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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!
What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
The biggest one is this: focus on what’s actually true, and what you actually have good reasons to believe. I think people should be held to much higher standards of honesty in public discourse than in private. Lies told in public discourse have negative spillover effects (in econ jargon, externalities) that private white lies don’t. Obviously, I think this is a general norm, not just what I personally try to do.
I don’t think honestly means you’re forbidden from keeping your mouth shut, as long as you’re not saying other things made misleading by the omission. “Technically true” doesn’t cut it, in my experience “technically true” statements are often indistinguishable from lies for anyone not privy to the secret rationalization the technical truth-teller is carrying around in their head. Conversely, you don’t always have to optimize for strict, literal accuracy if almost everybody in your audience knows what you mean.
Speaking of keeping your mouth shut, though, if you’re thinking of criticizing someone personally, it’s often worth erring on the side of keeping your case is very strong. That’s because, in such situations, you have to consider not just the effect of what you say on the discourse, but also on the individual you’re criticizing. That said, “never attack anyone personally” is a bad rule; it lets flagrant liars and pseudo-experts get away with polluting the discourse far too easily.
While I don’t think you need to always be nice, I think the rules I’ve outlined lead to mostly being nice. Among other things, the thing about making blanket generalizations about people who disagree with you (“Feminists are X, anti-feminists are Y”) is that they’re rarely true. Generalizations without quantifiers—words like “some” or “all” or “most”—are particularly dangerous, because it’s easy for the speaker to mean “some” but be interpreted as saying “all” or “almost all”. I usually interpret such claims to mean the claim applies in the typical case (saying “dogs have four legs” is fine, even though some dogs are missing legs), but even then, if a claim is likely to be controversial it’s a good idea to note significant exceptions.
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?
A lot of my feelings about the online social justice community were shaped when I got heavily involved in one particular corner of the social justice internets several years ago. This gave me a front row seat to, well—I just spent some time re-reading old blog posts as I was preparing to write this answer, and “toxic dynamics” feels like a gross understatement.
I saw people vilified for the most trivial intra-left disagreements. I saw people vilified and ostracized for questioning whether this was a good idea on a purely strategic perspective. One particular Internet Famous Person I knew during that period had a personal blacklist so long that she forgot I was on it, and offered to send me a free copy of her new book so I could blurb it, only to withdraw the offer when she realized her mistake.
A really obvious way someone could convince me to change my mind about the social justice movement is to convince me that my experiences with the particular corner of the social justice internets I was involved in was an anomaly. But as far as I can tell, it wasn’t. People who’ve had lots of experience with different corners of the social justice community report more or less the same things. Not everyone who identifies with “social justice” acts the way I’ve described, but loud self-identification with the label (in contexts where it’s clear people aren’t talking about Rawls or a branch of Catholic theology), or conspicuous use of associated jargon, seems to generally be a huge red flag.
When writing this, I had to stop myself to wonder if a political movement could exist at all with the kind of hair-trigger ostracism seen in the parts I’m most familiar with. Maybe most corners of the SJ world, even if they’re pretty bad, don’t take it quite that far? But actually, I don’t think my former corner was particularly extreme even on this point, and that fact is probably a major reason why People’s Front of Judea v. Judean People’s Front splits plague much of the left. On the other hand, if someone is sufficiently popular and well-liked, they’re much more likely to be forgiven for being “problematic”, even if at one point everyone seemed to think they were the Dark Lord of Kyriarchy.
Explain Gamergate.
I don’t know if I can. By the time Gamergate happened, I was actively avoiding paying any attention to social justice-related internet fights. My sense from reading what Ozy’s said about Gamergate gives me a pretty negative impression of both “sides”, but I haven’t looked into it myself. I tried when researching this submission, but gave up pretty quickly when I realized everything had happened in IRC chats and Twitter hashtags. From the excerpts of the IRC logs I’ve read, apparently some 4channers actually did plot to hack Zoe Quinn because they thought they’d turn up evidence of failures of “ethics in game journalism”—but I haven’t bothered to read the full logs.
Thing of Things 
Sincere.
The second answer sold it for me, and apparently only “kyriarchy” is only used ironically nowadays.
Having said that:
What is up with all of these purported anti-SJ writings claiming “truth” as a discourse norm? It seems so useless (and yet so universal in these submissions) as to make me think it must be a parody of a famous anti-SJer.
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I think that when SJers try to model an anti-SJer they’re sympathetic to, it winds up at “I care more about truth than about hurting people’s feelings.” Since SJers are also motivated by truth-seeking, this feels charitable to them.
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data point: Ben Shapiro has “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” pinned to the top of his twitter.
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Fisher – how would you characterize the difference between SJ and ASJ discourse norms? I’m curious, mostly because I just tried to do it, and I’m not sure.
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I don’t know that “ASJ” is even a thing, much less that it has discourse norms. But having said that “truth” is an extremely low-utility one in any kind of social situation.
SJ discourse norms are more inclined to self-effacement, the realization (or attempted realization) that one’s experiences may not reflect those of the person with whom they are discoursing. The preference to validate their conversation partner so that they may fully participate. That one needs to be quiet so that others can speak. You know, not being a jerk.
Yes, these are sometimes honored in the breach.
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I mean, assuming by “anti-SJ” we mean, like, Scott-Alexander-style and not, I dunno, Donald-Trump-style, I’d describe it in terms of allowing a person or group to self-correct. Once you decide that it’s acceptable to threaten to mark people as evil-and-to-be-ignored simply for disagreeing or questioning — as SJ-at-large constantly does — you’ve lost the ability to self-correct. With most unwilling to contradict you, and those who do ignored, whatever you just think up, however flimsy the reasons, will just be tacked on to your body of knowledge, which grows less and less grounded in reality. And without good tools to separate true from false, your movement will become more and more dominated by groupthink and thereby ingroup/outgroup politics, which consumes all.
I think the description in terms of “truth” is because people take the mechanisms of reaching truth as fixed, and so someone not using those mechanisms looks like them not caring about truth, or, at least, being negligent in their pursuit of it by using bad (or awful) tools when good (or at least less bad) tools are well-known. And the latter charge, as a description of SJ-at-large, seems basically accurate to me.
Although, Fisher: I’m a little confused at what you mean by “useless” here. I mean, I initially I assumed you meant it’s useless in the sense of trivial, i.e., “duh, everyone cares about truth, that’s not saying anything”. But later rather than “useless” you labeled it “low-utility”, which suggests perhaps you meant something different? Because I think it’s worth remembering, the constant background of everyone caring about truth, is not in fact constant. There’s plenty of people out there willing to openly embrace “supporting the movement” over truth (and here I do indeed mean “truth” and not just a particular mechanism of it), and to demand the same of others, given the chance. Making sure they don’t get the chance, that the group at large understands that’s not acceptable, is pretty damned important. There is a lot of mud that we’ve had to climb out of, always waiting for the unwary to fall back into it — more than just bad mechanisms of reaching truth.
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@Sniffnoy,
Sorry for the late response, I have been out of town/away from the internet.
My initial words included the qualifier “in any kind of social situation,” but I am
(with some trepidation) willing to make a stronger version of that statement.
I am convinced that truth-seeking is useful, or at least that it leads to useful results.
I am unconvinced that truth is useful, or at least more useful than any given approximation of the truth. The map is not the territory, but it is a hell of a lot more portable. Also classical mechanics, non-quantum chemistry, etc etc.
I am anti-convinced that telling the truth is useful. Especially in social situations, where the entire concept of truth is more than a bit suspect to begin with. It seems to me that the purpose of most discourse is NOT any kind of discovery or philosophical advancement, but a whole host of other social interactions. Even here, much of what you see written is about establishing/maintaining relationships or advertising that one is willing to engage in social relations. My experience is that telling “the truth,” rather than a particular approximation that emphasizes the shared values between the parties leads discourse into conflict and argumentation. Which is a social game, yes, but not necessarily a useful or productive one.
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@Fisher
Well, I see a lot of SJ arguments as ways to rationalize away truths.
For example, this article rationalizes away rather obvious advantages of being a woman by horrible logic, like that getting stuff for free isn’t privilege if you haven’t asked for it. Or by arguing that a higher chance of being able to marry a rich man is irrelevant if not all women have that option, as if it isn’t an advantage if one has a much higher chance of getting a good outcome.
Applying these same restrictions to the various lists of male privileges that float around would eliminate most of them. It’s very, very common for anti-SJs to consider many pro-SJs to be dogmatically hypocritical for these discrepancies.
Of course, the desire to prove a position, rather than follow the evidence is a human fallacy and one that anti-SJs are certainly not immune to. However, they do often believe that their side is far less dogmatic and more open to adapting their theories to new evidence, rather than to develop arguments to dismiss the evidence, so the initial beliefs can be maintained.
So to answer your question: a lot of anti-SJs do see ‘truth’ as a key distinction, although it is of course not a good argument to convince pro-SJs, who also think that they know the truth (and this is why many anti-SJs throw around so many numbers, to make the same point in a better way).
PS. Is there a feminist academic that has addressed ‘female privilege’ (not with race as the deciding factor)?
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Huh, interesting!
Your criticisms here mirror transfeminist Julia Serano’s quite well; she has written about how activists who ignore complicated power dynamics are bound to exclude some groups, and instead focuses on countering “myriad double standards”.
I like her work a lot, and am slowly reaching similar conclusions to both of you.
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Her ‘Holistic Feminism’ definitely seems to match my ideas rather well, at least in her high level description of it.
However, she still seems invested in believing that gender norms on men are lesser than those on women, which I see as a limiting belief that puts you back in the us vs them trap. Note that rejection of this trap doesn’t mean that one has to believe that men are worse off, but rather, that the question is not worth asking, anymore than: does an apple taste better than an orange?
As an aside, I also learned from her blog:
– That there is a magazine called ‘Holy titclamps,’ which I presume is a publication by the Vatican instructing clerics what to wear under their robes.
– That some people still use website designs from the 90’s.
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Ooh, thank you for taking the time to look into Serano’s articles! 🙂
I absolutely agree. Serano is flawed (though significantly less so than others) on men’s issues and misandry.
Yes!
I hope that Serano will find herself being pulled into a more liberal stance on men’s rights and inclusivity in the future. She already has the meta ideals for it but doesn’t seem to have applied them entirely to her ideology.
***
Sort of tangentially, I can’t think of any feminists who are saying, directly, that women have privilege. But I *can* think of feminist-adjacent people who are moving feminism’s Overton Window towards that concept.
She’s not a feminist (at least as far as I know), but the slightly-social-justicey Unit of Caring has also shown herself to be an effective advocate of men’s rights- she even has a misandry tag !
I am not much of a feminist anymore, but I wrote and performed a rather long essay on men’s rights and misandry. I didn’t frame it in terms of privilege because I was performing it for a feminist audience who would probably have reacted extremely badly to the implication that women have privilege, but the basic gist of it was that straight white cis men are disadvantaged in a way that is inextricable from their straightness and their maleness.
(It is also inextricable from their cisness and their whiteness due to intersectionality, but I thought that would *definitely* be misinterpreted by my audience. :p These things will, however, be included when I write it out, because speaking is a much more precarious and imprecise engagement than writing.)
I haven’t yet edited it into a blog post yet, but it’s definitely in the works. So. *coughs significantly*
>.>
***
Part of the reason that feminists are reluctant to admit privilege is because privilege is often (in my experience) used as an outgroup signifier and a way to discredit others’ opinions and experiences. (Serano addresses this in some of her posts also, as does Scott Alexander.)
It’s used as a sort of enforcer of party unity and fervor , much like how the f-slur is used to enforce gender conformity.
So that’s my preferred meta reason why. *shrugs*
Also, if Ozy objects to me shamelessly linking to blog posts of mine, I’ll cease and desist. They *are* relevant and on-topic, but I would understand if it’s aggravating. I would also prefer to not be banned for being irritating, since Thing of Things is a lovely blog to comment on.
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*sigh* The primary reason is that “female privilege” does not fit into the theoretical framework they use to model social-justice-related issues (basically, each type of ‘oppression’ goes in one direction along an ‘axis’, so it’s impossible for people on both ends of the gender axis to have ‘gender privilege’ relative to the people on the other end), and they haven’t built / agreed upon a better framework yet.
Also, I doubt Ozy would object to your links 🙂
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@silver and ivory
To me it is quite obvious that much rhetoric has the (subconscious) intent of legitimizing the ‘othering’ of the outgroup. It would be remarkable if any theory about humans would map them so neatly in two groups, when humans of any gender/race/etc have way, way, way more in common than what divides them.
I think that any grievance-based advocacy group has the tendency to vilify the outgroup, in no small part because the people who are willing to put in the most effort are the most aggrieved, who will generally have very unpleasant experiences with the outgroup. In a father’s rights organization, you also won’t find many men who divorced a reasonable mother who tried hard to keep the father involved. Similarly, the women who seek feminism tend to have way worse experiences with men than the average woman. The human tendency to divide the world in ingroup/outgroup then causes these experiences to turn into pedestaling of the ingroup and vilification of the outgroup, which in turn drives out the people with more moderate views.
This realization about the social dynamics of advocacy groups makes me very wary of (strong) advocates doing research, doing philosophy, etc.
@Nita
I think that the dynamics I described above prevent the ingroup from bettering their theory on their own. The best thing that can happen to SJ is that (progressive) anti-SJs get a bigger voice, which means that SJ is forced to confront the problems with their theories.
Traditionally, feminism was almost exclusively white upper class women. Then black women came in and disrupted the simplistic model. This improved SJ theories a bit by adding ‘intersectionality’. This would never have happened if a new group hadn’t barged in.
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@Aapje
I wrote out the article!
It’s more liberal than I actually am, and I’ve tried to input a lot of ingroup jargon about oppression.
But:
I didn’t see your response earlier, but I definitely agree with your position on privilege.
@Nita
I am well aware of the definition of privilege, and appreciate your input. I am, however, more interested in looking at its meta-role in sj discourse.
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@Aapje
But they didn’t do it by saying “social justice has gone too far”. They said it doesn’t go far enough in some ways.
Whenever someone complains about political correctness gone mad etc., I see SJ folks circle their wagons and cling harder to flawed theories. And that’s why I’m skeptical about the positive potential of anti-SJ rhetoric.
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@silver and ivory
Nice post/rant 🙂
Just 2 points:
– I disagree that the male gender role is just about violence, it is about taking responsibility in a much more general way (also by providing, for example, which cannot be called a violent duty). Also, violence by men can help women/children (for example, when men intervene to protect women/children from threats).
– The bit about men being involuntarily committed for being creeps is not something for which I’ve seen any evidence. So it weakens your argument, unless you can prove it.
@Nita
The issue is that a lot of progressive anti-SJs believe that some SJ solutions actually reduce the amount of social justice. In those cases they do say that SJ goes too far, but that doesn’t mean that they want traditionalism either. What they want is more (lower case) social justice, but as they tend to define social justice differently from SJs, that often involves somewhat different solutions.
For example, many anti-SJs want a full ‘reset’ upon divorce, by making shared custody the default. The result would be that a person who was not the primary carer during the marriage can ask for equal (or greater) custody if the person can demonstrate equal or greater ability to care, where this is not just decided by who stayed at home (more). The result of such a law would presumably be fewer single mothers living in poverty, more women working (more hours) and a more equal number of men having shared or primary custody. However, this is rejected by NOW, who don’t go far enough in rejecting traditionalist notions that women are better care-givers, IMO.
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@Aapje
Thank you! I do try.
Usually I’m not particularly ranty, but when in Rome… 😉
“– I disagree that the male gender role is just about violence, it is about taking responsibility in a much more general way (also by providing, for example, which cannot be called a violent duty). Also, violence by men can help women/children (for example, when men intervene to protect women/children from threats).”
Ooh, good point. I would agree that typically society doesn’t like when men are violent to white women.
I think this is more of a “men are constructed as” thing, rather than a “men are forced into the social role of”.
“– The bit about men being involuntarily committed for being creeps is not something for which I’ve seen any evidence. So it weakens your argument, unless you can prove it.”
Ah. So I mean more of a general “creepy violent [neurodivergent] dude is a threat to society” kind of deal, rather than specifically a creepy-to-women thing. I’m not sure if that changes your criticism, or ?
I’ll edit the piece soonish; thanks for your feedback! 🙂
@Nita
“But they didn’t do it by saying “social justice has gone too far”. They said it doesn’t go far enough in some ways.
Whenever someone complains about political correctness gone mad etc., I see SJ folks circle their wagons and cling harder to flawed theories. And that’s why I’m skeptical about the positive potential of anti-SJ rhetoric.”
I agree. It’s SSC’s “fifty more Stalins” thing again- you can usually only convince people by appealing to their values and shibboleths and worldview.
I’ve tried to flip the discourse here (as discussed here by appealing to already-accepted oppression, common intersectional ideas (“power doesn’t run in only one direction”), Focault, Othering, and the patriarchy.
A lot of MRAs don’t seem to get how SJWs see the world on a fundamental level, and that’s why, even when they appeal to privilege, they just don’t do it right, at least that I’ve seen.
This article was an attempt at appealing to privilege (“men are so oppressed omg guys”) in a way that resonated with SJWs, first by emphasizing oppression along other Legitimately Marginalized Axes, then by explaining that marginalization in terms of intersectionality with male issues, and then finally concluding that straight white cis maleness was an oppressed position as well.
I have no idea if it will work or not; I’m probably not famous enough for it to actually reach the people I’d like it to.
I like the idea of discourse-flipping and have tried the complementary version of this on 4chan as well, to mixed results.
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@silver and ivory
I would argue that the hyperagent role that is forced on men results in their behavior being far more often regarded as their own choice and/or indicative of their true character, while women are more often regarded as victims of circumstance. So when a man behaves in socially maladapted way, it is far more likely that he is classified as a ‘creep’. When a woman behaves similarly, people will look harder for explanations that do not reflect on her character (‘she is just drunk’). When no (somewhat reasonable) external explanation is available, she would most likely be called ‘crazy.’
The connotation of ‘creep’ is primarily that one is a threat to women, while ‘crazy’ is more neutral. So in the terms we also see the sexist assumption that socially maladapted men are a threat specifically to women, but not vice versa.
Note that feminism usually does address the other side of the same medal, for example that women are assumed to be less capable than men or that workplace successes are less likely to be credited to them.
Ironically, because the downsides to the male gender role are often downplayed, feminism quite often becomes male normative, where behavior that is forced on men is regarded as the endpoint of an equal society. For example, it is often assumed that an equal number of women would want climb the ladder to become CEO or high-level politician, even though society conditions men to work long hours, accept worse working conditions even if they don’t really need the money, accept not spending a lot of time with the kids, etc.
So where for many feminists a relative lack of female CEOs is considered to reflect oppression of women, I think that it primarily shows that men are strongly conditioned to sacrifice quality of life for rather useless status and money that they don’t have time to (meaningfully) spend.
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Hmm. Excellent analysis, and I think that I agree with almost everything you say here.
Do you mind if I edit in a summary of your comment with a link back to it?
As for the original issue at hand:
>The connotation of ‘creep’ is primarily that one is a threat to women, while ‘crazy’ is more neutral. So in the terms we also see the sexist assumption that socially maladapted men are a threat specifically to women, but not vice versa.
I can definitely see your point about the connotations of creep, but I don’t know about crazy as a more neutral alternative. To me, crazy is coded female, as you mention in your post above; it implies a sort of hysterical weakness and a need for paternal guidance, if that makes sense. I also don’t want to use the word crazy there since, well, mainstream SJ feminism way overdoes the whole “don’t use cr*zy because that’s ableist!!” thing.
Maybe I could frame it differently- like, using the connotations of “psychotic” and “insane”?
Insane is probably (?) the neutral-coded form, now that I think about it.
The difficult thing to do is to avoid encouraging word-taboo strategies. The issue is ableist ideas and attitudes, not ableist words by themselves. It’s rhetorically pleasing to link attitudes back to words, but then people don’t realize that you mean the concept implied by the word rather than the word itself.
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Please use whatever you find useful.
As for ‘crazy,’ I don’t understand why it would be wrong to use the word, as my argument rejects the use of gendered words with different connotations for similar behavior. Perhaps I did not clarify this enough.
That is exactly my point. Female behavior is interpreted in the context of hypoagency, which can indeed be described in terms such as “(hysterical) weakness and a need for paternal guidance.”
I merely believe that the people who reject these things often make a ‘grass is greener’ mistake, where they conclude that going overboard in the other direction is less damaging.
This happens in no small part because people tend to judge their own pain as more important than the pain of others. Furthermore, a lot of the consequences of hyperagency are not part of the feminist discussion. For example, the feminist discussion about workplace inequality is often limited to the downsides to women (like the wage gap), not the downsides to men (working long hours, overtime, less pleasant work environments, more workplace accidents, etc).
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Hmm.
>As for ‘crazy,’ I don’t understand why it would be wrong to use the word, as my argument rejects the use of gendered words with different connotations for similar behavior. Perhaps I did not clarify this enough.
So *I* am not calling certain behavior crazy and/or creepy. I’m referring to the way that *society* labels neurodivergence in a gendered fashion, so I think it would likely be inaccurate to connect misandrist ableism to the word “crazy”.
I also reject the use of gendered words for similar behavior (which is why the word “mansplain” really really irritates me), but I think it makes sense to mention the usage of gendered words for similar behavior.
(And thanks! :))
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I wrote something that is rather unclear. When I said ‘I don’t understand why it would be wrong to use the word,’ I meant in your argument, to illustrate your point. I didn’t mean it as: directed as a person after certain behavior.
Just to clarify…
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>I wrote something that is rather unclear. When I said ‘I don’t understand why it would be wrong to use the word,’ I meant in your argument, to illustrate your point. I didn’t mean it as: directed as a person after certain behavior.
No, I totally got that.
In my argument, to illustrate the point, it wouldn’t make sense because I’m discussing the way society constructs neurodivergent behavior in a gendered fashion against men. “Crazy” is female-coded in its societal usage, so it wouldn’t fit as an example of the intersection of misandry and neurodiversity.
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also,
Thank you Ozy for starting these up again. They make my day much more pleasant.
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I voted that this is fake because it doesn’t criticise SJ ideas. It only says people who believe in SJ are toxic. Lots of pro-SJ people wish SJWs would stop being abusive or toxic in the name of the movement. A real anti-SJ would point out where SJ ideas are wrong, too.
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“I completely agree with SJ on an object level but am anti-SJ because of how toxic and abusive pro-SJ people often are” is a thing I’ve seen many real anti-SJ people say.
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I’ve seen people like that but:
1. When you look closer, they usually do disagree on some things. Cultural appropriation is a big one. All the “I agree with object-level SJ but the community is toxic” people I can think of criticise that idea.
2. I see people like that call themselves “neither SJ nor anti-SJ” or SJ-critical or not call themselves anything.
3. Even if there are any that call themselves anti-SJ, they’re probably only a small fraction. The prior probability that someone is object-level pro-SJ given that they call themself anti-SJ is probably low. The prior probability that someone is pro-SJ and trying to plausibly criticise SJ given that they wrote an anti-SJ submission for the ITT is 50%.
4. This person says they have experience with SJ. The probability of someone having experience with SJ given that they’re anti-SJ is probably pretty high, maybe much higher than the general population, but there’s no way it’s as high as the probability of someone having experience with SJ given that they’re pro-SJ.
5. I’ve voted that most of the anti-SJ submissions so far have been genuine. There are three possible reasons: A) I give lots of false positives and vote that lots of pro-SJ fakes are real B) there are more anti-SJ submissions than pro-SJ submissions C) all the real submissions were clustered toward the beginning instead of spread evenly, which could happen by chance. In case A, I want to be more suspicious. In case B, A is probably also true, because I think I voted more than half of the pro-SJ submissions were genuine. In case C, all or almost all the remaining anti-SJ submissions are fake.
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I call myself SJ, and I criticize the idea of cultural appropriation.
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The labels of anti-SJ, anti-feminist, MRA, etc have been strongly vilified, so identifying yourself as such generally means that you have to dig yourself out of a hole before you even begin. So I’ve seen a lot of people identify as ‘egalitarian’ instead. Of course, you are still left with the issue that people define ‘equal’ very differently.
In general, labels just trigger stereotypes in other people (which can be what you want, but also….not).
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Pretty much exactly my reasoning. If you completely agree and identify with SJ, you have no reason to fall out of it, and will have a hard time noticing the toxicity of the community. You only need very little disagreement to notice it, given the strength of the bubbles involved, but you still need some. And this post would have been the place to mention it. Also, the post seems to try very hard to stay as vague as possible and to dodge issues completely (part 3), which is a pretty big tell in itself.
But in the end, it just comes down to “this feels wrong to me”.
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I voted that this is genuine. It’s not a stretch to think someone could see the inside of some corners of SJ online and find it so toxic as to be turned off entirely.
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This part rings true for me.
But, at the same time, as an SJ, I think it’s exactly what I would have done if asked to come up with an anti-SJ argument. It… just doesn’t fit together. I don’t think it goes into enough detail to be a real ASJ.
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I’ll call it sincere again. It’s another geeky one, even quoting Monty Python.
I have to wonder, however, if the common heuristic used by myself and others here to judge “fake” vs. “real” essays may be off-base. In general, it seems that everybody votes “fake” when it’s a shallow essay that makes no coherent points and gets facts wrong, and “real” when it’s a well-written one making good points (and using jargon correctly); but maybe it just is that some of the submitters are shallow people who don’t have facts straight and can’t make good arguments, and others are well-read, knowledgeable, and able to make good arguments (and even like to play devil’s advocate), and these things come off whether they’re writing for “their side” or the other side.
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That’s what makes it a Turing test, when the pro-SJ is knowledgeable enough to make a decent case, it becomes indistinguishable from the genuine article.
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The “genuine article” :p
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As an aside, I’ve been to Bletchley Park (where Turing did his code-breaking work) this summer and it is a very nice place for nerds to visit. They have a prototype Colossus rebuild that you can operate yourself and a full sized rebuild. Plus, most of the employees were women, so it is of interest to (nerdy) feminists as well, I presume. All of it is narrated with a interactive visual-audio tour that makes it much more than just a dry exhibit.
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*gasps
*waves hands around wildly
I need to see this. Why haven’t I seen this yet. This is amazing.
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I just noticed that I misspoke, it’s actually the Bombe, not the Colossus. But the Bombe is much more awesome, because you can clearly see the mechanism working. The wheels turn as they set a combination to try. It’s just so very mechanical, which is a lot more awesome than modern PCs which do a lot more, but where all that work is invisible.
An awesome detail is that there is a lubrication system where pulling a handle drips oil at 177 places.
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Yes, I adore the way you can see all of the mechanics in older computing technology. It just sort of feels like progress, you know?
!
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Oof, very tough one here.
Normally I’d be ready to call this a fake and be done with it, based on all the SJ shibboleths. Talking about ‘the discourse’, ‘kyriarchy’, etc. But Ozy has said that people aren’t faking their bio details, and this author is talking about being ASJ by way of being ex-SJ. A person with that background would totally have an SJ vocabulary, and that makes the word choice not useful for deciding.
I think, in the end, I’ll stick with this person being an SJ believer, at least on some level.
It’s tough to imagine an ASJ using the line “you have to consider not just the effect of what you say on the discourse, but also on the individual you’re criticizing.”
I feel like this entrant may have forsaken the other SJ practitioners, but they have not forsaken social justice itself. (yes, yes, I know in earlier responses I said much the opposite. I contain multitudes, brah)
Walter’s ASJ picks
#1: ASJ, unsure
#2: ASJ, certain
#3: ASJ, certain
#4: ASJ, unsure
#5: ASJ, certain
#6: SJ, certain
#7: ASJ, certain
#8: ASJ, certain
#9: SJ, certain
#10: SJ, unsure
#11: ASJ, unsure
#12: ASJ, certain
#13: SJ, certain
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Sincere. Especially the part about blacklists rings true.
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Voted genuine anti, because this sounds like a plausible thing that a real person would believe, and is written in a heartfelt way that seems difficult to fake.
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I think sincere. These are hard to tell, but the last sentence of #1 is so technical and not obviously relevant to SJ/ASJ that it strikes me as someone exploring their own norms in real time, not someone modeling someone else’s norms.
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