Report comment

The hope was that men would read the article and be more conscious of how they might accidentally intimidate women, and avoid or attempt to mitigate those situations. Obviously results have been mixed.

Report comment

In the interest of maintaining the post’s edit history, I suggest replacing the link with this one from the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130519220137/http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/18/schrodingers-rapist-proves-too-much/

Report comment

Politics is all serious. If you can ridicule something and actually make people laugh at some option you have dealt a blow to your enemy, you have eliminated one of their options, at least for the moment.

I do like the way you did it though. You take the maximally sympathetic view of suntzuanime, that she’s trolling, and the maximally unsympathetic view of Rolf, that he’s a proponent of “rape-archy” to use your phrase.

And then you end it by advising him to see a therapist. I think it more likely that you are a knowing troll than suntzuanime. Bravo, well done!

Report comment

It is, presumably, possible for men to decide that they’ve about had it with this, and re-impose purdah, “marital obligations”, or other laws and customs which would not be to your advantage. What would you do about it, if your “bigger rockets” got you a black eye and a shrug of “clearly had it coming” from the police?

Cool down, bro. You’re making men look bad by speaking as though (1) it were still 1860 and (2) men could still get away with the same “Rape Patriarchy Schtick” that they had been engaging in for the previous 4000+ years and (3) you reflectively endorse this socio-political regime as something that should be on the table as an fallback option in modern discourse.

Seriously, look at what you just proposed. Suntzuanime advocated trolling men in a culture war on the internet and you proposed forming a rape crew backed up by the power of the state like in the good old days. Seriously? Seriously?!

Do you really think that women shouldn’t sometimes make fun of men for having sexually and politically dangerous inclinations because otherwise men as a political class would organize to force them into rape-based-marriages with authority-sanctioned wife beating? Do you not see any irony here?

Look at the problems you create for dudes when you go all caveman on politicized gender relations… First, you’ve turned yourself into a political pariah, which is probably not selfishly good for you. Secondly, you function as problematic evidence for the attribution model that will be applied to other men because the temptation will be to model your preference for a rape-archy as being caused by your Y chromosome (which most other dudes also have) plus a lack of discretion and sneakiness (which many other dudes have in larger supply).

If Y-chromosomes cause a preference for rape-archy, then that sort of defeats the entire theory Scott put forward way up yonder in the OP about how “not all men are into rape and also statistics and nuance and milk of human kindness and good faith and blah blah blah with being all reasonable and humane n’stuff”.

It would be better for dudes if your political desire for a rape-archy was caused by you being exposed to freaky bad memes or having brain-scan certifiable psychopathy or something. If there was a weird but hidden cause for your apparent political tendencies then it implies that clever policies could be implemented to keep scary people like you away from the “normal god fearing moral people like the political speaker and the silent majority in the audience”. (Maybe brain scans or rating systems for internet writing? Who knows. Until the causal model is nailed down its not clear what might address the issue effectively.)

From a silly theoretical perspective, it would be even better for normal men if your fetish for black eyes and purdah (and similar tendencies in other men) were all caused by robotic drones with blinking neon signs and mind control rays floating nearby. Then the only dudes that women would have to worry about are the ones near the neon-lighted robotic drones. “No robotic drones means no tendency to rape” would make it trivial to identify and avoid the scary men, and vastly lighten the burden on normal men who might otherwise have to deal with complicated attempts to signal clearly that they aren’t scary, in the way that you sort of appear to be.

Also, if it was robotic drones with mind control rays causing the problem then maybe we could just ask people to move away from them or something? And if people refused to move way then we could sort of blame them for that (at least a little bit, though admittedly this might be part of the way the robot drones control people) and take appropriate measures like shooting the drones down from a distance and seeing if we are hailed as liberators!

In the meantime, a way way more practical and real world solution is for you to admit that you got trolled, admit that it implies you have some personal issues, and say “I apologize for the overreaction. Thank you, everyone, for the benefit of the doubt. As a self-regulating and basically moral person who is not in reflective equilibrium and is still learning stuff about the world I had not considered some of these issues in quite this light but I see how they are kind of complicated now… and I think maybe I have some issues to work out with a therapist. Thanks. Peace.”

Report comment

Report comment

According to the Guardian, 1% of UK blacks are in prison, compared to 3% of US blacks. One might reconcile this with the previous number by guessing that it the former includes jail. Or by not believing numbers from the Guardian. But note that shorter UK sentences could lead to lower imprisonment rates at any point in time, without lower lifetime rates of having been imprisoned.

A big difference between the UK and the US is that the US has a lot of blacks. A high rate of their imprisonment leads to very visible effects, like their being half of prisoners, and the largest prison population in the world. Whereas, a high rate of imprisonment in a place where they are rare might not be noticed. In particular, Minnesota has the highest rate of black imprisonment in the US, and no one notices, because it has the same proportion of blacks as the UK. (Actually, MN might be #2 behind Wisconsin, which is 3x as black as the UK.)

Report comment

Report comment

Disclaimer: Quotation marks used to separate thoughts. They are not intended to say that actual wording was used.

A convention I’ve seen proposed somewhere, and that I usually use myself whenever I remember to, is to use “double quotes” for verbatim (or as-close-as-verbatim-as-feasible) quotations and ‘single quotes’ for paraphrases/glosses.

Report comment

The first link you linked to says ‘1 in every 15 African American men are incarcerated’, so about 4% of blacks are sent to jail every year, with about 7% of blacks being in jail at any one time. That is petrifying, and starts to make the 30% look a bit more realistic.

I think this just might be a USA / UK difference that caused my initial shock. Your country has rates of 754 per 100,000, we have only 154 per 100,000. So my OMG, that’s impossible is mostly built on the fact that I am in shock there is a country with almost 1% of the population incarcerated at any given time. Then again, I find it hard to believe there isn’t a country with universal, free at point of need healthcare, so I guess this is just general UK/USA culture shock…

Report comment