatred and contempt for men “misandry” is controversial?
Then many SJ activists have a misandry problem, and their inability to recognize it is probably due to the privilege of not being on the receiving end of it.
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@ osberend
Well, there is a difference between “a representative sample” and “a sample”, right? I see the same difference between “represents current feminism” and “is a current feminist”.
In the beginning of your comment, you called it “Marxist class-warfare analysis”. Well, the people who used this analysis and arrived at more human-friendly conclusions aren’t going to throw it all away because someone else seemingly misapplied it.
Also, I’d prefer to use the term “asshole feminism” for deliberately cruel behaviour, rather than poor social analysis.
I don’t know. Most of the post lists ways in which trans men are worse than cis men (they are oppressors by choice, rather than innocent people thrown into the oppressor class by an accident of birth), and only the “just as evil” remark in the end departs from that narrative. I’d say it’s incoherent enough to support either interpretation.
@ Patrick
Well, I definitely wasn’t trying to defend mainstream feminism from accusations of misandry! I asked for examples of nice feminists defending cruel and abusive feminists by claiming that all feminists are nice.
@ osberend again
Thanks, I hadn’t noticed. But the rant clearly spawned a little storm of call-outs, derailing the debate and turning it into something else.
Wait, I thought it was about transmisandry? Blaming transmisandry on “current* feminism” is about as effective as blaming rape on “men”.
* another problem with that phrase is the word “current” — it seems to imply that feminism is moving / has recently moved in the direction of ichigolee’s views, which is the opposite of true, as far as I can tell
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Well, it’s moved in the direction of ichigolee’s views in the sense that views like hers didn’t exist a couple years ago, but not in the sense that they are remotely popular outside of one tiny circle of Tumblr. And certainly feminism has gotten a lot less transphobic and a lot less man-hate-y in the third wave.
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As an aside, where are all these terrible trans guys? What I mean is, I’m trans and in a big city and get around in queer spaces, and so far I’ve met one kinda-douchey trans guy, and he wasn’t really that bad. I mean, he was definitely bro-tastic, but on the other hand he was a working class guy who acted much like lots of working class guys and wasn’t some terrible bugbear. Just a guy who liked to fix his truck and was pushier than I’m comfortable with.
Whatevs.
I know a fuckton of trans men and mostly they seem like complete angels. I don’t get it.
I know that Buck Angel has said some shitty things. So what.
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@ InferentialDistance
Yes. Remember the racism=power+prejudice thing? Some people use similar definitions when it comes to gender. Others are undecided. Apparently, bell hooks used the phrase “man hating”.
You do realize that many SJ activists are men, right?
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Well, there is a difference between “a representative sample” and “a sample”, right?
Sure, if the sample size is large enough for representativeness to be possible. Individuals are representative or unrepresentative, as individuals. This may be verging on professional jargon, though.
In the beginning of your comment, you called it “Marxist class-warfare analysis”. Well, the people who used this analysis and arrived at more human-friendly conclusions aren’t going to throw it all away because someone else seemingly misapplied it.
Clarification: I didn’t mean “unmaking asshole feminism will cause this person’s ideology to cease to exist [and is therefore a good idea],” I meant “eliminating asshole feminism as a premise that this person holds will make it impossible for them to hold their current ideology, [and therefore ‘misandry’ and ‘taking the class struggle too far’ are obviously accurate descriptors for it].”
Also, I’d prefer to use the term “asshole feminism” for deliberately cruel behaviour, rather than poor social analysis.
I’d place the line in between, at evil social analysis, which I absolutely include “men are the enemy” in. There are forms of poor social analysis that are not instrinsically evil (e.g. “greater availability of (violent) pornography will lead to more sexual violence”); I would say that clinging to such analyses as axioms despite exposure to strong evidence against them is asshole feminism, but merely holding them is not.
I don’t know. Most of the post lists ways in which trans men are worse than cis men (they are oppressors by choice, rather than innocent people thrown into the oppressor class by an accident of birth), and only the “just as evil” remark in the end departs from that narrative. I’d say it’s incoherent enough to support either interpretation.
Except that there’s plenty in their post that indicates hatred (albeit less extreme) of cis men, and nothing that indicates hatred of trans women.
Thanks, I hadn’t noticed. But the rant clearly spawned a little storm of call-outs, derailing the debate and turning it into something else.
Maybe, although it’s also possible that those call-outs are meant as implicit support for A’s side of that debate, since C and D are both definitely trans men, and I’d bet a good deal of money that E is as well.
Wait, I thought it was about transmisandry? Blaming transmisandry on “current* feminism” is about as effective as blaming rape on “men”.
Except that transmisandry without blanket transphobia is, AFAICT, non-existent among people who aren’t feminist-identified. Also, feminism is an ideology; being a man is not.
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Two things wrong here. The first is the assertion that the analysis was misapplied. As far as I can tell, the analysis is correct; to whatever degree that “men” and “maleness” are problems (and Feminist theory says they are; “Patriarchy”, “toxic masculainity”, etc..), then trans men are adding to those problems by transitioning.
The second is “throw it all away” is objectively wrong. An argument involves many propositions conjoined together; the negation is (by De Morgan’s Law) the negation of the propositions disjoined together. Correct application of a valid argument can generate false conclusions if one or more premises is wrong. You do not throw away all the premises, you throw away the smallest number of them that generate the contradiction.
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Then those people have a misandry problem, because they’ve successfully blinded themselves from seeing the hatred and contempt of men.
Yes, they (mistakenly) think those blanket statements don’t apply to them because they’re SJ activists. That’s where some anti-SJs come from, after all; SJ activists who suddenly lost the privilege of not having SJ hate aimed at them.
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“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”
Never mind that NO ONE holds only that viewpoint, or that one can can horribly anti-feminist or anti-woman yet still think women are people.
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Steelman of the second use of motte-and-bailey: “The motte that you claim to support is true, but even though you’re being careful to avoid the bailey right now, you’ll go back to supporting it when I turn around and stop looking. You’re not equivocating between ‘the overall system of gender roles’ and ‘men universally hate women’ right now, but later you will. I don’t trust that you’re accurately presenting your beliefs right now, even if you’re not saying anything that’s outright false.”
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My impression upon reading that:
It seems to imply more “intention” than is maybe warranted? I do not think most people engaging in “less than maximally honest” tactics is doing so intentionally. For example I think that using SJ definitions of patriarchy, sexism and racism is muddying the debate and making things harder to understand. Those definitions also actually contribute to “sexism” and “Racism” as I think sexism and racism should be understood.
However I am pretty sure the vast majority of SJ people are just trying to make the world a fairer and happier place. And to stop extremely serious abuses. As well as be better friends and family members. Very few people are actively trying to be “dishonest” (though Arthur Chu exists). So I think your phrasing implies the other person is being more intentionally malicious then they usually are?
Maybe though I am reading it the wrong way and you meant something else.
*It is very hard to figure out how to make things better!
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I agree that most of them aren’t equivocating intentionally, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to go back to the bailey later. It’s not dishonesty because it’s unintentional, but it is something that happens.
It’s also not necessarily bad even if done intentionally. If you’re in a space where inferential distances are low, and someone from the outside comes in and starts debating with you, it may take a lot of effort to convince them of everything, but much less effort to persuade them of a weaker related claim. So you end up arguing that, because you really do believe in what you’re arguing (even though it’s incomplete), partially because it’ll be easier to convince them of the rest later (once they’ve absorbed the weaker claim) and partially because you don’t want to ignore them but you want to go back to talking about the bailey with the other people in your community.
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What’s your issue with Chu? I don’t always agree with him be he’s seemed earnest AFAICT.
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Its a long story. If you are interested read slatestarcodex (living by the sword, in favor of niceness and some others). also here are some direct quotes:
1 – “So yes, to momentarily borrow Yudkowsky fanboy terminology, I wear black robes. I am a practitioner of the Dark Arts. I rigorously manage my own thinking and purge myself of dangerous “unthinkable” thoughts — “mindkill” myself — on a regular basis.
This is what you have to do to be a feminist anti-racist progressive, i.e. a social justice stormtrooper, You have to recognize that there is no neutral culture, neutrality is impossible, that culture is a cutthroat war of memes and that you have to commit to picking a side and setting yourself up as a neutral arbiter of memes is impossible and is a form of surrender. You have to constantly “check your privilege” and “unpack the knapsack” and all those other buzzwords.
You need to understand that the only way to be “rational” in this world is to be irrational, that the only way to be “fair” is to pick the right side and fight for it.
The people who genuinely win are the people who do this. The people who refuse to do this are the ones who sit on the sidelines and never even lose because they aren’t really playing.”
2 – ” The shorthand and kind of flippant way for me to say it is that I’m basically in favor of all the things Scott yells at feminists for doing — the bingo cards, the dismissive labeling of “dudebros”, the naming-and-shaming.
I’m not categorically in favor of that because for all I know in his obsessive cataloguing of every shitty thing every self-identified feminist has ever done he’s probably named someone who really did burn down someone’s house for having a bikini calendar on their wall or something.
But in general if he’s written a post about how something feminists are doing must be stopped it’s something I’m strongly in favor of.”
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Admittedly its quite possible those quotes are inacurate. The were made n facebook and maybe Chu was mad. So I am not actually confident at all Chu is intentionally dishonest.
But using Chu as an example was something of an “in-reference.” Scott made several posts about Chu and any SSC reader would have gotten my point.
I am sorry if this was unfair or bad form 😦
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@LTP: He explicitly defended dishonesty (on the order of “misrepresenting the probability of being falsely accused of rape by numerous orders of magnitude, to the point of claiming that it is significantly less likely than being hit by a comet”) and slander.
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Personally I think outright dishonestly is a poor strategy, for obvious reasons of prudence. Sooner or later you get caught and then fewer people believe you. (And they are right not to do so.)
I fully support the deliberate use of memes. I fully support some amounts of naming and shaming. Up to a point. You all want strong Shelling points on this stuff, but I do not, since the *status quo* is pretty shitty for folks like me and we need to change it fast.
“But it will backfire” you say, and perhaps. But a review of the history of social justice shows how this stuff is needed to move the dial.
Cuz not moving the dial as fast as we can also “backfires” — on me and mine. It backfires according to the lost opportunity to thrive.
MLK called it the “fierce urgency of now.” Which is to say, the “culture war” is a real fight and it’s gonna land on me regardless. And things like Stonewall and AIDS and ACT-UP, to pick examples from gay history, along with aggressive civil rights and women’s movements — put it this way: the “cult of nice” does not work. The hippy-dippy we can all get along ideas are rubbish, cuz the people who hate me do so irrationally and without bounds, cuz the cultural structures arrayed against us are downright overwhelming.
Rational discourse is an important tool, but on the boundaries of the fight. It makes a difference. But it ain’t the main front of the main battle. Nor are women, queers, and minorities gonna wait around for the entirety of human thought to change.
So fire up the memes. Make our enemies seem uncool, small-minded, mean. Show how amazing queers and minorities are! Own the culture.
And the current SJ trends? The really bad discourse patterns? I don’t like them either, but they are part of the push and pull. As is everyone here.
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Chu didn’t “endorse lying.” He condemned spending your time criticizing your allies in ways that he believes undermine the movements chances of success. These are not the same. There is a finite amount of time and social bandwidth, and devoting it to circular firing squads is counter productive if you have productive goals. He also argued that if someone is always trying to start up the circular firing squad, maybe they’re not really on your side.
This isn’t nearly as controversial as the LW crowd tried to make it sound.
Their response to Chu has ironically proven his point.
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I fully support the deliberate use of memes.
As do I . . . when they’re accurate. Virally replicating truth is good. Virally replicating falsehood is bad.
put it this way: the “cult of nice” does not work. The hippy-dippy we can all get along ideas are rubbish, cuz the people who hate me do so irrationally and without bounds, cuz the cultural structures arrayed against us are downright overwhelming.
This seems like a tin man at best. It’s true that Scott Alexander, in “In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization,” condemns “lies, insults, and harassment,” but if you look closely, he only really talks about insults in the context of lies and harassment[1]. And certainly, I don’t think that either stargirlprincess or I could be accused of opposition to rudeness to committed enemies.
If someone actually hates you irrationally and without bounds, then sure, insult the fuck out of them, constrained only by honesty.
But look, the truth of the matter is this: If I try to discuss SJ online essentially anywhere other than here or SSC[2], sooner or later someone (often several someones) will accuse me of hating women, trans people, homosexuals, and/or non-whites irrationally and without bounds, based on a set of completely broken syllogisms (my personal favorites are shorthanded as “objectification is misogyny” and “Islamophobia is racism”). Our little spats over appropriate standards of social interaction notwithstanding, I hope you can agree that this is deeply unfair. And, perhaps more importantly (from your perspective), it is deeply stupid.
Because not everyone is either so principled that they’ll take the high road and say (as I do) “feminism and SJ are fucking awful, but I still believe in equal rights” and mean it, or so gratuitously spiteful that they’ll hate you even if you and your allies treat them decently. Whatever you may think of Radicalizing the Romanceless generally, one point that I think is indisputable is this: When you treat people who are, at worst, a bit flawed as The Enemy and pull out all the stops to slander them, you are doing your real enemies’ recruiting work for them.
Make our enemies seem uncool, small-minded, mean.
Sure, to the extent that it’s true.
Show how amazing queers and minorities are!
Sure. To the extent that it’s true.
[1] And arguably implicitly in the context of a personal friendship, but what I’m interested in is what he has to say about broader debate.
[2] Or right-wing spaces where I have no interest in discussing anything, of course.
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@Patrick
1 – I openly admit those quotes might not reflect Arthur Chu’s actual outlook. People say all sorts of shit they do not really mean on facebook. I admit it was maybe unfair to bring up Arthur Chu. I was really just trying for an “in reference” as I assumed a good chunk of the readers here know the SSC/Chu drama. I do not think we should write offf everything Chu says and I think bringing those quotes up in a discussion fo chu’s unrelated writing would be bad form. But its harsd to really give an example of a dishonest attitude without being uncharitable to someone? Chu seemed reasonable since the SSc stuff is known to alot of people here.
2 – I did not say he endorsed lying. I gave him as an example of someone with a dishonest attitude. There seems to be good evidence for this. In the Scot vs Clymer stats argument Chu nacked Clymer despite Clymer’s statistic being clearly insane. Chu maybe is not pro-lying but he is clearly anti-anti-falsehood for some set of falsehoods. In addition he later decribed Scott in this way “the other dude (scott) was so wrong.” Despite Scott’s actions being clearly reasonable in the Clymer rape statistics affair.
3 – Those quotes explicitly endorse agruing in bad faith. This seems “dishonest” to me. Maybe you can argue if my definition is fair but yoyu should note I even had “dishonest” in quotes. The attitude in those quotes at least describes someone who the “other side” should not trust at all or give any benefit of the doubt. Whether Arthur actually acts according to tohse quote sin general I do not know.
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If I go into an argument making an effort to separate 2 superficially similar concepts and only arguing for the defensible one, I’m going to stop taking you seriously if you accuse me of secretly waiting until your back is turned to start arguing for what I really believe in.
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The concept which “Motte and Bailey” refers to was in fact a concept I already had. I just didn’t put a name to it until commenters here started overusing it, obliging me to google the term and trudge through a long and boring SSC post to learn about a concept I already understood. That makes me kind of angry. Also see: the world’s worst argument aka equivocation.
IMO, the problem with “Motte and Bailey” is the same problem with all fallacies. It’s nice to have shortcuts to talk about the general principles of correct argumentation. But in practice, they become shortcuts to rejecting anyone’s arguments except one’s own. One of the few nice things I’ll say about the rationalist community as compared to the skeptical community is that they’re more self-reflective and better address the difficulty of changing one’s own mind. Emphasizing fallacies is a step in the wrong direction.
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Although citing group social dynamics is a bad way to win an argument. I think it’s important to take into consideration the way that political movements convert people into holding increasingly more extreme positions by using moderate positions. The moderate MRA says the MRM is about recognizing the existence of male rape and abuse victims. While the radical MRA is all about the the oppressive system of female hypergamy. Even if we assume that the moderate MRA is acting 100% in good faith and is using only factually correct arguments. That in no way changes the fact that the later can and will use the positions of the former as an recruitment mechanism.
Does this mean that all political movements who’s members use motte and bailey tactics should be dismissed off hand? No. But it does mean that a certain level of skepticism should be applied to such movements. There is no reason to assume political activists are always acting in good faith just be because some are.
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Do you have evidence that that’s true? It seems to me (admittedly, as an outsider) that the red pill and the MRM are very different people who don’t like each other very much, but are combined due to outgroup homogeneity bias.
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I’ve seen an MRA* say that the MRM is affiliated with the PUA movement, although not necessarily the Red Pill itself. It was part of an argument that Elliot Rodgers wasn’t connected to the MRM, because he got his ideas from an anti-PUA website (or something along those lines. It was a while ago).
*Pretty reputable in the specific context, but not at all a major figure in the movement. Take with the necessary amount of salt.
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It’s.. complicated. Although they should definitely be seen as distinct movements.
MRA’s for sure mostly want to distance themselves from TRP, since TRP is a) associated with traditionalism, which the MRM mostly hates, and b) sees PUA & game as just another form of gynocentrism (the MRM’s version of patriarchy theory).
TRP is more inclusive of the MRM because of congruency wrt divorce law, paternity, fraud, etc. Although some of the more prominent bloggers see MRAs as… well, losers, not to put too fine a point on it.
Both TRPers and MRAs acknowledge that hypergamy is a thing. It was certainly brought up during the after-party at the talk I attended.
IIRC (and I may not do his position justice), Warren Farrell in Myth of Male Power described a dynamic in work places where some women brought the full force of harassment policies to bear upon undesirable men, while other women used their position as secretaries or whatever to find and date high status men. So this has a long history.
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In my mind it’s not about whether moderates or extremist agree which each other or even like each other. But whether extremists can leverage moderate positions to their advantage. I don’t have an example with the MRA I can immediately think of, but I have seen this occur within the tumblr social justice community.
A popular anti-racist blogger that blogs photos of WOC, Curvesincolor, posted a image that seemed slightly antisemitic. Some Jewish people complained about it. Their response was to go on an antisemitic tirade of the type you would usually expect to see from neo-nazi’s. Afterwards several people criticized her for her antisemitism. What happened? Nothing. Her blog is still popular and has thousands of followers even as she still goes on antisemitic tirades. She hasn’t even deleted any of her antisemitic posts. Basically a “anti-racist” blog that was supposed to be about positive representation of women of color became a antisemitic propaganda resource and that change wasn’t even enough to dent their following.
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Ozy’s right. MRAs and redpillers have fundamentally different views, and mostly can’t stand each other. MRAs think redpillers are sex-obsessed Neanderthals who perpetuate the worst male stereotypes, the perfect foils to feminism. Redpillers think MRAs are ineffectual, deluded beta whiners who’ve adopted the methods of the enemy. They both hate feminism, but they hate it for nearly opposite reasons.
I wouldn’t expect feminists to stay completely au courant on the ideological differences of their various detractors, but that’s a pretty big one! It reminds me of evangelical Protestants who excoriate Catholics and atheists in the same breath.
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I’m still trying to figure out how the MRAs let Elam and AVFM get so influential. Which is to say, to me that is the face of the MRAs. Furthermore, even Farrell seems pretty gross in how he analyzes women’s sexual choices. The movement just has waaaaay too much bitterness from romantic failure.
“She chose HIM and not ME” — well , cry me a river. The women I like often chose other people.
And I keep hearing this stuff and it turns me off huge. Which, yeah let’s talk about male rape and male abuse and the hard shit masculinity drops on men, and the economy, and the fact that working class women are kinda giving up on romance and working class men are kinda coming across as deadbeats who the women don’t want.
Which, I don’t blame to women. I don’t wanna work all day while he plays X-Box with his friends.
On the other hand, this is a really bad social arrangement. It will cause harm.
Personally, I think this is what happens when your industrial base falls apart and women do “touchy-feely” jobs like nursing, whereas men make stuff. Plus working class culture seems to admire men who solve problems in a real kinda face-to-face way, such as chest-puffing followed by punches, and those men scare me a little [1].
So let’s talk about this. It matters. THOSE MEN MATTER! (Even if I don’t really get along with them all that well. Since, you know, trannies aren’t popular with that set.) Still, THOSE MEN MATTER!
Even if they call me faggot.
But the sad-boners and the “OMG she’s fucking THAT GUY” and “OMG she got a restraining order, all I did was {insert bullshit}” and “I can’t even say X anymore,” where X usually means following her puppy-dog-style for weeks even if she keeps dropping hints to go away.
(And before you poke in your nose, osberend, she has learned not to be direct and open cuz she gets punished when she does. And she doesn’t know you. She knows HIM, and her social matrix ain’t your social matrix.)
So some woman misused a sexual harassment policy, except those policies emerged because men had been abusing their absence forever. And women still get sexually harassed. A lot. It happens to me, and I’m a preposterously enormous tranny. I cannot imagine what a pretty cis girl goes through.
[1] If you take that comment out of context then you suck.
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”Thing is, it is useful to criticize such people, but when you fixate on such people at the exclusion of the more thoughtful members of a movement, you do truth a disservice.”
Furthermore, I find your description of Warren Farrel’s analyses as “gross” as uncharitable. Your emotional reaction to his points is not indicative of their correctness or incorrectness. In fact, your reaction is exactly why Paul Elam got to the top of the MRM; Warren Farrel, despite being kind and polite and all around a good person, was too “gross” to listen to, but not enough of an asshole to shout his points at you as you walk away. Paul Elam doesn’t just shout at you, he chases you down the street and back into the subway because he’s a huge fucking jerk. He gets his message across by sheer quantity, and generates the sheer quantity by violating social norms left, right, and center. Paul Elam gets results.
A step further: Warren Farrel is currently married (last I checked), so asserting that his arguments are due to “bitterness from romantic failure” is wrong. Focusing on the romantically bitter is a weak-man. Asserting that Farrel is either bitter or a romantic failure is a straw-man. Do better.
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Warren Farrell said, in the Myth of Male Power, that a man paying for a woman’s date when she doesn’t have sex with him “feels like a male version of date rape.” I personally feel that “gross” is a perfectly accurate way of characterizing this belief, along with “rape apologist”, “erasing of male rape survivors”, and “what the FUCK, dude.”
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Yes, that particular statement is wrong. And understandably offensive.
It should be noted that what Farrel means by “date rape” is not “Rohypnol”, but pushing past mixed consent/non-consent messages. He should have done more to disambiguate the latter from the former. Pushing past mixed consent/non-consent messages is, however, “exciting”; it’s a staple of the kyriarchy’s romance genre. That’s a problem with the kyriarchy, not Farrel’s analysis. Falling victim to the kyriarchy’s bullshit is no more a reason to dismiss everything Farrel says than Feminism’s tendency to also fall victim to the kyriarchy’s bullshit is to dismiss all of Feminism.
Similarly, there is a non-sexual resolution to the problem as posed by Farrel: those women could be more decisive and not send mixed consent/non -consent messages. People should say what they mean and mean what they say. Warren is mistaken in not offering this solution.
The book is over 20 years old, so it may predate the growing acknowledgement of (non-prison) male rape victims. Warren Farrell wasn’t exactly young when he wrote it, either.
And Farrell has said many things besides that, which should be judged on their own merits and not the merits of that particular argument. But yes, that comparison is wrong and offensive.
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@megaemolga: Oh wow. I went and look up her tumblr, and found among other things, this gem:
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re: romantic failure
Veronica and I seem to be reading very different sources. Most of what I see is “I got dragged through a divorce, she made false allegations against me, now I’m on the hook for child-support and I can only see my kids every other weekend and she’s turning them against me.”
re: Myth of Male Power
Yup – it is a less-than-perfect book, and I won’t stand behind 100% of what it says.
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@veronica d: Criticizing MRAs as pathetic, sad-sack losers is exactly the sort of gender-role shaming feminists are quick to deplore when it’s directed at them. You are making Elam’s point for him, and that’s not good, because he really is a huge asshole.
@Ozy: Farrell reminds me very much of Dworkin — not surprising, given his early association with second-wave feminism. He gets swept up in his rhetoric, and whatever legitimate points he was making tend to get lost.
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@roe — Yeah, there are those guys also. Which I suspect this is the difference between the nerd and non-nerd wings of the men’s movement. On the nerd side, particularly with younger men, you hear a lot of “women only date assholes and feminism is to blame for my sad boner,” whereas you also have an older, less nerdy set who are pissed about their lousy divorce.
Cuz of the social spaces I frequent, I hear from the nerdy sort more than the non-nerdy sort.
Furthermore, I can kinda sympathize with the latter sort. Which is to say, I can believe that *that guy* maybe did get screwed by his divorce. I mean, maybe not. It can go both ways. Divorce is its own private hell and stories have two sides. But yeah, I’ve seen bad shit. For example, I’m besties with this guy whose ex-wife has custody of the kid. And in fact *she is a terrible human being who is bad for the child* where *he is a totally stand-up human being who I boundlessly respect.* The kid would be better with the dad.
And this is solid feminism. The kid in question is a young woman who deserves good parents. And seriously, her dad is one of the best people I know.
So anyway, I have a pretty low opinion of the AVFM side of men’s rights, and I kinda suspect that a lot of those divorcées are genuinely terrible men and the kid is better off. But maybe not all of those men. We should at least listen, try to separate out the good points from the bitter, misogynistic rage.
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On Farrell, what Ozy said. If this guy is your example of a “reasonable” voice for men’s rights, you got problems.
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But those are not the words I used.
Which is to say, I think a lot of men are attracted to men’s rights, along with PUA and the “redpill” and similar cultural spaces, because *they feel like losers*, which is not the same as saying the ARE losers. The difference is, I hope, obvious. Furthermore, these movements give the men tools to feel better. Which is maybe understandable, but still hella toxic and broken, insofar as a tool can make you feel better but still be a shitty tool.
This is what Katherine Cross describes as putting personal catharsis ahead of justice and community building. (Cross is actually criticizing some of the toxic norms in SJ spaces, but I think the point transfers pretty well.) I get that the ideologies are *attractive*. I think I understand why they are attractive. But I also think they are really destructive.
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On Warren Farrel:
Warren Farrel basically said/did two things that are pretty hard to defend. He wrote that passage about date rape. And he did a pretty terrible and dangerous job researching incest. The rest of his work I am familiar with is actually quite reasonable. Explicitly the rest of “The Myth of Male Power” seems clearly fine to me (even if I disagree with some of it).
And then people go around saying stuff like this:
“If this guy is your example of a “reasonable” voice for men’s rights, you got problems.”
“Farrell reminds me very much of Dworkin”
Warren Farrel is clearly an open minded guy. The dude was a high ranking member of NOW when he wrote the Myth of male Power. Honest open minded people always say some very dumb things at some point in their career. The norm of “anyone who has said some terrible stuff at some point can be safely dismissed” can be used to discredit a massive chunk of intellectuals. For example if you do not like Noam Chomsky you can just bring up the fact he wrote quite in defense of the Khmer Rogue. One should see how trivially easy it would be to dismiss tons of feminists that Ozy is a huge fan of (idk what Feminists Veronica likes). And God only knows how easy it is to dismiss someone like Robin Hanson if that’s your goal.
If someone is trying to “discredit” a person with extensive writing they usually can. But I think comparing Farrel to Dworkin or Elam is really absurd. The vast majority of Farrel’s work is pretty compassionate and reasonable. And I am very wary of people who constantly bring up the few serious mistakes he made. Its dis-tasteful and reflects rather poorly on their level of bias.
I will note I feel the same way about people doing the same thing to obviously reasonable feminists like Betty Friedan.
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@Stargirlprincess — I mean, we can look at the latest cover of his book. Which, sure it’s a cover. But it is also meant to communicate, to *position* his ideas, where women are at fault for the problems of men, insofar as we lead them around by their boners. And that is certainly one of his positions.
But as Laurie Penny said, I didn’t ask for that power and believe me, it’s a double edged sword.
Anyway, there is what Farrel meant to say, what he actually said, and then how his ideas have landed in the culture space. Furthermore, there is his message as it operates in the world. Does he have no responsibility for that?
That’s a tough question. However, I see him doing little to discredit the AVFM types. In fact, he seems quite happy to let his ideas fester in some pretty misogynistic spaces. Has he spoken against that nonsense?
I’m not willing to say that a public figure *must* repudiate every X that happens on their side. But on the other hand, it’s nice to see. For example, Julia Serano has argued against toxic call-out culture. She sees “the bad stuff” in queer spaces and wants to address it.
In the meanwhile, arguments are soldiers. We don’t have to like that. We can work personally to avoid being mindkilled. Sure. But they are still soldiers nonetheless. If Farrel doesn’t want his ideas being soldiers for some pretty toxic stuff, he’s done little to show it. In fact, I suspect he kinda agrees with the current tone of men’s rights, even if he is smart enough not to go full Elam.
Whereas I’m pretty sure that Serano would genuinely like to see social justice develop better discourse norms. As would Katherine Cross. As would Laurie Penny. As would Ozy. As would I.
Anyway, I guess this borders on guilt-by-association stuff. However, I would say the difference is this: I don’t care either way about him as a person. I don’t know him. But on the other hand, it’s different to say “men are disposable” and “men are disposable cuz women.” The latter is indeed an MRA talking point — watch how they will bring up something about women and flowers and the first-world-war. (Do you all get that reference?) Furthermore, there is a thing in MRA space where women-are-evil cuz men-want-to-fuck-us, and that shit is OMG TOTALLY TOXIC!
And Farell has much responsibility in building and shaping that zeitgeist.
I would say this: I can produce some terrible feminists. I can also produce some amazing feminists. (And most fall somewhere in between.) Is Farrel really the best the MRAs can conjure up?
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Veronica: I think that Ally Fogg is the best explicitly MRA-ish blogger, but he’s almost always just being a male feminist focused on male issues anyway. This is more an indictment of male feminists not being sincere and empathetic enough to men (which implies, among other things, an understanding that change has to be founded on self-love and self-acceptance). Overall I’d say that male feminists do more to help men than most MRAs, but that’s a pretty low bar.
(Also, disturbingly enough, men are not recieving the basic messages of feminist sex-positivity for some reason. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/20/ozys-anti-heartiste-faq/#comment-137315 Look, here is a guy reconstructing some entirely wonderful and important messages from the ravings of a PUA misogynist nutjob. This is a bad situation.)
(Again, simply because there are outliers with a large comparative advantage in exploring certain things, it’s unwise to just blacklist everyone from a bad and almost entirely wrong movement. Kazerad on tumblr is a very good gamergator, and I agree with basically everything he has ever written except for his overly sunny view of GG itself. http://kazerad.tumblr.com/ . I can’t stand neoreactionaries even in person, never mind politically, but Moldbug is interesting and kinda valuable for how he repackages some Hobbesian and Machiavellian ideas. Etc, etc.)
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(P.S. ozy, is there a way to whitelist my comments so that they don’t go to moderation when I include several links?)
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(P.P.S.: in the linked SSC comment, yeah, some of that – “not returning calls” – is obviously awful, and being a nice guy in reverse still makes for pretty awful behavior. Still, remarkable for how the general idea of not being non-consensually clingy is correct, given the horrible source. It’s surely less harmful to be an “aloof” jerk against one person’s will than harrass dozens with unwanted clinginess, anyway?)
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Do folks even consider Ally Fogg a “men’s rights” person?
Which, we may be hitting some semantic roadblocks, as in we use “MRA” specifically when someone’s pro-man ideas are toxic and not when they aren’t?
Which is actually okay with me. I have no love for the “MRA” label. But whatever. That ain’t my fight to have.
In any case, yeah, Ally Fogg seems like a decent person, all in all.
On the SSC comment, yeah. In fact, I actually recommend that “Models” book by Mark Manson, at least for “heteronormative” straight men who want to date. Which, I don’t like some of what he says, but their is some really important stuff their about fixing your own shit and *not* expecting women to fix your shit.
Which, yay. As a queer woman, there are many particulars in his book that have no application in my life, and a few particulars that I very much dislike. But there is much to like. At least he does not blame women when shit goes wrong.
Which is not to say everything he says about we gals is correct. He does give the “women attracted to X” thing, which yeah, *some* women, but not others.
But whatevs. I suspect most men figure out that not-literally-every woman is like that. Just a lot of them, and if they want mainstream dating this stuff kinda works. Fine. He meets she, they do the little dance, they hook up. Yay!
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@Veronica
I think we have a different perspective on things. I agree with you there are problems with Warren Farrel’s message and views. What I explicitly disagreed with was Farrel being compared to Dworkin and the claim he wasn’t reasonable. He is not quite as fair and charitable as Julia Serano but whats your point? Very few people are that fair and charitable.
If Warren Farrel fails the “reasonable” test then so do Laurie Penny, Katherine Cross, Anita Sarkesian, etc. Should we all dismiss what those people have to say because one can convincingly argue some of their views are toxic? I think this is a terrible attitude. Warren Farrel has done some good and interesting work and seems to be arguing in mostly good faith. Even if some of his views are toxic (I certainly think so) he deserves respect. As do many people with views very opposed to his. And its in bad taste imo to constantly bring up the toxic things a person said whenever they are mentioned.
Some people really do not deserve respect (Elam and Dworkin are good examples) as thinkers. But anyone who is decently honest and respectful and not spreading an unusual amount of terrible stuff should not be stigmatized. Even if some of the things they believe or have believed are regrettable. Again this attitude should be applied evenly. And one should not set this bar so high only Ozy and Serano pass.
On “if Warren Farrel is the best the MRM has to offer” :
I am pretty sure there are several not super popular MRA bloggers who are very reasonable. But I am not exactly familiar with every MRM blog. I did however used to read alot of MRM stuff. As far as I can tell out of “major” MRAs Farrel is the best. Out of the Major MRAs I think he is the only one I would actually recomend to anyone. The only other “major” one who clears my “deserves respect” bar is Christina hoff Summers. Her “equity feminist” thing is annoying but its not a grave enough sin to damn her. I do not find her work as interesting though. The whole Elam crew is pretty terrible. Amsuingly Stefan Molyneux is now a major MRA and he seems to be very uncharitable, arrogant and has VERY toxic views.
Warren Farrel is not perfect. But if one is not already familiar with the stuff in the Myth of male power its probably a worthwhile read. Alot (not all) of the stuff in that book needed to be said. And Farrel is rather charitable for a writer on gender issues (though yeah he isn”t Ozy or Serano).
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I like Ally Fogg too – he’s very reasonable.
But he’s not running a male-focused political campaign, Mike Buchanan is.
He’s also not trying to start a Whitehouse Council on Men & Boys, Farrell is.
He didn’t run several men’s issues conferences, (the Detroit one last year, KSUM, another one this year) Elam & crew did that.
He didn’t start a Centre for Men & Families, CAFE did that.
So, it seems my choice is between people who say some crazy shit, but actually do something, or reasonable people who don’t do much.
Actually, CAFE is excepted – they’re pretty reasonable.
(This seems like deja vu – didn’t Betty Friedan liken American households to “comfortable concentration camps” for housewives?)
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This is maybe suicude to say but I will mention it. It is entirely possible I am being very unfair to some AVFM writer. I have not read the site in awhile. Its entirely possible someone on there is reasonable and I just do not know about them (nor am I likely to).
So its possible I was being unfair by saying “Elam and pfriends are all pretty terrible.” I should have said “Most of the writers on AvFM that I am familiar with have seemed pretty low quality. And Paul Elam himself seems angry and dangerous.”
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@veronica d
I wouldn’t know, because I don’t follow MRAs or MRM media. I only know Warren Farrell (and I’ve only read Why Men Earn More) because a feminist organization at my university picketed him. I only know Paul Elam’s name because you keep bringing him up. Between the two of them, I can safely say that Farrell is much better.
Given how he acted in the picketed talk, he seems pretty damn reasonable. He paints a far kinder picture of the picketers than the picketers paint of him. He frequently asks for audience input, including explicitly calling for audience members to give their answer to an audience question before he gives his own (at the end of the talk). He tries to hew closely to the evidence, though he doesn’t always succeed. He seems fairly pro-feminism, including being explicitly in favor of women-in-STEM initiatives. He holds dialogue as an ideal and a goal to pursue. If that’s unreasonable, I don’t want to be reasonable.
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I sort of think the treatment of Warren Farrell sends MRAs a very bad message. No matter what you do, as long as you are a MRM, feminists and pro-feminists will probably treat you like you are a dishonest and not worth engaging with. People can always ind a way to make you look bad and they will do so.
Farrell is an exceedingly polite fellow. Even to people who have attacked him badly. I do not agree with all his conclusions but his arguments seem fair and intellectually honest even if eh makes serious mistakes (like he did in the incest research). The whole “switch from being a feminist leader to being one of the first MRAs” thing seemed to work out for him but I don’t why he would have thought this would work out. By writing the books he did he got seriously kicked out the feminist movement and surely lost alot of friends. This also shows intellectually honesty imo.
I do not see what else you could reasonable ask for from the MRM that Warren Farrel isn’t already doing. Yet even on this site he was trashed and borderline vilified. And the commentators on thing of things are way above average in intelligence, relevant knowledge, and intellectual openness.
Now of curse some sets of ideas are so bad that even the kindest nicest proponents should not be engaged with seriously. I do think even the nicest and most honest white nationalists should be taken seriously.
I am very against Paul Elam. I think his rhetoric and ideas hurt people and attract very toxic people into his movement (hi Stef). If the MRM ever took off they put very unreasonable people in positions of power. Even if you agree with alot of what Warren Farrel says rooting for Paul Elam’s team is unacceptable. They will just make things worse if they get any power (though maybe they will make things different).
But Paul Elam explicitly argues that no matter what you do feminists and pro-feminists will treat you like you would treat a (nice) white nationalist. And how Warren Farrell gets treated basically proves Paul Elam right imo. Its pretty fucking lame when Paul Elam is right about something.
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Disclaimer: apparently this Ally Fog guy can get away with some MRA-ish stuff. And I have seen Mark Manson get recommended despite being kinda “pua-lite.”
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(Also, disturbingly enough, men are not recieving the basic messages of feminist sex-positivity for some reason. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/20/ozys-anti-heartiste-faq/#comment-137315 Look, here is a guy reconstructing some entirely wonderful and important messages from the ravings of a PUA misogynist nutjob. This is a bad situation.)
Obligatory comment, but: I would bet that feminists convincing us that men ever expressing any sort of interest is creepy, objectifying, harrassing, etc., has quite a bit to do with that! (“Objectifying” is the worst, because it doesn’t require you to even do anything, it is almost literally thoughtcrime.)
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Yeah, let’s not do that. It’s the equivalent of using “feminist” as if it meant “evil man-hater”.
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I agree with Ozy. I am currently an outsider but I used to be a MRA.
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OK, but scientific debates (which are ostensibly debates about truth) are going to be constrained by the scientific method (which is designed to correct for things like ingroup bias). Even (more sophisticated) creationists understand this and try to use the tools of the scientific method.
Social movements (which are implicitly about how social & political power is distributed) are only constrained by what is most convincing to most people – and (it could be argued) are often designed to leverage ingroup bias.
Therefore, we should be very careful about definitions and use of words generally (including motte-and-bailey) when discussing social movements.
In this spirit, “patriarchy” is a very suspicious choice of terms for “the overall gender system.”
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If most evolutionists were arguing for evolution based on signalling without being rational, like Ozy describes, *and if those were the evolutionists it was important to argue against*, then it would be *correct* for creationists to say “evolutionists are doing a group motte-and-bailey where they claim to be scientific but the group that actually matters is only signalling”.
Suppose that the signalling-evolutionists decided that white people are more highly evolved than black people and proposed that therefore only white people should be able to vote. Suppose further that the scientific-evolutionists did not. At this point, creatiionists (and black people) could *legitimately* claim that there is a group motte-and-bailey where the evolutionists claim to believe evolution for scientific reasons but are really just signalling, That’s because (unlike in the real world), the signalling-evolutionists act differently from the scientific-evolutionists, and are proposing different policies which affect people in different ways.
Of course, such things are common when social policies are concerned, but rare for science (unless a social policy is tacked on, like in the example of basing voting laws on evolution). Furthermore, there’s a definitive, relatively objective, source of science–it’s easy to say that the first group of evolutionists are not real scientists and the second group are. For social movements, there is nowhere to go to find out which ones are the “real” members of the movement.
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Right – and you don’t have to hypothesize something racist for this to work – for eg. much of the evolution debate revolved around “what do we teach in school?” – which is a social issue. And where we ended up was “we teach evolution in school and you can teach creationism in Sunday school” – which seems about right. But there was definitely lots of in-groupism around this issue.
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My annoyance with the phrase (beyond the usual over-application that happens in these cases) is that it fails to distinguish between different groups within a larger set. It’s already tempting to weak-man a political opponents argument, but with motte-and-bailey we can weak-man them and then proclaim that it was all a ruse to secretly trust us.
My other annoyance is the undervaluing of the mottes. Often times, the motte that is being ignored by the other party (after all, the motte is just a ruse: the bailey is where the real game is) actually leads to some fairly important conclusions, and often those conclusions are the very conclusions being contested by the motte and bailey accusation.
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“secretly trust us.” => “fool us”
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Yeah, this is the problem with the whole discussion of the the distributed M&B. On the one hand, you don’t want to ignore the dangerous potential of a reasonable position legitimizing a less reasonable one. On the other hand, you don’t want to make it too easy to use weak men.
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Right. People are trying to turn “motte and bailey” into its own super weapon. Which, I’ve kinda noticed this happening before I even heard the term. Witness any argument about “privilege.”
“I don’t have privilege cuz SJWs are mean!”
Both can be true.
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I agree with your point, but it is worth noting that the second version of M&B is a legitimate argument, just not a legitimate argument against evolution.
It is a legitimate argument against the person arguing in favor of evolution as a way of establishing his intellectual superiority and the intellectual inferiority of the other side—which, judging by my observation of the analogous situation in climate arguments, is the reason most of them are doing so. In that context, it’s worth pointing out that most of the people on both sides are ignorant of the relevant science and supporting their side because it is the side their tribe supports.
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The thing about the first idea for M&B is just what back in high school debate we used to call “definition control.” If you can force people to accept your definition of a word, you’ve already won any argument involving it. Just reject the definition as it relates to the argument and you’ve defeated it.
As for the second, it’s as you said, a different issue. A simple “I don’t feel comfortable associating with a movement which embraces a lot of shitty people doing shitty things in its name” is probably easier there than trying to call out fallacies.
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My take is that M&B is supposed to refer to just the first idea. It is supposed to be a subtype of equivocation, thus its other name, “strategic equivocation”. Only an individual can really equivocate.
I think the second idea is more just taking the first one and applying it to a group as though it were an individual. It’s not really a totally different thing, it’s just anthropomorphization similar to when we talk about what a corporation wants, what a society believes, etc.
When a group does M&B you can have a combination of one set of members within the group holding the motte and another out in the bailey (gaining credibility from the first set), one set holding the motte and using it to defend the set in the bailey, and members of the group doing M&B on an individual level.
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It occurs to me that one typical M&B type argument will take an inverse “no true Scotsman” form. That type of M&B is going to look a lot like 2, when it’s actually 1.
“No MRAs are saying that any woman is responsible for their own sexual assault.” would be a motte, the bailey being to later argue that women are “responsible for their own safety”. This scans like type-2, but it is in fact one individual employing both M&B.
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No, it’s not a sub-type of equivocation. See what it’s originator said about the misunderstanding: blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/
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Granting for the moment that the second use of M&B is compromised:
Ozy, and/or others here who have a problem with second use of the term: how serious do you think “the problem of emergent equivocation between different people within the same movement” is, and what can be done about it?
Might it warrant coming up with a name and definition for it, in spite of the various problems that might arise? Maybe including a FAQ (what this concept Does mean, what this Does Not mean, explicit disapproval of semantic drift, …)?
Maybe there are different things that need to be delineated for different circumstances? More strategic Bailey-ing by radicals / “stauncher” members (whether deliberately or merely in effect)? Oversimplifications of terms by relatively non-influential but angry novices? The cultivation of outrage, solidarity, polarization and page clicks in part through using equivocable terms, in ways that could easily be interpreted one way or the other by different readers?
I’m not directly experienced either with gender-issue activism or political communities, online or off, so I welcome thoughts and challenges on this. Really enjoy this blog.
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Is the context for this people accusing you of group bait and switch on this blog? But isn’t the context usually for that posts where you define a word? There isn’t much of an object-level debate, only the meta debate about whether this is a useful concept and a useful word.
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[Kicking this out to a top-level comment, since I’m hoping it will spark some subthreads of its own.]
People are wondering why the MRM can’t seem to produce better leadership than Farrel. I think that that’s to some extent a fair critique (and note that I don’t consider myself an MRA), but I think that at least part of the responsibility for that lies with feminists who have responded to real bullshit coming from numerous MRAs by deliberately painting being for men’s rights as such as a mark of misogyny, whiny loserdom, or both. MRAs are, by definition, the people who have decided to call themselves MRAs anyway.
I volunteer with a student activist group that has a name that is similar enough to “men’s rights activists” that people sometimes get confused. Recently, the question of whether we should change our name came up, for other reasons, and one member noted in favor of changing it that people sometimes have this confusion. Her phrasing, as I recall, was something along the lines of “men’s rights activists, as in, people who think that men should have more rights.”
She said this as if this was a self-evidently absurd idea that no one in their right mind could possibly agree with. Looking around the room, it was pretty clear that most people agreed with her—and I’m pretty bad at reading subtle cues, so if I’m picking something like that up, it’s probably pretty damn strong.
On another occasion, after someone not in the group had had that conclusion, I suggested that the other volunteers’ reactions along these lines were counterproductive in the long run, since MRAs do have some legitimate grievances, and the feminist antipathy toward addressing those grievances—toward acknowledging that yes, there are some areas in which men should have more rights—pushes men who share those grievances into the MRM. I specifically framed this as “yes these people are horrible people, but there are a very few things about which they actually have a point . . .” in an attempt to seem less like I was flying the enemy’s colors.
It didn’t matter. People were evidently not only in disagreement, but creeped out. When I gave some examples, they either denied that those were issues at all, or said “well, that’s the fault of the patriarchy, not of feminists,” as if that somehow refuted my point.
If you delegitimize men’s genuine issues, while demonizing those who are willing to address them, you’re liable to get an effect similar to the straight-from-hints-to-rage phenomenon that Lizardbreath noted on the creepiness thread, and that I (just yesterday) gave my take on[1]: Men’s issues won’t go away, but a lot of men who have them won’t join the MRM unless and until they are so angry and hurt that they don’t give a fuck anymore about whether that makes them misogynists or not—and then they’ll probably do, say, and support a lot of fucked-up shit, for precisely that reason.
[1] Along with a crapton of other things, naturally.
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Random side question: Is there any way to whitelist this site itself, so that they won’t cause comments to be dumped into moderation? I think it’s pretty safe to assume that someone linking to a post or comment on Thing of Things is not, in fact, spamming . . .
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So that links to posts or comments on it won’t cause comments to go to moderation, rather.
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I replied to the comment you linked to under [1], but, in brief:
Other people’s minds do not work the way yours (and, to probably a lesser extent, mine) does. The halo/horns effects are very, very strong, and most people are virtually unable to process a statement of the form, “I know you think members of group X are hateful inhuman monsters, but actually, this one idea they had is not too bad”. It’s not because they’re stupid, or morally inferior, or whatever; it’s just because they don’t have the neural wiring.
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Why on earth would anyone admit such a person (indeed, large numbers of such people) to a major research university!? Even if they are morally blameless, if they really cannot do that, then surely they are unfit for academia! And if they can do that (even with extreme difficulty), but won’t, then they’re shitty people.
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The halo/horns effect is not even a tenth as strong as you make it out to be. Even if it were, that’s not an excuse to blithely submit to it. My culture (which I assume you share) has numerous memes against that specifically: don’t judge a book by its cover; even a broken clock is right twice a day; ad hominem fallacy; etc…
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Yeah, perhaps I overstated the effect; my point was that it’s unreasonable to get upset at people for having biases that most of us share. After all, the rationalist community is relatively tiny — and even the most rational of rationalists are not completely bias-free…
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@InferentialDistance: To be fair, the existence of all of those memes is itself suggestive of the persistence of the effect they’re trying to vaccinate against, in a “reading philosophy backwards” sort of way. Vaguely related: I’ve seen it noted that an essential component of understanding early Christianity is to realize that every single statement found in the Nicene Creed is in there because some group or another disagreed with it, and considered themselves Christians.
@Bugmaster: But you actually don’t just need halo/horns to get to the phenomenon I’m describing, you need an extremely strong version of it. Because we’re not talking about feminists brushing off valid points raised by MRAs when the MRAs are raising them; we’re talking about something I prefaced specifically with “these guys are total assholes, but . . .” That ought to be a pretty strong “don’t halo/horns this” flag.
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I think you are making the same mistake that veronica d pointed out in the other thread: your model of your listeners is not accurate.
As far as I can tell (and obviously I could be totally wrong, I’m not that great at reading people either, not even ones named “osberend”), you are thinking of people in terms of functional blocks. There’s an input block called a “language parser”, whose output connects to an internal “general cognition” block, and that block is connected to an output block called “language generator”.
The “language parser” block itself consists of a “simple grammar parser” which feeds into “nuance and emotional content recognizer”, which in turn feeds into the rest of the system. Using this model, it makes perfect sense to ask, “please bypass the nuance recognizer”; you just move a couple of pointers around and you’re done.
Unfortunately, this is not how most people’s brains work. They have no direct access to that input filter graph. Even when you tell them, “please interpret what I say literally”, they cannot switch their verbal processing architecture around at will. I understand that you are trying to get around this limitation by saying, “I know these guys are total assholes…”, but this is a woefully inadequate hack.
Most people will understand what you are trying to say, on a logical level; but they won’t be able to internalize those beliefs and act upon them, unless you put in more work. This is especially difficult when you are speaking to a large audience, vs. speaking to a single person one-on-one. This is why “public speaking” is considered a skill (and also a talent); and, in fact, it’s why some people are able to build entire careers around it. Public speaking is a genuinely difficult task. I myself have never been able to master it.
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@Bugmaster: Your description actually matches my rough conclusions about my ex-girlfriend[1] quite well. On a couple occasions, during fights, she quoted something I had said maybe 2 minutes before, and got it drastically wrong. On others, she could actually remember the sentence I had produced, but literally could not understand the denotational meaning. It was frankly surreal.
But she was a lot more extreme than most people, and my mother (the person I talked to most about the ups and downs of that relationship, apart from my girlfriend hereself) insists that even seeing the difference as quantiative rather than qualitative is a mistake. I go back and forth on it.
But the funny thing is that when I go the other way, people freak out at the logical conclusion: Most people are drastically unfit for self-government[2].
After all, if someone is really incapable of understanding the literal meaning of a proposed law or policy[3], they can hardly be fit to judge whether it’s a good one or not, right? Clearly, we need to institute logic tests (somewhat similar to an LSAT, perhaps?) as a criterion for voting, and expect that most people won’t pass.
But when I suggest such ideas, not only do people tend to suddenly remember things they need to do and/or call me various unpleasant names, the calmer ones tend to insist that I am factually wrong, that people can analyze what is actually being said independent of the emotions it triggers, they just often don’t because [explanation that varies based on the politics of the explainer], and the solution is to [also varies].
[1] Who I feel obliged to note was (and is) actually a very good and generous person, just seriously damaged by a combination of various things, in ways that synergized quite unfortunately with my own limitations. We’re still friends, and if anyone here actually knew her, I’d probably say a lot less. (Yay for pseudonymity!)
[2] Or for (intellectual) higher education, for that matter. What’s the point of trying to teach people who can’t absorb what’s actually being taught?
[3] Which does accord rather well with how the public reacts to proposed laws and policies, of course.
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> Most people are drastically unfit for self-government[2]. … But when I suggest such ideas, not only do people tend to suddenly remember things they need to do and/or call me various unpleasant names…
Yeah, the reason for this is that, historically speaking, most people who said “you guys are unfit for self-government” usually followed that up with, “…and therefore you should blindly obey me, your Supreme Overlord, without question. First order of the day: build me a giant palace”. I am obviously simplifying history quite a bit here, but still, I think the overall pattern is accurate. It doesn’t even count as bias, IMO; it’s a perfectly valid Bayesian inference.
Now, it happens that you personally are not a wannabe Supreme Celestial Lord and Master, but just a regular guy who wants society to run more smoothly. That’s fine, but you’ll have to present some evidence for this fact, to overcome the prior. In addition, you will have to do so by using emotionally persuasive rhetoric, in order to overcome mental biases — because (for a variety of historical reasons) people’s mental biases (in excess of the prior) against potential Supreme Celestial Lords and Masters are extremely strong.
As I said, though, public speaking is a genuinely difficult task. Most people can’t perform it well (e.g. I can’t). It’s easier to pull off when you are inciting rage against some external enemy (real or imaginary), but much harder if you’re actually trying to be constructive.
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OK, but… it is actually really important not to enable the bailey-pushers. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean always avoiding “poisoned” words or constantly splitting the movement, but it does require at least some elevated level of caution around such things. Hence e.g. why I would disrecommend the way you use the phrase “affirmative consent” (see point #3).
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Have been pondering this further. I agree that phenomenon one and phenomenon two need to be distinguished (though I still don’t see a problem with using “motte and bailey” for actual strategic equivocation — people are capable of learning new metaphors). To me that suggests you need a name for phenomenon two. I propose “viceroy effect.” Similar to how a viceroy butterfly tries to use surface similarity to a monarch butterfly for tactical advantage, the unpalatable view-holders try to use surface linguistic similarity to be mistaken for the strengths of the palatable view-holders. It’s not perfect, since it’s actually the rhetorical “viceroys” here who are poisonous, but you still get the idea, I think
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Is there some kind of competition for the most cryptic name for a rhetorical phenomenon? At first I thought it was just historical accidents like “begging the question” + Eliezer’s and Scott’s individual quirks, but now I’m starting to doubt that.
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Technically, “motte and bailey” came from that philosopher writing about postmodernism, not Eliezer or Scott. But interest in fantasy is pretty common among LW-types; many will have encountered the term in RPGs or computer games. (I was familiar with it from Lords of the Realm II; whenever I see the term I inevitably hear it in the voice of the narrator for that game.)
Evolution is similarly something that fascinates people in this particular cluster, so it’s not like “viceroy effect” (which is something I just came up with) is a random personal quirk either.
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If you’re using the biological phenomenon for a metaphor, I think you’d be better off using the biological term for it: “Aggressive mimicry”. Well, OK — the butterfly example is defensive mimicry, but the thing we’re talking about is more like aggressive mimicry, I think.
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