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Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post. Feel free to speculate in the comment section about this person’s identity!
1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
This is sort of an odd question, since ‘norms’ implies community standards rather than individual standards. Like, at the moment I’m in a rationalist-adjacent space, so those are the norms that are operating, right? So I’ll answer it both ways:
In terms of personal preferences, I guess I’m mostly just shy? Less so offline than on. Not ‘highly conscientious’ in the way that phrase is deployed around here, but I don’t naturally express myself very well, and when I do it’s pretty deliberate. (Thanks for actually asking for philosophical essays about social justice, by the way! If you hadn’t asked I probably never would have written out such an essay, let alone for public consumption.)
As far as the sort of community norms that I prefer, I’m pretty enchanted with the whole ‘competing access’ conversation that’s happening right now, and I hope that spreads. It’s sort of a meta-norm, of course, but it seems like an absolutely fabulous way to head off many of the most harmful collisions before they become a problem at all. I think the original example was between a religious and an atheist community- where doctrine can be a source of support and community for one person, but another (perhaps one who has a history of suffering spiritual abuse) would be harmed by that same community, and needs a space where they can make irreverent jokes and post that one cartoon about Wrfhf naq gur Ohqqun having gay sex.
That might also be a sort of answer to the second question of part one, which is a somewhat nuanced yes. Object-level norms can and should vary depending on the needs of the community, but it’s very interesting to think about a kind of ‘universal syntax’ that respects our differences and nurtures our self-expression while still allowing us to hear one another and seek one another out. In fact, I’d say that such a thing is necessary within any future that isn’t basically colonial in nature. If you can’t understand people on their own terms, you have no place else to go- either you stay trapped on your own small island of experience, or (if you have power) you expand your own borders by contorting the people around you into comprehensible shapes. Both leave you stuck. So a lot of what we mean by ‘progress’ is a matter of developing an increasingly flexible and useful language for expanding our circle of real empathy. Not for nothing is it called ‘The Discourse’.
2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
There are no good masters.
Most obviously true back when ‘master’ was used without pretense, of course. The legal mastery of men over women (‘mister’), the mastery of slaveowners over slaves. These institutions created (and still create) unimaginable volumes of suffering. But an important question is, why are these practices synonymous with the worst degrees of injustice? What about these practices makes it so easy to see the moral depravity?
And I think the answer comes down to the fact that in these situations, one person becomes the tool of another in a totally explicit way. They have a sharply reduced voice in their own futures, because their actions are externally mandated. But in the same way that you can only ever see half a sphere unless you’re inside it, ‘mastery’ must necessarily be limited by an outside perspective. Even when a master thinks of themselves as looking out for their property and doing what’s best for them, the choices they make about our future are less well informed than the choices we make ourselves.
This is true of any method of control. Street harassers sometimes say that they honestly think that they’re paying women a compliment, and maybe they genuinely think they’re acting for some specific or common good. So do the religious conservatives who tell gay people that they can’t get married, the employers who give employees a choice between paternity leave and access to healthcare, the psychiatrists who construct arbitrary barriers between trans people and hormone therapy, the ‘true fans’ who give themselves the right to decide who’s really a geek, the autocrats who build a wall across the southern border of Hungary or Texas, the professors who compliment a female student by saying she’s just ‘one of the boys’, the cop who points his gun at a child, the congresswoman who votes for a bill that denies bankruptcy for student loan debt, the doctor who denies reproductive care to women.
But there are no good masters.
3. Explain Gamergate.
Boy, I don’t even know at this point. A couple years ago I was more confident, basically working on the assumption that social media and Twitter are making previously hidden methods of gendered gatekeeping in geek spaces more obvious, allowing reactionary male gamers to coordinate more effective attacks while simultaneously making it easier for women/gnc gamers and their allies to publicize these attacks and get media attention. But that was before the whole thing started to ooze together with red pills and corporate feudalism into a persistent befrogged alt-right manosphere.
I mean, I think the general diagnosis is still true, but it’s clear that the whole thing is driving and driven by a sort of emerging language, one that shifts unpredictably between irony and honest fascism to preserve violent systems of power with plausible deniability in any given moment.
As for the original conflict, the emergence of women in previously male-dominated gaming spaces, I think a lot of the issue is that gamers weren’t playing the game they said (or maybe thought) they were. I have a few friends that used to play DOTA, for example, and in this game one element of the competition was the use of outrageous or uncomfortable names. A lot of the extremely violent and sexualized competitive trash talking has the same general structure. And so gamers often try to ‘win’ at DOTA not by having superior DOTA skills, but by creating an environment that is untenable (or at least a lot less fun) for people that have experienced, e.g., a history of sexual abuse. And sure enough, this narrows the competition and makes it easier to win. But this isn’t the game that most people want to play- they want to play DOTA. And enforcing community standards of decency around gaming can align the competition more closely around the actual game, which subjectively feels like changing the rules and making the previous ‘champions’ struggle to win.
Susebron said:
Pro-SJ. Nothing about this rings false to me, and the specific mention of paternity leave (not what you would expect a stereotypical SJer to mention) makes me think that this is unlikely to be someone faking it. The Gamergate essay isn’t really how I would describe it, but it doesn’t seem fake.
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
FWIW, although stereotypical SJers might not mention paternity leave, that’s more a problem with the stereotype than with SJ.
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Susebron said:
Yeah, I’m pro-SJ. That’s why it rings true.
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J. Goard said:
Exactly the same tell for me, although I *would* expect an SJW to reflexively edit a highly prototypical reference like “maternity leave” to the opposite orientation. If somebody faked this, damn dude (gender-neutral for this Californian), I do not want to play poker with you.
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Fisher said:
There are no good masters.
Congratulations! You’re a libertarian! Copies of The Road to Serfdom are on the table under the pinup of Elizabeth Nolan Brown.
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jossedley said:
I think the author only thinks of anti-SJ activities as mastery. A professor telling a student “you’re one of the boys” or a congresswoman refusing to allow student loan bankruptcy is mastery, but I assume students opposing tenure for a professor where the tenure would reverse diversity or a congresswoman signing a bill that said that people who lent money to students could not collect it would not be mastery.
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Susebron said:
…you realize anarchists exist, right?
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jossedley said:
@Suse – I do, and I could easily be wrong, but I inferred from the list of mastery that some control isn’t bad and therefore isn’t mastery.
For example, the author finds it to be mastery when a doctor denies reproductive health care to women, but I’m guessing that it’s not mastery when the state requires the doctor to provide reproductive health care to women.
I might have gotten that wrong – it’s possible that the author thinks it would be wrong for doctors to deny reproductive health care to women and for anyone try to compel doctors to provide reproductive health care to women, and that it’s not just wrongful for congress to refuse to provide bankruptcy relief but that it’s actually wrong for the state to enforce all contracts – but that’s not how I read the list provided.
If I got it wrong, I apologize to the author. I’m looking forward to when we can discuss these, and hope my first read isn’t hurtful.
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Murphy said:
did the “the ‘true fans’ who give themselves the right to decide who’s really a geek” bit jar with anyone else in the middle of more serious matters? Apparently you’re a “master” if you don’t want to hang out with someone or don’t agree that they’re as into your hobbies as you and your peers.
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Sigivald said:
I did want to note that “the congresswoman who votes for a bill that denies bankruptcy for student loan debt” seems a little odd as “mastery”.
Because it’s Congress that put in Federal loan guarantees and all that to increase access to loans, which is not also presented as “mastery”.
(Otherwise, well, we have the Doctor Problem of an expensive, remunerative degree – followed by immediate bankruptcy at the start of the career and a low-paying job just long enough to cover the bankruptcy period.
And thus a decline in willingness to offer 1& year olds giant unsecured loans, and thus no loans – certainly not with private money.)
If the speaker views all interference as “mastery”, that’s well and good and consistent – but from the omission I can’t tell if that’s the case, or if it’s only “the stuff I disapprove of” that gets counted*.
* The bit about personal determination and choice-making, earlier, supports the former interpretation, but equally, people are really good at applying standards unevenly, unintentionally.
The anarchist interpretation is the most consistent opposition to any form of mastery; pure voluntarism cannot have masters – at least not enforced ones.
(“No gods, no masters!”)
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
In the little l sense most leftists are libertarians. This should actually be pretty obvious: BLM is a very large and popular protest against, basically, abuse of state power. Most of the people concerned about civil liberties post-Patriot Act were on the left. And so on.
The problem is that the big L sense which encompasses people like Nolan and Gary Johnson is tied to some other political positions which leftists don’t think are very good ideas, or indeed even very freedom-maximizing.
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memeticengineer said:
Some aspects of BLM are protests against abuse of state power. Other aspects (perhaps the most vocal/visible ones) are primarily protests against racism.
The anti-racist strain in BLM often seems actively hostile to expanding the circle of concern to abuses of police power that can’t be framed as racist. I conclude this based on the super hostile reaction to “all lives matter”. Additionally, there is the perception that stories of white people being killed by police in dubious circumstances are a derail of the BLM message rather than additional supporting evidence. (Both BLM and anti-BLM folks seem to see stories of white people killed by police this way.)
On the other hand, Black Lives Matter explicitly adopts the killing of Trayvon Martin and acquittal of George Zimmerman, even though this isn’t really a story of abuse of state power.
So even though they may tactically oppose abuses of state power in some cases, it seems like the loudest and most visible BLM activists do not seem to think in these terms.
To be fair, Campaign Zero proposes specific police reforms that would be a Libertarian’s wet dream. Libertarian journalist Radley Balko, who has long focused on abuses of state power via the justice system (including police, prosecutors, courts and prisons) is near 100% on board with this program for instance. But most of Campaign Zero’s proposed reforms get very little attention. The one that gets the most media attention is the proposal to train police about implicit bias and how to avoid it. For example, Hillary Clinton mentioned implicit bias in the presidential debates, but not police militarization or police union contract reform.
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Fisher said:
I’m not sure that’s very defensible. Outside of anarchism, most perhaps all revolutionary movements are based around the premise that there *are* good masters. That’s the plan: put the right people in charge, give them the power they need to keep the reactionaries from wrecking things, and bingo!
Outside the theory, just look at leftism as actually implemented. They all have hero-cults built around their leaders. Even ones as new as, say, Harper. This is not unique to left by any means. It may even be a requirement for a political party to gain power.
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
I left a pretty long comment on the last one about how social justice is social justice and therefore I find posts that give an answer about material conditions or happiness to 2 very suspicious.
I bring this up to say that this is the most convincing answer I’ve seen on this front, to the point where I would vote pro even if the other two answers were quite suspicious.
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MugaSofer said:
I voted pro-SJ, but would not be particularly surprised if this was an anti-SJ person who had the bright idea of writing in an explicitly rationalist register instead of mimicking the average SJ person as they perceive them.
Notably, the answers to #2 and #3 are strident but largely fail to answer the question, instead wandering off on tangents about how Oppression Is Bad, Yo.
Also, I’m dubious a pro-SJ person who set out to do an ITT would seriously think all the things they list form an obvious natural category, if they were trying to be persuasive (as #1 seems to indicate they are.) But an anti-SJ person might deliberately lump wildly dissimilar things together, on the basis that they see SJ people talking about “kyriarchy” and oppressive power structures.
But if it is a fake, it’s a very good one. I’m taking notes.
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jdbreck said:
That’s an interesting read on it. I would think that as far as really brief shorthands go, “Oppression Is Bad, Yo” is a pretty good one to sum up SJ.
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Treblato said:
This tastes like libertarian socialism. Genuine article, and probably someone who will also detest those who appropriate social justice to serve the needs of masters.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
This is beautifully written.
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Anon. said:
Definitely sounds very sincere. Uses the correct sort of language without overdoing it as a faker might (except perhaps in #3, “manosphere” and “fascism” is a bit over the top, but it only slightly decreases my confidence).
Epistemic relativism in #1. A focus on notions of justice in #2, though with a slightly peculiar libertarian left-wing POV. Typical evil associations of GG with “red pills and corporate feudalism” sort of stuff in #3. Seems like a textbook case.
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ruadhan said:
This sounds very natural and individual, so it’s convinced me it’s genuine. If I were mimicking what I perceive to be the SJ position, I wouldn’t write out of my own point of view but an assumed one that touches on the common tropes. Well done, whoever it was (and you annoyed me with “mister” but conveniently forgetting “missus”, because women were also mistresses with power in their sphere over the household, over domestics, children and apprentices, and with status in their society, so well done on that angle as well because that helped convince me you were genuine: poor wimmins always and everywhere in every place, time and sphere of activiity done down by the bad mens!)
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
👏 If this is fake, it’s a brilliant fake. Actually it’s brilliant either way.
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jossedley said:
I’m pretty comfortable this is pro. I can’t see an ASJ writing this, unless they were very sophisticated, in which case they pass.
(It’s totally foreign to my frame of reference – until I got to the end of #2, I honestly thought we might have switched to facially ASJ essays, but that’s on me as a reader).
So far:
1: Anti
2: Pro
3: Pro
4: Pro
5: Anti
6: Anti
7: Anti
8: Pro
9: ??
10: Pro
Overall: 5-4-1
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Walter said:
Feels pretty much correct. Bonus points for calling it “The Discourse”, which kind of implies a tumblr, which raises the odds that they are genuine.
Massive raised eyebrow at the notion that dudes on video games talk like they do as part of a strategy to reduce competition, but believing that kind of silliness isn’t exactly a red flag either way.
Walter votes:
1: ASJ, certain
2: SJ, certain
3: SJ, unsure
4: SJ, unsure
5: ASJ, unsure
6: ASJ certain
7: SJ, certain
8: SJ, unsure
9: SJ, certain
10: SJ, certain
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Walter said:
Gah, I’m having second thoughts on this one.
Question 2 was basically:
Ozy: What could cause you to change your mind?
#10: Here’s a list of jobs people can have where they suck.
Am I insulting the SJers by saying that this feels about right? Like, it is such an easy dodge to get a question, and then turn around and say “Actually the Important Question is”, and then go on a rant.
Basically, imagining them responding to the blog owner like this makes me unhappy. Am I just succumbing to the impulse to lump people whose actions I disapprove of into the out tribe?
I need the counsel of the SJ judges. I wish we had the votes split by judge identity like the last few.
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absurdseagull said:
You are right that the writer did not answer the second part of the question about changing ones’ mind. Instead, the writer seemed only to answer the first part of the question – “What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe?”
I think the reason given is plausible for an SJW (The belief that “There are no good masters”) and that the response serves to clarify how it applies in the context of SJ. Hence, though I might consider the answer incomplete, I wouldn’t consider it a dodge as it answers a key part of the question and clearly had a lot of thought behind it.
I honestly don’t see where you get “Here’s a list of jobs people can have where they suck” from. ‘Here’s a list of scenarios where control is exerted’ seems more accurate. Can you explain the summary?
On that note, it could also be that differing understandings of the same rhetoric is a causal factor for differing opinions on ‘social justice.’ In this case, you finding the response frustrating (If I mis-described, let me know) and classifying the author as an outgroup is a valid classification algorithm. However, I concede that this is based on a hypothetical.
For the record, I am an anarchist-aligned SJW who voted pro-SJ on this. Hope that helps.
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Walter said:
You don’t see it? Huh. I felt like “list of jobs” was a decent shorthand for a list that included cops, congresscriters, etc. We can go with your “list of scenarios” instead.
I think you are right that our reason for disagreeing is varying assessment of #2 response. I feel like this responder basically dodged question #2 and laughed off question #3, leaving me just guessing at Troll or Not Troll, rather than assessing their responses vs folks I know who advocate for social justice.
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
Does a good deal of rambling around without all that much actual answering of the questions… sounds like a real SJ person to me.
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
All I’m going to say is that, Pro or Anti, this person knows jack shit about DotA
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
I’d be curious to hear more on this. I played some DOTA back in the early oughts, and there was undeniably a horrific level of background toxicity.
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jdbreck said:
Voted pro, very certain. Everything about this feels on to me.
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Matt said:
Seems pretty fake to me. It feels detached and academic (not in the …..-studies sense), not at all what I have experienced in SJ circles.
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liskantope said:
I find it impossible to believe that any of what the author wrote is not sincere. If they are actually anti-SJ, then they have chosen here to “tell the truth but not the whole truth” regarding social justice issues by choosing to share their more SJ-ish-sounding thoughts while leaving out anything that sounds like it might support the other side.
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flockoflambs said:
I feel this answer is earnest and the writer believes what they are saying, I’m just not sure what they believe is SJ ideology.
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philosoraptorjeff said:
I’mma go with “too weird to be fake” (in the context of SJ debates as I typically encounter them).
I have zero doubt that this person is sincere. Any debate over whether they count as pro- or anti-SJ must therefore be confined to whether the positions they’re defending even count as SJ, but here I’m willing to respect people’s self-identification. The person is defending object-level positions that are at least SJ-friendly, even if it’s for reasons atypical in SJ circles; and I can see why that might make someone identify themselves as pro-SJ even though I’ve done that exact thing and I don’t. I might question the wisdom of their identification, but not the sincerity.
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Autolykos said:
This can’t possibly be pro-SJ, I agree with way too much of it…
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dndnrsn said:
This one seems earnest, not too much jargon, but doesn’t sound like someone describing something from the outside. Pro. Have to admit it throws off my “rely on question 3” method, because it talks about the underlying issues – to pick the WWI metaphor up again, it would be like if someone was asked “explain the beginning of WWI” and they talked about the underlying issues and didn’t mention Franz Ferdinand.
Also: A lot of people seem to be commenting about the way that things read, as in, the writing style. Weirdness in the writing style might be a result of people intentionally not using their ordinary writing style.
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Dank said:
Pro – and very convincing too.
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Pingback: SJ and Anti-SJ ITT: The Results! | Thing of Things
Toggle said:
Thanks again to Ozy for hosting the contest, and to the people that took the time to read my essays. I originally signed up because I wanted practice building empathy, but you guys also made it fun.
My approach here was to focus more on having an individual voice rather than adequately encompassing ‘social justice’ in its entirety. ‘Social justice’ is a cluster in people-space with some very fuzzy edges, and even if I were writing a textbook where I tried to delineate the boundaries of that movement as the beliefs-in-common of people who identify with social justice, it would get weird and internally contradictory very fast. So my goal was to simulate the perspective of a person who enjoyed SJ spaces and communities, who was respected there and felt free to contribute ideas, whose values were deeply informed by that conversation, and who identified with and felt deeply invested in it.
(Ironically enough, from my perspective, the habits of collectivist thinking are one important reason why I find myself as an outsider in SJ conversations in the first place. I think you get much better results when you err on the side of identities as being made of different people, rather than people as a collection of different identities. So I’m encouraged to see that individualist approach was successful here.)
From there, I think it’s part rationalism (the author must be a Thing of Things reader, after all), part floating academic postmodernism (and Hegelianism). There’s a particular tendency to focus on language, for example- “it’s clear that the whole thing is driving and driven by a sort of emerging language”, “it’s very interesting to think about a kind of ‘universal syntax’ “, and that whole weird thing with character names in DotA. On a more subtle level, a lot of the ‘no good masters’ list is a protracted process of Hegelian thesis/antithesis/synthesis leveled at existing social institutions, pointing out self-destroying ironies in (their view of) the ways that doctors prevent care, cops endanger citizens, and so on. This person isn’t going to be thinking of it in those terms, probably, but for a person in their intellectual tradition, I imagine that they would instinctively reach for that kind of structure when trying to build rhetorical strength and emotional resonance. (Much the way that I, in real life, find a certain amount of awe and magic-feeling in Hofstadterian self-reference.) On a less philosophical note, another way I tweaked the essay to create the feeling of sincerity was to introduce some grammatical errors at the most pathos-driven points: the author slips from oppressed people as ‘they’ to ‘we’ during the introduction of mastery as an idea, and from the plural to the singular in the following paragraph, basically to suggest that the author was identifying more vividly with the victims of oppression as they wrote. Before I started, I decided not to use the word ‘privilege’, even though it’s central to the way I see SJ, just because I’d have trouble getting the connotation down- the closest I come is in section 1, where I use ‘power’ as a near-synonym.
As far as the actual belief structure, I agree that there’s a libertarian-ish affect, but that’s not the whole story. After all, a libertarian probably wouldn’t have any fundamental problem with a job that didn’t offer paternity leave, and certainly wouldn’t compare that relationship to slavery. Also, it’s very difficult to sustain libertarianism and the kind of relativism that’s evident here- markets can’t be an agent of truth if truth is a matter of perspective. Although this isn’t discussed directly, the character is really using ‘mastery’ to mean something that I might describe more as ‘hierarchy’ (although not totally consistently). Unlike individuals, control by institutions as free-floating systems of imperatives can be good or bad, and tend to be good to the extent that they are the mutual creations of everyone that they control- if you have a voice in the institutions that structure your life, they’re not ignorant of your inner self the way that a ‘master’ is. An in-house maid would freak this person out, but a co-op cleaning service would not; the psychiatric barriers to hormone therapy are bad because that institution is not being responsive to the expressed needs of trans people, not because they involve compulsion per se. Things *do* get a little fuzzy here, basically because this person is working hard to fit social justice into a particular ideosyncratic box, but it works reasonably well.
One very important difference between me and the general patterns of social justice that I see is that social justice tends to equate ‘doing good’ with ‘fighting evil’; this character doesn’t really have any notion of ‘acceptable amounts of oppression’. So the ‘no good masters’ thing comes out very strident, and there’s very little sympathy for gamergaters. This character’s representation of gamergate was *really* uncharitable, and not very well informed, especially coming so soon after the bit where [Future] == [Expanding circles of empathy]. But I may have been too cynical, since people seem to have found that to be the weakest part of the essay.
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Aapje said:
Remind me to hire you when I need a master manipulator for my presidential run.
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Toggle said:
You what they say about sincerity- if you can fake that…
My fee is credible precommitment to an increase in NASA funding once elected. 😉
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