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in which ozy writes long blog posts railing against flaws they have, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post
Sometimes I say something like “look, you need to have a sense of proportion about culture war stuff. There are a bunch of people who are trying to make you scared and outraged and defensive about things that aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things. But your fear and outrage and defensiveness makes them seem really important. If you take a step away from it and look at the rest of the world, you’ll discover that millions of people honestly don’t care about your pet issue, or haven’t heard of it at all. And if you do that you’ll be happier, you’ll be better able to prioritize your time to deal with the more important issues, and even when you decide to engage with culture war stuff you’ll be a lot more relaxed.”
Of course, it is rather hard to take this on faith if you are currently trapped in a culture war bubble.
So. I want to point my readers to Reddit’s gender critical subreddits [cw: transphobia, read with caution if you are transgender], a central hub for trans-exclusionary feminists. This is particularly useful for my readers, because most of you guys (both social justice and anti-social-justice) tend to be fairly trans-accepting. So their particular culture war bubble is different from yours. (My apologies to my three trans-exclusionary feminist readers.)
There are a bunch of normal reactions to perusing the gender critical subreddits. For example, “I don’t think it’s very good allyship to detransitioned women to talk about how their bodies are irreversibly mutilated by testosterone.” Or “regardless of the accuracy of your statement that real lesbians don’t want to ‘have sex with penis’, I feel like you could say this in a way that doesn’t make me visualize women having sex with enormous disembodied penises.” Or “wow you people really really hate trans women. Like, a lot.”
However, a reaction I have to it very strongly is “wow, you people are really obsessed with trans people.”
At the time of writing, 12 of the 20 top posts on the subreddits are about trans people. The most popular thread on r/gendercritical, the Peak Trans thread, consists of people telling their stories about how they realized that trans activism was wrong. (Notably, there is no Peak Patriarchy thread in which they talk about how they realized that sexism still shapes women’s lives.) Even posts which aren’t originally about trans people often become about trans people, including the mind-boggling tendency to respond to articles about obstetric fistulas and sex-selective abortion with “but trans people claim these women have cis privilege!”
And, like, they’re not wrong. Trans advocacy has made tremendous progress in the past decade or so: we’ve passed local nondiscrimination acts, made it easier for people to legally change genders, improved access to transition care, raised awareness among cisgender people about the discrimination we face, and so on and so forth. Caitlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning are in the news a lot. And inn many subcultures (the queer community, the rationalist community), it can feel like trans people are everywhere and it’s impossible to get away from us.
And yet– trans people are less than one percent of the population. Even from a trans-exclusionary perspective, it’s really implausible that trans people cause 60% of the world’s sexism. If we all worked overtime, individually causing ten times as much sexism as the average cisgender person, we’d still only be responsible for three percent.
But it can feel that way. Maybe you start out in a community with a lot of trans people, maybe you have a formative negative experience with a trans person, or maybe you just get into a lot of arguments about it on Facebook. Eventually you find yourself reading r/gendercritical, Feminist Current, and other trans-exclusive feminist websites. Naturally, these websites don’t provide you with a randomized selection of things that happened, or even of sexism-related things that happened. Every time a trans woman punches someone, or commits a crime, or says something obnoxious (or even just poorly phrased) on Twitter, you will learn about it. These websites are notably free of articles with headlines like “Crime Committed By Cisgender Woman,” “Man Punches Other Man Because He Is Drunk, It is Completely Unrelated To Trans People In Any Way,” and “Person Makes Obnoxious, Or Possibly Just Poorly Phrased, Tweet About Dog Breeding.”
Trans people might not be sixty percent of the sexism in the world, but they are sixty percent of the sexism you read about.
Every website full of culture war bullshit is like this. You read Breitbart, you find out about immigrant crime. You read Feministing, you find out about sexual assault and harassment on university campuses. You read pro-life blogs, you learn about Alfie Evans. You read anti-racist blogs, you learn about cops shooting black people.
And then because of how people work, when you ask yourself “what are the most important problems in the world?”, your brain goes through all the examples it can think of and spits out “sexual assault on college campuses” or “immigrant crime” or “censorship on college campuses” or “cops shooting black people” or “trans people” or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”
(I know, I know, you are so outraged to see your personal issue on that list. Don’t I know that your pet cause is actually important?)
Your brain does not spit out (for example) “macroeconomic policy in developing countries,” because unless you are a somewhat unusual person you do not read articles about developing-world macroeconomics for fun. I work for an effective altruism organization and I don’t read those articles. I open them up, make a firm resolution to read them at some point, and feeling an aura of virtue go back to reading about Catholic Twitter drama.
“How many articles have I read about this topic?” is not particularly well-correlated with “does this topic, like, matter at all?” But if you’re not careful your brain might think it is.
If you enjoy your current level of interaction with culture war bullshit and it’s not interfering with your ability to achieve your other goals, then by all means continue. I’m not the sort of hypocrite that writes articles about transness and then turns around and tells people to stop caring. But if it makes you stressed and depressed and you can’t tear yourself away because this is important, this matters, what if the misogynists or the SJWs ruin video gaming forever—
Try a detox. A week, maybe two, away from culture war bullshit. Read books: I’d suggest both something that’s trashy and fun and lets you turn your brain off, and an academic work on something you find interesting. Go for walks. Bake banana bread. Call somebody you haven’t talked to in a while. Play with your kids. Play with someone else’s kids. Culture war bullshit has been going on for at least sixty years, it’s still going to be there when you get back.
Who knows? Maybe it’ll still be important after you’ve had a chance to rest and fill your brain up with examples of other things. Maybe it won’t. But I think it’s worth a test.
Thing of Things 
I find this article kind of confusing. It makes more sense when I read the
,
but since that’s near the end and the article doesn’t seem written the way it would be if it was specifically aimed at that, I’m assuming it’s meant in other ways too.
I feel like there’s some kind of – previous step that got unsaid and that I therefore missed? Or something like that? Where possibly that’s the step where there’d be a difference, but I’m not sure where it is?
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What should I do if my pet issue is “holy shit they’re all going to kill each other over this culture war bullshit”?
I have nightmares about this.
My main consolation is that the 70s still seem worse. We haven’t had anything like Kent State or the weathermen yet. And somehow 70s America muddled though without a total meltdown.
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Most people don’t live in a culture war bubble.
People who live outside culture war bubbles think that killing people over the culture war is bad, and will try to prevent it from happening by rule of law etc.
The culture war is one of those wars where you just have to look at a screen and prod some things with your fingers and feel angry. No need to leave the house, let alone co-ordinate even a paramilitary rabble.
How many times have people suddenly started killing each other over stuff for recent reasons, as opposed to centuries-old tensions?
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I disagree and think that most people live in a culture war bubble. Most are not radical in the antifa/Charlottesville sense, but they still tend to have out sized fear of and lack of empathy with the outgroup.
As for violence (and conflicts in general) being a continuation of centuries-old tensions, this is not exactly a comfort, because it means that people will let grudges corrupt their advocacy. So then you can get different groups that mostly represent people with different traits (like gender, race, etc), whose ideals are fairly similar and nominally trait-neutral, but who in practice heavily advocate for their ingroup at the expense of the outgroup.
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@Aapje:
It’s more that most all people live in a culture bubble, but not a culture war bubble. They may indeed have an outgroup, but they’re so well insulated within their comfort zone, they don’t interact with the outgroup that much.
So yes, if you ever asked them about a culture war issue, they would give a thoroughly culture war answer, but the reality of their lives is that they do not see the interaction of ingroup or outgroup much at all.
I think Ozy’s post is about people whose bubbles are not just culture, but the culture war itself.
For example, there are probably people who get to live the steelman version of feminism most of the time, because they’re so insulated from anyone ever challenging feminism, that they have no need to resort to Dark Side techniques to shut anyone down. You ask them about MRAs and they’ll give a cringe-inducing answer about manbabies, but no one actually ever does ask them about MRAs, and they do nothing that interacts with the MR cause or any actual MRAs. From the consequentialist standpoint, no one every should ask them about MRAs, so they can continue to do the good they are doing without starting to do any bad.
Likewise, there are people who get to croon their country song lyrics with the utmost sincerity, romantic and chivalrous, and it doesn’t hurt anyone, because no one’s ever forced them to take their beliefs to a questionable place. They tip waiters handsomely, never sexually harass, and always open the door/pull out a chair for women, children, and the elderly. And they also think the Confederate Flag is a waffy Southern Pride symbol, though they don’t own one. But so long as their black co-worker never asks them about their opinion on the Confederate flag, they could never know that they are supposed to be each others’ outgroups and engaging in Culture War.
Finally, I work in a place where we have people who openly voted for Trump, and others who openly mock Trump. But they don’t treat each other as outgroup. Politics is not their culture war of choice. And so long as that issue, whatever it is (probably paycheck levels) is not brought up, we all live in culture bubbles, not a culture war bubble.
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@AG
I disagree with you that these people don’t hurt anyone as long as they stay within their bubble. Steven Galloway was apparently quite happy in his bubble, having good relationships with his colleagues, until he was (almost certainly) falsely accused and his colleagues stabbed him in the back (even getting him committed for being suicidal when he explicitly denied being suicidal).
He lived in a community where concepts like ‘innocent until proven guilty’ had been eroded away for men, so any malicious woman could destroy him. There is no safe way for a man to live in such a community. The sword of Damocles hangs over them.
When institutions are broken, like Galloway experienced, you may have people fighting for you and eventually be exonerated, but there is often great damage. Emotionally, to ones reputation, the loss of friends and even family, financial, career disruption, etc.
The Dreyfus affair is an infamous example of antisemitism in France during the fin de siecle, yet lots of people fought for Dreyfus and he was eventually exonerated, reinstated and even promoted. Yet when we think of the affair today, we see it as strong evidence for a very discriminatory environment for Jews, not as an example that Jews didn’t have to worry, because “people who live outside culture war bubbles think that
killingharming people over the culture war is bad, and will try to prevent it from happening by rule of law.”One of the main concerns of SJ-critical people is that advances brought about by the Enlightenment are being undone by people who may have good intent, but who have very little understanding of how much damage they do and how little they actually advance their goals.
There is a lot of evidence that many/most people do not naturally behave fairly and rationally, but rather, that they are prone to various biases that severely compromise the justness of their behavior. Or to put it bluntly: many people are quite prone to witch hunts. These witch hunts are rarely motivated by an explicit desire to harm the outgroup. Instead, they tend to revolve around a virtuous goal that is pursued in way that feels virtuous and beneficial to others. This feeling that one is altruistic can be quite false, where in reality, the ‘altruist’ is the bad guy.
So it is crucial that the Enlightenment values are understood and protected by the institutions, policies and the law; or rather by the elite who run/set these. Yet if anything, we see the opposite, where the elite is at the vanguard of facilitating this.
—
Furthermore, there is a reason why more strident anti-SJ opinions are fairly common among nerds, which is that there are a lot of attempt to introduce anti-Enlightenment policies and culture into nerd spaces. I’ve had online spaces where I hung out transform. I’ve seen the media blame gamers for the behaviors of a few (who may not even be part of the community), while not holding the other side to the same standard. I see programmer communities around certain technologies become toxic to ‘oppressors’ and treating people different based on their gender, race, etc & requiring people to have the right beliefs (rather than behave decently). And from the stories I hear from others, it was/is worse for them.
Given that men form such a large group, while a lot of people seem to want to punish men collectively for crimes that supposedly only men do (and did during many centuries), one possible outcome is that the release valve is that an already heavily stereotyped group of men will be made the scapegoats. A lot of signs point to this group being people like me.
It’s not a given that this will happen, but history shows that it is far from inconceivable.
The main reason for me to step away from this is not that I’m actually quite safe, but rather, that in the wider culture, the stereotype about people like me is such that in a public conflict I will lose anyway. Furthermore, I don’t have the talents to survive as an edgelord and thereby influence society. So a reason for me to disengage would be because I’m quite powerless and dependent on processes beyond my influence, not because I’m fairly safe from harm.
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The above wasn’t meant to be a top level comment.
Weird.
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@Aapje: How many Galloway-type cases are there, though? You say “…any malicious woman could destroy him. There is no safe way for a man to live in such a community. The sword of Damocles hangs over them.”
But, like, when I walk down the sidewalk, any malicious driver could destroy me. I still consider myself living safely in my city, simply because this very rarely happens.
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Cases like Galloway are somewhat exceptional for the amount of media attention that they get & in that a celebrity like Margaret Atwood spoke up for him, but there are many very damaging cases that never get that level of attention and that most people are unaware of. For example, I’ve read many a horrible case where a Title IX court got involved, where the media attention is not ‘mattress girl’ level, but at a level where pretty much no one who doesn’t already worry about it, notices it.
Furthermore, there are probably many cases that never get any public attention. A man close to me applied for a job, but was rejected without his CV even being considered, because of his gender. Note that this person’s wife was once nearly fired from her job because she married him and the policy was that married women were fired (this illustrates how many feminists have adopted and gender-flipped anti-liberal policies). Anyway, this never got any public attention. There is no legal recourse here that allowed this man to fight gender discrimination; nor does he have the charisma or the correct enculturation or the correct gender to be able to play to people’s emotions in an effective way. So his rational choice was to let it go. It still happened. It was still an injustice.
I have personally been groped by a woman, which was technically sexual assault. I have good reasons to believe that I am one of the least likely people to experience sexual assault, yet it technically did happen to me. Yet the narrative that people are being told right now is that nearly all women experience sexual assault at the hands of men, while men are mostly safe (and men are told to shut up if they consider themselves victims).
It doesn’t add up. People are being told falsehoods. Mechanisms are in place which encourage and enable some to get justice and have a voice much more than others (which doesn’t mean that this first group can’t get treated better too).
In general, despite much research being compromised, there is still quite strong evidence that for many issues effecting men, the narratives that are presented to the populace and the actual truth differs greatly. Finally, my impression is that the situation is getting worse in some ways.
So to address your analogy: what if you have evidence that the newspaper seems to be lying about the true number of pedestrian deaths? What if it is supposed to be super rare, but someone close to you got killed and when you talk to people online, a great many say the same? What if you see cases where the evidence shows that the driver was malicious, but the officials call it an accident and refuse to persecute?
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We haven’t had anything like Kent State or the weathermen yet.
only in the sense that nobody has chosen to say “this event is like Kent State.”
Tamir Rice Happened.
James Hodgkinson happened.
Floyd Lee Corkins happened.
James Alex Fields happened.
Antifa exists, and Eric Clanton happened.
In order to be “like Kent State,” there will need to be a media freakout (above and beyond the typical media freakouts of this time) So we can safely predict that the “next Kent State” will be:
1. A white man
2. Using an AR-15
3. To kill multiple people for explicitly “right wing” reasons.
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I don’t agree with that at all. Those incidents are all really bad, but Kent State is in a league past them. And it’s not about race, or the type of gun, or left/right.
At Kent State, the *army* opened fire on a crowd. They killed four innocent people. Kent state is a lot closer to Bloody Sunday or the Boston Massacre than it is to the bike lock basher.
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Right, but we’ve already had the previous President declaring that he can kill anyone anytime for any reason or none, and then using the army to do just that. However, there was not a national media freakout telling everyone that “this is a seminal moment in American History.” If Kent State had the proportionate media coverage of the Kelly Thomas beating death, you wouldn’t have even known about it happening. Even though it was a police officer explicitly telling a cringing man that the officer was going to beat him to death, and then beating him to death, with everything from the taunts to the final whimper recorded on videotape and then getting acquitted. In California.
But… no media freakout, no outrage. No riots. No defining moment. It’s unimportant.
So the next great outrage will have to be something that the media wants to be an outrage.
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@Fisher
According to Wikipedia, the officer didn’t say that he was going to beat Thomas to death, but rather: “”Now you see my fists? […] They are getting ready to fuck you up.”
Anyway, the event is a good example of how the media and society in general operates by (frequently false) narratives. The currently dominant narrative from the left is that the police mistreats black people, while the dominant narrative from the right is that the police are mostly doing a good job. What happened to Thomas fits in neither narrative.
These narratives feed on themselves as well. The left-wing media & advocacy movements strongly favor events where a black person died at the hands of the police, so this results in a severe misconception that unjustified killings at the hands of the police only or almost only happen to black people. The right-wing media & advocacy movements strongly favor events where the police was falsely accused of bad behavior, resulting in a misconception that police abuses are extremely rare.
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@Fisher
I think there’s more to it than that. I don’t think biased media of any persuasion could have ignored Kent State. Police brutality is routine. Bombing people in faraway deserts is routine. It’s not rational by utilitarian standards, but the news can choose to ignore or hype 100 people being killed by the police and nothing will change, but 4 people shot by the army on a college lawn can’t be ignored.
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@Lawrence D’Anna
Do you think that in ten years people will remember who Stephen Paddock is or what he did? Five years? Now? People still kinda-sorta remember the Weathermen, but without a Neil Young song to let people know how evil they were, they can just go on with their post-bomber lives of privilege.
Then again, maybe I’m just typical-minding. Obvs I remember Kent State, and you’ve at least heard of it, but how many people here of Ozy’s age needed Google to know what we were talking about?
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@Fisher
I doubt Paddock will be much remembered. His motive is still unknown. If he’s remembered as anything it will just be as one of the larger copycats of Columbine. But there’s been a lot of those by now.
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@Fisher
“Then again, maybe I’m just typical-minding. Obvs I remember Kent State, and you’ve at least heard of it, but how many people here of Ozy’s age needed Google to know what we were talking about?”
I’m roughly Ozy’s age and I learned about Kent State in high school history class.
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While I agree with all of this, I think there’s an element that’s missing. What all of these small issues have in common is that a small number of people who care a lot do actually have the ability to shift the dial on them.
I think the most important issue in the world is probably climate change, but I can do virtually nothing about it. By comparison, there are maybe 100 trans people in my city, and my individual efforts could definitely affect whether, for instance, there are toilets accessible to them. I think this is a key factor in why it’s so easy to get drawn into these issues – it’s way more possible for one individual to change things, so the potential for reward is much higher.
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I agree that this plays a major role. However, there is also a danger that people simplify issues to make them manageable, but in doing so, actually stop addressing the actual or main causes.
For example, the main reason for the gender pay gap is complex, involving different behaviors/expectations of/on men and women, which has other benefits and costs (the higher pay of men is in large part due to costs that men accept). Truly addressing this requires very large changes, not just to policies, but to the cost/benefit choices that people make. For example, men currently accept less parenting time for higher pay, while women do the opposite.
However, there seems to be a very strong desire to incorrectly simplify this issue to employers underpaying women, because such a problem is relatively easy to address and provides much a easier way for activists to use their tactics (and to wield them against the outgroup, rather than call out their ingroup, which is much more costly, socially). Telling people they can get more pay at the expense of employers is like promising them free money. There is no cost to them personally or to their ingroup. Tell women to parent less, men to parent more, to be attracted to people who do that, etc; and you are telling people to accept costs that they may not want to accept or where they feel that others punish them for behaving differently than they do now. So then you can only expect gradual chance, not a major victory like gay marriage or having your organization adopt a policy that allows trans people to use the toilet they want to.
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Many people may also simply be extremely misinformed about the relevance of certain issues. On SSC, people are currently discussing this paper that shows that people greatly overestimate the percentage of Democrats and Republicans that belong to party-stereotypical groups. For example, respondents believe that 32% of Democrats are LGBT, while it is actually 6% & that 38% of Republicans earn over $250,000 per year, while it is really only 2%.
Such misconceptions probably drive Democrats and Republicans to focus more on helping such groups than is reasonable, while also causing fear of the other political party, based on the assumption that certain groups have outsized control of the opposition. Presumably, these reactions feed each other, as the fear of the other party advantaging groups unfairly causes resistance, which in turn is interpreted as a threat to those groups by members of the other party, who rally around those groups more, which feeds the fear that those groups are unfairly advantaged by members of the other party, which…
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Your advice seems to be written under the assumption that the person concerned about culture war issues can comfortably live in the broader world, where these issues don’t particularly matter. That tends to be not the case for me. The broader “normie” culture is deeply hostile to me and to my values. Like, I may want to go play some board games with people, but I don’t specifically select for very liberal partners, I run into issues like people using “a black person” to describe “a criminal” in Taboo (yes, that literally happened, I’m not making this up). Or I run into “extremely entertaining” conversations about how male and female brain differences result in different strategies in a given game. I want to please have none of this. So my next best bet is to select for environments that are specifically marketed as, for example, feminist. And *then* it becomes relevant that in Russia (unlike in the US) TERFs outnumber intersectional libfems by the factor of, like, 5 to 10, judging by the sizes of the biggest community hubs. Well, shit. So like, macroeconomic policy of the developing world is what matters in the grand scheme of things, but in my personal life, it matters much more whether or not I will have a community where I can feel safe, comfortable, seen, and understood. The niche culture war battles are fought over that. And they have a tremendous impact on me: I did find one community that is more or less everything I could possibly wish for, and my mental health is better than it has even been in a year. The sense of belongingness is a rather fundamental psychological need, and having it dissatisfied takes a massive toll on one’s health. This makes the culture war fairly high stakes for me.
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The other big assumption is that the culture war bubble is in any way distinct from the mass media bubble. There really is literally nothing as far as I can tell about Trump that is bad that was not measurably worse with another US president. And yet all day every day I am told (even here!) that Trump is somehow a uniquely dangerous outlier. I am not now saying nor do I forsee any day in the future in which I will claim that Trump is not evil. Trump is evil. But I don’t pretend that Obama wasn’t evil what with Operation Chokepoint, targeted assassination of Americans, etc, etc, ad astra, ad nauseum. Ditto Bush, Ditto Clinton, Ditto Bush, Ditto Reagan, Ditto Ford, Ditto Nixon, Ditto LBJ (holy fuck ditto LBJ!) Ditto Kennedy…
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This exactly.
Sure, I can avoid “culture war” forums, but I still ride the subway everyday, in public, and I remain a “token” in the culture war. People hate me for existing. They are plentiful. I have to deal with them. Likewise, while I kind of “accept” that the other side of the culture war — the “red tribe,” or whatever you want to call them — hates me, I also have to deal with my “token” status among progressives. My life and the lives of my friends are bargaining chips in a really shitty process.
Yeah, I can close my browser, and sometimes I do, for my own psychological well-being. However, laws will be passed even if I ignore them.
The culture war is a real thing. The fact I can thrive is the result of culture warriors in the past. That others like me can continue to thrive, to have a chance, depends on what we do today. This matters.
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(Notably, there is no Peak Patriarchy thread in which they talk about how they realized that sexism still shapes women’s lives.)
That’s just typical outgroup/fargroup differences, isn’t it?
To be fair to RadFems, you can’t actually be an honest, aware Radical Feminist (capital R capital F) and support transfolk. If the core part of the philosophy to which you have dedicated your lives is that gender is an artificial and deliberately harmful construct, that the entire concepts of “man” and “woman” are not only nonsensical but actively genocidal, you can’t support anyone who accepts these concepts in any way.
TERF logic is perfect, it’s their premises which are flawed.
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The idea that Radical Feminists (of some stripe) reject the very idea of “men” and “women” is … well, something I’ve never come across either directly or as a criticism of them*.
Is this some new thing? Because the Radical Feminists of 20 or 30 years ago certainly seemed Quite Sure That Women Were A Thing And Definitely Different From Men?
(* And I see lots of the trans-positive side criticism of “TERFs”, far more than I see of actual RadFems.)
Is there an exemplar of this phenomenon?
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I presume that Fisher means the rejection of men and women as a biologically relevant distinction when it comes to intrinsic behavior.
It seems to me that a not uncommon radical belief is that men and women have the exact same brains at birth, but that men are turned into abusers, rapists, murderers, etc of women. Then the TERF argument is that transwomen have had so much male enculturation (aka toxic masculinity) that they are abusers, rapists, murderers, etc of women & thus should be treated like men.
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The concept of man and woman, that is that there are clusters of behaviors and attitudes which are inextricably linked to certain very minor differences in human bodies, is anathema to Radical Feminism. Everything about gender, including its existence are purely social schema created and forcibly indoctrinated on the larger population for the benefit of a particular class.
Remember that “Radical” has a definite meaning in this context, it’s not just a modifier meaning “extreme.”
Interestingly enough, I see that the current version of wikipedia no longer lists gender abolitionism as a part of Radical Feminism, and furthermore has redefined “gender abolitionism” as “postgenderism,” which is so completely false it makes me chuckle a bit.
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I thought the whole point of /r/gendercritical was to moan about trans people, and when the same posters want to talk about the patriarchy they go to … I don’t know, /r/radicalfeminism instead?
If you analyse a subreddit made specifically for posts against trans people (and let’s face it, whatever the written rules say that’s what /r/gendercritical is for), you will conclude that this is the issue everyone’s worried about. Sample bias?
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It’s almost miraculous, honestly. Like, people’s ability to lock away huge moral differences behind “that’s just politics” is nothing shy of miraculous. It is an ENORMOUS moral achievement, and I join you in celebrating it.
The people in this thread who are dedicated to dismantling the ‘politics/life’ separation terrify me. Like, the culture war is a *culture* war because it is opt-in. If you make it compulsory the tribes will take it seriously, and that looks nothing like what folks in America have experienced in recent decades.
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The culture war isn’t “opt-in” for me.
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I get that. It is still better for you to leave it opt-in for everyone else, because for every bigot who flags for PVP and engages you there are ten more who are super busy right now, and they deliver your food and take your trash away.
Like, culture war sucks. The fact that you can’t opt out sucks worse. But, like, don’t let spite make you hurt your own interests. Look at Syria. The personal/political boundary is protecting even you, who can’t ever turn off your pvp flag. For your own sake, swallow the injustice and let the boundary stand.
It can get so much worse.
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I certainly know to take “mental health breaks” from the culture war stuff. But I’m visibly trans 100% of the time, and people don’t hate me because of what I do. They hate me because I’m trans. I don’t get to turn that off.
Equality is a fight. We don’t have to be on the “firing line” 100% of the time. But then, often enough I’m on the firing line for daring to exist in public. I don’t choose that. Likewise, social and political agitation are necessary for progress. Civil rights did not happen because black people “played nice.” MLK was a radical. He disrupted. He was broadly hated, every bit as much as antifa is hated today. (And MLK was not the only civil rights leader. Whites today have a nice, tidy view of civil rights. It wasn’t like that.)
So it goes for gay liberation. Stonewall was riot. AIDS slaughtered us and public officials did nothing (except a few notable heroes). ACT UP broke shit.
Trump is president. The supreme court is about to shift. Things are going to get really ugly for a while.
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We may be talking past one another here. I am definitely not saying that you are able to choose when it is culture war time and when it is not. Like you said, it is not “opt-in”, for you.
I am saying that, despite that terrible fact, you are still much better off with other people being able to decide not to care about politics. Your enemies who ‘opt-in’ are bad enough, but there are probably a lot more who despise you and simply don’t take action, because they don’t feel like doing politics at that moment.
Remember Ozy’s ‘moral mutants’ viewpoint isn’t theirs alone. It is the basic state of the human condition, and it doesn’t have a speck of mercy. Conservative-Ozy won’t lose a wink of their sleep if they are roused to action, but the rest of us absolutely will.
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I don’t make those who hate “care.” They seem to “care” quite on their own. The mere fact that I exist in the world, loving as a choose to love, is enough to bring out strong degrees of “caring.” Merely wanting to use a public restroom, just as everyone else does, seems to bring out their “caring.” They mobilize into hostile political movements with the stated purpose of undermining my life and destroying my ability to thrive.
You seem to think the targets of hate cause the hate. We don’t. It emerges from the corrupt hearts of the haters.
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Culture war is not opt-in for anybody. No matter who you are, I guarantee there’s someone who hates you just for existing.
That’s not to say it affects everyone equally, it doesn’t. Some are safely ensconced in a social context that accepts and protects them, with the haters far away. Some are right on the boundary, crossing paths with their haters every day. Some live in hostile territory, where their presence is barely tolerated at all.
We all make a choice to make it better or worse. You can remember that as wrong as your haters are about you, they’re also human beings, and they’re probably as afraid of you as you are of them. You can be decent and tolerant and civil, even to people who aren’t and don’t deserve it.
Or you can call them mutants, say your terminal values are irreconcilable with theirs, and declare that you’re coming for their kids.
Often all it takes is one person from the other side acting with kindness instead of hatred to start to change someone’s mind.
Choose well.
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Yeah, but frequency matters. It matters a lot. It is like comparing a kid who is bullied relentlessly with another kid who is well-liked and seldom faces social difficulty. Saying, “Well, they both are hated by someone” —
Sure, but what the fuck? You really cannot distinguish those things? Yeah, the “popular” kid is hated by some faraway people they might never meet. The bullied kid has real scars, both on their body and mind, that might never heal.
They will be bullied again tomorrow. Their parents (let’s imagine) are powerless to stop it, too poor to find another school. The school administrators do nothing. In fact, maybe they seem to kinda-sorta approve of the bullying (even if they won’t admit that out loud). This is reality for many minority and queer kids.
Being a hated minority matters. It changes so many things, in so many ways. It constrains our world. It leaves us vulnerable. Our core humanity is so often in question. We become a “topic of debate” by ignorant people with the power to hurt us.
Don’t be condescending. I understand those who hate me very well.
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The culture war isn’t opt in for you, and that’s true for a lot of people who nevertheless often act in ways that don’t reinforce culture war. Lots of gay people can’t hide either. Very few black people can. In eras past Catholics couldn’t hide from it. Many Jews can’t. I say that not to be dismissive, but rather to be affirming. Lots of people who can’t hide from the culture wars can still live good lives without engaging in it all the time.
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“And inn many subcultures (the queer community, the rationalist community)”
“inn” => “in”
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Pingback: What I’ve Been Reading: July 1, 2018 | Refrigerator Rants
This reminds me of my thoughts on /r/SneerClub.
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Isn’t this related to weakmen as superweapons ? As in, if you’re on a feminist blog, you’ll see a lot of horrible anti-feminist opinions and you’ll always learn about Heartiste or Jim or Roosh V and never about Scott, while if you’re on an anti-feminist blog, you’ll see a lot of horrible feminist opinions and you’ll always learn about Arthur Chu or Amanda Marcotte or Andrea Dworkin or Shulamith Firestone or Valerie Solanas and never about you or Julia Serano.
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Those are a *fascinating* set of lists. (I think an unbiased observer would put Scott Alexander and Amanda Marcotte in the same category.)
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? Are you trying to say Scott is an horrible feminist or Amanda Marcotte a non-horrible anti-feminist ? Both are, er, weird opinions to hold.
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I know a lot of complaints people have about Amanda Marcotte, but “she is an anti-feminist” is… not one of them. I guess Scott’s alt-right haters would say things like “He wants the SJWs to take over. He wants you to dawdle around appealing to ‘reason’ until the Commies have indoctrinated enough of the youth to allow PC Culture to permeate all things.”, but AFAIK you’re not a member of the alt-right.
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You misunderstood me. I mean if we’re comparing weakmen, I think Amanda Marcotte and Scott Alexander are at the same level of weakman-itude.
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Are we talking in absolute or relative terms ? As in, are we talking about their absolute badness or their badness relative to the average member of their side of the culture war ? Either way I would disagree, but saying this for the latter (as the word “weakman-itude” imply) is especially ridiculous (I think you will agree with me that anti-feminism has more average badness than feminism).
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I think Amanda Marcotte is probably an average Internet feminist, and the average Internet feminist is probably worse than the average feminist (given Internet makes everything worse), so Amanda Marcotte is probably worst than the average feminist. I would put her in, say, the bottom 15% of feminists.
The average anti-feminist probably think nonbinary people are special snowflakes and it’s okay to misgendering trans people, none of whom are Scott Alexander characteristics. I would put Scott in the top 30% of non-feminists, and probably something like the top 20% of anti-feminists (but Scott doesn’t identity as an anti-feminist).
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If you think Scott is the weakman, then I’ve gotta ask, who’s the steelman?
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@Lawrence D’Anna
Strongman. The reverse of weakman is strongman. The reverse of strawman is steelman.
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If Scott is to anti-feminists what Marcotte is to feminists, then IMO, that puts feminism in a very bad light. So I want to thank Ozy for making a strong anti-feminist argument for me 😛
Seriously, though. Scott has made posts like this where he tried to figure out the risk of rape and of false allegations*. When he calculated that the chance of rape was probably much higher than the chance of a false allegation, he actually published the result and argued that women are more at risk.
Compare that to how Marcotte reacted to Duke Lacrosse or the UVA accusations. In both cases she immediately picked the side of the accusers and was extremely reluctant to believe exonerating evidence.
Of course, I
may beam biased, but my strong perception is that that these two people are very much not alike in their tendency to jump to conclusions, their willingness to actually consider the evidence and to take the arguments of their opponents seriously.* Note that I don’t find his math very convincing, the data on false accusations is so poor that I don’t see how you can draw decent conclusions.
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@Aapje
To be fair, I was mainly thinking about opinion horribleness when making these lists, not epistemic rigor (not that this would have changed the lists very much).
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In the extremely out-of-character alternate universe where pick-up artists and radical feminists make rigorous arguments for their horrible opinions (which are bizarrely the same horrible opinions), I would still keep them both in the weakmen lists.
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That said, it seems very likely to me that opinion horribleness and epistemic rigor very strongly negatively correct, for obvious reasons.
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Oh, I assumed that “opinion horribleness” was obviously such a silly thing to classify people of different opinions based on that you couldn’t possibly be doing it. That just goes to show that you shouldn’t steelman! 🙂
Seriously, though, I can see why you’d say “these people have horrible opinions, but I respect their intellectual honesty and integrity” (people like Catherine MacKinnon or Mark Yarhouse) and I can see why you’d say “this person has horrible opinions and they seem to be in the mainstream of their group rather than some random nutjob picked to make the group look bad”, but I’m not sure what the point is of saying “this person has a label I disagree with but I agree with many of their opinions,” except to make the speaker feel good about how moderate and centrist they are.
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*negatively correlate
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I am now utterly confused about the meanings of your comments. What did you mean by “I think Amanda Marcotte and Scott Alexander are at the same level of weakman-itude”, then ?
I don’t see why it is ridiculous to say some opinions are more horrible than others, and knowing only about horrible opinions from the outgroup and not non-horrible opinions is a significant source of ingroup bias.
I am also confused about what this paragraph is supposed to mean. I think the context of my first comment is quite clear: given ant group, some people of this group have horrible opinions, other have non-horrible opinions, and if you’re trapped in a bubble where said group is the outgroup, you’ll only see the former. I was listing examples in the context of feminism versus anti-feminism.
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I did a funny typo.
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A comment by Fisher has been deleted for irrelevantly bringing up my dating life.
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I think Amanda Marcotte and Scott Alexander are at the same level of weakman-itude.
The question remains:
Can you provide me with an example where Amanda did notmisrepresent the side she was arguing against? I can provide examples where she says that pro-lifers are motivated purely by misogyny, and any claims on their part of concern for the lives of the unborn are cynical, self-aware lies. Alternatively, are there examples of Scott being uncharitable to that extent?
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I was also surprised you would lump in Scott Alexander with Amanda Marcotte.
To me, Amada Marcotte is one of the most malignantly awful columnists I can think of, on the level with Milo Yiannopoulos. I can’t imagine what thought process would justify comparing her to Scott Alexander. I’d be interested in reading why you thought the comparison was justified.
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This post makes me feel great about being obsessed with macroeconomic issues. Thanks!
Also the TERF subreddit descriptions strongly remind me of how the SlateStarCodex subreddit is filled with people who really really like to talk about “human biodiversity”
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