Social Justice And Words, Words, Words

[Content note: hostility toward social justice, discussion of various prejudices]

“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through. First from him, now from you. Is that all you blighters can do?” – Eliza Doolittle

I.

I recently learned there is a term for the thing social justice does. But first, a png from racism school dot tumblr dot com.

So, it turns out that privilege gets used perfectly reasonably. All it means is that you’re interjecting yourself into other people’s conversations and demanding their pain be about you. I think I speak for all straight white men when I say that sounds really bad and if I was doing it I’m sorry and will try to avoid ever doing it again. Problem solved, right? Can’t believe that took us however many centuries to sort out.

A sinking feeling tells me it probably isn’t that easy.

In the comments section of the last disaster of a social justice post on my blog, someone started talking about how much they hated the term “mansplaining”, and someone else popped in to – ironically – explain what “mansplaining” was and why it was a valuable concept that couldn’t be dismissed so easily. Their explanation was lucid and reasonable. At this point I jumped in and commented:

I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way.

The closest analogy I can think of is those religious people who say “God is just another word for the order and beauty in the Universe” – and then later pray to God to smite their enemies. And if you criticize them for doing the latter, they say “But God just means there is order and beauty in the universe, surely you’re not objecting to that?”

The result is that people can accuse people of “privilege” or “mansplaining” no matter what they do, and then when people criticize the concept of “privilege” they retreat back to “but ‘privilege’ just means you’re interrupting women in a women-only safe space. Surely no one can object to criticizing people who do that?”

…even though I get accused of “privilege” for writing things on my blog, even though there’s no possible way that could be “interrupting” or “in a women only safe space”.

When you bring this up, people just deny they’re doing it and call you paranoid.

When you record examples of yourself and others getting accused of privilege or mansplaining, and show people the list, and point out that exactly zero percent of them are anything remotely related to “interrupting women in a women-only safe space” and one hundred percent are “making a correct argument that somebody wants to shut down”, then your interlocutor can just say “You’re deliberately only engaging with straw-man feminists who don’t represent the strongest part of the movement, you can’t hold me responsible for what they do” and continue to insist that anyone who is upset by the uses of the word “privilege” just doesn’t understand that it’s wrong to interrupt women in safe spaces.

I have yet to find a good way around this tactic.

My suspicion about the gif from racism school dot tumblr dot com is that the statements on the top show the ways the majority of people will encounter “privilege” actually being used, and the statements on the bottom show the uncontroversial truisms that people will defensively claim “privilege” means if anyone calls them on it or challenges them. As such it should be taken as a sort of weird Rosetta Stone of social justicing, and I can only hope that similarly illustrative explanations are made of other equally charged terms.

Does that sound kind of paranoid? I freely admit I am paranoid in this area. But let me flesh it out with one more example.

Everyone is a little bit racist. We know this because there is a song called “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and it is very cute. Also because most people score poorly on implicit association tests, because a lot of white people will get anxious if they see a black man on a deserted street late at night, and because if you prime people with traditionally white versus traditionally black names they will answer questions differently in psychology experiments. It is no shame to be racist as long as you admit that you are racist and you try your best to resist your racism. Everyone knows this.

Donald Sterling is racist. We know this because he made a racist comment in the privacy of his own home. As a result, he was fined $2.5 million, banned for life from an industry he’s been in for thirty-five years, banned from ever going to basketball games, forced to sell his property against his will, publicly condemned by everyone from the President of the United States on down, denounced in every media outlet from the national news to the Podunk Herald-Tribune, and got people all over the Internet gloating about how pleased they are that he will die soon. We know he deserved this, because people who argue he didn’t deserve this were also fired from their jobs. He deserved it because he was racist. Everyone knows this.

So.

Everybody is racist.

And racist people deserve to lose everything they have and be hated by everyone.

This seems like it might present a problem. Unless of course you plan to be the person who gets to decide which racists lose everything and get hated by everyone, and which racists are okay for now as long as they never cross you in any way.

Sorry, there’s that paranoia again.

Someone will argue I am equivocating between two different uses of “racist”. To which I would respond that this is exactly the point. I don’t know if racism school dot tumblr dot com has a Rosetta Stone with Donald Sterling on the top and somebody taking the Implicit Association Test on the bottom. But I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is very much about abusing this ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

II.

I started this post by saying I recently learned there is a term for the thing social justice does. A reader responding to my comment above pointed out that this tactic had been described before in a paper, under the name “motte-and-bailey doctrine”.

The paper was critiquing post-modernism, an area I don’t know enough about to determine whether or not their critique was fair. It complained that post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”. There’s an uncontroversial meaning here – we don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society. For example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay. Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.

The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.

By this metaphor, statements like “God is an extremely powerful supernatural being who punishes my enemies” or “The Sky Ox theory and the nuclear furnace theory are equally legitimate” or “Men should not be allowed to participate in discussions about gender” are the bailey – not defensible at all, but if you can manage to hold them you’ve got it made.

Statements like “God is just the order and love in the universe” and “No one perceives reality perfectly directly” and “Men should not interject into safe spaces for women” are the motte – extremely defensible, but useless.

As long as nobody’s challenging you, you spend time in the bailey reaping the rewards of occupying such useful territory. As soon as someone challenges you, you retreat to the impregnable motte and glare at them until they get annoyed and go away. Then you go back to the bailey.

This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.

III.

I probably still sound paranoid. So let me point out something I think the standard theory fails to explain, but my theory explains pretty well.

Why can’t social justice terms apply to oppressed groups?

Like, even bringing this up freaks people out. There is no way to get a quicker reaction from someone in social justice than to apply a social justice term like “privilege” or “racist” to a group that isn’t straight/white/male. And this is surprising.

If “privilege” just means “interjecting yourself into other people’s conversations”, this seems like something that women could do as well as men. Like, let’s say that a feminist woman posts a thoughtful comment to this post, and I say “Thanks for your input, but I was actually just trying to explain things to my non-feminist male friends, I’d prefer you not interject here.” Isn’t it possible she might continue to argue, and so be interjecting herself into another person’s conversation?

Or suppose “privilege” instead just means a cute story about a dog and a lizard, in which different people have trouble understanding each other’s experiences and appreciating the amount of pain they can be causing. I know a lot of men who are scared of being Forever Alone but terrified to ask women out, and I feel their pain and most of my male friends feel their pain. Yet a lot of the feminists I talk to have this feeling that this is entirely about how they think they own women’s bodies and are entitled to sex, and from their experience as attractive women it’s easy to get dates and if you can’t it’s probably because you’re a creep or not trying hard enough. This seems to me to be something of a disconnect and an underappreciation of the pain of others, of exactly the dog-lizard variety.

There are as many totally innocuous and unobjectionable definitions of “privilege” as there are people in the social justice movement, but they generally share something in common – take them at face value, and the possibility of women sometimes showing privilege toward men is so obvious as to not be worth mentioning.

Yet if anyone mentions it in real life, they are likely to have earned themselves a link to an Explanatory Article. Maybe 18 Reasons Why The Concept Of Female Privilege Is Insane. Or An Open Letter To The Sexists Who Think Female Privilege Is A Thing. Or The Idea Of Female Privilege – It Isn’t Just Wrong, It’s Dangerous. Or the one on how there is no female privilege, just benevolent sexism. Or That Thing You Call Female Privilege Is Actually Just Whiny Male Syndrome. Or Female Privilege Is Victim Blaming, which helpfully points out that people who talk about female privilege “should die in a fire” and begins “we need to talk, and no, not just about the fact that you wear fedoras and have a neck beard.”

It almost seems like you have touched a nerve. But why should there be a nerve here?

As further confirmation that we are on to something surprising, note also the phenomenon of different social justice groups debating, with desperation in their eyes, which ones do or don’t have privilege over one another.

If you are the sort of person who likes throwing rocks at hornet nests, ask anyone in social justice whether trans men (or trans women) have male privilege. You end up in places like STFU TRANSMISOGYNIST TRANS FOLKS or Cis Privilege Is Just A Tenet Of Male Privilege or On Trans People And The Male Privilege Accusation or the womyn-born-womyn movement or Against The Cisgender Privilege List or How Misogyny Hurts Trans Men: We Do Sometimes Have Male Privilege But There Are More Important Things To Talk About Here.

As far as I can tell, the debate is about whether trans women are more privileged than cis women, because they have residual male privilege from the period when they presented as men, or less privileged than cis women, because they are transsexual – plus a more or less symmetrical debate on the trans man side. The important thing to notice is that every group considers it existentially important to prove that they are less privileged than the others, and they do it with arguments like (from last link) “all examples of cis privilege are really male privileges that are not afforded to women, or are instances of resistance to trans politics. I call it patriarchy privilege when something like an unwillingness to redefine one’s own sexuality to include males is seen is labeled as offensive.”

And the trans male privilege argument is one of about seven hundred different vicious disputes in which everyone is insisting other people have more privilege than they do, fighting as if their lives depended on it.

The question here: since privilege is just a ho-hum thing about how you shouldn’t interject yourself into other people’s conversations, or something nice about dogs and lizards – but definitely not anything you should be ashamed to have or anything which implies any guilt or burden whatsoever – why are all the minority groups who participate in communities that use the term so frantic to prove they don’t have it?

We find the same unexpected pattern with racism. We all know everyone is racist, because racism just means you have unconscious biases and expectations. Everyone is a little bit racist.

People of color seem to be part of “everyone”, and they seem likely to have the same sort of in-group identification as all other humans. But they are not racist. We know this because of articles that say things like “When white people complain about reverse racism, they are complaining about losing their PRIVILEGE” and admit that “the dictionary is wrong” on this matter. Or those saying whites calling people of color racist “comes from a lack of understanding of the term, through ignorance or willful ignorance and hatred”. Or those saying that “when white people complain about experiencing reverse racism, what they’re really complaining about is losing out on or being denied their already existing privileges.” Why Are Comments About White People Not Racist, Can Black People Be Racist Toward White People? (spoiler: no), Why You Can’t Be Racist To White People, et cetera et cetera.

All of these sources make the same argument: racism means structural oppression. If some black person beats up some white person just because she’s white, that might be unfortunate, it might even be “racially motivated”, but because they’re not acting within a social structure of oppression, it’s not racist. As one of the bloggers above puts it:

Inevitably, here comes a white person either claiming that they have a similar experience because they grew up in an all black neighborhood and got chased on the way home from school a few times and OMG THAT IS SO RACIST and it is the exact same thing, or some other such bullshittery, and they expect that ignorance to be suffered in silence and with respect. If you are that kid who got chased after school, that’s horrible, and I feel bad for you…But dudes, that shit is not racism.

I can’t argue with this. No, literally, I can’t argue with this. There’s no disputing the definitions of words. If you say that “racism” is a rare species of nocturnal bird native to New Guinea which feeds upon morning dew and the dreams of young children, then all I can do is point out that the dictionary and common usage both disagree with you. And the sources I cited above have already admitted that “the dictionary is wrong” and “no one uses the word racism correctly”.


Source: Somebody who probably doesn’t realize they’ve just committed themselves to linguistic prescriptivism
Actually, I suppose one could escape a hostile dictionary and public by appealing to the original intent of the person who invented the word, but the man who invented the word “racism” was an activist for the forced assimilation of Indians who was known to say things like “Some say that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” My guess is that this guy was not totally on board with dismantling structures of oppression.

So we have a case where original coinage, all major dictionaries, and the overwhelming majority of common usage all define “racism” one way, and social justice bloggers insist with astonishing fervor that way is totally wrong and it must be defined another. One cannot argue definitions, but one can analyze them, so you have to ask – whence the insistence that racism have the structural-oppression definition rather than the original and more commonly used one? Why couldn’t people who want to talk about structural oppression make up their own word, thus solving the confusion? Even if they insisted on the word “racism” for their new concept, why not describe the state of affairs as it is: “The word racism can mean many things to many people, and I suppose a group of black people chasing a white kid down the street waving knives and yelling ‘KILL WHITEY’ qualifies by most people’s definition, but I prefer to idiosyncratically define it my own way, so just remember that when you’re reading stuff I write”? Or why not admit that this entire dispute is pointless and you should try to avoid being mean to people no matter what word you call the meanness by?

And how come this happens with every social justice word? How come the intertubes are clogged with pages arguing that blacks cannot be racist, that women cannot have privilege, that there is no such thing as misandry, that you should be ashamed for even thinking the word cisphobia? Who the heck cares? This would never happen in any other field. No doctor ever feels the need to declare that if we talk about antibacterial drugs we should call bacterial toxins “antihumanial drugs”. And if one did, the other doctors wouldn’t say YOU TAKE THAT BACK YOU PIECE OF GARBAGE ONLY HUMANS CAN HAVE DRUGS THIS IS A FALSE EQUIVALENCE BECAUSE BACTERIA HAVE INFECTED HUMANS FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS BUT HUMANS CANNOT INFECT BACTERIA, they would just be mildly surprised at the nonstandard terminology and continue with their normal lives. The degree to which substantive arguments have been replaced by arguments over what words we are allowed to use against which people is, as far as I know, completely unique to social justice. Why?

IV.

And so we return to my claim from earlier:

I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is entirely about abusing the ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

If racism school dot tumblr dot com and the rest of the social justice community are right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are innocent and totally non-insulting words that simply point out some things that many people are doing and should try to avoid.

If I am right, “racism” and “privilege” and all the others are exactly what everyone loudly insists they are not – weapons – and weapons all the more powerful for the fact that you are not allowed to describe them as such or try to defend against them. The social justice movement is the mad scientist sitting at the control panel ready to direct them at whomever she chooses. Get hit, and you are marked as a terrible person who has no right to have an opinion and who deserves the same utter ruin and universal scorn as Donald Sterling. Appease the mad scientist by doing everything she wants, and you will be passed over in favor of the poor shmuck to your right and live to see another day. Because the power of the social justice movement derives from their control over these weapons, their highest priority should be to protect them, refine them, and most of all prevent them from falling into enemy hands.

If racism school dot tumblr dot com is right, people’s response to words like “racism” and “privilege” should be accepting them as a useful part of communication that can if needed also be done with other words. No one need worry too much about their definitions except insofar as it is unclear what someone meant to say. No one need worry about whether the words are used to describe them personally, except insofar as their use reveals states of the world which are independent of the words used.

If I am right, then people’s response to these words should be a frantic game of hot potato where they attack like a cornered animal against anyone who tries to use the words on them, desperately try to throw them at somebody else instead, and dispute the definitions like their lives depend on it.

And I know that social justice people like to mock straight white men for behaving in exactly that way, but man, we’re just following your lead here.

Suppose the government puts a certain drug in the water supply, saying it makes people kinder and more aware of other people’s problems and has no detrimental effects whatsoever. A couple of conspiracy nuts say it makes your fingers fall off one by one, but the government says that’s ridiculous, it’s just about being more sensitive to other people’s problems which of course no one can object to. However, government employees are all observed drinking bottled water exclusively, and if anyone suggests that government employees might also want to take the completely innocuous drug and become kinder, they freak out and call you a terrorist and a shitlord and say they hope you die. If by chance you manage to slip a little bit of tap water into a government employee’s drink, and he finds out about it, he runs around shrieking like a banshee and occasionally yelling “AAAAAAH! MY FINGERS! MY PRECIOUS FINGERS!”

At some point you might start to wonder whether the government was being entirely honest with you.

This is the current state of my relationship with social justice.

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973 Responses to Social Justice And Words, Words, Words

  1. I’m not sure it’s exactly the same concept, but John Holbo termed this thing “the two-step of terrific triviality” here. I’m sure “motte-and-bailey doctrine” is a better term to promote for actual use, since it sounds serious and important, while it’s hard to say “the two-step of terrific triviality” with a straight face.

    (I have other thoughts about this but I’m a hurry right now . . . )

  2. AJD says:

    “it turns out that privilege has a perfectly reasonable meaning. All it means is that you’re interjecting yourself into other people’s conversations and demanding their pain be about you.”

    This is, to coin a phrase, a straw motte. What you are responding to does not assert or imply that that’s what privilege means. It’s the pragmatic purpose of being reminded to check your privilege, not a description of what “privilege” denotes.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I accept that criticism as valid, and later I’ll see if I can rework the post around it or if that would be too complicated.

      • Randy M says:

        I think they are saying maybe that the motte examples are rather than all of privilege or racism either symptoms or causes. So interrupting a woman is a sign of sexism which is likely to manifest more severe symptoms. Of course, that doesn’t explain why it can only go one way.

      • Deiseach says:

        I am familiar with “social justice” only in the Catholic context and was very surprised to see the term being bandied about online.

        Better get the obligatory list of biases/warnings out of the way first: white cishet female here. So now you know (possibly) where my views may be consciously or unconsciously skewed.

        About the “interjecting yourself into the conversation” – until you’ve experienced this in action, it sounds like what Scott is gently mocking:

        I think I speak for all straight white men when I say that sounds really bad and if I was doing it I’m sorry and will try to avoid ever doing it again. Problem solved, right? Can’t believe that took us however many centuries to sort out.

        A sinking feeling tells me it probably isn’t that easy.

        I can only speak from personal experience of online discourse about six years back. Predominantly female group on a fandom plus whatever else popped into our heads site, discussion arose about FGM (female genital mutilation).

        Guy appears out of nowhere challenging us about male genital mutilation. Turns out he means infant circumcision as practiced in America as a routine medical operation(? I have no idea on this whether it is true or not).

        If we’re not prepared to immediately condemn this horrible practice that mutilates helpless little boys, then we are not sincere about anything and are all part of a Vast Feminist Conspiracy to degrade, mutilate and wipe out men.

        He managed to derail the entire discussion onto rape (men are raped too! Why don’t we talk about that?), domestic violence (men are increasingly victims of that! Why aren’t we condemning that?) and dragged everything back to his own hobbyhorses no matter how we tried to be reasonable, polite and give him the benefit of the doubt that he was in some way serious and not just a troll.

        That was just one guy, who was either a troll or a gibbering fruitcake (if not both).

        It does happen a lot: “Not all men!” is the way I’ve seen it referred to, as it often happens that (for instance) discussions about rape and/or sexual violence get someone (often several someones) chiming in with “Not all men are rapists” and wanting to make the conversation about how they feel threatened, insulted, hurt and unsafe by the assumption that they, as a man, are a potential rapist.

        That may be a valid point, but the middle of discussion with a rape survivor exploring her experience in what she (or he) feels is a safe, supportive space is not the place to raise it.

        • Zorgon says:

          Speaking as a rape survivor: If your discussion about rape can be derailed by someone mentioning rape, you weren’t talking about rape.

          Also, there is virtually no difference between FGM and MGM in practical terms. One involves the excision of genital flesh from an unconsenting minor performed in some countries for religious and social reasons typically linked to control of sexuality, and the other is FGM.

          The fact that you consider domestic violence (roughly half of the victims are men), rape (anywhere between 20% and 50%+ of the victims are men, once you actually count women raping men as rape) and infant genital mutilation (routinely performed in the US on most boys) to be women’s issues that men are not allowed to comment on demonstrates the concept of “privilege” better than anything I could have possibly managed.

        • Zorgon says:

          Gah. More aggressive than I’d intended. People gendering rape as a Woman’s Issue does that to me, for reasons which should probably be obvious.

          But here’s a suggestion. “Not all men!” is now near-triggering for some people, me included, because it’s indicative of being a Legitimate Target. I don’t care what the situation is, there is no context in which “all are ” where X is a non-selected universal like birth gender and Y is a Very Bad Thing is OK. Just none. Never. Don’t do it. It’s not OK.

          Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all black people are criminals. Not all gay people are paedophiles. Not all men are rapists. Live with it.

        • ozymandias says:

          In my experience, whenever you talk about female circumcision someone will show up and be like WHAT ABOUT MALE CIRCUMCISION and whenever you talk about male circumcision someone will show up and be like WHAT ABOUT FEMALE CIRCUMCISION. I wish that everyone would collectively agree this is bad behavior, because both conversations are important and it is really hard to talk about both at once. (I also think it’s fairly uncontroversial that male circumcision is not as bad as most forms of female circumcision. Prepuce removal is basically equivalent; infibulation is not.)

          Whether half the victims of domestic violence are men depends heavily on how you define “domestic violence.” Short version: men tend to be more violent abusers, so if you require higher levels of violence before it qualifies as DV, you get a lower rate of male victims and female perps.

          In most cases where I’ve seen “not all men are rapists!” people were not making the claim that all men were rapists, but instead making different points such as “sometimes non-rapist men act in a way that increases the rape rate” or “women are distrustful of men and this is not entirely unjustified.” So that’s kind of silly. However, I’ve seen a lot of people pretend male rape survivors don’t exist and then pretend it’s derailing to point out this erasure, and I think that’s fucking bullshit.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I wish that everyone would collectively agree this is bad behavior, because both conversations are important and it is really hard to talk about both at once.

          There are meta-conversations that most people aren’t… intellectually developed? enough to recognize that they want to have, though.

          Oftentimes, th-

          pause: I must stop here to acknowledge a self-triggering, in case it infects the point I want to try to make. The last time I tried to make the point I’m about to try to make was on rpg.net, and it was part of the whole process that destroyed my reputation there. So, I might be experiencing some amount of anxiety trying to make this point. Thank you, we now resume your regularly scheduled rant.

          Oftentimes, the people that throw out “but what about male circumcision” during a female circumcision discussion, or “but what about male rape” during a rape discussion, really want to have a conversation about “what percentage of our collective social attention should be spent on *this* problem vs. *that* problem?”, aka “I’m not saying your problem is bad, or my problem is worse than yours, I’m just saying that the ratio of badness to attention seems off, and I’d like to negotiate for us to adjust that in my group’s favor.”

          The problem is that people usually perform that negotiation process without explicitly acknowledging it, because acknowledging it means putting down all the dirty tricks that Scott is talking about in the OP.

        • Zorgon says:

          Ozy – I’d be interested in those statistics. The ones I’ve seen have men as fractionally more violent and women distinctly more likely to cause long-term injury, which seems more of a six-of-one-half-a-dozen-another situation to me.

          The “mutual violence” category is, of course, by FAR the largest demographic of domestic violence and has been near-verboten in discussion of DV for decades. I’d attribute that to feminist agitation; you may have a different suggestion, which as ever I’d be intrigued to hear.

          If we’re going to play the “whose genital mutilation is worse?” game, infibulation is certainly extremely severe mutilation, but it’s also an incredibly rare form of female circumcision, with labial docking vastly more common and even a tiny fast-healing ritualistic nick is a more common variant. Meanwhile more boys are mutilated in the US alone every year than girls on the entire planet.

          All that said – and I do have a LOT to say about that in particular – I completely agree that discussions about this are routinely derailed, but I would suggest that they should be derailed. Genital mutilation is not a gendered issue and should not be treated as one. If we’re against the genital mutilation of infants, we should be against all of it, and not just the bits that are unacceptable in our own cultures.

          As for the rest of it, I stand by what I said. Generalising non-selected group X with hyper-negative Y is never, ever OK. I don’t care if what they’re trying to say is “Women are distrustful of men.” There’s an easy way to say that without painting half of the human race as rapists; all you have to do is say “Women are distrustful of men.” That apparently that sentence is insufficient suggests to me that that is not the whole of what they mean.

        • ozymandias says:

          But Zorgon a lot of people use “not all men are rapists!” as an argument against, say, this essay, which in spite of its manymany flaws is extremely clear that it is not saying that all men are rapists. In my experience, “you’re saying all men are rapists!” is usually a strawman used to derail a conversation.

          Gender parity in abuse and mutual abuse tend to be found by studies using the CTS methodology but not by studies using other methodologies. I think this is a pretty reasonable critique. Looking at, say, <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_report2010-a.pdf"NISVS, one finds gender parity for emotional abuse, a quarter of stalking victims are men, a quarter of rape victims were men (using a remotely sane definition of rape), and about a third of victims of severe physical violence were men.

          I have no interest in comparing which is most important. They are both important. However, I think that it is useful to discuss them separately in many cases, because the dynamics are different. To pick one example: male circumcision is something that happens in developed countries; female circumcision usually happens in developing countries. The appropriate kinds of activism are different, because developed-world people probably don’t know the cultural context and should be allies to developing-world activists, while we can organize against problems in our own backyard with less worry about imperialism. And it is extremely tiresome to have one’s discussion about appropriate tactics for developed-world anti-female-circumcision activists turned into “why aren’t you talking about male circumcision?”– just as it is tiresome to have someone respond to your awareness-raising “there is no reason to circumcise your male child, that is EXTREMELY WRONG, PLEASE DO NOT DO IT” post with “why aren’t you raising awareness of female circumcision?” …Because people who read my blog aren’t going to fucking circumcise their female children, ffs.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          But Zorgon a lot of people use “not all men are rapists!” as an argument against, say, this essay, which in spite of its manymany flaws is extremely clear that it is not saying that all men are rapists. In my experience, “you’re saying all men are rapists!” is usually a strawman used to derail a conversation.

          The article you linked to isn’t bad, but it’s on the edge of a slippery slope that ends with… well, one of the college videos I had to sit through was full of ridiculous scenarios, like (this was explicitly stated in exactly these words):

          “If you stop by the side of the road to help a woman change her tire, DON’T RAPE HER.”

          this persisted through several iterations of “If you are in perfectly-normal-situation, remember NOT TO RAPE THE WOMAN.”

          And it’s like, “yes, I AM insulted that I’m being portrayed this way. Do you seriously think that most men, if they see someone who needs help, are actively looking for an opportunity to turn that into a rape if that person happens to be female? Fuck you, buddy.”

          Because I will tell you – the kind of person who needs to be told not to rape in that situation is NOT the sort of person who would “stop by the side of the road to help a woman change her tire”; he’s the sort of person who would PRETEND to stop by the side of the road to help a woman change her tire, as a pretext for the rape he was ALREADY LOOKING TO COMMIT. And those people are pretty rare, and you’re right that we need to stop enabling them, but STOP TRYING TO CLAIM THAT I’M ONE OF THEM. Jesus.

        • ozymandias says:

          I’ve seen things along those lines and I think it’s supposed to be a parody of victim-blaming messages like “don’t let strange men help you change your tire,” rather than actual advice for men. When I have seen it, the intended takeaway was “don’t victim-blame people”, not “men need to be condescendingly told how rape works.” (The “men need to be condescendingly told how rape works” is usually in the consent workshops and makes more of a gesture at being gender-neutral. :P)

        • Deiseach says:

          No, I don’t consider these issues to be solely women’s issues and that men are not permitted to comment.

          I think men should be more involved in such discussions, because they are both victims and abusers. But that’s not the point I was making.

          The point was that a lot of energy and time was wasted addressing the points our troll raised – and it wasn’t merely “You’re forgetting that men are also victims of sexual abuse”, it was “MEN ARE BEING ABUSED AND RAPED AND YOU SAY NOTHING ABOUT IT YOU CONDONE IT BY YOUR SILENCE YOU SUPPORT IT BY YOUR IGNORANCE TALK ABOUT AND ONLY ABOUT MALE RAPE AND DOMESTIC ABUSE IN THE TERMS I SET AND AGREE COMPLETELY WITH ME OR ELSE YOU ARE CASTRATING FEMINISTS!!!!!”

          I don’t know if you consider that to be a fruitful conversation, but it turned out not to be, in the end.

        • TGGP says:

          The Catholic connection to the term is the reason for Father Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice.

        • That may be a valid point, but the middle of discussion with a rape survivor exploring her experience

          “rape survivor”?

          Did the rape she survived consist of a rape that occurred during a home invasion robbery. Did someone break through her door and hold a knife to her throat? Or was she wandering around half drunk and sexily dressed looking for a dicking, and after sobering up decided that the dicking that she got was distressing and not at all what she was looking for and that she had never consented to that sort of rotten treatment?

        • Zorgon says:

          Catching up after a very long sleep.

          Ozy – the problem with the Kate Harding article (at least, in the context of what we’re talking about here) is that she engages in deliberate conflation of women’s fear of men and the personal risk status of those men. In Harding’s world, all women are right to fear all men, because all men are potentially the man who is going to assault them.

          But even laying aside that this is not a reaction made to any other risk factor in society whatsoever and that it is considered utterly unacceptable to use distorted risk factors in other unselected contexts like race, it is NOT the case that any given man that Kate Harding encounters in the street is equally likely to be the one that assaults her. We already know that rapists have a habit of being repeat offenders. We already know that most rapes occur in the victim’s home and that a large proportion of rapes are committed by family members and partners. If anything, the random guy coming up to Kate at a party is probably the safest person she’s encountered in a while. And a woman walking down an alleyway late at night with a drunken man is statistically safer than he is; he’s far more likely to be assaulted before he gets home than she is.

          The simple truth is this: Not all men are potential rapists. The vast, overwhelming majority of men and women go through their lives without sexually assaulting anyone. A significant minority commit minor sexual assaults that would likely have been considered meaningless social interaction when they were being educated. A minority of that minority will then go on to assault people they know and a minority of that minority will sexually assault strangers. If you go around assuming that every man you meet is a member of that minority of a minority of a minority, then that isn’t “reasonable caution” as Harding wants to present it, it’s prejudice.

          Not least since the 2012 edition of those NISVS tell us that 80% of those 25% of victims that are men (using the lifetime results; there’s still no good explanation for the yearly 50:50) were attacked by women. Yet no-one considers every woman a potential rapist, because that’s not an *acceptable* prejudice.

          • We already know that most rapes occur in the victim’s home and that a large proportion of rapes are committed family members and partners.

            This is, of course, a hateful lie.

            The crime victimization survey shows that the victimization rate among women living with their husband is indistinguishable from zero and that it is low among daughters of married couples.

            The greatest risk comes with living with a stepfather, the second greatest comes from being a single mom, or living with one’s single mother. In other words, most “rapes” occur from mom’s boyfriend or when a girl gets half drunk and cruises for a dicking.

            And my personal observation (doubtless statistically too small a sample) is that rapes by the stepfather or boyfriend are not exactly rapes either any more than rapes while cruising for a dicking are exactly rapes. The mother knows, and gives her daughter to the boyfriend to sweeten the deal, which while potentially unpleasant for the daughter is not the same thing as a man with knife breaking through the window.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Did the rape she survived consist of a rape that occurred during a home invasion robbery. Did someone break through her door and hold a knife to her throat? Or was she wandering around half drunk and sexily dressed looking for a dicking, and after sobering up decided that the dicking that she got was distressing and not at all what she was looking for and that she had never consented to that sort of rotten treatment?

          I feel like there are people who come to blogs like SSC to discuss things that no one else will allow them to discuss, and then there are people who come to blogs like SSC because “you can discuss things that no one else will allow you to discuss” can be hard to distinguish from “you can antagonize and troll people in ways that no one else will let you get away with”.

          The more you do the latter, the harder you make it for people to do the former. You realize that, right?

          • Did the rape she survived consist of a rape that occurred during a home invasion robbery. Did someone break through her door and hold a knife to her throat? Or was she wandering around half drunk and sexily dressed looking for a dicking, and after sobering up decided that the dicking that she got was distressing

            and then there are people who come to blogs like SSC because “you can discuss things that no one else will allow you to discuss” looks an awful lot like “you can antagonize and troll people in ways that no one else will let you get away with”.

            If it is forbidden to make fun of “rape survivors”, if it is trolling, some men will be unjustly convicted of rape, and then, very likely, suffer actual rape.

            The title “rape survivor”should not be a coveted honor which all men should bow before. Rape really does not kill you, hence the title “survivor” exaggerates, which exaggeration becomes the more necessary the more trivial the supposed “rape”. That married women living with their husbands are very seldom raped (crime victimization survey) suggests that a great many rape victims, probably the great majority, really were looking for it.

            Whenever we hear that someone is a “rape survivor”, we should suspect that what she actually survived was regretting that she went looking for a dicking while half drunk, because if someone actually broke through her bedroom window and held a knife to her throat, no one would feel the need to boost her experience and pile honors upon her head by calling her a “survivor”. The exaggeration suggests that exaggeration is required, which suggests that the underlying event was less than traumatic.

            Non stranger rapes are necessarily ambiguous. The first few times I have sex with a woman I usually pick her up and toss her onto the bed, sometimes shove her face into the pillows or lightly smack her backside. Consent is usually non verbal and pre-rational. If we are going to assume the person facing jail time is innocent until proven guilty, we have to assume the accuser is guilty until proven innocent, which we are forbidden to assume.

            If anyone calls a rape victim a “survivor”, chances are that they do deserve to be laughed at. The coveted title of “survivor” is pre-emptive defense against the laughter.

        • scansionbear says:

          Hi Zorgon,

          Genital mutilation is not a gendered issue and should not be treated as one.

          I find this a very oversimplistic point of view to take. “It happens to both men and women”, or even “…roughly equally”, is not the same as “it’s not a gendered issue”.

          I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that if you’re against MGM (or FGM), you’re probably against FGM (or MGM) too. In any broad and uninspiring conversation about how bad it all is, be my guest: the two are equivalent and you are welcome to jump in at the mention of one and mention the other. Fine.

          However, as soon as we decide that we actually want to do something about genital mutilation, we probably want to start thinking of how to combat it. Let’s start small and choose a particular geographical area, a society, a religion, a culture that practises genital mutilation to focus on. And we’ll find something interesting: that particular culture might only practise FGM, or only MGM. Or both, to the same extent or different extents. FGM might have all sorts of awful medical ramifications and be largely an ‘underground’ practice, whereas MGM might be mostly medically pretty safe and accepted (or vice-versa, of course). The sorts of people who perform MGM and the sorts of people who perform FGM might even simply be different people or doing it for different reasons, meaning that the ways in which we need to tackle the problem will be different, because it’s two problems. Two admittedly superficially similar problems, coming from different sources, being implemented for different reasons, with different effects. It’s obvious they need handling differently.

          And the interesting thing is that if we choose a different culture or religion, we’ll find that our answers to these questions change; but one thing is pretty consistent across cultures and religions: if different people are handled in different ways with respect to genital mutilation, then those people will typically be handled according to their gender, so we need to treat FGM and MGM differently in those cases. (There may also be cultures in which black people undergo genital mutilation and white people don’t, or undergo a different sort, or something; but I don’t know of any, and I can’t imagine why they would exist.)

          I think we need to know a little more than crude statistical statements of frequency to understand whether issues “are gendered” or not.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          This is, of course, a hateful lie.

          The crime victimization survey shows that the victimization rate among women living with their husband is indistinguishable from zero and that it is low among daughters of married couples.

          That doesn’t seem to match information I’ve read. I’m going to assume that this is due to looking at different statistics, and ask if you have a good heuristic for how to tell which studies are corrupted and which studies are honest?

        • Andrew G. says:

          The last time Donald posted this ridiculous claim here I found two studies using the British Crime Survey data that suggest approximately 40% of male-on-female “partner” rapes in the sample were committed by the victim’s legally married spouse (though I’m not clear how separation was counted there).

        • Andy says:

          The last time Donald posted this ridiculous claim here I found two studies using the British Crime Survey data that suggest approximately 40% of male-on-female “partner” rapes in the sample were committed by the victim’s legally married spouse (though I’m not clear how separation was counted there).

          I think the most charitable way to say what I want to say is “James has a tendency to let his rhetoric get far out ahead of his evidence.”

        • Zorgon says:

          scansionbear –

          I’m against genital mutilation. I don’t distinguish in principle between types. Other people do distinguish in principle between types, and that is my problem.

          However, as soon as we decide that we actually want to do something about genital mutilation…

          See, I would agree with the generally utilitarian slant of your post in almost every single detail, because I passionately oppose genital mutilation and absolutely anything that reduces the incidence of that is like fecking ambrosia to me.

          BUT. I could count the number of times that has been the actual subject of discussion on one hand, and I’d still have enough fingers left to count up all the Back To The Future movies. (I suppose now we’re arguably on 3, so I might need to ignore the one with the train now.)

          I’m quite serious about this. Virtually no discussion of female genital mutilation EVER centers on what to do about the problem. Every single case except two that I’ve ever seen has been a scare-tale of Muslims Hiding Behind The Bed Mutilating Your Little Girls, or a moral fable about How This Is Clear Misogyny, or some other variant on how This Is A Woman’s Issue.

          (The two good ones? A report from the UN and an excellent blog post that unfortunately appears to have been lost to time but which mainly revolved around existing “underground railway” smugging efforts in cutting nations.)

          See, I’m fairly straightforward about this. If a discussion about genital mutilation cannot contain any mention at all of the millions of boys mutilated every year in the US, then it is not actually about infant genital mutilation at all. It’s about how women are victims and men are aggressors, and I’m against that particular bit of folk wisdom and I’d much rather focus on genital mutilation.

          And besides this, as long as all mainstream discussions of genital mutilation revolve around women in Africa and the Middle East, the millions of boys mutiliated every single year continues to be a subject that’s mostly swept under the carpet and kept as an awkward afterthought, to be mentioned in the odd press release by a medical board; a medical problem, not a cultural one. Never mind that it’s not medically necessary, was introduced for purely cultural purposes and results in thousands upon thousands of deaths every year.

          When people act in support of that perspective, I start to think of them and as the US as a faraway barbaric country filled with willing mutilating freaks, just as you lot think of the various Muslim countries that perform FGM.

          Know why? THEY think it’s an awkward cultural issue that they don’t much like to talk about, too. Hell, I’ve even seen letters from mutilated women talking about how happy they are that they had it done and how much they feel it helped their sex life. It’s flipping creepy just how close the parallels can be.

          So unless people are actually talking about ways to prevent genital mutilation, no, I’m not going to distinguish between FGM and MGM. Genital mutilation is fundamentally wrong and focusing on one is unacceptable. I will not relinquish that position.

        • Matthew says:

          Also, there is virtually no difference between FGM and MGM in practical terms. One involves the excision of genital flesh from an unconsenting minor performed in some countries for religious and social reasons typically linked to control of sexuality, and the other is FGM.

          This is inaccurate. Male circumcision isn’t performed for reasons typically linked to control of sexuality.

          Although there is this hilarious medieval text, Jewish penis is better than Christian penis, which actually manages to get the typical effect of circumcision on ability to delay orgasm completely backwards.

        • Zorgon says:

          It’s committed for culturally traditionalist reasons which are themselves connected to century-old attempts to control sexuality. It came into vogue in very specific circumstances. I’m pretty sure a lot of the Muslim families who get their daughters ritually “pricked” (the most common form of FGM) do it for much the same reason; cultural traditionalism.

          In both cases it does not control sexuality now, but it came into existence for sexuality-control reasons.

          (To be clear – I’m talking about American circumcision, not Jewish circumcision, the origins of which are unfortunately lost in history.)

        • Harald K says:

          Well, your last paragraph applies to your interjector, too: in your polite and friendly mostly female discussion of FGM, odds are none of you were victims of it, and odds are you don’t know all that much about the cultures where it happens either. But the man who rudely inserted himself into your discussion probably was circumcised without consent as a child.

          I’ve run into such people. I agree they aren’t very productive and more likely to convince people they’re crazy… but in fact, they have a point. Two points, actually: one, that cutting male children for nonmedical purposes shouldn’t be OK, and two, that maybe you should care about the wrongs you tolerate and propagate in your own culture before what happens in distant and alien ones.

    • Decius says:

      I have experienced “interjecting yourself into public internet conversations and expressing that you are pained” being strategically equivocated with “having privilege”.

      It would be a straw motte if it wasn’t actually being used in that way, but it is.

  3. Stuart Armstrong says:

    On your “motte-and-bailey doctrine”, compare with the first piece of Schopenhauer’s “Art of Always Being Right” (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right#The_Extension) :

    >The Extension. – This consists in carrying your opponent’s proposition beyond its natural limits; in giving it as general a signification and as wide a sense as possible, so as to exaggerate it; and, on the other hand, in giving your own proposition as restricted a sense and as narrow limits as you can, because the more general a statement becomes, the more numerous are the objections to which it is open. The defence [against extension] consists in an accurate statement of the point or essential question at issue.

    On a more general point… You seem to bring up social justice stuff a lot. Not to me to argue with that, but I certainly get the subjective impression that your personal experiences might have coloured your focus. Would it be possible to run some sort of objective argument that social justice is more diseased, in a more dangerous way, than any generic field/group/ideology?

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Unlikely to be more diseased than other fields, but I think it has one of the higher diseasedness:number-of-smart-people-I-know-who-strongly-endorse-it ratios of any ideology I have to deal with, except maybe neoreaction. And I spend a lot of time arguing against that too.

      I won’t claim that fact that I and people I care for have been harmed by it doesn’t color my judgment. But anything I do with my time other than work overtime to earn money I can donate to the most effective charity is nonoptimal, so I feel like I’m allowed to devote blogging space to Not The Most Important Thing if I feel like it, as long as I’m not unfair or dishonest in my critcism.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        By ‘ratio’ do you mean something more like ‘product’?

      • Anonymous says:

        My impression is that social justice is the most harmful recent or contemporary intellectual movement (and I think there are some pretty harmful intellectual movements in economics, so I’m basically saying that feminists are worse than sub-prime lenders). As a result, as an intellectual, I’m prone to be very bothered by social justice. However, in practice, I think it’s very small-fry compared to anti-intellectual movements. I just don’t tend to interact much with anti-intellectual movements.

        To a significant extent, the insane rancor of social justice types can be understood if one recognizes that anti-intellectual movements (such as the Patriarchy which they so hate) even exist. To an intellectual, they can be almost invisible because they don’t engage in discourse, but they do have almost all the power in the world.

        • Paul Crowley says:

          Also there’s not much point writing a closely argued blog post against anti-intellectualism.

        • suntzuanime says:

          I suspect that the more insane intellectual movements gain currency, the more that feeds into anti-intellectualism. If the intellectuals can’t keep from being devoured by the Social Justice Blight, perhaps the anti-intellectuals have a point.

        • Deiseach says:

          I find this conversation interesting because, although I’ve seen a lot of social justice/feminist/trans and other identity postings on Tumblr, I wouldn’t have considered myself in sympathy with a lot of what they were saying.

          On the other hand, I’d be interested to hear an explanation as to why, in my current workplace, where 64% of the staff are women and 36% are men, as soon as you hit the higher grades (Da Bosses, in other words) – boom! Male, male, male!

          Women aren’t interested in promotion? Well, why not? Are you saying women aren’t ambitious?

          Women aren’t willing to put in the work necessary for their career? Immediate supervisor (who is a woman) is doing three separate jobs associated with the work carried out by our organisation at the moment. This means that, when she finishes her normal work day in the office, she spends additional hours every evening doing the extra work for one of the other jobs. She spent all Saturday and Sunday this week in the office catching up on that work.

          Boss of whole department, on the other hand (male) is “not interested” in, and “can’t be bothered with” that work, so he doesn’t do it.

          She’s not the only woman double- and triple-jobbing in our section (we’ve just had a Grand Reorganisation, which resulted in utter chaos).

          Women are more interested in their family life? Well, many of the women are married and have kids, yet are doing the work outside and the majority of the work inside the home as well.

          Women don’t spend as long on their careers? Again, many of the women have twenty and even thirty years racked up working for this place.

          So why, when we hit the Really Important Jobs, is it “Man, Man, Man”? Explain that to me, and why feminism shouldn’t have made me notice this, and why I should just have gone on accepting it as the Natural Order of Things.

        • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

          Standard deviation in IQ + Testosterone + Height.

          Assuming ‘bosses’ are high level corporate types, you’re looking at only slightly lower IQs than doctors and scientists. Not Gifted exactly but mid 120’s, which is high enough to put a dent in the number of eligible women.

          Testosterone is generally a pretty strong predictor of ‘leader-y’ traits, aggressiveness included, and is for fairly obvious reasons much higher in men. If you want someone aware of and capable of climbing hierarchies, chances are they will be in the deep end of the Test pool.

          Height is obvious albeit a little silly; you look up to tall people, thus they tend to be the ones we look up to. To steelman our instinctual preference, height is highly polygenic so higher-end-of-normal height implies relatively low genetic load.

        • nydwracu says:

          I don’t think it’s small fry compared to anti-intellectual movements.

          Who’s in the anti-intellectual movements? Who’s in the social justice movements? It doesn’t matter if half the country is in an anti-intellectual movement; social change is about quality more than quantity. If there’s only 1% of the population in a social justice movement, but those three million are all in positions of power — making policy, controlling the political loading of media reports, educating the people who will be in positions of power in twenty years, etc. — then that makes it a lot more dangerous than a movement of the powerless half of the country. That’s not just because they’re the ones writing the rules, but also because they’re upstream from the powerless people, who will, in time, go along with what the powerful people tell them to go along with.

          If there are no toxic waste-dumping factories along 99% of the bank of a river, but the other 1% is right at its source, the entire river will be filled with toxic waste. Numbers aren’t important here.

        • I’d be interested in a detailed look at anti-intellectualism, with a history and typology, not to mention suggestions for how intellectuals can deal with anti- and un- intellectuals.

          Michael Vassar’s done some interesting analysis of the approximate way most people use language.

        • Zorgon says:

          Deiseach:

          See, that there? That’s the kind of feminism I’m interested in. However, it’s the kind of feminism that’s mostly missing from public discussion right now in favour of campaigns against Robin Thicke lyrics and the word “bossy”.

          I have an explanation for this, but it’s an unpopular one. I would suggest that the public face of the movement has been overrun by comfortable middle- or upper-middle-class twentysomething writers and “online activists” for whom issues of economic fairness seem more like a route to pitchforks and torches at their door than a source of liberation.

          But then I’m an Old Lefty, so I would say that 🙂

        • Patrick Robotham says:

          Anonymous:

          Do you think it’s harmful because it advocates any false propositions or any screwy morality, or simply because of the number of jerks associated with the movement?

        • The Anonymouse says:

          >>I would suggest that the public face of the movement has been overrun by comfortable middle- or upper-middle-class twentysomething writers and “online activists” for whom issues of economic fairness seem more like a route to pitchforks and torches at their door than a source of liberation.>>

          Unpopular, perhaps, but as we’ve been told, no one likes to be called out on their privilege.

        • Mary says:

          Zorgon:

          You should also consider the possibility that they don’t want to put themselves out of a job by actually solving problems. What does a grievance monger do when she can’t manufacture more grievances? Get a life?

      • Anonymous says:

        I’ll just add, for your own data, that the ONLY time I’ve ever encountered the phrase ‘Social Justice Movement’ or variations thereon is on this site. I remember you once listed (something like) all of the times the social justice movement came up on your internet in one day, and you seemed to think it was somewhat typical. Perhaps consider this to be a case for optimism, that the totally horrible and evil memeplex doesn’t reach as far as you think. 🙂

        Btw, I do enjoy the posts criticising it still. Critiquing how specific internet commenters make mistakes is a very generalisable skill.

        • Nornagest says:

          Oh, it definitely depends where you hang out. Twitter and Tumblr seem to be the primary vectors, although in the last year or two it seems to have been picked up by the Gawker-style clickbait sites; I’ve noticed a few references in mainstream media, but for anything right of the SF Chronicle it still seems to be cast in Look At These Crazy People terms.

          And the Chron’s basically clickbait anyway, these days.

        • Matthew says:

          I’ve seen it invade boardgamegeek.com before. See here and here for example.

    • Would it be possible to run some sort of objective argument that social justice is more diseased, in a more dangerous way, than any generic field/group/ideology?

      Donald Sterling

      Compare the brown scare with the McCarthy red scare.

      • richard says:

        Bollocks. The NBA jumped at the chance to get rid of an owner everyone hated.

        • Imperfect Humanoid says:

          ‘Bollocks. The NBA jumped at the chance to get rid of an owner everyone hated.’

          Oh, well that makes it all OK then. Racism is just an excuse people use to ‘get rid of’ other people they don’t like. Nothing to worry about. (moron)

  4. Chris Billington says:

    That debate about postmodernism — I’ve had that EXACT debate.

    Me: Whether or not the Higgs boson exists is an objective fact.

    Him: No it isn’t, everything is subjective, because people might perceive colours differently, and you would never know!

    Me: Please define subjective.

    Him: You can’t know what other people are thinking, blah blah blah, so everything is subjective.

    Me: I agree with you in that sense, but that has nothing to do with whether reality has an objective existence.

    Him: But you just agreed everything is subjective!

    It’s making me furious just thinking about it.

    • Samuel Skinner says:

      Ask him for money and inform him its loss is just “subjective”. People get rational extremely fast when they can see it costs them cash.

      • karmakaiser says:

        Oh come on, even economists regard fiat currency as a social fiction used to mediate exchange. Even metal currency has only reality insofar as people agree to use it as a medium of exchange per Searle.

        If everyone agrees we don’t exchange dollars then dollars aren’t money.

        Cutting off his limbs is a better example because limbs would exist even if everyone agreed it didn’t.

        • Kaminiwa says:

          It’s not about the money being subjective, it’s about the theft itself being subjective. To my mind, I didn’t steal your wallet, to your mind you did. With no objective reality I guess we will both just have to accept that we have different subjective experiences and move on, neh.

          Mine will just happen to be a little more pleasant due to my ENTIRELY subjective belief that there is an additional wallet with me 🙂

        • Anonymous says:

          Fiat money is considered to be money because if you don’t pay your taxes with it the government will put you in jail. It may be a social fiction but when the cops kick your door down, shit will get real all of a sudden. Trust me, I’m an economist.

    • karmakaiser says:

      like an ideal postmodernist would be all like‏ “look we have to play by different rules once we’re dealing with sub atomic particles because of the design of instruments and the problems of maps and territories”‏ whether the higgs exists is indeed a matter of objective fact, but whether our instruments indicating it exists is actually reason to believe in its objective existence is another matter‏. given my feyabrendian view of science‏ this is more that we have cause to treat the universe as-if it exists‏

      A good post modernist would be all instrumentalist all over you.

    • Troy says:

      Alan Olding summarizes this argument as “We have eyes, therefore we cannot see.”

  5. Sarah says:

    This is spot on.

    One point that you didn’t make explicit is that if everyone is “guilty”, no one is.

    If everyone, or almost everyone, is a little bit rapey (a claim I’ve heard made!) then it becomes very hard to make distinctions between your slightly insensitive ex and a violent offender who should be in jail. If everyone is guilty, then it’s not possible to punish everyone. And you wind up *not* punishing the real bad guys; you punish whoever you’re upset at right now, and let genuine villains go free.

    • Error says:

      Sounds like sin in new clothing to me. “We are all sinners to some degree…(but some of us more so than others).”

      • Sarah says:

        Or like having a state with unenforceable laws.

        If everyone smokes pot, and pot is illegal, then anyone *can* be punished, but not everyone will be. Who gets punished? Whoever the cop doesn’t like.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Which, in the ‘rape culture’ example, means low-status males, and in the ‘systematic racism’ example, means those middle-class whites whose socioeconomic stability is most tenuous.

        • Andrew says:

          “Who gets punished?”

          Black people.

        • von Kalifornen says:

          That’s a good point. It usually isn’t young, white men. Though it can be, and privilege is not permanent.

    • coffeespoons says:

      From doing a bit of reading about this and talking to people I think that often the most dangerous sexual predators in communities are high status men, who are often attractive and have lots of friends. Now, it’s very difficult to deal with these people as no one wants to believe the victims (even in social justicy communities). However, if we want to “do something about rape” attacking low status men (creep shaming?) who seem a bit “creepy” because they gave me a hug that lasted a bit too long is very easy.

      • von Kalifornen says:

        Actually, I’d note that what is actually happening is that people who are high status within an enclave but low status in broader society are being attacked. Often correctly. This is part of what the fedora-neckbeard thing is about.

        • Scott F says:

          Fedoras and neckbeards were never high-status within any enclave. Not within atheism, not within certain imageboard communities, pretty much nowhere.

          (Unless you want to consider “a collection of people who think fedoras are cool and neckbeards are acceptable, who have banded together because everyone keeps telling them fedoras aren’t cool and neckbeard aren’t acceptable” an enclave, but now every low-status person is a high-status person inside their own enclave of one.)

          The broader society attacking fedora-neckbeard people as low status was directly imported from enclaves that those fedora-neckbeard people are part of, enclaves that attacked them as low status.

        • von Kalifornen says:

          Well, maybe not high status. But my perception was that in the past nobody cared and that the stereotype is only about three or four years old (the perjorative term “neckbeard” seems to be much older but previously referred to fairly apolitical basement-dwelling troglodytes.) Also, a *lot* of people attacked for fedora-neckbeard-ness don’t match the stereotype at all and aren’t low status as matching it would imply.

        • Matthew says:

          I had never heard of the “neckbeard” stereotype before encountering it on this blog; I’m fairly suspicious of the claim that it’s more than a few years old.

        • suntzuanime says:

          You are simply wrong as a matter of fact; this is a known bias you may wish to correct for in the future. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recency_illusion

        • Nornagest says:

          @Matthew: You’re right, it’s only a few years old, at least as far as Internet presence goes. “Fedora” is even younger, albeit untrendable because it postdates fedoras in fashion.

          The exact stereotypes aren’t all that important, though; they’re merely the latest incarnations of the much older stereotype of the badly dressed, unhygenic, unattractive nerd. “Misogynistic” is a relatively new wrinkle, but mainly by way of interpretation; most of the things the fedora-wearing neckbearded nerd of 2014 is considered creepy/misogynistic for could as fairly be laid at the feet of the trenchcoated nerd of 1998 (he whose classmates are more worried he’s going to shoot up the school), or the suspenders-and-pocket-protector nerd of 1980.

          (The latter nerds probably don’t watch My Little Pony, but the brony stigma among SJWs is faintly bizarre to me anyway.)

        • suntzuanime says:

          Nornagest, you are also wrong. Feminist co-option gave it a signal boost, but they were co-opting a previously existing stereotype.

          EDIT: Your link seems to show that it was popular enough to start showing up in websearches as of seven years ago; this does not seem to support your claim that it is only a few years old.

        • Nornagest says:

          Not saying you’re wrong, but can you elaborate? Five minutes of Google turn up no references older than 2002, and that was referring to the facial hair rather than the attendant stereotype. The Google Trends data up there looks like a strong argument for 2007.

          (I don’t remember seeing in feminist circles earlier than a couple of years ago, though, so they may have co-opted it about then.)

          EDIT: Ah. Seven years is “a few” to me. If it’s not to you, then we’re probably violently agreeing.

        • suntzuanime says:

          2007 was 7 years ago, which is already really pushing it in terms of “a few years”. And consider that in order to become a “trend” it has to have already existed long enough for people to pick up on it.

          I personally remember seeing it around a decade ago, but I do not have a citation I can provide.

        • zbeeblebrox says:

          You wouldn’t be able to post a primary citation anyway, since the term “neckbeard” first showed up on the Somethingawful forums, probably around 2005 or so? The SA forums are notorious for locking archives behind a paywall since before the word “paywall” existed.

          From what I remember, it was originally intended as an intentionally superficial pejorative they could use against any unsuspecting internet user they were trolling at a given moment, later with accompanying pictures of guys at computers with terrible hygiene/literal neckbeards, just to drive the point home. So it’s never been a positive (or even self-deprecating) identifier, but even still it was co-opted by outsiders and eventually social justice groups, all with their own agendas.

          Co-opting words is a common tactic for pushing an agenda or manipulating a cause. But it helps when they start with negative connotations in the first place.

        • nydwracu says:

          even still it was co-opted by outsiders and eventually social justice groups, all with their own agendas.

          SA is one of the major sources of the social justice memeplex, so it’s unsurprising that they would pick it up.

          (Gawker and Buzzfeed, to an extent, are downstream from SA. Yes, it’s that bad.)

    • Athrelon says:

      In many ways explicit “privileges and duties” norms, as practiced in many traditional cultures including some strains of Christianity, can be seen a progressive tax on social status. Obviously it’s still better to be charismatic than otherwise in those systems, but when rules are explicitly spelled out, rather than being a matter of ad-hoc consensus, it’s a little bit harder for a charismatic defector to totally evade censure. Moving to a “state of nature” where more things are up for grabs for talented politickers increases this particular form of inequality, and also causes you to lose certain kinds of coordination technology.

      The opportunity cost of social justicey norms supplanting older defection-punishing norms is in some cases significant. Informal social coordination using a SJ moral vocabulary is good at solving some problems, but is inefficient at others – and punishing charismatic defectors is not one of them. Of course, the question then becomes whether the benefits of getting rid of old, unequal norms are greater than these costs.

      • Mark says:

        The opportunity cost of social justicey norms supplanting older defection-punishing norms is in some cases significant. Informal social coordination using a SJ moral vocabulary is good at solving some problems, but is inefficient at others – and punishing charismatic defectors is not one of them.

        Could you be more specific or provide more concrete examples here? This sounds like a really interesting point.

        • Athrelon says:

          Disclaimer: I generally dislike moving meta level discussion to object level, because the debate immediately shifts to quibbling over the object level example. An additional pitfall when talking reactionary-SJ stuff is that part of the process of value change includes adding moral loadings to a bunch of factors that make it difficult to discuss sanely (we’ll see an example in the following paragraphs, which hopefully I’ve meta-d up enough to avoid it spoiling this entire exercise.) When I have time to write carefully and with foresight, I can usually come up with examples safely in the past so that we can have some sane discourse. But I’m going to ad-lib it here:

          Since we started talking about sex, we might as well continue. Let’s talk about social attitudes towards seduction, where I’ll use the term here as deliberate seduction with the goal of a transaction that will likely leave the other person worse off (rather than having it just mean “generally being attractive.”) If you’ve read Pride and Prejudice [WARNING: 200 YEAR OLD SPOILERS], you’ll remember the subplot where Wickham, the charismatic militia officer, ends up seducing Lydia, the headstrong and flirtatious youngest sister. What happens next? Everyone immediately recognizes this as a breach of conduct, lowers the status of both Wickham and Lydia*, and when the couple are found, they are cocerced into formally marrying to mitigate the social damage. The notion of a “shotgun wedding” is a colorfully American version of the same notion – that premarital sex is bad and if it somehow happens, the less-bad outcome is to formalize it into marriage**.

          Contrast that to today. We no longer think premarital sex bad; in fact insisting on it seems weird. The whole pairing-off process is also more informal – there’s no chaparones and relatively few formal mixers with adult supervision (like balls).

          Okay, so how does this new culture deal with seduction? Well, you can go on PUA sites and see that lots of men believe that it would be awesome and personally beneficial to seduce lots of women with relatively low commitment. Evolutionary theory being what it is, a lot of women see aspects of these tactics as giving them a raw deal, even though they don’t come close to falling under formal rape laws. Well, they can’t use the shotgun-wedding precommittment anymore, and we recognize that. As a society, we obviously don’t want women to be defenseless against rakes. So we ratify their use of their next best option: being very savvy and perceptive about preemptively picking up untrustworthy men, and having the social power to strongly castigate them…

          …except of course monkeybrains being what they are, not only does the “creepy” detector tend to be oversensitive towards low-status men and undersensitive towards high status ones, even if a woman correctly perceives that a high-status man is giving women a raw deal, it’s harder and more socially risky to try to to socially bring him down than, compared to if you doing the same thing with a low-status man. Also, unscrupulous women can use their new power to call inconvenient low-status men “creepy” and watch them socially disappear, and unscrupulous high-status men (but not low-status ones) can use the superweapon currently being constructed in the Top-Secret MRA Labs(TM), “she’s just claiming regret, it’s not rape,” and get away with predatory behavior.

          So, instead of having a norm that fairly cleanly targets seducers and seductresses who prey on the opposite sex, we now have this massive informal monkey-political mess. We expend a lot more effort, cause a lot more collateral damage (low-status men and low-status women both lose) and don’t get anywhere near the level of actual seduction-prevention. This is “doing less with more” – the very definition of a loss of technology.

          Reactionaries may notice the parallel to the concept of “anarcho-tyranny” here.

          My point is not that all men were perfect Darcys in the glory days of our ancestors, and now all we’ve got are degenerate Roissys. There were rakes back then the same as we had PUAs now. The point was that the culture had a much more effective way of containing the damage that rakes did, and that that was a side effect of making courtship a more free-form, informal affair governed mostly by monkey politics. Now, obviously some people benefited a lot from these changes, and, having won, we now see elements of the sexual revolution as wonderful ends in themselves (“dismantling a patriarchal system,” “sexual freedom,” “my body is none of your business” etc.) But there were some pretty big opportunity costs, of which this is one.

          ————————————-

          *Here’s the dissonance I promised – part of the sexual revolution changed norms such that while Austen saw the whole thing as an unobjectionable moral fable, it seems weird to modern eyes to hear her implicitly criticizing Lydia for her personality and sexual choices, and to slap her, as well as Wickham, with consequences for her actions. (“Guess you’re stuck with the handsome but dissolute guy now, and for the rest of your life!”) I too am a creature of modernity, and even I admit to a residual shudder despite seeing the logic and the benefits of this arrangement to actual women.

          **For the rakes out there, of course, this was also a reasonably good deterrent from indiscriminately seducing people.

        • drethelin says:

          So I like that you wrote this but it seems to miss a rather big part of why people wanted the norms to change in the first place: Yes we’ve made punishing “rakes” more expensive but we’ve made getting into a relationship WAY cheaper. If more people having more sex is a good, the changes from then to now have enabled a lot of good, especially for women.

        • Athrelon says:

          Drethelin: it’s possible that “moar sex” is a product of the sexual revolution and should be noted in the plus column. A quick Googling didn’t reveal any great stats; I’d be interested if you could find better ones.

          There’s a few non-obvious things that complicate the obvious intuition that sex became more frequent after it was less restricted. Yes there was no sanctioned sex before marriage back then – however, the age of marriage was much lower than today. Elizabeth was 20 in the novel, and England was itself kind of a weird outlier in having late marriage. Outside Hajnal Europe her age would have been even lower at marriage. Contrast with this fun Wellesley survey breaking down virginity (at age 18-22) by major. A lot of what’s now premarital sex would have been marital sex in traditional societies.

          Most sex almost certainly still takes place within marriage. How has marital sex been doing? Given Scott’s data on traditionalist marriages being happier and more stable (EDIT: also sexier), it’s not inconceivable that traditionalist societies may have had happier marriages, which is highly correlated with sexual frequency. But again, couldn’t find hard data; would be interested if you dug any up.

          So I honestly don’t know. I’d be pretty confident that that pre-marital sex has increased significantly, as well as sexual partner count, and under some worldviews that by itself is a definite plus. Uncertain about the sign and magnitude of delta total lifetime sex. The case that the sexual revolution brought us “moar sex” that can be chalked up under “benefits” is not as obvious and as large a win as the naive view suggests.

  6. Typhon says:

    I am reminded of this.

    So many words end up being used as labels meaning “this person is not our ‘our side’ and therefore evil by definition”.

  7. J. Quinton says:

    It seems to me that words like “racist” or “privilege” have the same sociological function that “blasphemer” or “heretic” had about 1,000 years ago. Not saying that SJ is like religion, but that it looks like they suffer from a lot of the same in-group/out-group dynamics.

    Though I have to admit, reading Tertullian talking about (the heretic) Marcion is a lot like reading the snark on a lot of Jezebel articles.

    • Salem says:

      Not saying that SJ is like religion

      To be clear, I am saying that SJ is just like religion.

    • Athrelon says:

      Note also that debates within a religion tend to be “limited warfare” and take place within an accepted framework. You might accuse your enemies of being blasphemers, but you wouldn’t say they’re dumb and materialism is clearly a better framework, nor would you coordinate with a secular King of Italy and help him annex the Papal States. This means that the kernel of the religion is in some sense still operative; at minimum you must say that it constrains the debates somewhat, restricting it from being a total free-for-all random walk. (At maximum, there’s this fascinating article claiming that God uses intra-Church political struggles to deliver more bits of theological information to mankind.)

      Similarly, the vicious court politics between women and trans-folk still take place within a particular meme called “social justice,” and that meme has a particular logic that drives the movement – it’s not all random noise. It’s overly dismissive to downplay SJW shenanigans as merely playing directionless monkey politics, even if the actual humans are just executing their “monkey politics” algorithms.

      The logic of social justice – the deep logic, not the surface rationalizations, has its own ideas about the kinds of group-coordination and status dynamics that it wants to reinforce. And if the examples of the Catholic Church and Communism tell us anything, it’s that ideologies can make pretty big dents in the world even if their constituent humans are a bunch of bickering politickers.

      • Athrelon says:

        “Similarly, the vicious court politics between women and trans-folk”

        By the way, as an aficionado of Chinese history, you have no idea how hard it was for me to stop my reflex to type “court politics between concubines and eunuchs.”

        • Multiheaded says:

          You are out of line. Protip: mentioning something about the historical high status of said groups will make it worse.

          (Good point in the parent, though!)

        • Athrelon says:

          I disagree with shifting commenting norms in that direction. I have, however, clarified the quip to emphasize the historical side, to make it extra-hard to interpret it in an offensive way.

        • bad at pseudonyms sorry says:

          You are in line. Please fill your comments with Chinese history analogies. There’s probably other aficionados, and I know our host has read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is getting there.

        • lmm says:

          I played Koihime Musou which is basically the same as reading romance of the three kingdoms, right?

    • AspiringRationalist says:

      See also What You Can’t Say, an excellent essay about how these terms get abused in this way.

      • Typhon says:

        Yes, a truly wonderful text. I hesitated to mention it in my other comment and I thought that most people here already know about it, but in case someone hasn’t, it’s a must-read (as are many of Paul Graham’s essays).

  8. Anonymous52 says:

    When the Social Justice people accuse rationalists of “Inserting themselves into conversations where they shouldn’t be”, I think what is happening is that we are using the word “conversation” differently.

    To a social justice person, any discussion about race is part of “the conversation”, and that conversation belongs to them and them alone.

    For rationalists, a conversation is an attempt to exchange information, share likelihood ratios and evaluate arguments to make each participant’s map correspond better to the territory.

    By having a discussion about race or gender on LessWrong or SlateStarCodex, we are in no sense intruding in anybody else’s conversation in the rationalist sense of the word. We are however intruding in the conversation in the first sense of the word. The social justice movement are attempting to shame us into silence, as evidenced by Apophemi and Arthur Chu.

    By insisting that the “conversation” belongs to the social justice movement, and making it impossible to discuss these issues honestly even in the privacy of our own corner of the blogosphere, the social justice movement has the effect of making it shameful to even attempt to increase the map-territory correspondence. Obviously, any group of people whose fundamental values are summed up by the Litany of Tarski is going to find that offensive.

    • James James says:

      Interesting idea!

    • von Kalifornen says:

      I’d agree with this. It’s a bit worse because in general, only the SJ movement and those such as Mr. Alexander who take inspiration from them have an accurate view of gender politics or power relations — stepping outside the box is an eternal cringe. And yet, they have so many problems.

      The lowest depth is the postcolonialist queer who imagines their knowledge of themself to be perfect (correct) and their knowledge of Miss Traditionalist Straight to also be perfect (so, so wrong, though they often know things that she does not.) The otherness with which the likes of the great Ozy Frantz refer to us sons of heteronormativity is refreshing.

      • bad at pseudonyms sorry says:

        Ozy was the only intellectually honest gender-issues blogger I’m aware of, and I hope they stopped freely rather than being browbeaten into it.

        • von Kalifornen says:

          I’m afraid I must inform you that hope is an empty dream. Ozy still blogs, but in a personal way, having largely fled from feminist discourse.

        • Zorgon says:

          This is very sad news indeed. Zhe’s been my favourite writer on the subject for quite some time and getting to interact with hir on here* is one of the things I most like about SSC alongside SA’s clarity.

          *pun not intentional

    • Drake. says:

      i’m not sure whether i agree to this or not, but – regardless of its accuracy – it could have been phrased in a less polarizing way. i don’t think any sj-inclined person here would consciously endorse the first definition, nor buy into a collective trying to ‘shame us into silence’. the pro-ingroup language was a little jarring as well, and i’d imagine it’d be even more so to an outgroup reader.

  9. J Arcane says:

    Hrm.

    I feel like I agree and disagree with this, and I’m having difficulty pinning down exactly where.

    In one sense, I absolutely agree that you are correct about the use of these as weapons. I’d even tentatively agree that it may even be a majority.

    On the other hand, there’s a part of this that smells a little funny to me. Part of this is just that I don’t know that Sterling was the most sympathetic example you could have used, but also because it smells almost a little bit like the ‘worst argument in the world.’ (incidentally the article that made me a regular reader here.) I will attempt to explain why.

    There is an actual, original definition of privilege as a sociological concept (soft ‘sciences’ I know, but…) And it is, I think, a useful one, and whose presence doesn’t make it a good fit for an analogy to racism. ‘Privilege’ as a concept merely denotes those aspects of life that are inherently advantaged because of that privilege, and which may go unconsidered because they are often largely invisible to those within it. The example that brought the concept to clarity in my personal experiences was seeing the difference between my wife going into a tabletop hobby store, and me going in with her at the same time. She will experience hassles in that environment that I never even considered, simply because I’m male, so I never had to deal with them.

    So whereas the case of racism does seem like a clear case of deliberate and convenient reclassification, so does privilege, but in a very different way. And I feel like consigning it to suspicion solely because of the rampant abuse of it is, if anything, giving those abusers of language exactly the weapon they want. It’s granting them their erroneous definition as read.

    It starts reading like the ‘these people used X, and they did awful horrible things, so how can you dare use X!’ Which perhaps may not have been your intention, but it did come across a bit that way.

    • Randy M says:

      If you go to a busy playground alone, you are likely to experience hassles as well. Is this due to the advantages society confers upon mothers?

      • J Arcane says:

        Yes.

        Or at least, due to structural and societal expectations that produce that advantage.

        ‘Everyone’s a little bit privileged’ works just as well as a phrase, because it is true, at least for most anyone in Western first-world society (I struggle to imagine what social privilege is afforded being a starving African child, for instance).

        Though, as a male who has literally never once experienced that supposed effect, I confess to finding it a bit hard to swallow as anything more than ‘straw oppression’.

        • Zorgon says:

          Speaking as the father of a young girl, I can say this: If that’s “straw oppression”, straw has got a whole lot harder lately.

          • J Arcane says:

            Fair enough. I would never presume to dismiss your experiences, and besides which, bickering about the frequency of such experiences is besides the point.

            The key thing about ‘everyone’s a little bit privileged’, and indeed the concept of privilege, is that they are independent variables.

            Think of them in terms of economic advantages. I might have some. You might have some. They remain independent factors, except in so far as I might have more of them than you, or vice versa. My having Advantage A has no bearing on the reality of your Advantage B, and there is also an onus to be careful when comparing advantages that they are actually equivalent.

            What I *think* erroneous examples like the one in the image that commences this post are trying to get at is addressing the ‘but you also Y!’ type arguments preemptively.

            You probably know the form: Person A says ‘you did X!’ Person B is angry, and their defense, retorts with, ‘But you did Y!’ regardless of whether Y is even applicable. But by drawing that equivalence, in suggesting an imagined injustice or hypocrisy on the part of Person A, the fight is now about that, and Person B, if successful, gets to pretend X never happened.

            Only privilege doesn’t work that way, anymore than my factory only being able to produce 20 shoes an hour is somehow disregarded by your factory paying $0.30 less an hour for your workers. It’s apples and oranges, but if you shout it right when you’re both angry in a boardroom somewhere, it *sounds* valid at the time, and shuts down the conversation either through back and forth bickering or straight diversion.

        • Randy M says:

          >I struggle to imagine what social privilege is afforded being a starving African child, for instance

          Very little, I assume, but I also assume the social challenges are not of their immediate concern.

          >Though, as a male who has literally never once experienced that supposed effect, I confess to finding it a bit hard to swallow as anything more than ‘straw oppression’.

          As opposed to a bit of unwanted leering in a game store? I think its comprable.

        • Randy M, you don’t know what J Arcane’s wife was putting up with at the game store. It might have been “a bit of unwanted leering”. It might have been being ignored. It might have been being automatically guided toward games she wasn’t interested in.

          J Arcane, if you don’t mind, what actually happened?

        • Randy M says:

          Well, true, I was going off of my wife’s experiences going to a game store alone, which were not close to innuedos of being a pedophile kidnapper.

        • Kaminiwa says:

          I’ve had someone scream that I was a pedophile for talking to their kid. It was blatantly obvious that he had a grudge against mom and didn’t like that I was helping watch her kid.

          But, even dismissing 100% the chance he really did think I was a pedophile it still remains that:

          (a) it worked and I got right the fuck out of THAT situation

          and (b) he’d been culturally primed to EXPECT it to work

          (because, by and large, people do not make bizarre, ineffective threats – no one has ever threatened to report me to the CDC, or accused me of having a British accent)

          So, at least on the west coast of the United States, it seems sufficiently culturally entrenched as to be a readily available weapon.

        • MugaSofer says:

          @J Arcane:

          “Think of them in terms of economic advantages. I might have some. You might have some. They remain independent factors, except in so far as I might have more of them than you, or vice versa. My having Advantage A has no bearing on the reality of your Advantage B, and there is also an onus to be careful when comparing advantages that they are actually equivalent.

          That would be the motte. It is true, and a valuable concept. It is also a trick.

          Read some of the links Scott posted above, if you can’t be bothered to use Google.

          There are several lengthy tracts helpfully explaining why anyone who implies someone not straight/white/cismale might have some is evil, and possibly mentally ill.

          They do so by pointing out excellent examples of straight/white/cismale “privilege”, by your definition. They then declare that this proves no-one else can have any. Because there can only be one “privileged” group on any axis.

          Assuming your definition, as you point out, this is utter gibberish. Steelmanning it, they are referring to a separate concept- “the bad guy”, basically. But that concept does not seem very … useful … to be discussing. It seems kind of underhanded, even.

          And why exactly do they equivocate between the two, instead of speaking clearly?

          Because “this group are the bad guy who is oppressing us” is the bailey. And your definition is the motte.

    • “There is an actual, original definition of privilege as a sociological concept (soft ‘sciences’ I know, but…) And it is, I think, a useful one, and whose presence doesn’t make it a good fit for an analogy to racism. ‘Privilege’ as a concept merely denotes those aspects of life that are inherently advantaged because of that privilege, and which may go unconsidered because they are often largely invisible to those within it.”

      What makes something “advantaged”. Who decides? Do we take genetic differences and other differences between people into account when considering outcomes? More importantly even if we can agree on some definition of advantage how do we find and weigh all of these “advantages” to know if one person is more advantaged overall? (Hint: we can’t, they’re not quantifiable so the concept of overall “privilege” used in sociology is useless) Sociology isn’t usually soft science, it’s just nonsense.

      • anon says:

        Not quantifiable, therefore useless. That’s a terrible way to think. Quantifying is nice, but can only be done within a preexisting framework of general reason.

        Additionally, if you can’t quantify something that has real effects, you’re probably not trying hard enough. Perfect quantification is impossible in any field, and estimates in sociology will be worse than in other fields, but truth can still be approached through broad strokes.

      • Kaminiwa says:

        Quality of life scores would be the most obvious way to quantify it. If all, or even most, minorities demonstrate lower quality of life, it suggests there’s probably merit to the idea of privilege.

        Obviously these observations are still only useful to the sample considered, but it’d still be rather interesting to study 🙂

        • xachariah says:

          This is treating “privilege” rather monolythically, which is not the most useful way of viewing the concept. When people use the term “xxx privilege”, they’re referring to a very complex web of different forms of advantage, where that advantage is generally invisible to the person being advantaged. These privileges occur in many different domains, and those who are advantaged in one domain may find themselves disadvantaged in another. It’s not a linear roadmap.

          Thus, it’s probably better to quantify it in specific domains rather than attempting to look at total life outcomes. Many instances of privilege are not fuzzy at all and we have solid statistics on them, whether that’s in terms of wealth accumulation, job prospects, education prospects, (sexual) assault risk, conviction rates, arrest rates, housing discrimination. Most specific forms of privilege have been studied and quantified, often repeatedly and in various contexts. Some of those statistics are subject to disagreement, as is any area of study. But the fact that social justice takes on many of the trappings of a lot of ‘soft science’ doesn’t mean that there’s no hard(er) science there.

        • Kaminiwa says:

          @xachariah

          My point was that if their actual “Quality of Life” hasn’t declined, then either the privileges are rather trivial to the bigger picture, or are being balanced out. Just because two groups have different privileges doesn’t mean one is better off.

          I fully expect you’d find that minorities tend to do worse, of course. I think there’s a lot of important privileges, and that the balance favors the rich-white-male stereotype.

      • David Moss says:

        Who said that the point was to decide which individuals are advantaged simpliciter or the most advantaged?

        The context where “advantage” would be fruitfully employed is in saying that some group (those with characteristic x) are advantaged in some respect to some other group (those without characteristic x or with characteristic y). So we can easily identify (and to some extent quantify) the disadvantage of black job-seekers, where we find that fake CVs sent out with stereotypical black-sounding name receive fewer responses than identical CVs with white names, or if we find that expert evaluators evaluate the same piece of music much more negatively if they are told that it is played by a female musician than a man and so on.

      • adsd says:

        anything that is not quantifiable is nonsense?

        Scientismist fool!

  10. Dave says:

    For what it’s worth, I agree completely that this “motte-and-bailey doctrine,” or “strategic equivocation,” or however we want to label it, is something common in social justice subcultures. Also, as you suggest, in religious subcultures.

    I would add that it’s also common among liberals, conservatives, progressives, reactionaries, communists, libertarians, Jews, Christians, atheists…

    Hm. Actually, it might be easier to list groups who _don’t_ engage in this practice.

    Of course, intensity varies.

    And I agree with you that in the social justice case the “motte” in question is the social power that accrues from being able to identify certain individuals and actions as racist, sexist, etc. (we can label this activity “calling out oppression” or “attacking white men” depending on which tribe we want to piss off.)

    Other groups have other mottes.

    I’m not entirely sure what follows from this.

    • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

      Key phrase here: “intensity varies”

      Saying ‘both groups do it!’ without looking at the ‘intensity’ or centrality of the practise is to practice equivocation. It obscures a useful comparison with a useless trusim.

      • Dave says:

        I acknowledge that you consider it obscurantist, and I appreciate why, though I don’t agree.

        If the entire discussion were about how universal this kind of “motte-and-bailey doctrine” was and how there’s no distinction to be made between different groups that engage in it, I might feel compelled to stress that while yes it’s universal (which is is), actually intensity varies and that matters (which it does).

        In the actual case, where the entire discussion is about how the social justice movement engages in it and what that implies about the social justice movement, I instead felt compelled to stress that while yes intensity varies (which it does), actually this is pretty universal and that matters (which it is and does).

        Edit: Oh, and I’m not sure who you consider “both groups” here. SJ activists are one group, I assume. Is the other group “everyone else”? “Rationalists”? “Sensible people”? Did you not really mean “both” but rather “all”?

        • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

          I probably should have said all, just that it’s hard to imagine non-SJ/Intersectional people who both know about them and aren’t opposed to them.

          Not that their ideas are too crazy, after all much smarter people have believed much stupider things, just that they are so hostile to everyone outside of their clique it’s hard to see anyone putting up with them.

    • James says:

      The problems with the social justice movement are the problems with humans in general.

  11. Hrothgar says:

    Scott, this post is great. Thank you.

  12. Hainish says:

    To be fair, the people who use the teal-blue-circle definition of racism do have other words they use to describe what other folks use the red-circle definition for (namely, bigotry and prejudice). What annoys me is that when an outsider uses the red-circle definition, the conversation becomes all about the fact that they defined racism incorrectly.

    (Also, I’m not sure that linguistic prescriptivism is really all that terrible.)

    • Dave says:

      Yes.

      That said, I have at times in my life tried to nip the labeling argument in the bud by gently suggesting that while yes, OK, the original commenter had perhaps used “racism” to refer to what is more precisely described as “bigotry” or “prejudice,” could we maybe devote some bandwidth to the actual claim being made about the referent, and not just the label being used?

      I don’t do that much anymore.

      • Zorgon says:

        As Scott mentions above, virtually no SJ community will permit any discussion which presents their own “oppressed” group as being in any way bigoted or prejudiced. Hence rapid derailment of discussions of black-on-white prejudice (even violent incidents) into definitional arguments; the alternative is admitting that black people do bad things to white people, and that’s unacceptable. It’s not an accident, it’s an in-group defence mechanism.

        (By the tone of your post I suspect you already knew this, but I figure it bears stating outright.)

        • Mark says:

          As Scott mentions above, virtually no SJ community will permit any discussion which presents their own “oppressed” group as being in any way bigoted or prejudiced.

          That’s not true at all. Many if not most SJW’s I’ve seen typically bend over backwards to point out how oppressive their oppressed minorities are to other, even more oppressed minorities – see feminists excoriating Sheryl Sandberg for her “white feminism” or Suey Park and co. constantly accusing Asians of throwing black people under the bus in order to maintain “model minority” status. The cynic inside me would say, in fact, that complaining loudly about your own group’s lack of intersectionality is an important way to build SJW cred, especially if you fall into one of the relatively more privileged buckets.

          They just won’t permit discussion that suggests they’re unfairly bigoted against less oppressed groups. And if you’re complaining about X’s oppression of Y, you’d better be at least as oppressed as X. (So no white men criticizing Asians for being racist against black people or conservative Muslims cultures for being misogynistic.)

        • Zorgon says:

          Good point Mark, I’d forgotten about that particular bit of virtue signalling. It is, indeed, always about the gradient, rather than the boundary.

        • Randy M says:

          >see feminists excoriating Sheryl Sandberg for her “white feminism” or Suey Park and co. constantly accusing Asians of throwing black people under the bus in order to maintain “model minority” status.

          Saying a white woman is racist may answer Zorgon’s point, but I don’t think it is particularly relevant, as it is still compatible with the implied premises that only and all white people can be racist. Similarly, you can perhaps find examples of feminists calling out black men for sexism, because that supports the “all men are sexist” meme. Find examples of feminists calling out women for anti-male bigotry, or social justice groups pointing out blacks can be bigoted against whites.

          Basically, racisms and sexism and other isms are defined by social status and hierarchy such as to make upwards directed oppression impossible, as the SJ-ers tell it. And other uses are confusing these terms with bigotry that is non-directional. Fine, if you want to have a conversation on those terms, so be it, but you haven’t proven that you (not anyone in particular) will even admit that up-status bigotry exists or can be a problem.

        • Mark says:

          I didn’t bring up Sandberg as an anomalous example of a feminist who just happens to be racist (according to SJW’s, anyway). I brought her up because she was help up as representative of much broader phenomenon dubbed “white feminism.” According to the feminists who criticized Sandberg, there’s an entire class of women feminists who are absolutely racist to the core, and whose bigotry is foundational to their entire feminist ideology and praxis. Very similar to the consensus on trans-exclusionary radical feminism. I don’t think anyone on the left says anything comparable about black men vis-a-vis misogyny.

          But I already stated that there’s a hierarchy of who is allowed to criticize whom for bigotry. SJW’s are happy to allow people to “punch up” but not “punch down,” to borrow some of their favored terminology from another context. And what counts as “down” vs. “up” depends entirely on your identity.

    • Nornagest says:

      I would be more impressed with this line of thought if I’d ever seen an attack on bigotry and prejudice coming from the proponents of blue-circle racism, or an analysis of how they work, or an attribution to them of any social ills that might otherwise be attributed to racism.

      Which, needless to say, I haven’t.

      • xachariah says:

        Part of the reason for that is that it lies outside of their interests. Because they’re talking about blue-circle racism, prejudice and bigotry are so mundane/everpresent that talking about them distracts from blue-circle racism. Note that this isn’t just a case of selective anger. You don’t see blue-circle people ganging up on nazis or Klansmen either because, well, it’s just not interesting. “Prejudice bad”, well sure. The point where it gets interesting for social justice is well beyond “prejudice”, though.

        I’m not sure what you mean by “social ills that might otherwise be attributed to racism”. Once prejudice reaches a point where it is (or causes) a social ill, social justice theory will generally start including it as part of an -ism. This has happened with many “men’s rights” issues, which are within social justice seen as genuine problems caused by the same structural sexism/privilege/gender roles that limit women.

        Can you name a specific example of an area you think social justice should address but doesn’t because it doesn’t fall under blue-circle racism?

    • Anonymous5 says:

      I don’t really get why Scott hasn’t explored the following since he understands the reasoning behind it and has put it well elsewhere.

      Part of the problem is that people using what you call “red-circle” definition aren’t using it the way Scott wants them to either, per this blog post.

      Racism in that definition is what Scott calls the “worst argument in the world” applied to race.

      The red-circle definition of racism is not just “subconscious biases” or something similar. That’s also not a great definition because it leaves an awful lot out. Scott understands what he calls the “worst argument in the world” and racism is a poster example of that, so as far as definitions go that is really worth including.

      In this whole analogy, just to be clear, the teal-blue circle definition as a reference point is still the “structural oppression” definition.

  13. Adam says:

    But the sun ISN’T a mass of incandescent gas!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA&feature=kp

    Clearly the postmodernists were right.

  14. Patrick Robotham says:

    Ah! That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been motte-and-baileying the term “Social Justice”. The motte is, to borrow a phrase from Moldbug, ‘Universalism”. The bailey is all the paranoia and hostility and Arthur Chu-ishness that Scott’s been criticizing.

    As for touching nerves, this seems a corollary of the fact that historically-oppressed-groups jealously guard their status. This is because previous lowerings of status, aka “othering”, led to Bad Things happening.

    Words like “racism”, “privilege”, etc. are “boo words”. They have huge negative connotations (though they can be used with care to denote things.) Calling you a racist is an attack on your status, and historically othered groups are more sensitive about their group status than historically “normal” groups.

    • Katie says:

      This makes a lot of sense from a social-survival perspective. If you are high status, taking the hit from being called racist or the like is something you can usually afford. Low status individuals (which here means members of an oppressed group) don’t have as far down to fall, and not as many resources to fall back on if they are cast out of their in group, and thus must more viciously defend against the claims that would lower them further. Of course, it’s not a good thing, but it adds some explanatory (and predictive) power based on this being a naive strong defense instead of calculated strong offense (eg weapons).

  15. kappa says:

    We find the same unexpected pattern with racism. We all know everyone is racist, because racism just means you have unconscious biases and expectations. Everyone is a little bit racist.

    People of color seem to be part of “everyone”, and they seem likely to have the same sort of in-group identification as all other humans.

    As far as I remember – I don’t have a cite on hand – the studies showing white people react in subconsciously racist ways wrt non-white people have not shown the reverse, and may even have indicated that non-white people also react in subconsciously racist ways wrt non-white people, although possibly not to the same extent – my memory isn’t clear on the details.

    If that’s the case, then of the people you quoted in the ensuing paragraph, those who are more or less saying “the things people call ‘reverse racism’ and ‘racism against white people’ are fundamentally different and less dangerous/pervasive phenomena than the rest of the things we call ‘racism’, to an extent that merits our habitual exclusion of them from the term” seem to be pretty well supported against your criticism. (And even if it isn’t, I think the exclusion has other merits, but those depend on things I am having trouble remembering and expressing in detail right now.)

    Anybody know where to find the science?

    • Martin says:

      Well, there’s the doll experiments, for one:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_and_Mamie_Clark#Doll_experiments

      The child was then asked questions inquiring as to which one is the doll they would play with, which one is the nice doll, which one looks bad, which one has the nicer color, etc. The experiment showed a clear preference for the white doll among all children in the study. These findings exposed internalized racism in African-American children, self-hatred that was more acute among children attending segregated schools.

      In 2006 filmmaker Kiri Davis recreated the doll study (…) When Davis repeated the experiment 15 out of 21 children also choose the white dolls over the black, giving similar reasons as the original subjects, associating white with being “pretty” or “good” and black with “ugly” or “bad”.

      • That’s because the ‘structural advantage’ of whiteness is essential and not constructed. Vonnegut only missed the ‘handicap’ of universal blackface.

      • George says:

        The doll experiments are bunk. The white dolls were nice, store-bought toys, and the black ones were handmade.

        • Were nice mass-produced black dolls available?

        • Martin says:

          What’s your basis for claiming that? I’m looking at pictures from the original doll test and video from two later doll tests. As far as I can tell, there’s no relevant difference between any of the dolls except the color.

          Here’s a screen grab, judge for yourself:
          http://i.imgur.com/KI26EMk.png

        • nydwracu says:

          That would present its own problems if white and black babies tend to look different. If you took a picture of a white guy and photoshopped it to make him look black, or vice versa, it would probably look weird, since different population groups have different facial structures.

          Even if there’s no difference, there’s a somewhat stylized white-baby archetype that that doll looks like, so it could be that people are reacting the way they would if they were shown a picture of Rudolph with a green nose.

    • Multiheaded says:

      This was the first thing that jumped out at me while reading this post, and it seems very important, because it cleaves right to the core of vulgar sjw-ism. I still maintain that, while Scott exposes various abuses of language and social influence, he doesn’t successfully grapple with sjw-ism’s key articles (“it’s evil and bad-faith to attempt impartiality when everything is skewed according to predictable laws”). There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence for those.

      • von Kalifornen says:

        I agree with that statement, though I cannot say whether I agree with what you actually mean. (This is a substantial part of what I mean by the claim that only SJ people understand power relations).

        I do think that letting everybody have a ‘home field’ would be beneficial.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        This is too interesting a lead to let sit; I vote for an expanded presentation of the argument, either here or in a link.

        Does he at least kinda grapple with what you’re talking about in http://squid314.livejournal.com/354385.html, particularly under ‘The Obvious Liberal and Conservative Responses’?

      • suntzuanime says:

        The way to deal with predictable skewing is to take your impartiality up a meta-level, not give up on the idea.

        • anon says:

          This. I’ve heard lots of people claim that fairness is a concept intrinsically rooted in white privilege. While I don’t think fairness is important or an objective concept, the idea that we should destroy everything associated with past white supremacy is ridiculous and terrifying. Yet that’s exactly what pessimists/radicals like Wilderson assert must happen.

        • von Kalifornen says:

          How does fairness have anything to do with race at all? That sounds like the people who assume that straight white men must be wicked to each other. Is it just anarchy?

        • anon says:

          The idea is that if you try to be fair, but you’re within a society that skews everything towards white males, then your attempt at fairness will miss and deepen oppression. And fairness/justice is an ideology invented by white men who owned slaves, therefore blah blah blah.

    • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

      This seems to be conflating two different phenomenon.

      The first is that members of all races generally prefer to associate with other members of their own race. This is pretty well studied; even infants prefer members of their own race and have difficulty differentiating between individuals of other races. Less well established but still convincing is the evidence that greater racial diversity reduces trust and increases stress within a social group. This would be the “everyone is a little bit racist” segment and the likely source of most so-called micro-aggressions.

      The second is that members of all races generally have poor opinions of american blacks (in europe replace with gypsies). This is less well studied, or at least studied more poorly, but still very likely to be true. This would be the “learned prejudice” segment, although personally I would dispute that from a bayesian perspective it is a fairly rational prior.

      You could probably eliminate most of the confusion with the term racism by just separating out natural distaste for outsiders and learned prejudice, but then again that would mean neutering most of the SJ arsenal so it’s unlikely to catch on.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      On some psychological effects, blacks show pro-black bias; on others they show pro-white bias or are neutral.

      For examples of the former, blacks more likely to use self-serving attributions to explains behaviors of black vs. white people, on explicit measure of ethnic preference, blacks explicitly report much stronger liking of blacks than whites, blacks with high ethnic identity primed with ingroup prime quicker to respond to positive traits than those primed with outgroup prime (1), blacks have an easier time distinguishing members of their own race from members of other races (2), blacks more likely to convict whites and acquit blacks in controlled mock trials, (3), blacks more likely to show neural response to pain of other blacks rather than whites (4), blacks more likely to believe blacks than whites are smiling (5), blacks more likely to prefer reading stories about other blacks or stories that portray whites negatively (6), as blacks’ ethnic identity increases they are more likely to buy products advertised by blacks rather than whites (7) et cetera.

      It is true that implicit association tests and some other experiments find blacks showing no or inconsistent bias. One common explanation for this that I find reasonable is that blacks have a pro-white bias instilled by society versus a pro-black bias instilled by the in-group effect, which usually cancel out.

      (I also note how complicated it is to attribute IATs to a “pro-white bias” in the way people are likely to think. Suppose you’re more likely to associate the word “joy” or “love” with white people and “angry” or “bad” with black people. This could be because you hate black people. Or it could be because black people are associated with lots of negative-valence stuff – poverty, racism, prison, et cetera – in your mind, which naturally predisposes you to sad thoughts. The idea “black people are unfortunate and unhappy” is more than enough to get you your IAT results. But this is something black people should think as often or more often than white people do.)

      I suspect the same combination of social effect and in-group effect is true of gender, but I have a hard time finding it from the research. What we actually get is the so-called Women Are Wonderful Effect (real scientific name!): “Both male and female participants tend to assign exceptionally positive traits to the female gender with female participants showing a far more pronounced bias.” See also here: “women’s automatic ingroup preference for women is remarkably stronger than men’s preference for men.”

      • suntzuanime says:

        So men are oppressed in roughly the same way as blacks, you’re saying?

        • Mark James says:

          No, it’s not what he is saying at all. Also, this is exactly the type of deliberately dishonest exaggeration of someone else’s argument that Scott mentioned in his original post.

          Why don’t you try reading and understanding the whole of what Scott posted, and responding to that instead of simplifying it down to a dumb, clearly flawed cliche?

        • suntzuanime says:

          Accidentally dishonest if at all. The “women are wonderful” effect sounds a lot to me like the famous test where you give children a black doll and a white doll and even the black children have nicer things to say about the white doll.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          Comparing those two effects is a reasonable observation, but comparing the overall oppressions does not follow and is a predictably inflammatory statement (easily predictable to me, anyway).

        • xachariah says:

          The presence of a “women are wonderful” effect is not the same as oppression, and doesn’t even imply oppression. It merely says something about the way society views one gender versus the other in specific circumstances. But the “women are wonderful” effect does not imply that those feelings are acted upon, nor that if they were acted upon they’d constitute oppression, nor that if it would constitute oppression, that that would dominate other forms of gender oppression.

          To be fair, the other studies involving race don’t imply those things, either. But all of these studies are merely examples of some cognitive effects of the way we’ve structured our society. They are not complete or even semi-complete theories of oppression.

      • Anonymous5 says:

        There’s also the problem that it’s most likely implicit association tests outright don’t work. They’re all random noise, with small sample sizes or p-value hacking doing the lifting.

        Old people have too slow of reaction times to test in a mathematically reliable way at all, and young people can often fake iats to get whatever outcomes they want.

        It’s frustrating to see you criticize horrible pseudoscience in various other blog posts and then not critically examine other things in questionable fields like psychology.

        That goes for a lot of things in social priming research (see Rolf Zwaan’s blog or anything similar) as well.

        • I’ve wondered whether or how much IATs correlate with behavior.

        • Army1987 says:

          I dunno, when I took a bunch of IATs I could *feel* that “good or elderly” vs “bad or young” felt less natural than “good or young” vs “bad or elderly”. In most cases after I finished the test I could guess its result to within one or two points on the seven-point scale.

          (FWIW, I was in my late teens or early twenties when I took them.)

        • MugaSofer says:

          Cite?

        • Harald K says:

          Like IQ tests, IA tests measure something, but it’s not entirely clear what they’re actually measuring – or that it is what they explicitly or implicitly claim to be measuring.

          The explicit claims seem to be the motte and the implicit ones the bailey. As it is with IQ tests too.

        • Douglas Knight says:

          Harald, what are the unsupported implicit claims about IQ tests? Have you actually tried looking to see if they have been tested?

    • MugaSofer says:

      Wait, yeah. I remember that too.

      The same holds for unconscious sexism and e.g. treating the same resumes with female names attached as worse. (I think.)

  16. Corey says:

    the sun is a mass of incandescent gas

    I think you mean the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma.

  17. Charlie says:

    Allow me to demonstrate a new and unusual form of privilege:

    I have only one friend who’s really into this SJ stuff, is on tumbler alla time, et c. And we can still hang out, and we pretty much just don’t talk about it anymore. The only even slightly social justice related thing on my facebook feed for the last week is this article about prison conditions.

    On the one had, white male privilege is the privilege to not have to worry about this stuff. On the other hand, I have basically the same facebook group as my housemate – what makes her and I similar and you different is not race or gender but social group and possibly facebook-usage habits.

    I agree that you have it worse than me, not just because of random variation but because of structural factors set in motion long ago. But from my position of privilege, it seems like you’re also seeking this stuff out.

    A statistical argument: if you’re on the right end of some social-justice-people-exposure bell curve, then the most likely cause is that you’re slightly to the right on multiple independent causes of social-justice-person-exposure.

    If this is trivializing your pain, I’m sorry, and will try not to do it again.

    • Anon says:

      Can’t speak for Scott hear, but for my own part, I do seek it out, because, for all that the movement is diseased, I do care about its nominal goals. It matters to me on a deep and fundamental level that, eg, women are actively discouraged from going into technology, etc. I’m not going to stay away from feminism just because a lot of people doing it are a little bit evil.

      • Viliam Búr says:

        Yeah, there are good parts and bad parts. I support equality, and oppose domestic violence and genital mutilation. So why shouldn’t I be interested in a movement which already did some work and started a social debate about this all? Many people with similar values are already there. Should I reinvent the wheel?

        But then we have these crazy ideas that we shouldn’t speak about male victims of domestic violence or rape or genital mutilation, because that somehow detracts from the suffering of female victims; that hating other people because of their gender or race is bad, but only when white men do it; and that internet bullying or spreading false statistics is the most compassionate and enlightened form of human communication.

        So, could we (the wide public, not readers of this blog) somehow avoid the package-deal fallacy, keep the good parts and throw away the bad parts? Because the good parts are worth preserving, but on the internet the bad parts seem to thrive better.

      • nydwracu says:

        It matters to me on a deep and fundamental level that, eg, women are actively discouraged from going into technology, etc.

        Why?

        • Scott F says:

          Apart from all of the “I still care about the original meaning of equality” responses, there are plenty of good reasons to still care.

          One interesting one is a kind of aesthetic appreciation of “the realisation of potential”. You see someone like Turing and all his achievements, and you wonder if he could have reached even greater heights had he not been persecuted for his sexuality. Similar for women in tech: I see someone like Marissa Mayer and all she has achieved as spokeswoman for Google and CEO of Yahoo, and I wonder what she could have achieved if she faced the same obstacles that Larry Page, Sergey Brin, or Paul Graham faced, rather than a comparatively greater set of obstacles because of sexism in tech.

        • Anon says:

          Because during my time as a computer science TA at a top-ten university, precisely 0 of the men in the top decile of students switched majors, and over half of the top decile women did.

          And because I care about my sister, and the only reason she’s doing her doctorate in chemistry instead of computer science is because she was repeatedly and actively discouraged from doing so.

        • Devin F says:

          Anon-

          Why did the women switch out of computer science? Did they state any reasons?

      • It matters to me on a deep and fundamental level that, eg, women are actively discouraged from going into technology, etc.

        I see a lot of women affirmative actioned into technology who really should not be there. Notoriously, first year computer science is full of women who are just not smart enough, and leave over the course of the year because they just cannot do the work.

        Is this not active encouragement of women to go into technology?

        Any activity that selects for smart people is going to under represent women, because not that many women will be able to do it. The only way to fix the problem is to do what Google and our leading universities have wound up doing, and stop selecting for smarts.

        • dublin says:

          This doesn’t just crowd out capable men – it also means that the men who remain have to deal with a curriculum that’s dumbed down in a desperate attempt not to weed out the women. It doesn’t usually work, but they tend to take that as just a sign that they need to try harder.

        • Anonymous says:

          I see a lot of women affirmative actioned into technology who really should not be there. Notoriously, first year computer science is full of women who are just not smart enough, and leave over the course of the year because they just cannot do the work.

          It would be interesting to see whether female CompSci undergrads really do have a different major-change rate than their male peers. Because I’m an ex-Compsci major, and I’ve run into a couple other ex-Compsci majors at my school who went into other fields because it wasn’t for them, and the math was too abstract. I do love the irony that I ended up in GIS, which involves some more compsci concepts and programming languages. Many of the best people at geospatial programming I know are women, including several of my professors.
          You bring up first-year college students, but I feel this is an invalid example because a lot of students change their majors to begin with! How are we going to find the women who are good at computer science? By putting a lot of them through first-year computer science and seeing which ones have the knack and the passion.
          Edit: Andy here again. Sorry.

        • Alrenous says:

          Are Gawker and its ilk genuinely interested in bringing women into technology? Do they genuinely like either (a) (other) women, or (b) technology? Because it would sure seem, to the uneducated observer, that the actual effect of their actual actions is to scare women away from programming careers – on the grounds that, if they so much as master MySQL, they will be instantly raped by a pack of Satan-worshipping “brogrammers.”

          Do you know what women who actually want to help other women learn programming look like? They look like this. Sexist, check. Probably illegal, check. Recognizing that women are different from men in more areas than the chest compartment, check.

        • Anon says:

          >I see a lot of women affirmative actioned into technology who really should not be there. Notoriously, first year computer science is full of women who are just not smart enough, and leave over the course of the year because they just cannot do the work.

          As a TA, so did I! Perhaps even disproportionately more so than men.

          > Is this not active encouragement of women to go into technology?

          Of a sort. Althoug I’m more concerned about it at age 10 – the age at which all of the competent men in my classes started learning – than at age 20.

          > Any activity that selects for smart people is going to under represent women, because not that many women will be able to do it. The only way to fix the problem is to do what Google and our leading universities have wound up doing, and stop selecting for smarts.

          I don’t think that this adequately accounts for the current state of affairs.

          As to the question of whether or not women are discouraged from entering technology, I can only say that the experience of those close to me (I tend to think specifically of my sister here, with whom I’ve always been quite close and who is at least as smart as I am) does not seem to agree with your experience.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      “But from my position of privilege, it seems like you’re also seeking this stuff out.”

      Well, just to give an example, I ran into that racism school png on the top of this post on Ozy’s Tumblr.

      I agree that hanging out with Ozy and reading Tumblr are, like, risk factors, but ze’s my girlfriend and so really hard to avoid!

      • lmm says:

        I am all for calling people whatever they prefer, but surely a “girlfriend” is a “she” because, like, that’s what the grammar means. It makes the sentence hard to parse otherwise.

        • Anonymous says:

          Do you really think Scott has not thought about this? Maybe harassment will change his general usage, but when his usage about his girlfriend deviates from his general usage, do you really think it’s up for grabs?

          FWIW

        • lmm says:

          I figure he’s writing to communicate and would want to know when he’s confusing his readers. And yeah, I’ve certainly changed which words I use to describe my girlfriend because of context / audience / what people understand by the words.

        • Scott has previously pointed out that Ozy likes girlfriend, but is still zie. Why not honor zir preference? It seems like a small enough cost.

        • lmm says:

          The cost felt high; I had to reread the sentence a few times. (You may say I should lose my sensitivity to grammar, but I don’t want to; I edit as a fairly serious hobby and I need it for that. Maybe I should ask for a bad^Wnonstandard grammar trigger warning). Honouring a simple preference is one thing, but a preference that requires us to write inconsistent sentences (yes, I know English has no rules and is defined by usage) feels like the wrong side of the Schnelling line.

        • Creutzer says:

          English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and so I don’t see what’s inconsistent about the sentence.

          It’s easy enough to edit your mental lexical entry for “girlfriend” to “partner of female gender, or partner of non-masculine gender who likes to be referred to as ‘girlfriend'”. If you’ve managed the feat of acquiring a whole new pronoun, which is much trickier than editing lexical entries for common nouns, this can’t be much of a hurdle. 😉

        • MugaSofer says:

          Ozy is a ze – insofar as you can apply “is” to a deliberately meaningless word like “ze” – and *hates* being called “she”. However, they quite like being called “girlfriend”, and both Ozy and Scott have mentioned they deliberately make an exception there.

          As you, apparently, know? I’m not sure what the trouble is. Heck, IIRC Scott has other girlfriends, so the contradiction should help *clarify* things if anything.

          If you’re having trouble picturing Ozy, I suppose you could always track down their camgirl-ing … place. Whatever you call that.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Nope! Linguistics is one of the first vectors of social control, so it makes perfect sense for people who disapprove of the current social model to try to take control of language. Also, it’s a very effective costly signal that you’re willing to negotiate with them on their terms – it takes conscious effort to modulate your language to their preferences, without actually imparting any harm other than the effort. This is an excellent signal for “I am willing to expend effort to accomodate you”, because you’re already doing it.

  18. aretae says:

    The easiest response to much of this is to formally come out against linguistic prescriptivism and in favor of natural usage…and not cede words to folks trying to twist normal usage. “That isn’t how people use the word.”, “You’re mistaken about how language works”.

    • anon says:

      Even easier is to say “I agree with [X definition that blah blah blah] but see that as distinct from [Y definition that blah blah blah] which I disagree with for reasons 1 2 and 3”. Directly calling someone wrong is a mistake. And getting into a debate with a non-rationalist about the way words do or should work is a giant time investment.

    • So, the question is, empirically, how does language work. We did not have a word for racism until recently, bigot did not mean what it now means.

      Prejudice used to mean the opposite of what now means. It used to mean literally pre-judging, refusal to believe one’s lying eyes. Now it means willingness to believe one’s lying eyes, for example generalizing about blacks on the basis of one’s actual experience of blacks.

      Pretty clearly, when a gang of black men attack a white boy and beat him to death because he is white, they are not being racist. They are being anti racist.

      Few people called Martin Trayvon a racist because he turned around and went back from his father’s house to get that “creepy cracker”, and those that did showed awareness that they were not likely to be understood, and awareness that they were trying to give the word a meaning contrary to normal usage.

  19. falenas108 says:

    There’s a difference between the “everyone’s a little bit racist” of implicit biases and feeling slightly uncomfortable, and saying “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people”, and, “You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want”, but “the little I ask you is … not to bring them to my games.”

    I don’t think you can say that Sterling wasn’t being any more racist than everyone else, as you imply in your article.

    Furthermore, it wasn’t just a comment in the privacy of his home. He was trying to control someone else’s actions about how they associated with black people.

    • Quixote says:

      Yeah that’s an important point. Additionally he was trying to control someone else’s actions with the specific and deliberate aim of preventing black people from being seen in high status positions (owners box, front row seats, etc). His intention was aimed at third party externalities.

      • Anonymous says:

        If you listen to the tapes, you will learn his intention.

      • As I understand it, the black people in question were generally high-status basketball players, so that argument seems weak. Another way of looking at this is that he was arguing with a romantic partner and romantic partners often try to control each other’s actions.

        But crucially, this is a question of the private vs the public sphere. When the NSA spies on everyone it has a chilling effect on what people will be willing to discuss in the private sphere. To a lesser degree, so does the Sterling scandal. A private sphere is probably very important for working out sensitive positions.

        Another question is: when does racism cause harm? Certainly a deliberately racist public statement is hurtful. Of course denying housing based on race as Sterling was accused of doing was hurtful. Denying jobs based on race, etc.

        The argument against racist comments in private is much weaker though. On the one hand, it could serve to propagate a malicious meme. On the other hand, it gives others a chance to help disassemble hurtful ideas. Can racism really be eliminated if no one is permitted to admit to racism even to their loved ones? How are they supposed to talk it through?

    • Anon says:

      What? The implication was not at all that Sterling is no more racist as everyone else. The explicit statement was that Sterling-esque racism and the little-bit of racist that everyone is are not the same thing in any reasonable conversation, but rather that they get motte-and-bailey’d.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I agree that there’s a difference. I feel like I made this very clear in the article:

      “Someone will argue I am equivocating between two different uses of ‘racist’. To which I would respond that this is exactly the point.”

      As long as these are called by the same word, they allow that word to be dangerous.

      If I started calling people who liked little kids and got along with them well “pedophiles”, then even thought this is appropriate Greek derivation, the people whom I called pedophiles might reasonably ask me to stop, especially if I kept doing it publicly. “I promise I’m keeping the two definitions straight in my head” isn’t much consolation if somebody overhears me using it. And if I refuse to stop, you’re reasonable to wonder whether I have some ulterior motive.

  20. James says:

    Nails a pattern which I’d vaguely sensed before but had until now been unable to articulate. Nice.

  21. Ialdabaoth says:

    I’m just going to repeat my last public thoughts on the subject, in the hopes that saying them here will lead to more discussion and less hostility.

    So, here’s some of the common critiques of the so-called “Nice Guy” and the “Creep”.

    You never let us know you’re interested, and then you complain when we keep you as a friend.

    No, we let you know explicitly and in direct words that we’re interested, usually using phrases like “I would like to date you” or “I find you quite attractive, would you like to go out sometime?”. But we’ve discovered that when we do that, we’re labeled “Creeps” and “too forward”.

    You jump right into asking us out without getting to know us as a friend first.

    No, we absolutely get to know you, find some common interests, and discover that we like you a lot – and that you seem to find us fun/useful to have around – before asking you out. But we’ve discovered that when we do that, we’re labeled “Nice Guys” who were “just pretending to be friends so we could date you”.

    Do you see the double-bind yet? I’ll keep going.

    You spend all this time acting like our friend, but then when we say we’re not interested in fucking you, you move on. It makes it obvious that you just wanted sex in the first place.
    No, we move on after the failed attempt to date you starts making things incredibly awkward, and constantly grinds on our dignity and self-esteem. We move on when we discover that we can’t maintain the friendship because seeing something we want but can’t have is actively painful, and we can no longer simply be happy for you in your relationships when we desperately want to have one.

    You don’t want me, you just want a girl.

    Guilty as charged. Loneliness is crippling. Being with someone who is low-status is cringeworthy – you know it’s true, it’s why you aren’t attracted to us. “Settling” for someone you don’t really want just to stave off loneliness is a recipe for a disaster, right? Right?

    So we get down to the real problem: we’re just too low-status.

    So instead of calling us “Creeps” or “Nice Guys”, why not just cop to it? Why not just say “look, I don’t date neckbeards.” Or “look, I don’t date fatties.” Or “Sorry, no fuglies.”

    You’ve established quite strongly that fat-shaming, slut-shaming, etc. are off limits for us. But we don’t have enough power to make them off-limits for YOU. Granted, men higher up on the totem pole do, but you don’t attack them, because (thanks to Patriarchy) that would actually be dangerous.

    I’m not being facetious here. “Patriarchy affects men too” isn’t just a marketing meme for feminism, it’s real. And this is a big part of it. You make weak men – men who are already suffering the most under Patriarchal influences – your targets, because you’re afraid to go after the people who are actually benefitting from it.

    I’m not saying the alternative is to date someone you aren’t into. That would be gross. I’m saying that, when you decline to date someone, and it turns into a regrettable but predictable drama-filled weekend, maybe have some compassion, and realize that they’re struggling under the same bullshit expectations and double-binds that you are. Maybe stop coming up with stupid cliches and stereotypes to lump all these people into, and invalidate their struggles and experiences.

    Maybe except that sometimes, “But what about the menz!?” is actually a valid question. Because it actually fucking hurts over here, too.

    But those misogynistic frat-boys and creepy stalkers? I’m right there with you: FUCK those guys. Just remember that some of us try really hard not to be like that, but we’re caught in a double-bind and it would be nice if your attempts to teach them a lesson in common courtesy didn’t keep spilling over onto us, because we’re doing all we can to not become THEIR targets for bullying and shaming and mockery. And it would be nice if we could say “I am actively trying not to be like that, I’m sorry if I’m failing but it’s somewhat hard right now, if you tell me something specific that I’m doing wrong I’ll try to do less of it” without immediately hearing “Oooooh of COURSE you’re TRYING not to be like that, YOU’RE different, YOU’RE a Nice Guy(tm)! Fuck off, Nice Guy(tm)!”.

    Because it makes it REALLY hard to stay on your side if you keep shooting at me like I’m the enemy every time I try to break away from Team Douchebag. I’m going to keep trying, though, because I really do think your side is right.

    • Andy says:

      Because it makes it REALLY hard to stay on your side if you keep shooting at me like I’m the enemy every time I try to break away from Team Douchebag. I’m going to keep trying, though, because I really do think your side is right.

      This has been my experience fighting against the Patriarchy and the disdain for low-status males, while trying to get a date. My semi-perpetual neckbeard didn’t help.
      In general, I found that I got yelled at a lot less when I appended “,but if you don’t want to, I totally understand/it’s totally okay” to my “I like you, I’d like to date you” spiel. This signals an appreciation for their autonomy and feelings.
      “You don’t want me, you just want a girl” is harder to fight against, but I didn’t get it as often. Separating between the general, long-term desire for a relationship and the specific desire for a relationship with that person helped a few times. “Well, it wouldn’t be moral to try to coerce you into changing your mind, so wouldn’t it be more moral to keep trying to establish a relationship with different people? Am I supposed to not have desires?”

      • Phil Goetz says:

        In general, I found that I got yelled at a lot less when I appended “,but if you don’t want to, I totally understand/it’s totally okay” to my “I like you, I’d like to date you” spiel.

        Whoa.
        A. You’ve actually been yelled at by women for asking them out?
        B. You actually say “but if you don’t want to, I totally understand” to a woman when asking her out? That… sounds so low-status. I would never do that. What success rate do you have with that?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          A. You’ve actually been yelled at by women for asking them out?

          Dunno about Andy, but I sure as hell have.

          B. You actually say “but if you don’t want to, I totally understand” to a woman when asking her out? That… sounds so low-status.

          That’s because it is.

          I would never do that.

          That’s because you aren’t.

          Listen.

          Being low-status is not caused by your actions. Your actions are constrained by your status. You would never say something like that, because you would never get maced for failing to say something like that.

          In other circles, that “not getting maced” ability would be called a “privilege“.

          What success rate do you have with that?

          In my experience, little-to-none if by success you mean “got a date”, but pretty high if by success you mean “did not get maced and/or arrested”.

          <sarcasm>Check your privilege, motherfucker.</sarcasm>

        • von Kalifornen says:

          Is this for real? The arranged marriages I have seen are far from your informal dating, but everything I have seen points to you having to do something very, very wrong to actually get people angry.

        • Zorgon says:

          I’m gonna back Ialdabaoth up on this one because I’m in a fairly unusual position which has given me a front-row view of this sort of thing over the years.

          I spend most of my time in low-mainstream-status subcultures. I’m a tech geek, a coder, a gamer, a metalhead and a rationalist, and I’m educated-poor. I live in a low-status intersection and as a general rule the more any given person intersects with me, the lower status they are.

          As a result, I’ve spent a LOT of my adult life watching low-status guys get treated absolutely incredibly horribly by pretty much anyone they’re interested in. Reactions to being asked out that I’ve been aware of have ranged from being punched in the face, kicked in the balls, had things thrown at them, and on one occasion someone was severely beaten. This in a relatively calm town, too.

          At the same time, I’ve been sufficiently lucky in the genetic lottery to have ended up with some combination of factors which have caused this to be absolutely no problem for me whatsoever, to the extent that with maybe two exceptions (both of which were successful), I’ve never once actually asked anyone out, but have generally been approached by interested parties.

          The difference has never escaped me. People have historically asked me what my “secret” is and I have nothing to tell them. I don’t have “game”, I have no special techniques, I’m not rich or even especially well-groomed. I’m just lucky, and therefore high-status-for-the-purposes-of-sex. There is no other difference at all.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Is this for real?

          Yes. (My kingdom for the social power to say “QUESTIONING MY EXPERIENCE IS OPPRESSING ME!”. Ugh, on second thought, no – that would turn anyone evil.)

          The arranged marriages I have seen are far from your informal dating, but everything I have seen points to you having to do something very, very wrong to actually get people angry.

          Would you say that a dalit trying to request intimacy and respect from a brahmin would be doing something ‘very wrong’?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Is this for real? The arranged marriages I have seen are far from your informal dating, but everything I have seen points to you having to do something very, very wrong to actually get people angry.

          This assumption is used as a weapon. In fact, it’s one of the core tricks of actual privilege of all forms.

        • Andy says:

          You’ve actually been yelled at by women for asking them out?

          Yep. Being a mumbling, neckbearded awkward person who can’t make eye contact for very long (and compensates for it by looking at a person’s center-of-mass) will do that. Coming out of high school, I had nearly no social skills. Really, I’m glad I found feminism before I found the manosphere, or I honestly probably would have gone Elliot Rodger-level crazy.

          You actually say “but if you don’t want to, I totally understand” to a woman when asking her out? That… sounds so low-status. I would never do that. What success rate do you have with that?

          Not good, generally, but understand, it’s not funging failure for success, it’s funging better-failure for worse failure. I assume that someone who is going to say “no” to an overture is not going to say “yes” no matter what I say.
          Not counting online dating, where I didn’t use that append, I got generally 50% in getting a first date for that overture, but usually I didn’t unless I’d spent a while with the person (I used this on both men and women) to establish they were interested in men, single, and had some common interests. But that’s not the success rate I am concerned with – my goal was to maintain a happy friendship with people whether or not they chose to date me. For not having drama wither they said yes or no, it was around 90%.
          And I didn’t need a good “success rate” – I just needed one person, not a bunch of notches in my bedpost. I’m coming up on one year with my lady now, and I’m quite happy with that. We’re spending a week together for a professional conference next week. So looked at that way, it was 100% successful.

        • ozymandias says:

          I usually append “but if you don’t want to it’s fine” to the end of my asking people out and my success rate is very very good, but then I am in a rather different social position than many people in this conversation, because I’m read as female and I’m trying to date the low-status neckbeards.

        • Randy M says:

          Implying to a highly sought after woman that you think she is in your league (when you are low status) may be considered by some as very wrong.

        • Nick T says:

          Ialdabaoth, Zorgon, Andy, thank you for sharing your experiences. (I haven’t experienced anything similar, but I care about low-status-man-bashing and I appreciate anecdotes demonstrating its existence.)

        • von Kalifornen says:

          Good lord. I have significantly updated my concern on how big the worry of seeming like a creep is for many people. I had previously been quite unconvinced.

          I still do wonder whether you are with the wrong crowd though.

        • nydwracu says:

          Being low-status is not caused by your actions. Your actions are constrained by your status.

          Cf. eight-circuit: status is imprinted early in life and is very difficult to change without methods that our wonderful and benevolent government made illegal and killed research into almost as soon as they were discovered.

          (It follows from this that children should not be raised in environments where they’re generally considered elthedish. This follows even if status is zero-sum, since it distances second-circuit imprinting from ability. In an environment where 90% of people are in thede A, 10% of people are in thede B, thede B has little ability to insulate themselves from thede A, and the two thedes hate each other, a very smart and generally potentially-capable person from thede B will end up imprinting lower status than a hopeless case from thede A.)

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          status is imprinted early in life and is very difficult to change without methods that our wonderful and benevolent government made illegal and killed research into almost as soon as they were discovered.

          That is a more accurate set of statements, yes, but I do not have the status necessary to muster the courage to speak them myself.

          Which hurts.

          A whole lot.

        • Matthew says:

          Cf. eight-circuit: status is imprinted early in life and is very difficult to change without methods that our wonderful and benevolent government made illegal and killed research into almost as soon as they were discovered.

          Unlike most of the insinuations I see on this blog, I genuinely have no idea what the referent of this is. I would like a hint, if you can safely offer one.

        • Anonymous says:

          Unlike most of the insinuations I see on this blog, I genuinely have no idea what the referent of this is. I would like a hint, if you can safely offer one.

          Search for “eight-circuit model of consciousness. A theory of the mind conceived by Timothy Leary, which reeks of LSD. Not sure if it’s backed up by any neurological evidence.
          [b]edit:[/b] this is Andy, not sure what went wrong.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Unlike most of the insinuations I see on this blog, I genuinely have no idea what the referent of this is. I would like a hint, if you can safely offer one.

          More specifically, he’s talking about Leary’s LSD research in the 50’s, which discovered that a good deal of criminal behavior could be turned around VERY QUICKLY with some LSD and guided therapy – primarily because it broke people of their ‘loser’ scripts.

        • Does anyone have long enough experience to say whether women have become more violent if they’re given an unwelcome request for a date?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I’ve had about… 20 years in the dating scene, and in my experience, women haven’t become more violent. They have, however, shifted the method of their violence.

          In the 90’s, the primary trend was “become annoyed that Ialdabaoth is flirting with me, go flirt with large man, tell him to beat up Ialdabaoth, watch and laugh.”

          In the 2000’s, the primary trend was “become annoyed that Ialdabaoth is flirting with me, tell the nearest authority figure, watch and laugh.”

          In the 2010’s, the primary trend is “become annoyed that Ialdabaoth is flirting with me, pull out mace, use mace, watch and laugh.”

        • Multiheaded says:

          Jesus H. Christ, Ialdabaoth… I think the problem might have less to do with you or with society and more with the possibility that you might be trying to date horrible, awful women! Even if you’re unknowingly doing something wrong and repulsive, this kind of thing just can’t be appropriate. What the fuck is wrong with them?

          blinks in horror

        • Matthew says:

          I agree with Multiheaded. While I think an overwhelming majority of women will be bothered and possibly offended by a really low status man hitting on them, I emphatically do not think most of that overwhelming majority are actually sadists who would be amused at the low status man being beaten. You’re hitting on the wrong people.

          Edit: I vaguely remember you mentioning in another thread a preference for considerably younger women. This is… probably not helping you. Though I’m being totally hypocritical by advising that.

        • Nick T says:

          Ialdabaoth: Do you have citations about Leary that focus on criminal treatment and “breaking people of their ‘loser’ scripts”?

          Also, sorry to hear you’re apparently surrounded by such terrible people 🙁

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Also, sorry to hear you’re apparently surrounded by such terrible people

          Look. If you never grasp anything else I say ever again, please listen to this:

          THESE ARE NOT TERRIBLE PEOPLE.

          They are normal people. Everyone tries to say “those are not normal people” to distance themselves from this behavior, but this is how most people react, when given the chance.

          You are not terrible. You are just running on corrupted hardware. And when you see the chance to punish the powerless, you will, and you will find a way to justify it that makes it feel like they deserved it.

          You will continue to do this until you learn to recognize yourself doing it.

          So please, stop calling these people ‘terrible’.

        • Anonymous says:

          I am incredulous that the primary response is trending toward ‘pull out mace, use mace.’ Is this metaphorical?
          For starters, after being maced once I wouldn’t have thought you wouldve tried talking to another woman again which doesnt give you time to observe a trend.
          Secondly, from what I understand of mace, it would be difficult to avoid hitting oneself with some of the mace in the process of using it, making it a weapon of last resort against a clear and unexpected threat rather than a first resort against a weak and self-flagellating proposal of courtship.
          Further, I don’t actually know anyone who carries mace in social settings. Where are you approaching these people? What are you saying to them?
          I submit that violence against an unwanted advance is not the norm. I have no personal experience with normal people but I do take in media where violence in response to an unwanted advance is played for laughs because it is incongruous not because it is normal.

        • Matthew says:

          Ialdabaoth — I think your experiences are such an extreme outlier (I’m not questioning that they are true, just that they are far from typical) that you should probably lower your confidence about any judgments you want to make about human nature/human behavior in general based on personal experience.

          I mean, I agree with the corrupted hardware point in general, but I disagree that it’s anything remotely like a human universal that people will always be looking for someone defenseless to take out their frustrations on, particularly in such an extreme way.

          On a more general note: some people in the “already late” condition still stop to help the confederate in the hallway, and some people in the “no rush” condition still ignore the distressed confederate. Individual variation in, for lack of a better term, baseline benevolence, clearly exists just as much as individual differences in intelligence or strength do.

        • a person says:

          I’m not a super low status male and have never experienced or even seen a woman (literally) violently reject a man, but I found Ialdabaoth’s rant in the OP very relateable and I think I agree with everything he’s saying about human nature.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I am incredulous that the primary response is trending toward ‘pull out mace, use mace.’ Is this metaphorical?

          No.

          For starters, after being maced once I wouldn’t have thought you wouldve tried talking to another woman again which doesnt give you time to observe a trend.

          First, I don’t give up easily. I tend to get terrified, spend some time pushing through that terror, then move on.

          Second, I’m 39 years old. I’m giving the ‘hilight reel’ of 20+ years’ worth of experience.

          Secondly, from what I understand of mace, it would be difficult to avoid hitting oneself with some of the mace in the process of using it, making it a weapon of last resort against a clear and unexpected threat rather than a first resort against a weak and self-flagellating proposal of courtship.

          It depends on the delivery system. Most of the little keychain mace cans, for example, aren’t even really pressurized, and are more of a ‘stream’ than a ‘spray’ (go for the eyes, boo!).

          Further, I don’t actually know anyone who carries mace in social settings. Where are you approaching these people? What are you saying to them?

          The mace situation itself was in a nightclub. And mace is reasonably commonly carried in purses and on keychains, given the Schroedinger’s Rapist assumption.

          I submit that violence against an unwanted advance is not the norm. I have no personal experience with normal people but I do take in media where violence in response to an unwanted advance is played for laughs because it is incongruous not because it is normal.

          It ISN’T the norm, but for some people it’s not too much of an outlier, either. (“get nearest cute boy to harrass me” was far more the norm back when I was in my 20’s, for example).

        • Anonymous says:

          I wonder whether it would help to present it as a Rejection Therapy exercise. “Hey, I’d like you to go out with me, but if you say no, then that will be my Rejection Therapy for today”. Of course, then you’d have to explain Rejection Therapy.

        • Extremely low-status neckbeard type here (low-income, very nerdy, and conventionally unattractive), to throw in yet another anecdotal data point.

          I have been yelled at once in my life, when I was 14 or 15, by a girl I was flirting with. And without getting into details, in hindsight I think she was right – my flirting at the time was intrusive and gave her no graceful way to get away from me.

          Other than that once, I’ve never been yelled at for flirting or for hitting on someone, let alone maced (!). I’ve never even heard of such a thing before – and virtually ALL my friends are low-income nerds.

        • anon says:

          No way they’ve been maced more than once for asking a woman out. Ialdabaoth has got to be lying, and I won’t believe much of what they claim about their experiences in the future.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          @Barry: I’m not really sure what to do with anecdotal evidence like this.

          I have seen some women in tech say they face constant life-ruining harassment. And I have seen other women in tech say none of the men they have met have ever given them the slightest trouble and the myth of women being harassed in tech is clearly some kind of weird feminist con.

          (and likewise for other combinations of $GROUP and $SITUATION)

          At this point, I just accept that people will have very unpredictably different experiences based on the very particular community they are in, personal qualities like attractiveness and wealth and status, their own personal style of interaction, and the thickness of their skin .

          (I suspect people are not personally able to measure the thickness of their own skin very well. They might think “I have never been insulted” rather than “Every insult I received was so dumb it didn’t even register as worth thinking about”. Their cognitive tradeoff between paranoia and gullibility in terms of distinguishing obviously-in-good-fun-jokes from serious insults might be calibrated way to one side or the other. Or they might be the sort of person finely attuned to what one might politely call microaggressions)

        • Matthew says:

          I guess this is a skin-thickening life-hack, although I developed it spontaneously rather than purposefully:

          I have an unbounded mental bingo card of insults, so whenever someone insults me in a novel way, I have a moment of excitement: “Woot! There’s another square checked off,” that substitutes for the immediate moment of status-defense rage.

          Admittedly, that doesn’t apply to a very select set of people I’m actually close to who can hurt me deeply with a word, but making it into that group generally means they won’t often be choosing to insult me anyway.

        • Scott wrote:

          At this point, I just accept that people will have very unpredictably different experiences based on the very particular community they are in, personal qualities like attractiveness and wealth and status, their own personal style of interaction, and the thickness of their skin.

          I very much agree with this.

      • Zorgon says:

        Only about 15 years in my case, and I’ve observed a decrease rather than an increase. One thing that’s become notably less common is demands of retribution from other nearby men; the last couple of incidents were direct.

        (edit: Intended as a reply to Nancy. Screwed up the reply chain…)

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        Well, to be fair:

        1. All three tend to be somewhat uncommon reactions
        2. I tend to only be attracted to exceptionally high-status and attractive women.

        • I’m going to take the liberty of suggesting that you may be attracted, not just to high status attractive women, but to high status attractive women with a mean streak.

          Any specific advice is outside my competence, but would anyone who’s found that they’ve switched to being attracted to more benign people care to weigh in on what changed?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Actually, the ‘mean streak’ is merely symptomatic; the causative factor that I’m attracted to is unattainability.

        • In the SSRI thread, you mentioned having a narcissistic mother, and I’m going to try the typical mind strategy– I’m going to talk about the effects of my mother, and see if any of it’s relevant.

          When I was a kid, it seemed as though I didn’t exactly have a relationship with my mother– instead, there was people as she imagined them (and she believed she was absolutely right about the world), and she was primarily afraid that I’d get things wrong dealing with them. She expected me to be disliked.

          Thinking about it now, there was some evidence that she didn’t like me, and she was projecting that out on to people in general, but the relevant point is that she raised me to believe I was socially and emotionally incompetent. (Now that I think about it, generally incompetent.)

          What I’m thinking is that your preference for unattainable women is a major trained-in problem, and solving that might be possible. I suspect you’ve got a similar script about getting mutual loyalty from other relationships.

          I’m going to offer tentative advice. I think you’ve been trying to solve a problem without finding out what’s happening at the moment-by-moment level, and I suggest going somewhere where there are women, and just observing your reactions. If there are women of similar attractiveness, how do you conclude that some of them are more attainable than others? What happens if you spend a little longer observing your reactions to the more and less attainable women?

        • Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre has a lot about specific behaviors which indicate high and low status– the idea is that status an ongoing interaction between people.

        • Alrenous says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz,

          Nitpick: seems to me everyone is absolutely certain they understand the world. Indeed so certain it’s easier to change one’s model of the world to make it an understanding rather than to change the certainty to match the model.

      • Rationalist says:

        @Ialdabaoth: Very interesting thread here.

        Ialdabaoth: “I’m going to keep trying, though, because I really do think your side is right.”

        – around the time I was about 18 I held a similar opinion, i.e. that if I could just be nice and respectful enough, women would start liking me.

        I then found Tyler Durden’s (the “Game” guru) early material (which is almost impossible to find now) where he basically said:

        “look, be a bit empirical about this: if women hate you when you try to be nice but then go and date jerky men, maybe you should pay attention to what they do rather than what they say”

        Since I accepted the possibility of being empirical about what works and what doesn’t work in the dating world, I have not had problems getting girlfriends.

        The tone of this comment snippet: (“I’m going to keep trying, though, because I really do think your side is right.”) suggests that Ialdabaoth has not come round to the idea of empiricism, and is still trying to fit the epicycles of feminism and social justice bullshit onto his real life experiences, rather than using those experiences to falsify said bullshit and try a different theory out.

        It makes me sad when I read stuff like this because it reminds me of the years I spent trapped in that same mindset.

        • By “empirically,” you mean anecdotal observations from your own life, it would seem.

          For me, virtually all my male friends are feminists and lefties, and almost all of the straight ones have girlfriends and/or wives. (As do most of my lesbian friends, come to think of it). Some of them are poly and have multiple girlfriends and/or wives. But there are also a few who rarely seem to be in a relationship, even though they’d like to.

          So as far as I can tell from my own anecdotal observations, being a feminist/lefty is no barrier to winding up with a girlfriend and/or wife, or if it is a barrier is a trivial enough one to be overcome without noticing.

          The serious barriers appear to be being conventionally unattractive, and being shy around women. And when those things come together, they can form a feedback look, which can make things even worse. There’s not a 100% correlation, but there’s a strong correlation.

          It’s plausible that a lot of this varies based on the social community you’re in.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          around the time I was about 18 I held a similar opinion, i.e. that if I could just be nice and respectful enough, women would start liking me.

          WTF does any of this have to do with women LIKING me? I said their side was right – i.e., human beings should be treated as morally equal, coercion and force should be off the table as mating strategies unless explicitly negotiated in advance from a position of equal power, potential does get wasted when we force people to conform to stereotype.

          I don’t see how that has anything to do with my likability.

          Also: this is not ‘beta bux’ talking; I am not and never will be beta. I’m omega. I lose regardless.

        • Alrenous says:

          At or near Barry;

          That is a fascinating thing. PUA obviously gets PUAs the pussy they crave. Simultaneously, reams of openly feminist men are married, and I would stake money they have lower divorce rates.

          That said, only 27% of women are openly feminist. Presumably true feminist men are even rarer, so I need to correct for selection effects. For example if they all have IQs north of 105, then the data’s confounded.

          Either way, I’ve become fond of saying that between traditionalists, feminists and PUAs, we can understand maybe 30% of intersexual relations. Half might be reasonable, one day!

          @Ialdabaoth

          At least some women don’t genuinely think of themselves as morally equal. (Enough to keep PUAs in steady lays.) If you say you do and your body language backs it up, they take you for a sucker. One possible reaction is to then metaphorically sucker punch you for shits and giggles.

          Even many women who do feel themselves morally equal on average want a morally superior man who will treat them as the inferior they are, due to hypergamy.

          Barry, can I get you to ask some of these couples how they initiated their first date-equivalent? And tell us? (That seems unclear, let me try a couple more times.) If they were traditional marriages, I would ask about how the dude asked the chick out the first time. But also possible are; the chick asked the dude out, or it just happened, or something I failed to imagine.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          At least some women don’t genuinely think of themselves as morally equal. (Enough to keep PUAs in steady lays.) If you say you do and your body language backs it up, they take you for a sucker. One possible reaction is to then metaphorically sucker punch you for shits and giggles.

          Absolutely, and here is the dilemma of the omega:

          If I attempt to treat ANY women as morally inferior, even after explicit negotiation, other women who believe that all women should be treated as morally equal will attack me.

          If I attempt to treat all women as morally equal, the ones who believe they should be treated as morally inferior will attack me.

          NEITHER party would ever attack an actual alpha, because they correctly recognize that anyone with that much power will harm them. But both sides know that I’m harmless, so they can inflict upon me all the misery they wish they could inflict on their oppressors.

        • nydwracu says:

          For me, virtually all my male friends are feminists and lefties, and almost all of the straight ones have girlfriends and/or wives.

          There’s a difference between claiming to be feminist and actually living in accordance with feminism.

          Game principles don’t directly predict that men who claim to be feminist are less likely to get laid; they predict that men who actually live in accordance with feminism are less likely to get laid.

          Men who claim to be feminist but don’t live in accordance with it could do better than men who neither claim to be feminist nor live in accordance with it, if a sufficient percentage of highly promiscuous women are drawn to feminism and therefore made more available to men who claim to be feminist for networking reasons, made to feel disgusted and threatened by men who don’t claim to be feminist, or something along those lines.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          So as far as I can tell from my own anecdotal observations, being a feminist/lefty is no barrier to winding up with a girlfriend and/or wife […] The serious barriers appear to be being conventionally unattractive, and being shy around women.

          These don’t really seem to be independent from one another. Like, correct me if I’m wrong here, but I’m going to assume that by “shy around women” you don’t literally mean being shy around women (which is a problem that feminism should actually help with, I would think), but rather being afraid of anything mating-related, especially initiating such. And the whole point other people are making is that this, or its amplification, is often an effect of feminism. (Do I have to post the same links as always? 😛 ) Or do you have some information that it is in this case unrelated to that?

          Barry, can I get you to ask some of these couples how they initiated their first date-equivalent?

          This is a key question.

          Game principles don’t directly predict that men who claim to be feminist are less likely to get laid; they predict that men who actually live in accordance with feminism are less likely to get laid.

          And when what feminism says is unclear, and you can’t ask as anyone who finds it unclear must be evil, and you have to err on the side of safety, and you have to listen to all feminists, and everything is simultaneously forbidden and required…

        • Alrenous says:

          @Ialdabaoth

          Unilateral thread forking.

        • nydwracu says:

          And when what feminism says is unclear, and you can’t ask as anyone who finds it unclear must be evil, and you have to err on the side of safety, and you have to listen to all feminists, and everything is simultaneously forbidden and required…

          …and if you have a problem with this then you lack the self-confidence or the social skills to pick it up on your own, and if it causes problems for you then your status was low before and even lower now, so you’re an acceptable target.

          It’s a brilliant strategy for progressivism, if you assume that progressivism is the tool of a cabal of abusive personalities who want nothing more than the ability to curbstomp low-status people. Or if you assume that progressivism is formulated by morally impeccable consequentialists who have come to the conclusion that the best way to gain enough power to make the world a better place is to shift societal status mechanisms in a direction that allows and incentivizes them or their followers to curbstomp people who disagree with what is clearly morally right.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          It’s a brilliant strategy for progressivism, if you assume that progressivism is the tool of a cabal of abusive personalities who want nothing more than the ability to curbstomp low-status people. Or if you assume that progressivism is formulated by morally impeccable consequentialists who have come to the conclusion that the best way to gain enough power to make the world a better place is to shift societal status mechanisms in a direction that allows and incentivizes them or their followers to curbstomp people who disagree with what is clearly morally right.

          From under the boot, though, I’m not sure how to tell the difference.

        • ozymandias says:

          I’m not sure what “live in accordance with the principles of feminism” means. Like… if you define it as “tries to obey every mutually contradictory piece of advice someone on Tumblr says,” then of course that doesn’t help you get laid, just as it would probably interfere with a bunch of other routine life tasks. If you define it as, say, “I call out my friends when they say something sexist, have occasionally done bystander intervention at social events, and used to volunteer as a clinic escort,” then I am not particularly sure why it would affect it one way or the other, except maybe that it would signal in-group membership to other feminists. Yes, feminist dating advice is crazymaking, but most of the men who it scares are men who were already terrified of asking women out; IME, men who aren’t scared just shrug that sort of thing off.

          I also feel like this conversation is framing feminism/progressivism as somehow unique in its tendency to provide moral injunctions about sex and love that are unclear, present anyone who thinks it’s unclear is evil, and make everything either forbidden or required. I think that’s actually a pretty common failure mode of ideologies about sex: at least, that description was also true of the abstinence movement when I encountered it.

        • Rationalist says:

          @Ialdabaoth:

          You just need to stop caring about what women want or think and treat them like black box functions which output “consensual sex” for certain inputs. The reason I say this is that what women actually want in “near mode” and what they say they want in “far mode” are almost complete opposites.

          Stop reading anything on the internet to do with feminism and go read some books and blogs on game. I would recommend the DVD/video series called “The Blueprint” by Tyler from Real Social Dynamics. You can easily torrent it.

          Also get in slightly better shape – go to the gym, buy some cool clothes (not “nerd cool” but mainstream cool) and buy some men’s cologne. You’ll feel good about yourself, which will boost your confidence (and confidence is what women actually want). Find your local pick up community.

          If you are nervous about talking to women you can borrow a little trick from me – take some tylenol or aspirin before you go out to meet women.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          hrm. I think that may be one of the problems, here:

          “consensual sex” is like, five entries down on my priority list.

          What I *want* are respect, emotional validation, companionship, and non-violent physical contact.

          (This is one of my bigger frustrations with the Social Justice movement, incidentally – when presented with a man whose needs are primarily emotional rather than sexual, people who normally spend the majority of their time railing against the masculine ‘fuck-em-and-leave-em’ stereotype respond with revulsion rather than respect. What’s up with that?)

        • Rationalist says:

          @Ialdabaoth “who normally spend the majority of their time railing against the masculine ‘fuck-em-and-leave-em’ stereotype respond with revulsion rather than respect. What’s up with that?”

          BECAUSE IN NEAR MODE MOST WOMEN ACTUALLY WANT A MASCULINE ‘FUCK-EM-AND-LEAVE-EM’ MAN

          … and when you present them, in near mode, with what they asked for in far mode, they won’t like it!

          Is Robin Hanson’s far mode/near mode distinction not common knowledge here?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          It absolutely is. I guess I need to make the next meta-level explicit:

          SOCIAL JUSTICE IS EXPLICITLY ABOUT HOW WE SHOULD ACT IN FAR-MODE BECAUSE NEAR-MODE IS SHITTY.

          Racism? Classism? Patriarchy? These are all explicit near-mode preferences that we agree suck in far-mode.

          Social Justice is about explicitly precommitting to NOT ACTING IN NEAR MODE when near mode has obvious prejudices.

          So typical Hansonian hypocrisy kicks in – which Social Justice has explicitly precommitted to rooting out.

          Thus, my objection to Social Justice, which I have been holding myself up as example this whole thread, is “Remove the plank from your own eye before reaching for the speck in mine” – i.e., I WANT YOU GUYS TO WIN; I want you guys to fight oppression and prejudice and unfairness, but right now the low-hanging fruit is in your OWN DAMN CAMP, so get to it and leave us poor neckbeards alone.

        • Nornagest says:

          when presented with a man whose needs are primarily emotional rather than sexual, people who normally spend the majority of their time railing against the masculine ‘fuck-em-and-leave-em’ stereotype respond with revulsion rather than respect. What’s up with that?

          To a first approximation, everything everyone says about relationships is meant to prop up a desired self-image or pander to their friends’ insane norms. That’s not to say that it’s disingenuous, or even necessarily wrong; just that it’s more about identity than behavior. Treat it as such.

          (The same is true for a number of other things, like nutrition and the relative merits of programming languages.)

        • Multiheaded says:

          I feel sad for y’all people afraid of women or treating them as MMO mobs (not NPCs, there are occasionally consequences to hurting NPCs).

          Personally, being genderqueer, I feel like I see a little bit of both sides, and I’d say: weak boundaries are always unattractive but draw in narcissists. This isn’t even inherently a sexual or gendered thing, except the dynamics of male narcissists (PUA shitstains) vs. female narcissists (the horrible evil women Ialdabaoth has been around) prey on the weak boundaries in a different way. Nydwracu, this relates to what you said too! Feminism clearly isn’t unattractive in men, but the “feminism” that some neurotic men display and some toxic women cultivate is – and, as tragic for Ialdabaoth it is, it might be hard to isolate as a flaw, and most feminists are unhelpful here. And of course PUA gets results for weak men; it sets up fake boundaries, projects a fake A.T. field if you would, with none of the emotional labour! (This is one side; the non-gendered mechanism of intermittent reinforcement is another, even worse one.)

          @Rationalist:

          The combination of your handle and your message helps solidify the impression that Decent People have been forming about the LW-sphere for a while now. If you care about the LW-sphere, maybe don’t wrap your awfulness in it? (And no, saying that women desire confidence and traditional masculinity isn’t what’s awful about you, and would be rather inoffensive in itself.)

        • ozymandias says:

          Shockingly, when you are prioritizing finding women who put out, you end up finding a lot of women who are into casual sex and don’t want you to stick around afterward. Wow, women are so mysterious, I don’t know how anyone could understand them.

          But this doesn’t change the fact that becoming a fuck-em-and-leave-em guy will not solve Ialdaboath’s problem, because his problem is (as he has explicitly stated) not the absence of sex. (I mean, gosh, if that was his problem it would be much easier to buy a plane ticket to Michigan and fuck me than to learn game.) In my observations, foreveralone people are often pretty happy if they have respect, emotional validation, companionship, and regular physical contact; after all, you can masturbate. But there’s no masturbation for loneliness.

          Also Multi’s analysis is p excellent I think.

        • Rationalist says:

          “Social Justice is about explicitly precommitting to NOT ACTING IN NEAR MODE when near mode has obvious prejudices.”

          So the idea is that men should commit to being beta nice-guys, and women will in return commit to only sexing the beta nice guys and all the alpha badboys will be left sad and lonely?

          And you have tried this strategy, played the “cooperate” card by always being beta and nice, and you feel that the other side is defecting against you…

          … and your reaction to this is to try to talk them into cooperating in blog comments. But what you haven’t quite realized is that their form of defection is bolstered by actually believing that they are not defecting. Girls fuck alpha badboys one night and in the morning they will post comments on social media about how there aren’t any nice men left. Again, read Hanson about how humans are great at self delusion for precisely this reason.

          Though I really should disclaim that I don’t totally agree with the premise that “bad boys” and “alphas” are defecting by acting as they do. They provide meaningful, intense positive emotions that women really enjoy. Yes they are also assholes a lot of the time, but I think overall the impact is positive. Alpha badboys are fulfilling a need the same way chocolate bars do – in far mode you would rather have celery, but if we all had to eat celery every day life would be distinctly worse.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Feminism clearly isn’t unattractive in men, but the “feminism” that some neurotic men display and some toxic women cultivate is – and, as tragic for Ialdabaoth it is, it might be hard to isolate as a flaw, and most feminists are unhelpful here.

          Well, and the largest tragedy is that it’s a positive feedback loop: desperation causes a weakening of boundaries.

          This is why the fantasy of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is so appealing – most Forever Alone guys understand painfully well that the more desperate they get, the more unattractive they are, and the more unattractive they are, the more desperate they get, and realize that it will take an external rescuer to break that cycle.

          Which, of course, is why the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is now a weaponized meme to use against us.

        • Rationalist says:

          @Multiheaded: “If you care about the LW-sphere, maybe don’t wrap your awfulness in it?”

          You do not own or speak for LW, and LW doesn’t own the word “rationalist”.

          If you want to disagree with me in a rational way by setting out the case against what I say, then be my guest. So far you have ad hominem’d me (“your awfulness”) and implied that I should shut up to avoid bad appearances in the eyes of “Decent People”.

          Why don’t you take a leaf out of the rationality book and steel-man my position? Or even just outline what you think our disagreements are and whether they concern denotations or connotations?

        • ozymandias says:

          I mean, and also because girls who have been expected to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (I put myself in this category, tho I am not a girl) are legitimately screwed over. The MPDG has no desires of her own, no boundaries, nothing but a constant flow of unconditional positive regard. But human beings can’t actually do that, and trying to hurts. Other people can’t save you; you have to save yourself; but that is impossible advice to take when you’re already drowning.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Also:

          You just need to stop caring about what women want or think and treat them like black box functions which output “consensual sex” for certain inputs.

          That’s also related to the problem of feminism vs. “feminism”. @Rationalist: you think you ever cared about what women want or think before you’ve been Redpilled by /r/TheRedPill? NO, YOU DID NOT. You had some shreds of Sklavenmoral. Always looking over your shoulder for what society would prescribe for a Nice Guy. Then you clearly decided to prey on the vulnerable. You have never actually undergone any transformation, just as Ialdabaoth here would seriously rather die than manipulate a woman in this way. It is likely that you were never a decent person, your claws were just weak.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Why don’t you take a leaf out of the rationality book and steel-man my position?

          I would, but I honestly don’t have the stomach for it. Let Ozy do it, zie’s a hardened veteran.

        • ozymandias says:

          I don’t know how to steelman. I can do Principle of Charity, or I can do stealing the shiny bits of your ideas and carrying them off to my idea magpie nest, but my brain does not come in steelman form. I think that Jim’s critiques of steelmanning might be somewhat on, tbh.

        • Rationalist says:

          @Multiheaded: “I would, but I honestly don’t have the stomach for it. Let Ozy do it, zie’s a hardened veteran.”

          stomach for ad hom/insults/pronouncing final moral judgement upon the entire life of someone you have just met on the internet, yet no stomach for engaging rationally, attempting to understand things from the other person’s point of view, drawing clear separations between denotations and connotations or any of those other good rationalist habits we learned on LW. To be fair, the latter are harder work than the former.

          Conditional on you being right and me being wrong, you are making it maximally hard for me to change my mind.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I mean, and also because girls who have been expected to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (I put myself in this category, tho I am not a girl) are legitimately screwed over.

          Very, very much so.

          The MPDG has no desires of her own, no boundaries, nothing but a constant flow of unconditional positive regard. But human beings can’t actually do that, and trying to hurts.

          Indeed. And worse, society still conditions girls to do this. I’m going to describe the next example selfishly, but please understand that I’m only doing so for credibility; I fully empathize with every side of this:

          The last relationship I was in started with a girl desperately wanting to be my Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I spent two years holding her at arms length, convincing her to date other people, generally making sure that she was seeking out more healthy alternatives, because I did NOT want to set her up to discover how impossible those roles are to fulfill until she had gained enough maturity to not try to fulfill them.

          After two years of desperation on my part and romantic moping on hers, I relented.

          The relationship lasted three and a half years, and ended when she came to the stark realization that she couldn’t be ‘on’ all the time for me, that I was just too dark and too broken.

          <selfish_mode>WHICH I TRIED TO EXPLAIN FROM THE BEGINNING, BECAUSE I LIKED HER AND WANTED TO HAVE A MATURE AND LONG-LASTING RELATIONSHIP WITH HER.</selfish_mode> And so did she. We both wanted this thing to last, but because the relationship was built on a foundation of ‘I need a MPDG’ / ‘I need to be someone’s MPDG’, it was doomed to failure. And I knew this.

          But I did it anyway, because after two years of her offering, I was weak. (To this day, she still doesn’t blame me for accepting the relationship; she blames me for waiting two years to start it.)

          Other people can’t save you; you have to save yourself; but that is impossible advice to take when you’re already drowning.

          Oh yes. And sometimes you just can’t be saved, but you can’t help thrashing and screaming anyway. And you become a moral hazard on other people’s journeys. 🙁

          That said, it wasn’t all bad – her other boyfriends were pretty much the only loyal friends I had, and now she’s finally able to move on from me enough to start looking for more fulfilling options.

        • Nornagest says:

          @Rationalist and Multiheaded: Okay, I get it. You hate each other. In the context of this discussion, though, I’m pretty sure what you’re saying is neither kind nor necessary, so can you please cut it out?

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          (Edit: made a casual observation about MPDG before reading Ialdabaoth’s latest post, seems silly now)

        • Troy says:

          What I *want* are respect, emotional validation, companionship, and non-violent physical contact.

          I’m not sure how this advice will go over here, but have you considered joining a church?

        • Troy says:

          Unitarians are fairly inclusive– they welcome atheists.

          Yes, although both secularists and more conservativ religious believers like myself like to make fun of unitarians, from the unitarians I’ve known you would probably find a welcoming community there — and you probably won’t have to sign on to beliefs you disagree with.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          I’m not sure what “live in accordance with the principles of feminism” means.

          Yes, that is the problem, isn’t it! The fact that feminists have failed to make it clear that we don’t need to listen to everything feminists say in order to overcome our sexist common sense in order to be good people is a large part of the problem.

          (Note that, as I’ve said elsewhere, we don’t need to round off to Tumblr here; there’s enough to do plenty damage without going all the way to Tumblr. My own formative experience with this stuff was largely in the comments section on Slacktivist; this was before it moved to Patheos.)

          I mean, as I understand it, Ialdabaoth is essentially correct in saying “social justice is explicitly about how we should act in far-mode because near-mode is shitty”. And my reaction to that is, yeah, near-mode is shitty and prejudiced! Let’s act in a moral, principled manner instead! But the problem is that feminists in general have kind of required us to open our brain to whatever principles other feminists want to stuff in there if we want to not get shouted at. They haven’t given us any way we can say “Hey, this feminist principle is actually bad” and not have to consider ourselves terrible people.

          Yes, feminist dating advice is crazymaking, but most of the men who it scares are men who were already terrified of asking women out; IME, men who aren’t scared just shrug that sort of thing off.

          Hm. Quite possible. That said, I don’t think this is an argument that the problem can be disregarded — just that it’s different in nature from what others are suggesting.

          I also feel like this conversation is framing feminism/progressivism as somehow unique in its tendency to provide moral injunctions about sex and love that are unclear, present anyone who thinks it’s unclear is evil, and make everything either forbidden or required.

          Hey, if everything were merely forbidden or required, at least I’d have a guidebook! 😛 Quite possibly a harmful one, but…

          (OK, OK, I’m being a little unfair here. Sometimes they do essentially present something like a guidebook, just not a realistic one.)

          I think that’s actually a pretty common failure mode of ideologies about sex: at least, that description was also true of the abstinence movement when I encountered it.

          I’m going to say here what I said earlier when people were pointing out that feminism isn’t unique in terms of bad statistics: Sure, very possibly it isn’t. But that’s not what’s relevant. What’s uniquely awful about feminism (and SJ more generally, but to a lesser extent) is the combination of the tactics it uses together with who it’s able to influence.

          Basically, it’s the walled garden again. What’s awful about feminism is the way it’s able to import barbaric extra-garden tactics into the garden. Sure, other groups use equally destructive tactics, but we recognize those groups as barbaric and put up walls to keep them out! Whereas feminism routes around or subverts the usual defenses, or even perverts them to its own ends.

          (Which again doesn’t mean that the feminists are in general *wrong*, and I agree with them on a lot and in other contexts will say I am one. But this is truly awful stuff.)

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Actually, hold on. I wonder how much of this is about levels of certainty.

          Like, “actually living in accordance with feminism” is an unclear target — it’s a region, but you can’t directly know whether you’re in it or not. Let’s suppose that it is possible to be actually living in accordance with feminism and not be completely paralyzed mating-wise. Like, there are spots in the region that allow this.

          But then the question becomes — how certain are you that you’re living in accordance with feminism? You can’t actually know whether you are or not. You can be living in accordance with feminism and not be paralyzed… but if you want to be, say, 80% certain? 90% certain? 99% certain?

          That is to say, it’s not living in accordance with feminism that causes the problem, but attempting to do so at a reasonable level of certainty. (Not whether or not you are actually in the region — which you can’t know — but rather your strategy for staying in the region.)

          …of course, this then comes back to, why do some people feel they have to be so certain, and the answer is, because ethics is the most important thing, and sexism is an especially terrible evil. Which then leaves the question of why some men who call themselves feminist don’t feel they need to be so certain, and I have no answer to that — are they just OK with being terrible people or something? 😛

        • blacktrance says:

          “But then the question becomes — how certain are you that you’re living in accordance with feminism? You can’t actually know whether you are or not.”

          You look at whatever kind of feminism you find plausible, check whether you’re acting in accordance with its principles, and then you know. I don’t understand the problem – this seems like asking “How certain are you that you’re not stealing?” – if you accept the principles and internalize them, it’s hard not to act in accordance with them. This kind of doubt suggests that the person simultaneously thinks he should be a feminist and doesn’t know what feminism requires, which is an odd state because if he doesn’t know what feminism requires and why it requires those things, why does he want to be a feminist? Why does he think feminism is correct if he doesn’t understand it?

        • Ragnhild says:

          … if he doesn’t know what feminism requires and why it requires those things, why does he want to be a feminist?

          Presumably because they have internalized that nonfeminists are evil (“feminism is the radical idea that women are human” sexism, patriarchy, mansplaining etc). Such things usually aren’t accepted based on understanding the content of the nonevil thede, but simply by not wanting to ignore or confront somebody who strongly believes in it.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          SOCIAL JUSTICE IS EXPLICITLY ABOUT HOW WE SHOULD ACT IN FAR-MODE BECAUSE NEAR-MODE IS SHITTY. Racism? Classism? Patriarchy? These are all explicit near-mode preferences that we agree suck in far-mode. Social Justice is about explicitly precommitting to NOT ACTING IN NEAR MODE when near mode has obvious prejudices.

          Deciding that a facet of human nature sucks does not magically change human nature. The failure of Communism should have made that clear, and the failure of Social Justice advocates to follow their supposed ideals simply piles on the evidence. How much more do you need to see before you update on the fact either the goal is impossible, or else everyone else is defecting away from the commitment? What point is there in unilateral martyrdom?

          Ironically, it is patriarchal social technology which has been most successful in making people’s near-mode behavior correspond to their far-mode ideals. A life-long monogamous marriage may not be the enlightened sexual utopia social justice advocates would like, but it is a far kinder, happier, and more functional state of affairs than the natural human mating equilibrium which used to exist in our hunter-gatherer days, and to which we are returning as our civilization collapses.

          It is fashionable for neoreactionaries to invoke the name of Gnon, but for my own part, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Rudyard Kipling’s old poem.

          We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn,/That water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:/But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,/So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

          With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch./They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch./They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings./So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

          On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life/(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)/Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,/And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Blacktrance:

          [Argh, I’m having to retype this comment from memory; the original seems to have vanished into the ether. I think I remember the general outline, though I may be missing a paragraph or two, and I think the original was better-written. Hence the apparently-late reply. Anyway, possible you may not see this, but, hey, next time this comes up, I can link to it…]

          So, you’ve said this sort of thing before and there are several things wrong with it. Some are quite general, others are more particular to feminism and/or SJ. Ragnhild has already given a partial answer, I’d like to say more.

          First off, people are not logically omniscient. Like, I’m guessing you’d probably agree that the Peano axioms are true statements about the natural numbers. Basic mathematical principles, most anyone would agree with them. So: Is the Ramsey number R(5,5) even or odd? I mean, should be pretty simple to tell; it’s one or the other, and only one of the two possible answers is in accordance with those basic mathematical principles! If you don’t know what they entail, why would you accept them?

          I think you get the idea. Understanding a set of statements doesn’t necessarily mean understanding everything they entail. (Otherwise mathematics would be trivial.) And in many cases it can be impossible to determine the relevant facts in any reasonable time. It’s hardly unreasonable, then, to turn to apparent authorities and experts who have already worked out such things for you. Understand the basic principles of feminism, but can’t figure out how they apply in a particular situation? Listen to what feminists have to say on the matter! It’s certainly not obvious in advance just how disastrously this can go.

          This, really, is the fundamental feminist equivocation. Feminists like to claim that feminism is just common sense — and much of it is! But other, less trivial, more objectionable parts, don’t follow from the “common sense” part at all. But they pretend it does follow and bundle it all up into “feminism”. So of course you’re going to accept the more objectionable parts then — you have it on good authority they follow from basic principles that you’d agree with, even if you can’t entirely follow the argument; and you’re not a misogynist, are you?

          So now imagine that our hard-to-quickly-decide question is an ethical one. And not one you’re being asked to state an answer to, but one you are actually facing, with action required. If you can’t figure it out quickly from your basic principles — and you don’t have an expert on hand to tell you the answer — what are you going to do? Err on the side of safety, of course. We’re talking ethics, after all. It’s the most important thing there is. And of course in the case of feminism this is made worse by the fact that, y’know, stealing is wrong, but sexism is inexcusable.

          Isn’t this kind of incompatible with the idea that we’re all a bit sexist and have to do our best anyway? Probably, yeah. I’m not claiming to describe a consistent frame of mind here. Even if this sort of problem can only afflict the inconsistent, I don’t think that really makes it substantially less of a problem.

          (You know what I really want to see, whenever I post something like this? An acknowledgement that the problem exists. Yet few feminists seem to be willing to do even that.)

          (Note by the way that contrary to what you claim, it isn’t always clear if you’re stealing. To take an example that actually came up the other day — if I take a soccer ball that was abandoned in the woods, on someone else’s property that I’m exploring (i.e. trespassing on), is that wrong? Maybe it’s obvious to you, I don’t know. Nonetheless, I don’t think this should be counted as trivially obvious from basic principles.)

          And when we get to SJ let’s not forget that one of the principles is that we can’t understand. This is the doctrine of lived experience. Us privileged sorts are not expected to understand because we are not able to, lacking the lived experience of the oppressed. We just have to take their word on what is bad and what is not without understanding.

          And no you cannot rely on us to have common sense to keep out the awful stuff, because, as Ialdabaoth has pointed out, to a large extent feminism (and similar) is about — not necessarily wrongly! — ignoring your biased or self-serving common sense in favor of principle. The problem isn’t the reliance on principle, of course, it’s that feminists will then try to stuff all sorts of awful principles that they haven’t really tested and do not themselves follow (regardless of what they say), all the while claiming that this all just follows from basic principles that you already accept so now you have to accept this as well.

          And let’s not forget that in real life we are typically, however unfortunate it may be, not just trying to answer the ethical question iin a way that’s accurate (or, failing that, safe) — we’re also trying to preserve our self-image as good people, as well as our image to other people as good people. And when you’ve been through all this it’s easy to conclude that non-feminists are evil (and you’re not an evil person so you must be a feminist), and if you contradict feminism in any way then all decent people will ostracize you.

          So, to answer your questions:

          […] if he doesn’t know what feminism requires and why it requires those things, why does he want to be a feminist? Why does he think feminism is correct if he doesn’t understand it?

          Among other things: Because he believes these requirements follow from principles he does understand; because he listened to self-proclaimed experts who barely checked what they were saying; because he believes he does not have the lived experience to make a judgment by himself; because he’s afraid doing otherwise will get him ostracised by all decent people.

          Does that answer your questions?

        • blacktrance says:

          “of course you’re going to accept the more objectionable parts then – you have it on good authority they follow from basic principles that you’d agree with, even if you can’t entirely follow the argument”

          The solution here is to say, “No, as long as I don’t understand the argument, I’m not going to accept the implications that you think it has. Either guide me through it or let me figure it out on my own.”

          Also, ethics is much simpler than mathematics. The problem is usually in determining the magnitude of the empirical costs and benefits, but determining what’s a cost and what’s a benefit is relatively simple. So if your hard-to-solve question is an ethical one, it’s because you don’t know enough about the real-world effects of your action (in an empirical value-free sense), not that you’re confused about right and wrong. So when acting, you err on the side of what you believe to be safety (based on the ethical principles you accept), which may not be the same thing as what the SJW thinks is safety.

          As for the doctrine of lived experience, it’s really similar to the doctrine of Original Sin. If I walk up to you, hold out my hand, and say that there’s a hundred-dollar bill in it, and you don’t see one and say that there isn’t one, and then I say that you’re evil for not being able to see it, you could safely ignore me. The doctrine of lived experience makes some sense when they say something like, “You don’t know that X happens because it wouldn’t happen to you” – it’s a problem of local knowledge. But when they say “You don’t know that X is evil”, it’s a matter of ethical principles, and lived experiences have nothing to do with it.

          But your answer does clarify some things for me. Thank you.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Oh, yay, glad to hear I’m making some sense! Meanwhile, you make some good points, so let me take a moment to respond to them.

          The solution here is to say, “No, as long as I don’t understand the argument, I’m not going to accept the implications that you think it has. Either guide me through it or let me figure it out on my own.”

          I don’t think this is a full solution. Let’s suppose you partly understand the argument, but aren’t convinced and are still working through it. What are you going to do in the meantime? Well, you’re uncertain, so you’re going to err on the side of safety. Which takes us back to the problem.

          I mean, maybe the solution is to recognize that a movement that responds to requests for clarification by accusing you of being evil is not one that you should listen to! But that took me quite a while, and, perhaps more to the point, their arguments do make a substantial amount of sense. Not enough that I’m convinced, but enough that I’m uncertain. And seeing as I don’t yet have a viable alternative, well, I think you can see why I say I’m still in the feminist trap despite no longer listening to them.

          Also, ethics is much simpler than mathematics. The problem is usually in determining the magnitude of the empirical costs and benefits, but determining what’s a cost and what’s a benefit is relatively simple. So if your hard-to-solve question is an ethical one, it’s because you don’t know enough about the real-world effects of your action (in an empirical value-free sense), not that you’re confused about right and wrong.

          Well, this assumes that you’re a consequentialist! And if there’s a reason I’m not willing to be a consequentialist about such things, it’s precisely because that would require violating feminist rules I’m not comfortable violating! But that’s not exactly rational, so perhaps we should ignore that.

          I’m uncertain as to whether the problem survives if you take a consequentialist point of view. It’s possible that it does, because the feminists seem to be pushing really exaggerated versions of how much harm is caused by various things, as justifications for their rules. But other parts don’t.

          Let me recount an argument I once had with someone who did not understand feminist paralysis; they tried to take the consequentialist point of view and say that, OK, you’re considering the harm of creeping someone out, but you also have to consider the harm of disappointing them. But I was taking a more standard feminist point of view, according to which, I do have an obligation not to creep someone out, but I have absolutely no obligation to not disappoint someone mating-wise, because the idea that I do is pretty rapey! Clearly that argument doesn’t survive once you switch from talking about obligations to talking about consequences, but how much they’ve exaggerated the harm of being creeped out does. And now I have no realistic estimate. (Meanwhile, in the actual argument, I was pretty annoyed at the person I was arguing with, as the whole problem is that I’m laboring under contradictory obligations, and they to me seemed to be attempting to put even more obligations on me rather than free me from incorrect ones. Not really a correct description of what they were doing, but…)

          (To be clear, I wasn’t arguing that position because I exactly agreed with it anymore, but because I was hoping they would knock it down and replace it with something better. But instead they basically failed to engage with it.)

          Anyway, yeah, I’m unclear on the matter. It seems to be lessened but maybe not eliminated.

          So when acting, you err on the side of what you believe to be safety (based on the ethical principles you accept), which may not be the same thing as what the SJW thinks is safety.

          I think these pretty well are the same in this case; I’m not clear on why they would differ. I mean, obviously not everyone will have the same idea of what is the safe direction to err in all in all cases, but in this particular case it’s not clear to me why any other direction would be perceived as safety.

          As for the doctrine of lived experience, it’s really similar to the doctrine of Original Sin.

          Heh, usually it’s the notion of privilege that I’ve heard compared to original sin. 🙂 (I have no substantial comment on this.)

          The doctrine of lived experience makes some sense when they say something like, “You don’t know that X happens because it wouldn’t happen to you” – it’s a problem of local knowledge. But when they say “You don’t know that X is evil”, it’s a matter of ethical principles, and lived experiences have nothing to do with it.

          Sure, but as I’ve said above, they used “lived experience” not just to directly claim that various things are evil, but also to claim that various things are extremely harmful to them as justifications for their rules. The problem isn’t just overbroad, untested proscriptions that they don’t actually live by, but overbroad, untested, and evidently inaccurate descriptions of what causes harm.

        • blacktrance says:

          “Let’s suppose you partly understand the argument, but aren’t convinced and are still working through it. What are you going to do in the meantime? Well, you’re uncertain, so you’re going to err on the side of safety.”

          In the meantime I’m going to act based on what I believe, even when that doesn’t agree with what the feminist wants me to believe. I’m not going to err on the side of safety because I don’t believe I have any reason to err on the side of safety. I’ll listen to what they have to say, but I won’t start acting based on it unless I’m convinced that it’s correct.

          “they tried to take the consequentialist point of view and say that, OK, you’re considering the harm of creeping someone out, but you also have to consider the harm of disappointing them. But I was taking a more standard feminist point of view, according to which, I do have an obligation not to creep someone out, but I have absolutely no obligation to not disappoint someone mating-wise, because the idea that I do is pretty rapey!”

          These don’t strike me as mutually exclusive arguments. If you take a rule consequentialist approach, it’s quite likely that a world in which people err on the side of not creeping people out is better than a world in which people try to go for some kind of even balance of creeping people out and disappointing them, both because people are more likely to be creeped out than disappointed, and because if you don’t know someone well, the magnitude of being creeped out is likely worse than the magnitude of being disappointed. There’s probably a better way of making this argument, but that’s what comes to mind right now – I’m fairly certain that adopting a “first, do no harm”-style rule of thumb of not creeping people out is best from a consequentialist standpoint.

          “The problem isn’t just overbroad, untested proscriptions that they don’t actually live by, but overbroad, untested, and evidently inaccurate descriptions of what causes harm.”

          If they give inaccurate descriptions of what causes harm, you can say something like, “I believe that you’re accurately describing the events that happened to you, and I believe that they harmed you, but I think you’re mistaken about why the harm is harmful or about why the thing that hurt you happened. You’re correctly identifying a symptom, but you’re misdiagnosing the disease.”

          As I understand what you’re describing, the general problem is that people “deep into feminism” are more concerned with being feminist than with being right. Would that be an accurate summary?

        • Sniffnoy says:

          I’ll listen to what they have to say, but I won’t start acting based on it unless I’m convinced that it’s correct.

          That seems oddly all-or-nothing? But then, perhaps so does my own “erring on the side of safety”! Meanwhile, my own experience is that if you go to a decently feminist place and try to get them to make decently watertight arguments things will quickly get hostile, so… :-/

          I’m fairly certain that adopting a “first, do no harm”-style rule of thumb of not creeping people out is best from a consequentialist standpoint.

          OK, but then where does one begin to find a solution to the problem of feminist guilty/paranoid paralysis?

          If they give inaccurate descriptions of what causes harm, you can say something like, “I believe that you’re accurately describing the events that happened to you, and I believe that they harmed you, but I think you’re mistaken about why the harm is harmful or about why the thing that hurt you happened. You’re correctly identifying a symptom, but you’re misdiagnosing the disease.”

          Or as I like to say, being a the scene of the crime makes you a witness, not an expert. 🙂

          Problem is, going by my own experience, what will happen is that your attempt to break down exactly which parts are harmful and which parts are not will get you accused of nitpicking, sophistry, and missing the point — as well as contradicting people’s lived experiences despite the disclaimer.

          Of course, the particular charge of “nitpicking” will be right, because nitpicking is exactly what’s necessary to develop a substantial understanding! But try explaining that…

          As I understand what you’re describing, the general problem is that people “deep into feminism” are more concerned with being feminist than with being right. Would that be an accurate summary?

          Well, that’s part of the problem, certainly, but it’s not all of it. And anyway, that’s just ordinary partisan politics, so A. it’s not interesting and B. it’s a known trap that people fall into, so the sort of people who care about being right will already be trying to avoid being too biased by it.

          As for what the problem is… well, if you give me a few months, maybe I’ll eventually write something on the matter! I’ve been planning to for a while. But if I had to provide a quick summary, here are the points that come to mind:

          0. Garden subversion; I’ve already mentioned this upthread. Being convinced that dirty tactics aren’t dirty if it’s for feminism. This one is maybe not that interesting though, and again maybe not that relevant for what we’re talking about here, so let’s ignore it for now.

          1. Patternmatching. Thinking they already know all the sorts of people who disagree with them, and rounding anything you say off to something awful they’ve heard before and know how to refute, rather than actually engaging. This one is a bit more relevant for what we’re talking about. But I think the most important one right now is:

          2. Common-sense goggles! An inability to see past “common sense” and see what their principles really imply. This leaves them unable to properly test their own principles, as they never actually apply their own principles; they apply their principles moderated by such heavy doses of their common sense as to be barely recognizable by someone not possessing said common sense. (They identify these moderated versions with the principles themselves; when you try to actually apply the principles as stated, you’re told you’re taking them too far, you’re deliberately misunderstanding what they said, you’re strawmanning.) They don’t recognize that this common sense is not possessed by everyone, or that people might assume that, y’know, the point of having principles is to overrule common sense. When they do illustrate with examples, the examples are extreme and thus obvious and unhelpful. Where are the minimal contrasting pairs? (OK, this isn’t always possible due to the fact that such things aren’t always definite. Still, I maintain that one could come substantially closer than they have.)

          (As I’ve said elsewhere — if you’ll permit the generalization, if you’re a woman, you assume the point of feminism is to help you, so if feminists say to do something stupid and harmful, you ignore it, and possibly dismiss it as unrepresentative of feminism. If you’re a man, you assume the point of feminism is to restrain you from doing evil, so if feminists say to do something stupid and harmful, you hop to it before your not doing so causes any more harm.)

          Basically, they’re running straight up against Moravec’s Paradox and failing to acknowledge the fact. I mean, men aren’t computers, but the fact is that serious detail is necessary if you’re going to communicate constructively with people who don’t share your common sense, which may be a substantial number of people. (And the shutting down of actual discussion in favor of guilting us into agreement makes us a bit more like computers than would otherwise be the case.)

          Of course, real life and human interaction are complicated, and you won’t be able to specify every detail — at some point you are going to say “You’re just going to have to judge this by experience” or “Use your common sense” or similar. I’m just saying they are placing that point way too early. Maybe it’s more just “illusion of transparency” rather than “Moravec’s Paradox”, but — well, I think I’ve made my point. If you constantly make a big deal of not creeping people out, and are then surprised when there are a number of scrupulous feminist guys that will never initiate, well, I really don’t want you programming a seed AI, y’know?

          Edit: Before I go to bed, let me also add one more, which is also just a subcategory of illusion of transparency and failure to recognize that they’re failing to communicate constructively, but which I think is worth calling out explicitly:
          3. Failure to calibrate fuzzy abstractions against real-world examples. (Or at least not helpful examples, see above.) I could probably expand on this, but, I need to sleep.

        • blacktrance says:

          “That seems oddly all-or-nothing?”

          If you want to say that applying the principles you believe to be correct is all-or-nothing, then this is all-or-nothing, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing in this context. You have principles that you believe to be correct, and someone is trying to convince you of something – in such a situation, it makes sense to act based on what you believe to be correct, rather than taking some average between what you believe and what they believe.

          “OK, but then where does one begin to find a solution to the problem of feminist guilty/paranoid paralysis?”

          I doubt that this problem is relevant to feminism – certainly there are men who are paranoid about being rejected in ways that would hurt them (sometimes rightly so), but I don’t think that has anything to do with feminism, that’s just how these guys’ personality is. Sometimes I see self-confidence and respect for others’ boundaries being presented as some kind of trade-off – “Some guys need to hear that they should be more respectful and not impose themselves on women, while other guys need to hear that they should go for it, and the wrong guys hearing the wrong thing is bad” – but the two have little to do with each other. At worst, hearing the message intended for the other guys is neutral. You can be confident and assertive while respecting people’s boundaries and not imposing on others, and if you’ve have a good understanding of “respecting people’s boundaries”, increasing your confidence doesn’t mean respecting other people’s boundaries less.

          “Problem is, going by my own experience, what will happen is that your attempt to break down exactly which parts are harmful and which parts are not will get you accused of nitpicking, sophistry, and missing the point – as well as contradicting people’s lived experiences despite the disclaimer.”

          Not All Feminists Are Like That. A lot (perhaps even over half) of them are like that, but that’s no reason to reject feminism altogether. As I wrote elsewhere, Sturgeon’s Law applies to most sufficiently large groups, and you have to take that into account when dealing with them – feminists can be horribly mind-killed while still having some correct ideas. It may take a more rational and analytical feminist to be actually persuasive. Most movements are based around more than one idea, and it’s important to remember that you can agree with them on a great number of issues without subscribing to their ideology as a whole. Besides, feminism has a lot of factions that have huge disagreements with each other, and as long as you agree with one of them, you can reasonably call yourself a feminist. For example, I’m an individualist/libertarian feminist, and most feminists have no great love for libertarians, but that doesn’t make me any less of a feminist.

          (This reminds me of a joke sometimes told in libertarian circles: “You know you’re a real libertarian when someone’s written an article claiming you’re not a real libertarian.”)

          “This leaves them unable to properly test their own principles, as they never actually apply their own principles; they apply their principles moderated by such heavy doses of their common sense as to be barely recognizable by someone not possessing said common sense.”

          Do you have an example of this?

        • Sniffnoy says:

          If you want to say that applying the principles you believe to be correct is all-or-nothing, then this is all-or-nothing, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing in this context. You have principles that you believe to be correct, and someone is trying to convince you of something – in such a situation, it makes sense to act based on what you believe to be correct, rather than taking some average between what you believe and what they believe.

          Well, taking an average in the space of belief “basis states” doesn’t make sense, but a (formal) probabilistic mixture does. Or no?

          Anyway, this is of little help to me, whose naïve pre-scary-feminist thoughts on such matters were many years ago and probably not very coherent in the first place!

          Not All Feminists Are Like That. A lot (perhaps even over half) of them are like that, but that’s no reason to reject feminism altogether.

          And indeed I don’t! In other contexts I’ll call myself a feminist; I’ll gladly support the feminists over the old-school sexists. But right now I’m focusing on ways in which feminism is terrible, so for the purposes of this particular discussion, I’m not one. My position doesn’t seem to play well with the categories people have, but, y’know, categories aren’t necessarily that meaningful. You’d probably count me as a feminist based on your statement

          Besides, feminism has a lot of factions that have huge disagreements with each other, and as long as you agree with one of them, you can reasonably call yourself a feminist. For example, I’m an individualist/libertarian feminist, and most feminists have no great love for libertarians, but that doesn’t make me any less of a feminist.

          but, well, who cares? That’s just a category-membership statement.

          Anyway — I really probably should be more cautious with my statements. My intent is not to say “All feminists do such and such…” but rather “The net effect of feminism has included such and such…”. Such things can of course be influenced by a small number of people with extreme positions! As such to speak as generally as I have is really unfair. Certainly I cannot accuse all feminists of anything, and I don’t think I would attribute shutting down discussion or pattern-matching or constantly accusing questioners of being evil to anything like a vast majority of feminists, even if it’s enough to cause a problem.

          But there are particular problems I would — based just on my own experience mind you, I have no statistics here — attribute to almost all non-silent feminists. Direction-pushing rather than target-hitting would be one of them. (This is pretty easy to fall into accidentally.) And if we restrict further to those saying anything about creepiness issues etc., common-sense goggles / illusion of transparency would be another.

          Like, many feminists (not almost all) seem to fall into this pattern where, firstly, they frequently claim there’s us reasonable feminists and then there’s the crazy extreme ones. But then they don’t provide any principled way of distinguishing! You’re just expected to use your common sense or something.

          And then they go and they make statements, and these statements, taken seriously, take you to the “crazy” extreme positions. They’re not hitting a target — they’re pushing in a direction, and relying on you to have “common sense” like they do to not go too far in that direction. Or, really, they think they’re describing a target, because common-sense goggles; anyone who takes it to mean something further is told they’re deliberately misconstruing it.

          (And to the extent they do complain about the extreme ones, it seems to mostly be about object-level positions. I don’t have a problem with reasonably discussing “extreme” object-level positions! The terribleness that the feminist movement has created is largely at the meta-level, in how much it has screwed up norms of discourse. It doesn’t matter how “extreme” their object level position is, they would not have been able to do so much damage without their screwed-up norms of discourse! But I see few reasonable feminists bothering to defend reasonable norms of discourse.)

          So, again, I wouldn’t say “almost all” feminists fall into the above pattern, but I would say that it seems to me that almost all non-silent feminists are pretty much direction-pushing rather than target-hitting, and that a really large fraction of those are doing so due to illusion of transparency, and this has nasty effects. My message to the feminists isn’t “You’re all terrible people”; it’s “Look at what your carelessness has wrought.” (And also, “No, we cannot easily distinguish you from the ones you think we shouldn’t be listening to, they are a real threat and you should be doing more to limit how much damage they can do rather than just laughing at them as if they were harmless.”)

          …OK, I’ll respond to other parts later, as those seem largely unrelated.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          “This leaves them unable to properly test their own principles, as they never actually apply their own principles; they apply their principles moderated by such heavy doses of their common sense as to be barely recognizable by someone not possessing said common sense.”

          Do you have an example of this?

          OK, “barely recognizable” was an overstatement. As for an example… well, it should become clear shortly.

          I doubt that this problem is relevant to feminism – certainly there are men who are paranoid about being rejected in ways that would hurt them (sometimes rightly so), but I don’t think that has anything to do with feminism, that’s just how these guys’ personality is. Sometimes I see self-confidence and respect for others’ boundaries being presented as some kind of trade-off – “Some guys need to hear that they should be more respectful and not impose themselves on women, while other guys need to hear that they should go for it, and the wrong guys hearing the wrong thing is bad” – but the two have little to do with each other. At worst, hearing the message intended for the other guys is neutral. You can be confident and assertive while respecting people’s boundaries and not imposing on others, and if you’ve have a good understanding of “respecting people’s boundaries”, increasing your confidence doesn’t mean respecting other people’s boundaries less.

          OK, this is going to be a bit of a rant, so let me begin with:

          argggh no no no you clearly still do not get it

          OK. One thing at a time.

          I doubt that this problem is relevant to feminism – certainly there are men who are paranoid about being rejected in ways that would hurt them (sometimes rightly so), but I don’t think that has anything to do with feminism, that’s just how these guys’ personality is.

          To be clear — you’ve read Scott’s “Meditations” series, right? Have you also read this post of Hugh Ristik’s? I really recommend it, I think it sums things up pretty well. (Obviously there are still some things it misses, but yeah.)

          So, firstly: I’m glad to see you acknowledge this is not about paranoia over just “being rejected”, but “being rejected in ways that would hurt them”, although I would call that something of an understatement when we’re talking about “ways that will hurt them” translates to “everyone will know I’m a bad person and all decent people will ostracize me.”

          But this isn’t just about paranoia but also guilt, the fear that anything you can think other than inaction is seriously harmful and you would actually be a bad person for doing it. If you get ostracized for it, you’ll know you deserved it; if nothing bad happens to you, you’ll have to wonder whether maybe you just did something horrible and got away with it. (And oftentimes inaction is deemed harmful as well, completing the bind!)

          I mean, I’m not really sure how you can say that this isn’t about feminism, considering the men who explicitly say they are afraid to do anything because of feminist concerns.

          Now, upthread, Ozy suggests the hypothesis that this sort of thing is only able to affect men who already have a problem with this sort of thing. Plausible! (Certainly I already did.) And I’m certainly not going to claim that feminists have any sort of responsibility to help fix these people’s pre-existing problems. (Although if they’re writing on the subject anyway and making a serious attempt to be accurate, that might well go a long way towards that without explicitly trying!) But that doesn’t mean taking these problems and amplifying them to such a ridiculous extent should be considered OK.

          At worst, hearing the message intended for the other guys is neutral.

          Empirically false! Like, I’m not sure how else to even respond to that, other than to suggest you read Scott’s Meditations again, and “When You Have Feminist Guilt You Don’t Need Catholic Guilt” again, and… like, do you want more links? I’d agree with the other links progressively less, but I have them stockpiled for when I eventually sit down to write a whole thing about this.

          You can be confident and assertive while respecting people’s boundaries and not imposing on others, and if you’ve have a good understanding of “respecting people’s boundaries”, increasing your confidence doesn’t mean respecting other people’s boundaries less.

          But a huge chunk of the problem is that you cannot assume people have a remotely reasonable understanding of “respecting people’s boundaries”! Because the people caught in the trap clearly do not! This is something that requires explicit explanation! This is what I’m talking about when I talk about common-sense goggles!

          Like if we take seriously the idea that “Asking repeatedly is creepy, because why didn’t you get the message the first time?” (along with various other common feminist ideas I won’t bother to list) we naturally get out the conclusion that asking (once) for confirmation (as in, “Ah, damn. You sure?”) is evil. Does this require completely disregarding common sense, and having no idea what actually constitutes a boundary violation? Yes! Will people reach this conclusion anyway? Well, I sure did!

          (Similarly, if we take seriously the idea of “Asking repeatedly is creepy because you can’t make someone attracted to you,” we get the conclusion that asking a second time after a long time has passed and the context is entirely different is evil. And no, neither of those conclusions were ones I’d reached on my own before being exposed to the sort of feminism I’m complaining about here; those weren’t part of the pre-existing problem.)

          This is the sort of thing I’m talking about when I talk about feminists not having any idea what the actual implications of their principles are, and only endorsing them because they are implicitly thinking of common-sense-moderated versions of those principles. When I talk about fuzzy abstractions that need to be calibrated against examples — helpful, realistic, two-sided, ideally close-together examples — I mean things like what constitutes “pressuring” someone. Because otherwise you end up with people who think that any realistic way of asking at all is pressuring.

          (Alternatively, none of this would probably be necessary if we didn’t have the idea that violations of feminist principles are inexcusable and cause extreme harm. That wouldn’t in any way help those with pre-existing problems, of course, but feminists are in no way obligated to help them! It would just mean that it wouldn’t make their pre-existing problems substantially worse.)

          Whew. OK. End rant. Hoping that clarifies the problem a little.

        • blacktrance says:

          “Well, taking an average in the space of belief ‘basis states’ doesn’t make sense, but a (formal) probabilistic mixture does. Or no?”

          Taking some kind of probabilistic mixture makes sense if you’re talking about something empirical, but I don’t think it applies when you’re purely in the realm of ethics.

          “but, well, who cares? That’s just a category-membership statement.”

          Presumably, the person who’s being accused of not being a feminist. When the more SJW-ish feminists say something like “How can you not be a feminist?! Don’t you support This Thing That Decent People Believe? And if so, you should also support This Thing That We Claim Follows From The First Thing”, you can respond with something like “Actually, here are some people who are definitely feminists and accept the thing that decent people believe, but they don’t at all accept the thing you claim follows from it. Besides, I have belief X, which only feminists have, right? You wouldn’t say that someone with belief X isn’t a feminist, would you?…”

          “It doesn’t matter how ‘extreme’ their object level position is, they would not have been able to do so much damage without their screwed-up norms of discourse!”

          Norms of discourse are screwed-up by default. Welcome to politics, or maybe, welcome to humanity. 🙂 I don’t think it’s accurate to particularly blame feminists for it, when most people do it when they get a chance. It takes rationality and a commitment to good discourse to not have screwed-up discourse norms, and most people don’t have enough of those things. Most groups are full of mind-killed people more interested in pushing their agenda than seeking truth. If you condemn feminists for this, you might as well condemn most social movements and organizations that have ever existed. The only thing to do is to separate the ideas from the people who hold them, and in this case not let the flaws of most feminists poison one’s perception of good feminist ideas.

          As for your other post –
          Some people have difficulty understanding what people’s boundaries are, but in my experience feminists spend plenty of time talking about what people’s boundaries are. If some people misunderstand and naturally feel guilty and therefore have an exaggerated view of where boundaries are, that is in no way the fault of feminists. You say that feminists moderate their principles with common sense, but it seems more like feminists adhere to principles A, B, and C, and these guilt-ridden people have somehow only accepted principles A and B and are making up their own substitute for principle C – one that’s biased against them, because they feel guilty and lack confidence.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Taking some kind of probabilistic mixture makes sense if you’re talking about something empirical, but I don’t think it applies when you’re purely in the realm of ethics.

          I’m confused here. While certainly it’s important to distinguish the empirical from the ethical, I don’t think that distinction affects this particular point. That is to say, if we allow uncertainty over ethics, then the same justifications that motivate handling uncertainty with probability in the one case also apply to the other. Am I missing something?

          Presumably, the person who’s being accused of not being a feminist. When the more SJW-ish feminists say something like “How can you not be a feminist?! Don’t you support This Thing That Decent People Believe? And if so, you should also support This Thing That We Claim Follows From The First Thing”, you can respond with something like “Actually, here are some people who are definitely feminists and accept the thing that decent people believe, but they don’t at all accept the thing you claim follows from it. Besides, I have belief X, which only feminists have, right? You wouldn’t say that someone with belief X isn’t a feminist, would you?…”

          Possible. It also might just get you all called not real feminists. Let’s not forget the opposite strategy: “Sure, I’m anti-feminist. Now can you tell me what, concretely, is wrong with what I’m saying?” Personally, I’m fine with whatever works here, but I prefer the second because it defies the usual scripts — the first one is likely to get bogged down in further category-membership arguments; the second, well, if you’re lucky, you get a “Well at least you’re honest” and a real substantial argument, and if you’re unlucky, they just don’t know how to handle it, and you’ve exposed their inability to do anything but name-call. (I guess there are worse possible outcomes, like nobody getting the point, but then you presumably know to stay away from there.)

          So, I mean, let’s suppose I support basic feminist principles, but am opposed to the monstrosity the feminist movement has become. What can I do? I can do as you suggest, and try to change things from inside. But that will most likely just get me kicked-out; I think you’d have to have a lot of established credibility before that could go anywhere. Or I can call myself not-a-feminist while highlighting our points of agreement; ideally, the latter gets me past the “don’t deal with misogynists” filter, and the former gets me past the “root out concern trolls” filter. I become sufficiently unusual — an apparently reasonable opposition member! — that people will pay attention to me out of curiosity if nothing else. (And, seriously, the feminist movement needs to learn that there can be such a thing as reasonable opposition.)

          …mind you, I’m not exactly carrying out this strategy seriously, because this isn’t a particular focus of mine; but other people such as Hugh Ristik and our present host seem to be beginning to maybe get somewhere with it.

          Norms of discourse are screwed-up by default. Welcome to politics, or maybe, welcome to humanity. 🙂 I don’t think it’s accurate to particularly blame feminists for it, when most people do it when they get a chance. It takes rationality and a commitment to good discourse to not have screwed-up discourse norms, and most people don’t have enough of those things.

          Certainly! But this brings us back to the garden-subversion complaint again: The problem isn’t that feminists have more screwed-up norms of discourse than the general population, any more than that they have worse statistics; the problem is that they’ve been able to import those screwed-up norms of discourse to the places meant to protect against such things.

          Some people have difficulty understanding what people’s boundaries are, but in my experience feminists spend plenty of time talking about what people’s boundaries are.

          I’ll agree they talk about it, just not in a way that’s helpful for the unclued! And, of course, almost always in a way that says “You need to take even more care not to violate people’s boundaries”; other than Ozy, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen [people speaking as [unambiguous]] feminists say “Actually, here are things you might think are boundary violations, but are actually OK.” Oh! Wait, once in some random blog post that Scott linked to, by nobody I’ve ever heard of elsewhere. (And I guess maybe once or twice in private conversations, but that’s hardly helpful to most people. And those would not have happened had I remained the frightened feminist.) I’m having serious difficulty recalling anything else.

          …well, OK, no, the above isn’t quite true: I guess [people speaking as [unambiguous]] feminists do say to go ahead and do things; the problem is, they don’t explicitly contradict the people putting on restrictions, so this just leaves people like me looking for a way to reconcile the results. If you’re told P and Q, and you can deduce that P => ~Q, then — well, if you’re doing mathematics, hopefully you can notice the contradiction, and conclude that one of the statements you were told must be wrong. Real life is less clear; it’s much harder to notice your confusion, and it’s easy to get stuck going down the path of searching for ways to make P and Q true simultaneously and ending up in a double-bind. You often have to explicitly tell people ~Q if you want them to stop believing Q!

          Like, these things are confusing; and when you recognize that you’re talking about something confusing, it’s good practice to think about how people might misread you and explicitly ward off those possibilities. If [people speaking as] feminists did that more routinely, we might not have such problems. (Not that they never do, obviously. But mostly the misinterpretations I’ve seen them bother to ward off are ones that are already blatantly ridiculous, like “Feminists hate men”, rather than the more subtle ones that cause problems.)

          You say that feminists moderate their principles with common sense, but it seems more like feminists adhere to principles A, B, and C, and these guilt-ridden people have somehow only accepted principles A and B and are making up their own substitute for principle C – one that’s biased against them, because they feel guilty and lack confidence.

          I think we’re just going to have to disagree here, because I don’t think there’s any way we can resolve this short of gathering lots of evidence that will not be easy to gather.

          That said, from my point of view, the problem is feminists simultaneously A. speaking carelessly and B. having assumed moral authority — and perhaps more to the point, having assumed it for all feminists (or all “real” feminists), not just those who want it and can handle the responsibility. (And sometimes ascribing moral authority to women in general, e.g. “Shut up and listen”.) Their speaking carelessly wouldn’t cause so much problems for those of us who take everything they say as a dictate to be obeyed, if, well, there weren’t so many of us taking everything they said as a dictate to be obeyed!

          And I mean — of course people are going to speak carelessly; it’s hardly reasonable to expect otherwise. But you need to avoid that when you’re a moral authority. So I think the really reasonable solution would be for them to somehow give up that — like, big-name feminists making big things saying “Feminists are not moral authorities, you are not obligated to agree with us, please consider our ideas on the merits; and if feminists attempt to guilt you or silence you instead of arguing, they are not people you should be listening to.”

          Meanwhile, from your point of view, the problem is people with feminist guilt. But why do people have such feminist guilt in the first place? Well… I think you can see the point of agreement I am suggesting. 🙂

          • Steve Johnson says:

            So I think the really reasonable solution would be for them to somehow give up that — like, big-name feminists making big things saying “Feminists are not moral authorities, you are not obligated to agree with us, please consider our ideas on the merits; and if feminists attempt to guilt you or silence you instead of arguing, they are not people you should be listening to.”

            Progressives do not take evolution seriously.

        • blacktrance says:

          “if we allow uncertainty over ethics, then the same justifications that motivate handling uncertainty with probability in the one case also apply to the other.”

          You act based on what you believe to be right, which is derived from the ethical premises you believe. Someone who suggests an object-level applied-ethics change in your behavior isn’t changing your premises, so your behavior shouldn’t change either.

          “It also might just get you all called not real feminists. Let’s not forget the opposite strategy: ‘Sure, I’m anti-feminist. Now can you tell me what, concretely, is wrong with what I’m saying?'”

          FWIW, in my experience the “I’m a feminist too” strategy works better, both because you can point them to people who agree with you whose feminism is difficult to deny, and because if you say that you’re an anti-feminist, you’re likely to be dismissed as evil and not engaged in an honest, truth-seeking way. If you’re a heretic, true believers will engage you, but if you’re a heathen, they’ll dismiss your beliefs altogether.

          “The problem isn’t that feminists have more screwed-up norms of discourse than the general population, any more than that they have worse statistics; the problem is that they’ve been able to import those screwed-up norms of discourse to the places meant to protect against such things.”

          Have they? I suppose it depends on your social circle and its commitment to good discourse. While I’ve certainly seen plenty of SJW feminists who are terrible at discourse, but that would never fly in my social circles despite them being full of feminists. Perhaps I’ve been lucky.

          Regarding feminism and boundary violations, there are several important points. First, it’s better to think you’d violate a boundary when you really wouldn’t than to make the opposite mistake, because having your boundaries violated is worse than being disappointed. Second, people not respecting boundaries is much more common than the opposite problem, and since it’s both more of a problem and a worse problem, it makes sense that it’s what feminists talk about primarily, e.g. if you’re getting harassed, that’s more of a problem than some unconfident guy not approaching you. Third, different people have different boundaries, so even if someone wanted to say something like “Here are things you might think are boundary violations, but are actually OK”, it’s hard to say that authoritatively because it’s likely that those things really are boundary violations for some people.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          if we allow uncertainty over ethics, then the same justifications that motivate handling uncertainty with probability in the one case also apply to the other.

          You act based on what you believe to be right, which is derived from the ethical premises you believe. Someone who suggests an object-level applied-ethics change in your behavior isn’t changing your premises, so your behavior shouldn’t change either.

          You seem to be assuming logical omniscience here?

          FWIW, in my experience the “I’m a feminist too” strategy works better, both because you can point them to people who agree with you whose feminism is difficult to deny, and because if you say that you’re an anti-feminist, you’re likely to be dismissed as evil and not engaged in an honest, truth-seeking way. If you’re a heretic, true believers will engage you, but if you’re a heathen, they’ll dismiss your beliefs altogether.

          I think our experiences just differ here. I expect it has a lot to do with how much on-alert for “concern trolls” the people you encounter are.

          Regarding feminism and boundary violations, there are several important points. First, it’s better to think you’d violate a boundary when you really wouldn’t than to make the opposite mistake, because having your boundaries violated is worse than being disappointed. Second, people not respecting boundaries is much more common than the opposite problem, and since it’s both more of a problem and a worse problem, it makes sense that it’s what feminists talk about primarily, e.g. if you’re getting harassed, that’s more of a problem than some unconfident guy not approaching you. Third, different people have different boundaries, so even if someone wanted to say something like “Here are things you might think are boundary violations, but are actually OK”, it’s hard to say that authoritatively because it’s likely that those things really are boundary violations for some people.

          So offhand I want to agree with all of those! But that seems like I would be endorsing the trap. So let me take a moment to examine this more closely.

          I notice first of all that these all seem to be explanations of “how we got here”, not “why things have to be this way”. It’s easy to slide between these so I want to make this distinction. Because these all seem to work pretty well as the former, but (possibly excepting #1) I want to object to them as the latter.

          Let’s now take them one by one.

          #1: OK, this is just a statement I agree with. Maybe I want to disagree with the connotations, but, this is just a statement I agree with.
          #2: Let me address #3 and then return to this.
          #3: Certainly, but (unlike #1 and #2) this statement is symmetric. At some point you have to hand things over to people’s own judgment (and give them heuristics to help judge the situation) rather than giving them rules to follow; that’s symmetric.

          (Let me go on a ranty tangent for a bit and say how annoying it is that (in my experience) feminists, when asked for advice on what to do in such situations, will generally respond with something to the effect of “Women aren’t all the same!” or “Women aren’t robots!”; but have no trouble issuing blanket prohibitions as if women are, well, identical robots. I mean, OK, some of these blanket prohibitions are correct, and expected utility considerations do make the situation asymmetric, but it would be nice to just see them acknowledge the [at least apparent] irony.)

          Now let’s return to #2, which is I think where a lot of the problem lies. Because, well, what you’re saying makes sense if we ignore some important context, but once we factor that context in it causes a problem.

          That context is the way that the feminist movement has essentially assumed sole responsibility for all things gender-related. See, it would be OK if the feminist movement only focused on one side of the problem, as long as they allowed other groups to handle the other side; or, conversely, it would be OK if they took it on themselves to do it all themselves and get it right.

          But instead, the feminist movement has essentially assumed sole responsibility for all things gender-related, and then abused it, using their power in a straightforwardly partial manner. If you go to them and say “You are ignoring this side of the problem,” then — well, if you’re unlucky, you’ll get a “No we’re not”, but if you’re luckier, maybe you’ll get a “Well, we’re the feminists; we’re here to handle women’s problems. If you want to handle the other side of things, form your own group.” But if you do that, then they’ll attack you and deligitimize you! You’re not allowed to address the problem except through them, and they won’t address it.

          This is why it always annoys me when I hear the old “Patriarchy hurts men too” — because taken by itself it’s straightforwardly a true statement; but what’s meant by it is “Patriarchy hurts men too, so you have to go along with our particular way of fighting it, in which we almost always only directly address women’s problems.” Instead of “Patriarchy hurts men too”, they may as well say, “Embrace and extinguish.” (There’s not really any “extend” step.)

          So just as above the problem was the combination of carelessness and moral authority, here the problem is the combination of partiality and sole responsibility. So what can we do? I think going the “care and impartiality” route is basically impossible, as it would require the movement to be far more organized than it is. So once again, I’m suggesting that the feminist movement make an effort to jettison moral authority and sole responsibility.

          • I accept that’s how it looks from your perspective.

            From my perspective, however, it looks like people approaching feminists and saying “listen up, you lying malicious worthless demon manginas/hags!” and then being shocked, shocked when that approach doesn’t cause feminists to immediately drop everything we’ve ever worked for so we can work on what they believe to be more urgent issues.

            I doubt that’s what you mean. But what presents as overwhelming contempt for feminists and feminism is obvious in what you write, and I suspect that comes through when you talk to feminists, very likely causing them to respond less-than-well to you.

            Then you say that men’s rights folks can’t form their own groups because if they do, “then they’ll attack you and deligitimize you!” If by “attack” you mean feminists will go after you with guns and shoot you dead, then you have my sympathy, although I will expect some supporting evidence for this claim. But more likely, by “attack” you mean feminists will criticize you.

            But what makes you think you should be above criticism?

            Feminism has been the subject of prolonged and vicious criticism for as long as it’s existed, yet this hasn’t prevented feminists from organizing and working for the world we want. Why should it prevent you from doing the same?

            The fact that people will criticize men’s rights and/or anti-feminists groups has not, in fact, prevented such groups from being formed. It is not what is preventing men’s rights groups from forming partnerships with feminist groups. And it is not the reason men’s rights groups have gotten so little accomplished.

            You blame everything on the eeevvviiiillll demon feminists. If MRAs don’t form their own groups, that’s not the fault of the MRAs; it’s FEMINISM’S fault for criticizing! If a guy isn’t as successful at getting laid as he’d prefer, it’s not to do with him, it’s FEMINISM’S fault!

            This is why it always annoys me when I hear the old “Patriarchy hurts men too” — because taken by itself it’s straightforwardly a true statement; but what’s meant by it is “Patriarchy hurts men too, so you have to go along with our particular way of fighting it, in which we almost always only directly address women’s problems.

            That’s not what I mean when I say it. Can you please link to a feminist who actually said that statement?

            Oh, wait, you weren’t claiming that any feminist HAD actually said that, were you? You were just saying “what’s meant by it,” based on… what? Your completely objective and unbiased intuitions for what feminists are secretly thinking?

            If you haven’t been successful at having good-faith discussions with feminists, maybe the fault isn’t 100% with the feminists.

        • blacktrance says:

          “That context is the way that the feminist movement has essentially assumed sole responsibility for all things gender-related. See, it would be OK if the feminist movement only focused on one side of the problem, as long as they allowed other groups to handle the other side; or, conversely, it would be OK if they took it on themselves to do it all themselves and get it right.”

          In my experience, feminists are perfectly willing to let you do this and are sympathetic when you do, as long as you don’t come off as an MRA and/or blame feminism for men’s problems. I think the latter of these is a common problem – men talk about legitimate problems they face, and then they blame them on feminism. Naturally, feminists don’t like it. It’s unfortunate that “patriarchy” has become the term that’s used for sexist gender norms, because it leads to easy misunderstandings.

          As for moral authority, I don’t think jettisoning it is an option. If someone doesn’t consider themselves to have moral authority, they’re not going to have the conviction necessary to be involved in any kind of movement (except perhaps at its periphery). Any movement, whether SJW, reactionary, libertarian, etc, has to have a core of people who are convinced that they’re right, which doesn’t mean that they have to be dogmatic, but it does mean that they have to have enough confidence and conviction to put themselves “out there” and tell people what to do and not do. Anyone who believes that people aren’t obligated to agree with them is doomed to failure.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          In my experience, feminists are perfectly willing to let you do this and are sympathetic when you do, as long as you don’t come off as an MRA and/or blame feminism for men’s problems. I think the latter of these is a common problem – men talk about legitimate problems they face, and then they blame them on feminism. Naturally, feminists don’t like it. It’s unfortunate that “patriarchy” has become the term that’s used for sexist gender norms, because it leads to easy misunderstandings.

          Hm; this might be so. I guess I haven’t seen too many instances of that. On the other hand:

          1. What, now we’re OK with just tossing the MRAs out as unreasonable? 😛 (I mean, they largely are. But I’ve also made some reasonable and yet straightforwardly MRA points in my post above, I think.)

          2. Partial counterexample: When the problem of forced paternity comes up, I have generally seen feminists insist this is either not worth addressing or is not an actual problem, even without anyone blaming it on them. (You can say that in this cases the people talking about it are coming across as MRAs, but in this context, what’s wrong with that?) I say “partial” counterexample because while I certainly cannot agree that this is not a problem, this is one where I have to agree with the feminists that it’s not worth addressing before the women’s side (availability of contraceptives and abortion) is addressed.

          3. What, then, am I to do when I want to make the claim — as I am doing here — that something is honestly [largely] the fault of the feminist movement? I mean, at least an “Oops, I guess we kind of screwed that one up” would be nice, but apparently that’s too much to ask for!

          Edit 3: I mean, I guess we have the option of waiting for one of them (e.g. Ozy) to come up with the “we screwed this up” hypothesis on their own, but that’s a bit limiting, don’t you think?

          I am not claiming men’s problems in general, or even any of them other than this particular one, is due to the feminist movement. But this particular one I claim [largely] is. (Parts of it at least are due to a combination of feminist and pre-feminist notions; this is the P, Q, Q=>~P problem I described above. They don’t have to fix those parts by retracting Q; they could potentially also fix those parts by explicitly asserting ~P.)

          Perhaps this claim is incorrect, but to dismiss it out of hand is certainly incorrect.

          As for moral authority, I don’t think jettisoning it is an option. If someone doesn’t consider themselves to have moral authority, they’re not going to have the conviction necessary to be involved in any kind of movement (except perhaps at its periphery). Any movement, whether SJW, reactionary, libertarian, etc, has to have a core of people who are convinced that they’re right, which doesn’t mean that they have to be dogmatic, but it does mean that they have to have enough confidence and conviction to put themselves “out there” and tell people what to do and not do. Anyone who believes that people aren’t obligated to agree with them is doomed to failure.

          Maybe you are using “moral authority” in a weaker sense than I am? I mean the sort of thing that obligates you to speak carefully. If you don’t think they have [claimed] that sort of moral authority, then maybe we don’t have the point of agreement I suggested earlier after all.

          Edit: To be clear, obviously I don’t think they have claimed an obligation to speak carefully; I just think they have claimed a form of moral authority that obligates them to speak carefully.

          Edit 2: Also, like, I’m pretty sure I’m right (about the particular things I’ve been claiming here, not on gender issues in general, where I remain mostly very confused), which is why I make a point of not claiming any sort of authority and instead taking the high road. Which I guess suggests once again that when you say “moral authority is necessary”, you mean something much weaker by “moral authority” than I do.

        • blacktrance says:

          “What, now we’re OK with just tossing the MRAs out as unreasonable?”

          MRAs are largely unreasonable. But feminists are largely unreasonable too. The difference between them is that with feminism, there’s a core of good beliefs, despite how mind-killed many of them are, whereas with MRAs (even though they take the correct position on some issues) it seems to mostly be bitterness, misunderstanding feminism and blaming it for their problems, etc. There could be a male equivalent of feminism (in terms of having similar core ideas), but MRA isn’t it.

          “When the problem of forced paternity comes up, I have generally seen feminists insist this is either not worth addressing or is not an actual problem, even without anyone blaming it on them.”

          A good proportion of the feminists I’ve seen are in favor of letting men have a “financial abortion” and surrender all parental rights in return for being free of parental responsibilities. I don’t think there’s one solid feminist position on this. And if feminists largely don’t take a stand on this issue, that only means they’re neutral, and still opposed to sexist social norms in general.

          “What, then, am I to do when I want to make the claim – as I am doing here – that something is honestly [largely] the fault of the feminist movement?”

          You’d have to convincingly demonstrate that something is actually the fault of the feminist movement, and not unconfident guys’ issues manifesting in a particular way because of feminism. And even if these issues only exist because of feminism, it doesn’t mean that feminists are in the wrong. For example, if you tell me that me painting my house purple will lower your house’s value, and I go ahead and paint it purple, your house indeed has a lower value because of something I did – but that doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong. Similarly, it’s possible that some guys may be reluctant to approach women because of some things feminists have said, but that doesn’t mean that feminists were wrong to say those things.

          “Maybe you are using ‘moral authority’ in a weaker sense than I am? I mean the sort of thing that obligates you to speak carefully.”

          By “moral authority” I mean something like “Believing yourself to be correct to the extent that you’re willing to enact policies and/or social norms based on what you believe and engage in persuasion premised primarily on the idea that you’re right and those who disagree with you are wrong”. It would be nice if those who claim moral authority would speak carefully, but that’s an unenforceable obligation.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          A good proportion of the feminists I’ve seen are in favor of letting men have a “financial abortion” and surrender all parental rights in return for being free of parental responsibilities. I don’t think there’s one solid feminist position on this. And if feminists largely don’t take a stand on this issue, that only means they’re neutral, and still opposed to sexist social norms in general.

          Well, I guess I’m glad there are more reasonable feminist communities out there than the ones I’m familiar with! I’m used to them being actively against the idea, generally with reasoning something like “comparing it to abortion is ridiculous, so it shouldn’t be allowed”.

          You’d have to convincingly demonstrate that something is actually the fault of the feminist movement, and not unconfident guys’ issues manifesting in a particular way because of feminism.

          I think it’s worth stating again here that I think feminism is to blame for so compounding the severity of the problem, and for making it much harder to fix (especially the latter). That’s not just an issue of in what way it manifests.

          Similarly, it’s possible that some guys may be reluctant to approach women because of some things feminists have said, but that doesn’t mean that feminists were wrong to say those things.

          If you restrict your options to “say it or don’t”, sure. But there are any number of other options! (Like, take the time to clarify and iteratively refine your ideas, rather than accusing people of willfully misreading when they get it wrong.) They’d take more effort, certainly, but I’m suggesting that it would be worth it. We don’t even need a lot of people doing this, but I think we need more than there are currently.

          Edit: Actually, I should really say here — there is of course a possibility that I’m wrong, that it wouldn’t be worth it at all, that people like me and Scott and all the others are just “necessary casualties”. But in that case it would be nice to see some acknowledgement of that fact, rather than denial of the problem and being pattern-matched to creeps, which is what we get currently.

          By “moral authority” I mean something like “Believing yourself to be correct to the extent that you’re willing to enact policies and/or social norms based on what you believe and engage in persuasion premised primarily on the idea that you’re right and those who disagree with you are wrong”. It would be nice if those who claim moral authority would speak carefully, but that’s an unenforceable obligation.

          Yes, that’s much weaker than what I mean. I mean, you are using the word in a sense such that basically everyone on every side is claiming it. I mean something more like “If this person makes a moral claim, you are obligated to accept it.”

          Now, obviously such a claim is always ridiculous, and I am absolutely not accusing most feminists of claiming moral authority for themselves! I absolutely do not think that the generic feminist is as anywhere near as unreasonable as that. Rather I am accusing a small but significant number of feminists of claiming moral authority for feminists and/or women in general — not a very nice burden to drop on these people, who weren’t necessarily expecting to be taken as authorities!

          And yes of course such an obligation is unenforceable; I’m just pointing out what happens when moral authorities speak carelessly — people listen to them and do stupid things as a result! Perhaps it’s just an obligation in the sense that I’m going to hold them responsible. 🙂

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Barry:

          Are you trying to start a flamewar? Well — I guess I’d best answer you anyway.

          From my perspective, however, it looks like people approaching feminists and saying “listen up, you lying malicious worthless demon manginas/hags!” and then being shocked, shocked when that approach doesn’t cause feminists to immediately drop everything we’ve ever worked for so we can work on what they believe to be more urgent issues.

          I doubt that’s what you mean. But what presents as overwhelming contempt for feminists and feminism is obvious in what you write, and I suspect that comes through when you talk to feminists, very likely causing them to respond less-than-well to you.

          I seriously don’t think I’ve been anywhere near that unreasonable here; I would certainly never say anything like that “Listen up…” line or call anyone a “mangina” (!) or a “hag”. I accept many basic feminist principles (which is why we have a problem in the first place — the argument is in some sense over the implications of those principles), I agree with the feminists on many points and in other contexts, where it needs defending, I will gladly call myself one. (Seriously — you think I would call someone a “mangina”??) But on this particular point I think they’ve screwed up badly. I do not accuse feminists of lying; I accuse them of being blinded by their own common sense like a novice programmer (or perhaps more like a novice philosopher, or maybe a novice psychologist). I do not ask that feminists drop what they are working on; in the one case where I posit that what they are working on is causing harm, I am just asking them to go about it with more concern for accuracy, detail, and clarity to the unclued. I do not ask that feminists prioritize others’ concerns; I just ask that they not set out to stop others from addressing those concerns. Hell, as I mentioned above, in the case of “financial abortion”, I completely agree that this is a concern not worth addressing presently!

          The actual fact of the matter is that outside of right here, Slate Star Codex, I (with very few exceptions) simply don’t argue about such things, because I don’t want to deal with the hostility. When I talk about what feminists generally do in my experience, I’m mostly talking about how they react to other people I’ve observed, not me.

          If you want to claim that this is how most other people with similar complaints act, fine. But I don’t appreciate having it attributed to me.

          Then you say that men’s rights folks can’t form their own groups because if they do, “then they’ll attack you and deligitimize you!” If by “attack” you mean feminists will go after you with guns and shoot you dead, then you have my sympathy, although I will expect some supporting evidence for this claim. But more likely, by “attack” you mean feminists will criticize you.

          Well, no. Certainly I do not mean they will physically attack me or anyone. But neither do I simply mean they will criticize, at least if by “criticize” you mean “argue reasonably”. There was a reason I used the word “delegitimize”. When I spoke of “attacking”, I meant the terrible patterns of argument I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread — patternmatching; accusing you of being evil when you ask for clarification (if you weren’t evil you wouldn’t need to ask!) or insisting you must be willfully misreading when you try to press them on a point; employing the fundamental feminist equivocation; basically, anything other than honest argument on the substance, with the goal of not proving you wrong, but marking you as illegitimate, evil, unfit to speak on the matter — getting you kicked out of the garden. That’s the sort of thing I mean when I speak of “attacking”. So yes, I believe I should be immune to that sort of attack, because everybody should be; that sort of thing simply has no place in reasonable discussion.

          You blame everything on the eeevvviiiillll demon feminists.

          Again, I blame a few particular things on the foolish incautious feminists.

          If a guy isn’t as successful at getting laid as he’d prefer, it’s not to do with him, it’s FEMINISM’S fault!

          You are exaggerating my position to a point that is plainly ridiculous; my actual assertions are milder. I’m going to suggest perhaps that you should reread my comments.

          I’d also like to remind you that this is not merely about “getting laid”, nor about it simply being “less often than one would prefer”. This is about being completely locked out of anything “mating-related” — sex, dating, whatever — or anything that appears like it could be “mating-related” — out of guilt and paranoia. Perhaps I should indeed repost the standard links for you. Here’s a good essay of Hugh Ristik’s on the matter. And let’s not forget Scott’s “Meditations” series on his old blog (though I’m afraid you’ll need to use the Wayback Machine if you want to read the crucial Fourth one; I’m avoiding posting an actual link for now as I don’t know how OK with that Scott is). (I can provide more if you’d like, though I’d agree with it less.) So yes, I continue to claim that much of the problem is feminism’s fault, because I believe that I have good reason to do so.

          On that note, I can’t help but notice that you’ve made no attempt to answer the questions addressed to you upthread. Not that you’re in any way obligated to, of course, but if you’re not going to do so it would be nice, now that you’re reappeared, to explicitly tell us that you have no intention of doing so.

          (Let me also repeat here — although I hadn’t yet said it when you first posted your comment, so I guess it’s not exactly “repetition” to you — that if the feminist movement could at least acknowledge the problem and say “While we’re sorry for the trouble we’ve caused you, we truly believe this is the best way, and we don’t intend on doing anything different, you’re necessary casualties”, rather than denying it exists, that would be at least satisfactory as a starting point for honest argument.)

          Oh, wait, you weren’t claiming that any feminist HAD actually said that, were you? You were just saying “what’s meant by it,” based on… what? Your completely objective and unbiased intuitions for what feminists are secretly thinking?

          No, inference from context. But I suppose it’s been quite a while and I could be misremembering; the example I thought I had turned out not to be one. I’ll just cede you this point for now rather than go to such an effort.

          I think your most spot-on criticism of me is the fact that MRA groups do, in fact, exist. I’m not much of a fan of them. And perhaps more to the point, they don’t have much of an influence among reasonable people, as they probably shouldn’t. I’m sorry to say, I’m not much of a “boots on the ground” kind of guy — call me privileged all you want, because I am, but really I’m largely concerned with what reasonable people think; when I talk about people “addressing” concerns, I largely just mean reasonable people talking about it. Hence all my complaints about “garden subversion” above. If I had to pick just one complaint about the feminist movement? It would be that one. If to you that means I am focusing on things that are basically irrelevant compared to what’s going on in the outside world, well then… feel free to ignore me, I guess? Sorry for wasting your time, maybe? Personally I don’t think that solving one set of problems should be incompatible with solving the other.

          Hope that clears some things up.

          • Sniffnoy, I honestly didn’t mean to suggest or even imply that you, yourself, would ever use the term “magina” or similar, and I apologize that I gave you that impression. I was just trying to give you an idea of my context. I’m not sure that anyone who hasn’t been a prominent online feminist (as I was once, years ago – no longer, thank goodness!) can appreciate just how relentless and extreme the hostility we receive from anti-feminists is.

            However, I do think many of your comments here do come across as if written by someone with a great deal of hostility towards feminists. If that’s not what you intend to convey, then it might be of interest and concern to you that it is what you’re conveying. (Or maybe not.)

            Although you’ve walked it back a bit in your response to me, your comments on this thread have been full of sweeping negative generalizations about feminists, as well as frequent attacks on strawmen and attribution of over-the-top evil thoughts to feminists (what you call “inference from context”). For example, I strongly suggest that “if you weren’t evil you wouldn’t need to ask” is a strawman, or perhaps treating a fringe example as if it were the center.

            (By the way, I’d say this sort of behavior, as well as “inference from context” – which has the effect of attributing fictionalized evil thoughts to an entire class of people whom you disagree with – is a clear example of an “other than honest argument on the substance, with the goal of not proving you wrong, but marking you as illegitimate, evil, unfit to speak on the matter.” I agree that feminists shouldn’t use such arguments and, alas, we sometimes do; but I think that you demonstrate that such behavior isn’t particular to feminism.)

            So yes, I believe I should be immune to that sort of attack, because everybody should be; that sort of thing simply has no place in reasonable discussion.

            I agree, but since less-than-ideal-argumentation is, I’m sorry to say, the norm in very nearly all of our society, it seems very strange to complain that feminism in particular is the problem here, or that such attacks drives opposing views out of visible existence. Alas, no one is immune to that sort of attack. Yet somehow opposing views still exist.

            Correct me if I’m wrong, but the specific argument of yours I was responding to – that feminists somehow prevent others from taking up issues because of the dreaded feminist “attack” and “delegitimization” – now seems to lie in shreds. As you conceded (and thanks, I appreciate you being reasonable), MRAs and anti-feminists are capable of forming organizations despite such feminist attacks. And now you’ve clarified that by “attack,” you mean unfair arguments – something that virtually all political advocacy organizations deal with on a daily basis.

            It seems to me that you no longer have a case that feminism, through “attacks,” unfairly maintains a monopoly on gender issues. And since a significant portion of your argument against feminism relied on that false premise, I think you should reconsider your views. What’s wrong with feminists saying “if you want to handle the other side of things, form your own group”? (Consider also that most feminist activists I know already feel overwhelmed by their existing commitments).

            This is about being completely locked out of anything “mating-related” — sex, dating, whatever — or anything that appears like it could be “mating-related” — out of guilt and paranoia. Perhaps I should indeed repost the standard links for you. Here’s a good essay of Hugh Ristik’s on the matter.

            Are you aware that Hugh’s essay was part of an ongoing discussion he was having with me and some other folks at my blog? So yes, I’m aware of his perspective, and I don’t think you’re accurately summing it up; his case was actually considerably broader than what you describe here. (Incidentally, I miss Hugh’s work, although I seldom agreed with him).

            As I said to Hugh back then, feminism is not an all-powerful god, with limitless resources, perfect foreknowledge, and responsibility for all outcomes. Relationships are confusing and so are boundaries; it is not within feminism’s ability to define those boundaries in a way that avoids all subjectivity and confusion in all circumstances. Nor is there any imaginable system that would never leave anyone feeling hurt.

            Feminism isn’t to blame for the problems of “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” men (the quoted phrase is Hugh’s). I think those men, due to being shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed, naturally find and cling to excuses to not put themselves (ourselves) forward and to not take risks. If the shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed man in question is a feminist (or was raised by feminists), maybe he’ll think “I can’t say ‘may I kiss you?‘ because that would be harassment”; but if that same man was a Christian, he’d be thinking “I can’t say ‘may I kiss you?’ because Jesus wouldn’t want me to.”

            The scapegoat is not the causal agent.

            So yes, I continue to claim that much of the problem is feminism’s fault, because I believe that I have good reason to do so.

            If you could show me strong empirical evidence demonstrating that the incidence of men being “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” has increased in lockstep with feminism, I’d find that interesting, although we’d still have to figure out a way to distinguish causation from correlation, of course.

            But, lacking such evidence, your argument just isn’t persuasive. Men who can’t find love because they (we) are “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” are hardly a new phenomenon; think of movies like “Marty,” or think of Charlie Brown and the red-headed girl. Heck, think of Christian in the 1898 play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” who despite his great beauty was crippled by shyness when speaking to a woman he was attracted to. This problem was around before feminism and was common enough to be a recognizable stock character in literature. If there’s any “good reason” to think feminism has made it worse, I haven’t seen it.

            On that note, I can’t help but notice that you’ve made no attempt to answer the questions addressed to you upthread.

            The ones asking me to survey my friends about the nitty gritty details of how they met their sweeties, and report back the details to y’all? Yeah, I’m not gonna do that.

            if the feminist movement could at least acknowledge the problem and say “While we’re sorry for the trouble we’ve caused you, we truly believe this is the best way, and we don’t intend on doing anything different, you’re necessary casualties”, rather than denying it exists, that would be at least satisfactory as a starting point for honest argument.

            I have been honest with you. The demand that I should concede a point that I don’t believe you’ve established doesn’t seem to me to be reasonable as a condition for “honest argument.”

            The most I can honestly say is that it’s probably true that some men, at the margins, have had their already existing “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” tendencies made more difficult for them to deal with because they’ve had bad interactions with feminism. However, I’m also certain that some such men have had their problems made easier by feminism. I don’t see any way to objectively determine that one is larger than the other.

            Personally I don’t think that solving one set of problems should be incompatible with solving the other.

            Agreed.

            Regarding “garden subversion,” I’m actually not sure what you mean by that, although I did follow the link to Scott’s argument with Arthur.

            Finally, regarding “paper abortions,” I’m against the idea for a few reasons, but the major one is that I don’t think increasing child poverty is a reasonable price to pay. If we were in a socialist society that had successfully eradicated poverty and economic insecurity, I might favor the “paper abortion” idea.

        • blacktrance says:

          “If you restrict your options to ‘say it or don’t’, sure. But there are any number of other options!”

          If you can think of any, I’d like to hear them. To me, it seems that if you say “It’s vitally important to respect people’s boundaries”, that necessarily means that people who listen to the message and are unsure where the boundaries are will be more cautious. A more fine-grained message would require information about where people’s boundaries are, but because that’s different for different people, a message about it is almost certain to simultaneously be too restrictive for some people and too lax for others. If there’s a better alternative to saying it bluntly and not saying it at all, I’d like to hear it.

          “I mean something more like ‘If this person makes a moral claim, you are obligated to accept it.'”

          Such a claim is so plainly ridiculous that it’s easy to reject if you haven’t accepted it already. They may not put it in such easily identifiable terms, so figuring out that they’re doing that may not be easy, but once you do figure it out, their incorrectness is obvious.

          I think I probably agree with you on the other points.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Barry: Ugh, sorry, let me make one correction to my comment above: Where I say “in the one case where I posit that what they are working on is causing harm”, that should say “in the one object-level case where…”. Obviously I believe that a number of their meta-level projects are causing harm, and in those cases the problem is not insufficient accuracy, but that they’re doing it at all. (And really those are the fundamental problem; if we solved those, we wouldn’t have the object-level problem.)

        • Army1987 says:

          However, I’m also certain that some such men have had their problems made easier by feminism.

          e.g. myself. (When I stumbled upon the Schrödinger’s Rapist article, I finally realized why I seemed to scare women away, which previously made almost no sense to me, and stopped taking it personally, which made it much less emotionally painful to me.)

        • Andy says:

          You just need to stop caring about what women want or think and treat them like black box functions which output “consensual sex” for certain inputs. The reason I say this is that what women actually want in “near mode” and what they say they want in “far mode” are almost complete opposites.

          Funny, it was only when I stopped doing this and started talking to women as people that I actually was able to get what I wanted – a stable, emotionally fulfilling relationship.

          By “talking to women as people,” I mean seeing them as not a single unitary class, and respectfully trying over and over until I found someone I could be compatible with. Treating women as sex-dispensing machines that respond to the proper inputs didn’t get me what I wanted, because I didn’t just want sex. And of the men and women I approached and dated before entering my current LTR, I wouldn’t say that any of them acted in a a single way. It was almost like they were different people instead of person-shaped black-boxes!

          what women actually want in “near mode” and what they say they want in “far mode” are almost complete opposites.

          In other words, women are lying, you can’t trust what they say, and just “fuck ’em and leave em, that’s what they want anyway.”
          I do not doubt that some women want precisely this. I don’t even doubt that some women lie and say they want a long-term relationship when they want a quick fuck. So what? I know men who say they want a long-term relationship, are eternally questing for the “right lady,” but in reality they’ll screw anything that shows them a bit of nipple. Some people lie, some people tell the truth, and it’s damn hard to tell the difference.

          If you are nervous about talking to women you can borrow a little trick from me – take some tylenol or aspirin before you go out to meet women.

          Exactly how is this supposed to help? Placebo effect?

        • Andy says:

          e.g. myself. (When I stumbled upon the Schrödinger’s Rapist article, I finally realized why I seemed to scare women away, which previously made almost no sense to me, and stopped taking it personally, which made it much less emotionally painful to me.)

          Seconded, this was a great help to me as well.

        • Rationalist says:

          @Andy: “In other words, women are lying, you can’t trust what they say, and just “fuck ‘em and leave em, that’s what they want anyway.””

          That is a pretty severe strawman of what I said, you should be ashamed of yourself. I expect better than this on a rationality-related blog.

        • Andy says:

          @Andy: “In other words, women are lying, you can’t trust what they say, and just “fuck ‘em and leave em, that’s what they want anyway.””

          That is a pretty severe strawman of what I said, you should be ashamed of yourself.

          Nope, I stand by what I said.
          Let’s take a look at what you said:

          what women actually want in “near mode” and what they say they want in “far mode” are almost complete opposites.

          Either women – most or all women, since you didn’t bother to append a “some” to give even a suggestion of nuance to the thing – are either being dishonest or too stupid/irrational to know their own preferences. I felt that “women are lying when they say they want a nice guy, they want an alpha asshole, now go out and be the alpha asshole they want!” was the more charitable of those two interpretations.

        • Rationalist says:

          @Andy:

          As I have said several times, it is a near/far mode thing. When people are in far mode, they genuinely think they want far mode things. When they are in near mode, they want near mode things.

          So yes, like MOST PEOPLE ON THE PLANET, women(qualifiers apply: of dating age, western culture, not 99% outliers in personality) do not know their own preferences very well and do in fact deviate significantly from the model of a unified agent with consistent preferences. That is the whole point of the near mode/far mode distinction.

          It takes a great deal of rationality and insight to really understand how one’s preferences change with context and time, so let me disclaim immediately that I am not trying to denigrate women(qualifiers as above) compared to any other group. See the literature on hyperbolic discounting, prospect theory, etc.

        • Oligopsony says:

          @Rationalist,

          So you would recommend, then, not just that

          You just need to stop caring about what women want or think and treat them like black box functions which output “consensual sex” for certain inputs.

          but that

          You just need to stop caring about what people want or think and treat them like black box functions which output “[desideratum]” for certain inputs.

          correct? Happy to be corrected if I’m misapprehending you.

        • Rationalist says:

          @OLIGOPSONY: “correct? Happy to be corrected if I’m misapprehending you”

          No, I wouldn’t say that works as a total generalization for all situations, but for situations that are relevantly similar (far mode request strongly contradicts near mode behavior) it does work.

          For example, if you sell and stock vending machines and customers fill out surveys asking for the machines to be filled with celery instead of chocolate bars, I think you could apply the “black box” principle pretty successfully.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            When dealing with species that has evolved social intelligence and concealed ovulation the default assumption should be that everything the females of that species say about their mating preferences is a lie. Also, as a general principle, lies are more effective when the teller doesn’t know that he’s lying – this is also a relevant fact.

            Want to know what women actually desire? Ask men who sleep with lots of women or read what they write. Why not just observe? Because deception about when and where mating takes place is part and parcel of concealed ovulation.

            Anyone who takes feminism the least bit seriously does not take evolution seriously.

          • Rationalist says:

            @Steve Johnson “everything the females of that species say about their mating preferences is a lie”

            “lies are more effective when the teller doesn’t know that she’s lying”

            If you don’t know that you’re lying, then you’re not lying… see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie .

            Women rarely lie about what kind of guy they like, at least as far as I can tell. They sincerely believe falsehoods. The reason I didn’t bring this up is that I don’t want to have to defend evo psych in an already long and rambling discussion, it is enough for me that there *is* a contradiction between near mode behavior and far mode claims, it doesn’t really matter what causes that difference.

        • Rationalist says:

          @Steve Johnson “Anyone who takes feminism the least bit seriously does not take evolution seriously.”

          Also I would like to explicitly distance myself from this sweeping generalization – I think that feminism should be taken seriously and that there are elements of feminism that are perfectly sensible and in no way contradict known facts. PLEASE DO NOT ASSUME I AGREE WITH EVERYTHING STEVE SAYS JUST BECAUSE I AGREED WITH SOMETHING HE SAID

        • Taradino C. says:

          @Rationalist: “If you don’t know that you’re lying, then you’re not lying”

          George Costanza said it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn_PSJsl0LQ

        • Sniffnoy says:

          If there’s a better alternative to saying it bluntly and not saying it at all, I’d like to hear it.

          Honestly? I’m a bit uncertain, and I’m thinking now I might just be going after the wrong thing here. I mean I think it is possible to be more fine-grained by considering people’s reactions. And perhaps importantly to just give a standard “be aware of variation, don’t be afraid to use common sense, etc.” But, I don’t know, maybe I was just wrong there.

          Like, all this is a lot of responsibility to impose on these people, a lot of whom are just making offhanded comments, you know? I think the right solution is to un-screw-up the meta-level and dispel the air of moral authority.

          Such a claim is so plainly ridiculous that it’s easy to reject if you haven’t accepted it already. They may not put it in such easily identifiable terms, so figuring out that they’re doing that may not be easy, but once you do figure it out, their incorrectness is obvious.

          Yes, the hard part is noticing that there’s a problem once you’ve already swallowed it all!

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Barry:

          However, I do think many of your comments here do come across as if written by someone with a great deal of hostility towards feminists. If that’s not what you intend to convey, then it might be of interest and concern to you that it is what you’re conveying. (Or maybe not.)

          Well, I think it’s entirely fair to say that I have quite a bit of hostility towards generic feminists in these particular contexts. 🙂

          For example, I strongly suggest that “if you weren’t evil you wouldn’t need to ask” is a strawman, or perhaps treating a fringe example as if it were the center.

          You’re absolutely right, I’ve been using over-the-top summaries. I honestly didn’t think about how that would come across. Sorry about that. I’ll try to be more careful about that. I just assumed people would know what I was talking about instead of taking it literally — the exact mistake I’m criticizing the feminists for. (Of course, I don’t have any moral authority! 😛 )

          For now, for “If you weren’t evil, you wouldn’t need to ask”, you can read, “Feminists frequently claim or imply — via the fundamental feminist equivocation — that the correct feminist response to a given situation is obvious. This strongly discourages asking about non-obvious cases, as if you expose yourself as finding it non-obvious, you will be (via the fundamental equivocation) non-feminist and thus evil.” They don’t actually make the claim that if you were a good person you wouldn’t need to ask, because that would be plainly unreasonable. I really shouldn’t have said that they do. Sorry about that.

          I agree, but since less-than-ideal-argumentation is, I’m sorry to say, the norm in very nearly all of our society, it seems very strange to complain that feminism in particular is the problem here, or that such attacks drives opposing views out of visible existence. Alas, no one is immune to that sort of attack. Yet somehow opposing views still exist.

          This seems to be the point that these things always get stuck on (recall the old argument about feminist statistics). But as I said above: The problem isn’t that the feminist movement has worse norms of argument or worse statistics than whatever other group you care to name. The problem that is particular to the feminist movement is that they are able to screw up the norms of discourse even in places that are full of reasonable people who are supposed to know better. This is what I mean when I talk about “garden subversion”. Perhaps this claim is incorrect, but I don’t think it’s a claim you’ve addressed, instead just talking about whether or not its arguments are worse on the whole.

          It seems to me that you no longer have a case that feminism, through “attacks,” unfairly maintains a monopoly on gender issues.

          Again, I think we’re looking at different arenas here. Among the general population, absolutely it doesn’t have a monopoly. There are plenty of old-school sexists out there causing problems and the feminist movement is doing good work in fighting them. Here on SSC, where you have neoreactionaries, it certainly doesn’t have a monopoly! My claim is that it has an unfair monopoly (or almost-monopoly) among the population I am used to thinking of as “reasonable people”. I realize that’s a pretty fuzzy demarcation, but, to my mind it’s important and this is a real problem. (Here, Hugh Ristik summed it up as “white middle/upper class educated liberals”, which I think is a bit restrictive — why only white? Was he just hedging, or was there some reason for that I don’t know about? — but hopefully you are getting an idea of the cluster of people I’m pointing out.

          Like, you keep talking about activists and political advocacy; I’m talking about people holding discussions ostensibly trying to get at the truth! 🙂 If to your mind that makes what I’m discussing irrelevant, then, as I said, feel free to ignore me!

          What’s wrong with feminists saying “if you want to handle the other side of things, form your own group”?

          By itself, absolutely nothing. I’m just saying it’s inconsistent to both say that others should form their own groups, and demand that those other groups do things the feminists’ way! (Of course, you would say that they don’t do the latter, and I don’t really want to argue about this right now.)

          Are you aware that Hugh’s essay was part of an ongoing discussion he was having with me and some other folks at my blog?

          Ha, yes, I’d forgotten that!

          As I said to Hugh back then, feminism is not an all-powerful god, with limitless resources, perfect foreknowledge, and responsibility for all outcomes. Relationships are confusing and so are boundaries; it is not within feminism’s ability to define those boundaries in a way that avoids all subjectivity and confusion in all circumstances.

          As I’ve said elsewhere: You’re absolutely right that it can’t do that, and as such it shouldn’t have responsibility for all outcomes, but with its unfair monopoly, responsibility naturally attaches to it.

          Feminism isn’t to blame for the problems of “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” men (the quoted phrase is Hugh’s). I think those men, due to being shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed, naturally find and cling to excuses to not put themselves (ourselves) forward and to not take risks. If the shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed man in question is a feminist (or was raised by feminists), maybe he’ll think “I can’t say ‘may I kiss you?‘ because that would be harassment”; but if that same man was a Christian, he’d be thinking “I can’t say ‘may I kiss you?’ because Jesus wouldn’t want me to.”

          OK, so you’ve found a third option! Honestly arguing that there is in fact not a problem, rather than dismissing the possibility out of hand.

          If you could show me strong empirical evidence demonstrating that the incidence of men being “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” has increased in lockstep with feminism, I’d find that interesting, although we’d still have to figure out a way to distinguish causation from correlation, of course.

          Inside view vs. outside view, eh? I really do not have the time to go searching for such evidence, and have to wonder whether it presently exists, so I think we’re both just going to walk away unconvinced here.

          But, lacking such evidence, your argument just isn’t persuasive. Men who can’t find love because they (we) are “shy, anxious, introverted, unassertive, and sexually repressed” are hardly a new phenomenon; think of movies like “Marty,” or think of Charlie Brown and the red-headed girl. Heck, think of Christian in the 1898 play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” who despite his great beauty was crippled by shyness when speaking to a woman he was attracted to. This problem was around before feminism and was common enough to be a recognizable stock character in literature. If there’s any “good reason” to think feminism has made it worse, I haven’t seen it.

          Well, if you can argue by example, so can I! How about Scott’s 3rd meditation? 🙂 Where he explicitly says he was getting better until he encountered feminist discussion on the subject? (I’d use my own example, but that’s less clear-cut, I suppose.)

          Edit: OK, on rereading, you weren’t really arguing by example. Oops. Regardless, just as you’d want to see outside-view evidence that it has made things worse, I’d want to see outside-view evidence that it hasn’t, because there seems to me to be a pretty clear qualitative difference between simple shyness and the guilt and paranoia-filled double-binds that feminism presents. But like I said, I think we’re just both going to walk away unconvinced here. Now, I think I could make a better case that feminism has made the problem harder to fix, but this is long enough already, I’ll do that perhaps later in a separate comment.

          The ones asking me to survey my friends about the nitty gritty details of how they met their sweeties, and report back the details to y’all? Yeah, I’m not gonna do that.

          OK. No problem.

          However, I’m also certain that some such men have had their problems made easier by feminism. I don’t see any way to objectively determine that one is larger than the other.

          If our only options were “feminism or no feminism”, you’d have a good point! But, like, why can’t we modify feminism so as to get the good parts and shed the bad parts? I’d like to see a better feminism, one I can once again proudly (rather than heavily conditionally) endorse!

    • anon says:

      I’ve begun to feel sorry for frat boys in the abstract, though not for any of them I’ve actually encountered. They have a terrible reputation, and get stereotyped. While stereotypes are often broadly true, it’s still important to mention occasionally that they’re exaggerations and not universally true, otherwise a conceptual superweapon will be formed. But for the frat boys, it may be too late.

      • a person says:

        I’m a frat boy and this stereotype doesn’t really affect me in real life. It seems mainly to exist on the internet among liberal intellectual types. There’s a bit of a stigma, but it definitely elevates my status much more than it lowers it.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I’m a frat boy and this stereotype doesn’t really affect me in real life. It seems mainly to exist on the internet among liberal intellectual types. There’s a bit of a stigma, but it definitely elevates my status much more than it lowers it.

          I will attest to this.

        • Matthew says:

          The stereotypical frat boy is definitely not reading this blog.

    • Alrenous says:

      The absence of anti-nerdism makes it impossible for me to take anti-racism seriously. Obviously it’s about gaining status and power for the agitator. Indeed we, all of us, were fools to ever think it might have been otherwise. Again, assumption of innocence is for murder trials, and the generalized principle is assumption of inaction.

      • Anonymous says:

        The absence of anti-nerdism

        Actually, this is all nerds ever talk about. I can’t think of a single other group that is so relentlessly self-pitying. (It also has more or less obvious political manifestations.)

        • Alrenous says:

          Man, anti-racism is all those black slaves talk about. They’re relentlessly self-pitying. Get back to work!

          Not even slightly obvious. Is that really your best argument?

        • Oligopsony says:

          You’ll note that that’s an entirely different question. Blacks being concerned about racism would indeed refute a claim about anti-racism not existing, regardless of whether the tone of the refutation expresses contempt, admiration, or indifference towards blacks.

        • Alrenous says:

          Uncharitable reading, Oligopsony. Can you really not think of what I might have meant instead, that would make sense?

        • MugaSofer says:

          I don’t know about Oligopsony, but I certainly can’t.

        • Alrenous says:

          Okay.

          The absence of anti-nerdism in the anti-racist makes it impossible for me to take anti-racism seriously.

          “I don’t like status being granted based on morally irrelevant details.”
          vs.
          “I say certain details are socio-morally irrelevant when it’s politically useful to say so.”

          Certainly my sentence was ambiguous. But it’s suspicious when the overly-general interpretation outcompetes the less-general one, especially as the next sentence provides specificity context. ‘Agitator’, not ‘movement’ or ‘philosophy’.

          Oh, and then they say skin colour is morally relevant if we’re talking about whites. It’s the perfect storm of self-refutation.

        • Nornagest says:

          Presuming that “anti-nerdism” means “opposition to prejudice toward nerds” and not “opposition to nerds”, I see that in nerds but very rarely in anti-racists.

          I don’t think this is valid grounds for criticizing anti-racist culture, though. For one thing, nerds are a subculture: one that smart and socially awkward people are often pushed toward, at least in the US, but one that they in principle have chosen to adopt. For another, I think there are some very good reasons to criticize that subculture (though not usually the same reasons that SJ types like to present).

        • Alrenous says:

          @Nornagest

          Something like 50% of nerds have Asperger’s. That’s not a choice. Nerds do not choose to be socially awkward, especially not in high school. They would choose to be left alone but aren’t allowed to choose that. Nerds don’t aggressively try to convert non-nerds to social awkwardness.

          For another, I think there are some very good reasons to criticize that [race]

          Higher crime rates for example. By which I mean your analogy appears self-defeating.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Something like 50% of nerds have Asperger’s. That’s not a choice. Nerds do not choose to be socially awkward, especially not in high school. They would choose to be left alone but aren’t allowed to choose that. Nerds don’t aggressively try to convert non-nerds to social awkwardness.

          But who are the non-nerds supposed to punish? the school system? The government? The easiest people to punish to get the nerds to go away are the nerds themselves. And it’s hard to punish someone when it’s not their fault; therefore, it’s their fault.

        • Alrenous says:

          But who are the [whites] supposed to punish? the school system? The government? The easiest people to punish to get the [blacks] to go away are the [blacks] themselves. And it’s hard to punish someone when it’s not their fault; therefore, it’s their fault.

          So I’ve done this substitution three times now, and it gets more amusing every time. You realize the only reason nerdism seems different from racism is because Authority has told you they’re different…right?

          Nerds go away on their own, you don’t need to punish them. You seem to be infected with creepy collectivism.

          One of the times Authority and Respectability are wrong is when they say segregation is evil. Different thedes auto-segregate, you don’t even need laws. Let them do so, and most of problem evaporates.

          Indeed the opposite is true: NORPs need to be punished so they’ll leave Nerds alone. Or rather, the Nerd’s right to self-defence needs to be respected, instead of school and State reinforcing NORP predation.

          I know nobody cares and this won’t happen. That’s not my point.

          That’s precisely why anti-racism is farcical: it’s obvious that nobody cares about that either, except maybe in far mode. If Lincoln couldn’t have used slavery as an excuse to conquer the south, he wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass. How do we know this? Because a quarter of slaves died after being ‘freed,’ and we saw neither shame nor remorse nor reparations. Did you read that right? Yes: a full quarter. Think about how many suffered but didn’t quite die. Because they weren’t ‘freed,’ they were forced off plantations. Nobody ever asked what the slaves wanted. Sure, many of them would have wanted off, but we have first-hand accounts that not all of them did.

          (When a company hears a complaint, they know 100 or so wanted to complain but couldn’t be arsed to make the call. There’s between 10-100 lurkers in Twitch channels for every person in chat. For every account of a former slave that regretted Emancipation, we know many, many more regretted it but didn’t bother to write down how much.)

        • Nornagest says:

          Nerds do not choose to be socially awkward, especially not in high school. They would choose to be left alone but aren’t allowed to choose that. Nerds don’t aggressively try to convert non-nerds to social awkwardness.

          For clarity, I’m not using “nerd” to mean “socially awkward person” here. I’m using it to mean “one who identifies as a nerd, a geek, or a member of one of several closely affiliated subcultures”. Not everyone that gets called a nerd in high school is going to be a nerd in this sense, any more than everyone that gets called a retard is actually mentally handicapped — but the referent of “nerd” is the culture, just as the referent of “retard” is the handicap.

          Higher crime rates for example. By which I mean your analogy appears self-defeating.

          What analogy? I’m talking about attitudes toward nerds here, not race. Though for the record, the main thing that keeps me from being very critical of the inner-city cultures responsible for higher crime rates etc. (provided you’re not a biodeterminist, which I’m not) is precisely the fact that it’s almost always dog-whistle for class or race. Well, that and the fact that I don’t know much about them. I know a lot about nerd culture.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          Nerds don’t aggressively try to convert non-nerds to social awkwardness.

          Funny how many SJW / progressive initiatives look exactly like trying to convert people to social awkwardness.

          Don’t talk to women in public places (be socially avoidant).

          Ask for specific verbal consent when sexually escalating (someone upthread accused James Donald of rape because he described having sex with women for the first time as mostly a matter of throwing them on a bed and with some ass slapping – that’s normal behavior and some lunatic describes that as an extremely serious crime because the thought of normal people behaving normally makes her uncomfortable).

          Have a preferred pronoun.

          Never refer to someone with a pronoun without asking that person what his preferred pronoun is (imagine how insanely awkward that sounds to normal people – basically you’re going around insulting people by implying that they’re not manly enough to be clearly male / feminine enough to be clearly female).

          Insane sensitivity around race. Example – someone recognized Suey Park of #cancelcolbert fame and asked her if she was Suey Park. Her response? “Just because I’m Asian you think I’m Suey Park?” That’s both insanely socially awkward behavior and an attempt to force other people to behave socially awkwardly by breaking out a giant rhetorical weapon over literally nothing. Think about what goes through the mind of the person who approached Suey the next time that person goes to approach someone to start a conversation. Think that person will be more or less socially awkward?

          People like to be around and talk to confident people (salesmen make a living from this fact). SJW / progressivism undermines this as much as possible.

          Sure looks to me like trying to convert people to social awkwardness.

        • Crimson Wool says:

          Example – someone recognized Suey Park of #cancelcolbert fame and asked her if she was Suey Park. Her response? “Just because I’m Asian you think I’m Suey Park?”

          Ahaha, what the fuck? Got a link?

        • Nornagest says:

          someone upthread accused James Donald of rape because he described having sex with women for the first time as mostly a matter of throwing them on a bed and with some ass slapping

          As uncomfortable as it makes me to touch this subject with a ten-foot pole, I got the impression that the objection wasn’t to rough sex per se but rather to the sentence “consent [is] nonverbal and pre-rational”. Nonverbal, fine, that’s normal. Pre-rational? That could mean all sorts of shit in this context. As much as I dislike Jim’s attitude I think we ought to at least give him the benefit of the doubt where major felonies are concerned, so I think it’s probably meant to be relatively benign, but I can see how someone primed to think otherwise might do so.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          So I’ve done this substitution three times now, and it gets more amusing every time. You realize the only reason nerdism seems different from racism is because Authority has told you they’re different…right?

          LOL way to miss subtext.

        • Multiheaded says:

          That’s precisely why anti-racism is farcical: it’s obvious that nobody cares about that either, except maybe in far mode. If Lincoln couldn’t have used slavery as an excuse to conquer the south, he wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass. How do we know this? Because a quarter of slaves died after being ‘freed,’ and we saw neither shame nor remorse nor reparations. Did you read that right? Yes: a full quarter. Think about how many suffered but didn’t quite die. Because they weren’t ‘freed,’ they were forced off plantations. Nobody ever asked what the slaves wanted. Sure, many of them would have wanted off, but we have first-hand accounts that not all of them did.

          If Stevens and Douglass ran things in the occupied South, it wouldn’t have come to that. (Yes, Stevens did wield power post-war, but obviously not enough to defend the Reconstruction.) Really, that’s clearly the problem with the South: it wasn’t treated like occupied Germany or Japan.

        • Matthew says:

          Something like 50% of nerds have Asperger’s.

          Citation needed!!!

          I was a nerd in high school and college (meaning I enjoyed learning for its own sake; I also incidentally was fond of sci-fi, RPGS, etc). My friends were all nerds too. I am absolutely confident that none of them had Aspergers. In my entire high school class (of about 250 people) I can only think of one who might have been Aspergers in retrospect. The 50% figure does not event remotely accord with my own experiences.

          I had previously assumed that the increase in autism diagnoses was a diagnostic issue, not a change in prevalence. But if your figure is even close to correct, perhaps I was wrong. (I went to high school in the 90s).

        • Alrenous says:

          @Ialdabaoth

          Oh yeah? I’m still missing it. And will 99.etc% likely miss it again in the future.

          @ Matthew

          Pure guess. I just want to say it’s way, way higher than the general prevalence. As in, almost all Asberger’s cases are nerds.

          It would seem you can get the actual numbers here if you want.

        • Anonymous says:

          @Alrenous, Steve Johnson

          That tweet reads to me like a joke she made (possibly self-deprecatingly?), the way she starts out with OMG. Obviously, it is hard to tell in text form and with knowing nothing about SP except the cancelcolbert kerfuffle. Possibly I’m being too charitable, but I was all ready to believe she was seriously that hostile and then reading the actual tweet made me think otherwise.

  22. James James says:

    “…even though I get accused of ‘privilege’ for writing things on my blog, even though there’s no possible way that could be ‘interrupting’ or ‘in a women only safe space’.”

    Can you give an example to back this up? In the original context (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/14/living-by-the-sword/) you appear to equivocate between “privilege” and “mansplaining”.

  23. Phil Goetz says:

    “Words no good.” — Ezra Pound

    Scott, I don’t understand how you have time to go to medical school, write one giant post every other day, *and* surf madness on the internet. Just *reading* your stuff takes up a lot of my time. I love the motte-and-bailey analogy.

    Not to detract from your point, but I’d like to back up to the original tumblr gif’s definition of “check your privilege”. I’ve heard most of those objections made about things I wrote. Here’s what they mean in practice:

    “You are inserting yourself into a conversation where you shouldn’t be. Acknowledge what you are doing, apologize and stop it.” – You are representing the viewpoint of whites / males in a conversation about race / gender. Apologize and stop it.

    “You are belittling my pain.” – You are saying that (men / whites) also have pain.

    “You are making my fears concerns and troubles less important than your annoyance about me talking about my experience.” – You are pointing out the errors and inconsistencies in what I just said.

    I got sucked into blogs about rape because I wrote a story that subtly implied that one of the characters had been raped, and a reader questioned why I would write about such a painful experience. (The short answer is that writing is always about painful experiences.) I found bloggers arguing with each other about the ground rules for talking about rape, trying to ban speech that they consider politically disadvantageous. The main factors in determining the ground rules seem (my subjective impression) not to be facts about rape, but the political circumstances (which groups they can receive support from and hence must not alienate).

    It was not remarkable that it’s not allowed to mention that women who can be proven to have made false rape accusations are often not prosecuted. But it was remarkable that discussing how to reduce rape is banned. Any discussion of correlates of rape, or steps that could reduce rape, is banned. Even mentioning statistics showing that legalizing prostitution reduces rape, or interventions or behavioral therapy that could reduce recidivism in rapists, is banned. The suggestion that rape has any structural causes other than the inherent malignant nature of males is banned.

    I concluded that most of the people speaking out against rape are no more against rape than Karl Rove is against abortion. They like rape. Rape is useful to them. It’s a source of moral high ground and political power. Anything that might decrease real rape in the real world is a threat to them, and they attack it. They throw the resulting rape victims under the rapist bus, for the sake of political power.

    So the simple story, that there are people on two sides of an issue, and the side that has historically been the victim group is trying to turn the tables, may be too simple. There may be organizations that consciously exploit historically oppressed groups for political gain, with no intent of ever improving their situation. (The only part of that sentence I’m skeptical of is the “conscious” part.)

    • falenas108 says:

      That is NOT what is meant by that. I’m sure there exist people who use things that way, but in my experience that is not typical.

      “You are inserting yourself into a conversation where you shouldn’t be. Acknowledge what you are doing, apologize and stop it.” – You are representing the viewpoint of whites or males in a conversation about race or gender. Apologize and stop it.”
      In a conversation about what systematic oppressive racism, the standard views of white, male, ect should probably not be represented. Because that’s not what the conversation is about.

      “You are belittling my pain.” – You are saying that (men / whites) also have pain.”
      Now, this obviously depends on the context. An example from my own life: In a conversation about street harassment, I could bring up the fact that as a cis male, I was once told by a stranger that I should smile more while walking down the street, and it didn’t feel bad. If I did that, I *should* be told to check my privilege because there is a massive difference between having that happen once, and done many times going in public.

      It could also be applied if I took the above example, even if it was hurtful, and saying that this lets me emphasize with women who have this problem. Because there’s a difference between feeling uncomfortable once, and being afraid of harassment every time I decide to walk more than a couple blocks. It’s saying “The pain you experience is not nearly as extreme as what I have experienced as a _____, and equivocating the two is belittling my own.”

      “You are making my fears concerns and troubles less important than your annoyance about me talking about my experience.” – You are pointing out the errors and inconsistencies in what I just said.”

      This sounds like your response was something to the effect of “Oh, what you experience isn’t that bad because _____” To which the person is saying, because you haven’t experienced this, you do not understand that this is seriously hurtful.

      • James James says:

        “In a conversation about what systematic oppressive racism, the standard views of white, male, ect should probably not be represented. Because that’s not what the conversation is about.”

        However, this argument is also used when the conversation was not originally about systematic oppression.

        • Jaskologist says:

          Note that word “conversation” is itself being strategically equivocated. In a real conversation, at least 2 sides are allowed to speak. What is being described here is at best a lecture, and at worst a harangue.

      • Phil Goetz says:

        That is NOT what is meant by that. I’m sure there exist people who use things that way, but in my experience that is not typical.

        “You are inserting yourself into a conversation where you shouldn’t be. Acknowledge what you are doing, apologize and stop it.” – You are representing the viewpoint of whites or males in a conversation about race or gender. Apologize and stop it.”
        In a conversation about what systematic oppressive racism, the standard views of white, male, ect should probably not be represented. Because that’s not what the conversation is about.

        Make your mind up. First you say it doesn’t mean what I said; then you say it does.

        • falenas108 says:

          There’s a difference between “a conversation about race and gender” and “a conversation explicitly about racism.”

      • Phil Goetz says:

        This sounds like your response was something to the effect of “Oh, what you experience isn’t that bad because _____”

        No, it doesn’t. That would not be pointing out errors or inconsistencies.

      • Mary says:

        “That is NOT what is meant by that. I’m sure there exist people who use things that way, but in my experience that is not typical.”

        Ah, but is your experience typical?

        And if it is, does it negate the experience of those who habitually face the atypical variety?

      • Anonymous says:

        “In a conversation about what systematic oppressive racism, the standard views of white, male, ect should probably not be represented. Because that’s not what the conversation is about.”

        That makes no sense. If the conversation is about racism, that a white person’s viewpoint on racism in completely on point. Dismissing a viewpoint merely because of the race of its holder is an ad hominem attack. And racist.

        • Nornagest says:

          I don’t necessarily find the argument compelling, but it makes more sense if you read “a conversation about racism” as “a conversation about its participants’ experiences with systemic oppression vis-a-vis race”.

        • Mary says:

          So what? “Jabberwocky” would make more sense if you read more standard words into the place of the nonsense ones.

    • Zorgon says:

      “Any discussion of rape outside of the academically-agreed explanation of rape isn’t allowed” doesn’t automatically mean that “Rape is politically convenient and a good thing for Us.”

      Yes, it could certainly be argued that the SJ movements gain significant political benefit from gendering rape and they’ve certainly been deliberately doing so for decades, BUT the academic framework (erroneously) supporting that view predates that slow campaign.

      In short, you’re projecting malice where straightforward belief would suffice. I think you may have lost sight of the Principle of Charity here.

      • In short, you’re projecting malice where straightforward belief would suffice. I think you may have lost sight of the Principle of Charity here.

        Prison rape, which is typically of males, is treated as a joke. On the other hand, if a women gets half drunk and goes looking for a dicking, and when she sobers up regrets the dicking, she is a “rape survivor”. Absolutely no one is allowed to laugh at her.

        Seems malicious to me.

        • Zorgon says:

          To reiterate – the former is a traditionalist viewpoint which does not contradict the feminists’ gendered model of rape. The latter is the result of decades of gendered rape victim advocacy along with prejudices stemming from traditionalism.

          Neither of these contradicts the model I gave above. For this situation to occur, there only needs to be simple belief in a wholly gendered model of rape. Malice is not required.

          Hell, the model I’m presenting is even compatible with neoreaction. (Might need to go shower now.)

          • To reiterate – the former is a traditionalist viewpoint which does not contradict the feminists’ gendered model of rape. The latter is the result of decades of gendered rape victim advocacy along with prejudices stemming from traditionalism.

            By “traditionalist”you refer to the view that women are naturally pure and chaste, except that evil males impose upon them, which still survives as the view that children are naturally pure and chaste (even when well past andrenarche) except that evil adults impose upon them, so the high school football star who nails his hot teacher is also a rape survivor. (Unlike the man who gets raped in prison)

            This was the view of the Victorian left, and was used as a hammer to destroy marriage. Since women were naturally pure and chaste, there was supposedly no need to enforce the marriage contract against women, only against men, and enforcing it on women was what we would now call misogyny.

            Whenever a left wing program produces total disaster, you guys move further left, and attribute your old program and its disastrous consequences to being insufficiently left.

            The traditional view (eighteenth century, early ninenteenth, politically incorrect äfter 1820 or so) was that women were lecherous animals who, given half a chance, would crawl one hundred miles over broken glass to fuck some guy who half plausibly pretended to be high status. Hence the urgent necessity of not giving them half a chance.

            In the latter part of the nineteenth century, we had a hundred programs to “rescue fallen women”- by removing all adverse consequences of falling. When these programs had the entirely predictable result, then you guys deemed the view that women were naturally chaste “traditional”, and shifted the grounds for your attack on marriage and the family to the doctrine that women have an absolute right to sexual autonomy – even when exercising that supposed right is contrary to promises and formal contract, and even when it is apt to have extremely bad consequences for their children, themselves, and their husbands.

        • Zorgon says:

          Going to Manboobz for opinions on MRAs is roughly analogous to going to Stormfront for opinions on Jews.

        • Anonymous says:

          @Hainish
          Funny how for the SLPC, you link to them, but for “MRA”, you link to someone talking about them.

          David calls the comments here “mostly ignorant”. I don’t see how any but the second to last can be so called. What is his definition of “MRA”, that he was unable to fin any other reference to prison rape? I was quickly able to find this:

          http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/the-rape-of-mankind/

    • anon says:

      Did you know that Karl Rove also hates Italians?

  24. James James says:

    “I feel like every single term in social justice terminology has a totally unobjectionable and obviously important meaning – and then is actually used a completely different way.”

    Have you read the Radish Magazine article about doing this with “feminism”?
    http://radishmag.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/fair-sex/
    Points out that the way the word is used in practice is different from the commonly-given definition.

    I have seen this done before. Someone raised some objections to feminism, and someone else replied something like, “How could you oppose feminism? It just means equality for women”, ignoring the objections that had just been raised.

    Yudkowsky espouses the “equality” definition of feminism, but luckily he actually uses the word that way too.

    • Taradino C. says:

      Scott made the same point back on LiveJournal: “… opponents of feminism use straw men to make feminism look wrong beyond any possibility of controversy. Proponents of feminism use straw men to make feminists look right beyond any possibility of controversy. But they’re both straw-manning the other side and in reality feminism is controversial – hence the obvious controversy around it.”

    • Sarah says:

      Standard conversation:

      Me: “I don’t consider myself a feminist.”
      Friend: “Oh no! But everybody who believes that women are people is a feminist!”
      Me: “Well, sure, I believe women are people. But I also believe X. Do you think one can be a feminist and believe X?”
      Friend: “Oh ew no. X is gross. Feminists don’t believe X.”
      Me: “Ok then, I’m not a feminist.”
      Friend: “Noooo! Feminism is for everybody!”
      Me: “Well, I believe X. Am I allowed to count as a feminist or not? I’m ok either way, but make up your mind!”

      [You could resolve this issue by admitting that there are feminists you think are wrong. Or by admitting that some non-feminists are reasonable people worth talking to. And some self-described feminists do pick one of those tactics. But I’ve encountered several who don’t.]

      • Mary says:

        I have with my own eyes seen feminists have vapors at the idea that anyone could know what feminism was — when they talk, write, publish, etc about incessantly.

  25. James James says:

    Steve Sailer has been covering the Donald Sterling affair. He thinks Sterling was set up by a consortium who wanted to buy his team, and that his mistress was hired to trick him into saying racist things.

    • Randy M says:

      Yes, the Magic Johnson connection he points out is interesting, and belies the notion upthread that his complaint was about having blacks be seen as high status by shring the owners box with his Mistress.

      • James James says:

        If true, the funny thing is (a) that Magic Johnson and co. were outbid by Steve Ballmer, and (b) Sterling is gonna get $2bn for the Clippers. So he won’t do badly in the end. (He’s 80 though, so it doesn’t make much difference whether he gets $1bn or $2bn. What’s he gonna do with the money?)

        • Randy M says:

          a) Just because you orchestrate a coup, doesn’t mean you wind up on the throne (paging Jaime Lanister).

          b) True, I do find it hard to find sympathy for him personally (wow, only a billion dollars to compensate?) which is probably why he makes a good target for the mob.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      This would actually be a comforting thought. It would mean the whole thing happened for a good reason and made sense.

      On the other hand, exactly how much Machiavelli does it require before a really old white guy who’s said racist things before says racist things again?

      • nydwracu says:

        How much Machiavelli does it require before a really old white guy who’s said racist things before says racist things again on a tape that gets leaked?

      • Steve Johnson says:

        Would it be comforting?

        It would mean that people have consciously chosen to use weaponized social justice to rob someone.

        • lmm says:

          It would mean that he was targeted by someone who wanted his wealth rather than at random. To someone not so wealthy that’s comforting.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          I guess if you don’t own anything that other people might want, you’re safe – from thieves anyway.

          Of course then there are the people who engage in these witch hunts just for the monkey thrill of destroying one of the enemy. Better not have anything to be safe from them – not a job or a home or friends.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Of course then there are the people who engage in these witch hunts just for the monkey thrill of destroying one of the enemy. Better not have anything to be safe from them – not a job or a home or friends.

          That doesn’t help. In order to be safe from those people, you have to not have positive feelings for them to take away.

          (Note: this explains much of my personality; I spent most of my childhood learning to be Dementor-proof.)

        • MugaSofer says:

          >Would it be comforting?

          Well, I would rather the superweapon we constructed was in the hands of humans than firing randomly.

          Humans, at least, are predictable. They even sometimes have ethical pretensions that can modify their behavior.

      • xachariah says:

        Donald Sterling didn’t just get trolled into saying racist things, though. He has actively and harmfully discriminated, because he actively engaged in housing discrimination.

        Granted, his losing the team was because he got caught saying racist things. But the fact that society got a lot more upset about that than about his much more harmful housing discrimination is troubling.

        • nydwracu says:

          Talk about strange. A man notoriously concerned with profit maximization refuses to take money from those willing to shell it out to live in the most overrated, overpriced neighborhood in Southern California? That same man, who gives black men tens of millions of dollars every year, refuses to take a few thousand a month from folks who would like to crash in one of his buildings for a while? You gotta love racism, the only force in the world powerful enough to interfere with money-making.

          journalists dot t x t

        • Steve Johnson says:

          Hey nydwracu, the whole progressive enterprise works much better if you have an unrebuttable presumption that there are no group differences and therefore and different treatment is solely the result of internalized oppression or evil racism depending on who is meting out the treatment so stop pointing out how silly it is!

          [Looping back to the original post] – that makes us in the SJ movement angry and if we get angry enough we’ll get triggered and cry AND BLAME YOU FOR IT! [Ok, we won’t actually get “triggered” (after all, we’re not combat veterans with PTSD, we’re people who have chosen to read some words on the internet) but that doesn’t matter – we’ll pretend to be really angry and try to get you fired!]

        • James James says:

          “his much more harmful housing discrimination”

          I think you mean his profitable and good-for-society housing discrimination.

        • >You gotta love racism, the only force in the world powerful enough to interfere with money-making.

          Try modelling prejudice as one of the luxuries you buy with money and status.

          And I don’t think racism is the only thing that interferes with money-making– akrasia (including the too-busy-to-think variety) is a much larger force.

        • nydwracu says:

          Try modelling prejudice as one of the luxuries you buy with money and status.

          The excerpt is totally ridiculous, and this is basically true in that people prefer to maximize the number of people of their own thede who they live around but government policies have made this substantially more difficult in such a way that it now costs much more to do so than it did before, but those two things aren’t related.

          What Sterling did was own a place called Koreatown and refuse to rent to non-Koreans, which usually meant blacks. In other words, he noticed that there was a potential market and moved into it. Moving into that market is, of course, illegal, but he managed to get away with it for a while.

          The thing that the journalists don’t notice, far beyond the usual patterns of desired association stuff, is that the LA riots happened. “LA riots” is a euphemism: it was a race war. The LAPD didn’t bother trying to protect the Koreans from the blacks — they had to take matters into their own hands.

          Sterling was found guilty of heresy over Koreatown, and he was fined a few million dollars. Even if Sterling personally didn’t like blacks or whatever, the point remains that he moved into a market that’s only illegal because this country’s government doesn’t like it when one race isn’t allowed to have their own building to live in that excludes the race that tried to ethnically cleanse the city of them only a few years before.

          Now, what’s really interesting is that I’ve heard rumors of whites being driven out of Chinatowns. I don’t expect that anything will ever be done about that — whites aren’t blacks.

  26. falenas108 says:

    The racism school gif misses an important point. Being told to check your privilege means “Due to your _____, you don’t have this experience that these other people do.”

    I think this would cover a lot of the other cases, though obviously not all.

    At the same time, this provides more evidence in support of your theory Scott, because that’s also a perfectly reasonable term that should be applied to minorities/oppressed folks when it fits.

    • Kaminiwa says:

      Men can get raped. Quite a few women go through life without being raped. I don’t see non-raped-women being excluded from discussions on rape, or being told that not-being-raped is a privilege they need to be aware of.

      I doooo see men who have been raped dismissed as one-offs and otherwise irrelevant or “derailing” the conversation, though.

      So… Motte and Bailey again: some people might actually use it that way, but that doesn’t mean there’s not also a weaponized strain out there. And I see the weaponized strain a lot more often out in the wild.

      • falenas108 says:

        Yeah, that’s what I meant when I said “At the same time, this provides more evidence in support of your theory Scott, because that’s also a perfectly reasonable term that should be applied to minorities/oppressed folks when it fits.”

    • I think it’s plausible that men and women have different social problems around getting raped– women are defined as the sort of people who are naturally subject to rape, while men (if not prisoners) are defined as the sort of people who are supposed to be rape-proof.

      This is not a reason for the possibility and reality of men being raped to be erased from the discussion.

      • women are defined as the sort of people who are naturally subject to rape, while men (if not prisoners) are defined as the sort of people who are supposed to be rape-proof.

        Men, if not prisoners, are pretty difficult to rape, hence ridiculing males who get raped is reasonable. He probably was asking for it. Ridiculing male prisoners who get raped is unreasonable. He probably did not fight back hard enough because he feared for his life.

        Ridiculing drunken sluts who get raped while cruising for a dicking is also reasonable, but forbidden.

        Trouble is that if forbidden to laugh at drunken sluts getting “raped’, men will be charged with ”rape” because they had a one night stand and in the morning she looked at him without beer goggles.

        If it is forbidden to make unkind remarks that some “rapes” are likely to be considerably less traumatic than other rapes, if such remarks are offensive, if such remarks are trolling, then grave injustices will be done to some men.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Men, if not prisoners, are pretty difficult to rape, hence ridiculing males who get raped is reasonable. He probably was asking for it.

          Fuck you, you fucking fuck.

          Fuck you.

        • Multiheaded says:

          SCOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!! Misander this fucking animal and keep it far away from us for half a year or so, will you?

        • Andy says:

          Fuck you, you fucking fuck.

          Fuck you.

          The “Report” button is probably better than swearing at him. Swearing at him lowers you – not quite to his level, but below the level of discourse that you’re worthy of.
          Going off and watching a bunch of funny cat videos helped the urge to tell James exactly what I thought he should do with his convictions.

          SCOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!! Misander this fucking animal and keep it far away from us for half a year or so, will you?

          While I don’t agree with Multi’s language, I agree with his sentiment – James might not belong here. He says interesting things, but no less than other NRx commenters, and his contributions can become flat-out toxic. I think it’s clear his two previous bans haven’t changed his toxic behavior, and it’s time to show him the door.
          However, if you disagree, such is life.

        • Matthew says:

          [I believe the following passes both the TRUE and NECESSARY gates]

          To Scott:

          James A. Donald is a far more pernicious influence on the comments section of this blog than any of the other neoreactionaries, including the ones you’ve already banned permanently, by an order of magnitude. You would be doing your blog and everyone else who participates here a service by banning him permanently. Please.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Going off and watching a bunch of funny cat videos helped the urge to tell James exactly what I thought he should do with his convictions.

          Sorry, I know that was uncalled for. But as one of the people he’s explicitly talking about, who’s heard exactly the claim he’s making far, far more times than I can handle, my initial reaction was not fully mediated by my prefrontal cortex.

        • Andy says:

          But as one of the people he’s explicitly talking about, who’s heard exactly the claim he’s making far, far more times than I can handle, my initial reaction was not fully mediated by my prefrontal cortex.

          Oh, I did not realize. Yeah, I’ve been there, not in your specific situation, but the “initial reaction was not fully mediated” place, I have been.
          Whatever it is worth, you have my sympathy.

        • Elissa says:

          Guys I think we need to recruit a SJW to say something bannable so Scott can feel ok about symmetrically banning this feller

          (Edit: I really didn’t expect anyone to take that as a serious suggestion rather than a wiseass reference to Scott’s history of politically symmetric bans, but if Andy’s is a representative reaction then I have committed a bannable offense and will take my lumps, please note for the purposes of this blog I am sympathetic to SJ)

        • Zorgon says:

          So. Since I already completely lost my damn rag in this thread, I’m going to attempt to keep it this time in the face of extreme provocation.

          Men, if not prisoners, are pretty difficult to rape, hence ridiculing males who get raped is reasonable. He probably was asking for it.

          You’re factually incorrect, James. Erections are not consent, men are not universally stronger than all women, and alcohol, drugs and coercion are all things that exist.

        • Andy says:

          Guys I think we need to recruit a SJW to say something bannable so Scott can feel ok about symmetrically banning this feller

          As a card-carrying SJW, get away from me. Give Scott time to respond, the man’s a medical doctor for Pete’s sake.
          If James is worthy of banning, and I believe he is, Scott will either say so and do so, or will strongly caution him. It is, however, possible that what James has said is controversial but within the bounds of civility, in which case, we hit James’ arguments.
          Recruiting a SJW to tactically get someone we disagree with banned is burning down the walled garden to get a cockroach. Not worth the damage it will do to the environment of respect and civility we have.
          get thee behind me, heretic.

          edit:

          I really didn’t expect anyone to take that as a serious suggestion rather than a wiseass reference to Scott’s history of politically symmetric bans, but if Andy’s is a representative reaction then I have committed a bannable offense and will take my lumps

          Apologies, I am bad at detecting wiseassery over the Internet.

          You’re factually incorrect, James. Erections are not consent, men are not universally stronger than all women, and alcohol, drugs and coercion are all things that exist.

          Drugs, alcohol, and coercion exist between men, and I know men who have been sexually assaulted and raped by other men in a non-prison environment where consent was unclear or ambiguous. I would not be surprised if there are women who were sexually assaulted or coerced by other women in a non-prison setting, as well.

        • Nick T says:

          +1 on banning James, I’ve thought this for a while.

          It seems obvious to me that Elissa was joking.

        • Multiheaded says:

          @Elissa

          I’m an SJW, and Scott once banned me symmetrically with him, but that was for personal attacks on individual racists and misogynists here, not for some kind of broad morally significant pronouncement. I’m not sure what I’d have to come up with; I’ve already supported political violence both generally and in particular cases, insulted the tech culture, said that my views on society involve “killing other people and taking their stuff”… I don’t actually want to defend Pol Pot or something like it (although I might, say, link to a not-so-edgy Maoist view of him).

        • Zathille says:

          Backseat modding is not a very good practice, I’d say, for the same reason that upvoting and downvoting systems may calcify status and engender rigidity in the ‘walled garden’. The report button should be used exactly so these kinds of comments become unnecessary and the thread is not derailed and emptied of substance as seems to be happening now.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          Yeah, okay, banned indefinitely.

        • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

          It’s kind of interesting that Jim’s flame about rape has gotten this immediate intense response, and yet at most we get tut-tutting when one of our resident communists recommends democide along class/racial lines and even directly threaten other posters with death or torture for ideological nonconformity.

          Is rape really so much worse than murder that we should have this reaction?

        • Zorgon says:

          As far as I’m aware, none of the commenters in this thread have ever been tortured or murdered, while as far as I can tell at least two of us are men who have been raped.

        • suntzuanime says:

          I report any call for or defense of mass murder that seems reasonably serious; if there is a difference in treatment I suspect it arises because the fans of mass murder tend to be more polite about it.

        • Multiheaded says:

          AFP: there is the important distinction that most people (thankfully!) share the idea of rape being apriori unjustifiable with no need to consider the circumstances, while there’s a million good justifications for murder, and everyone has a dozen of, to them, particularly compelling ones.

        • Andy says:

          It’s kind of interesting that Jim’s flame about rape has gotten this immediate intense response, and yet at most we get tut-tutting when one of our resident communists recommends democide along class/racial lines and even directly threaten other posters with death or torture for ideological nonconformity.

          If recommending democide bothers you that much, I will recommend that said communist be banned each time I see them advocating for extermination, death, or torture, and aggressively report their comments that contain such, and since I am more-or-less on their side (which you can’t say about me and James.)
          However, since the communist I think you are referring to has been banned once, while this is James’ third banning, advocating for a three-week ban would be more in line with stated policy.

        • Mary says:

          “Men, if not prisoners, are pretty difficult to rape, hence ridiculing males who get raped is reasonable.”

          So, how do you stop a woman with a gun from raping you — so easily that anyone who doesn’t is ridiculous?

        • Steve Johnson says:

          Mary says:
          July 8, 2014 at 11:29 pm

          “Men, if not prisoners, are pretty difficult to rape, hence ridiculing males who get raped is reasonable.”

          So, how do you stop a woman with a gun from raping you — so easily that anyone who doesn’t is ridiculous?

          Has this ever happened or are we just playing more progressive / SJW “all groups are the same and I refuse to notice the differences and will get angry if you do and point them out” games?

          Men are stronger than women. Men who are weaker than women will get mocked for this*. Women are also really rarely attracted to men who are so unmasculine that they can be physically overpowered her (shockingly, men are attracted to femininity and women are attracted to masculinity). Men don’t take unwanted sexual attention from women as a serious threat while women do – both because of the SJW approved reason that men are dangerous to women (being physically stronger and more aggressive) and for the invisible, never to be spoken reason that, since women generally select from men who approach them rather than approaching (normal range of testosterone from nih.gov * Male: 300 -1,000 ng/dL, Female: 15 – 70 ng/dL), they only know their true level of attractiveness based on the quality of men who approach them and that a low quality man approaching her is dangerous to her self image and her social image far more than he is dangerous to her physically. Since men do the approaching they are keenly aware of their own rank – they get polite “nos” and “maybes” and occasional “yeses” from women in their league and hostile “nos” from women out of their league.

          Women’s brains are shaped by the fact that mating often leads to pregnancy and that a large portion of her life and resources are tied up in every one of her children. Men do not have that expectation (to the same degree).

          The upshot of all of this is that the idea of a woman forcibly coercing a man into intercourse is rare and comic. It means the guy is insanely high status to get a woman to act that way (the highest status men you see in real life normally lead to women aggressively advertising their availability – women screaming and fainting at the sight of the Beatles – not trying to rush the stage and ravish the band – in contrast when attractive women perform for men physical security of the women is of the highest priority). It means he’s also quite weak. The combination of an extremely physically weak high status man experiencing something he sees as a misfortune (but most men would be quite happy to experience(aggressive physical pursuit by a woman)) is comedic.

          “Ridiculing drunken sluts who get raped while cruising for a dicking is also reasonable, but forbidden.”

          Going to defend this one too. Ridicule serves a valuable social purpose – it lets people learn from other people’s mistakes. It sucks for the object of ridicule though – but that’s part of the cost. If ridicule didn’t hurt then no one would fear it. People generally believe they’re invincible (young women in our culture even more so**). Yeah, the guy who raped the woman is guilty of a crime but at the same time the woman is the one who got raped. Learn from that and don’t do the same things because rape isn’t going away.

          Of course, the fact that rape fantasies are the single most common fantasy reported in women, that women frequently orgasm when being raped and are actually more likely to conceive when being raped point to another reason why emotions get so heated when discussing rape. Biologically speaking, rape is a mating market strategy for men but it’s also one for women. Women act as if they value the genes of successful rapists. Of course, part of that value comes from the fact that they have to make it difficult for him to succeed – otherwise he could just be a mediocre rapist and hence have bad genes that will produce sons who will get killed by the men of the tribe. The woman’s regular mate wouldn’t be happy about that, of course, so she has to get very angry and upset to show that it wasn’t her idea. It’s easier to convince others you’re angry and upset if sincerely do get angry and upset at the thought. That explains the anger quite well while being in line with what we know about human biology (also it means that the ridicule is there to increase the cost of faking anger and upset after inviting rape).

          People are far more rational than rationalists imagine.

          * On my high school golf team if you shanked a drive and failed to out hit the women’s tees there was always some form of hazing punishment – and this was the golf team – not exactly the football team.

          **Quick example – young women walk around the streets in NY paying zero attention to their surroundings just staring at their phones – I’m a larger than average, stronger than average guy whose hobbies are lifting weights and brazilian jiu jitsu and I don’t do this and looking around I never see men doing this

        • Bish says:

          Steve, I agree with you that sex differences in desire and psychology, but that doesn’t mean that men being raped by women is a strange scenario.

          You are correct that the average woman is probably very unlikely to rape the average man, given what we know about sexual psychology. But female rapists are not the average woman!

          If you take women who are more aggressive and less scrupulous than average, and pair them with men who are less aggressive (or passed out), then it really shouldn’t be hard to imagine female-on-male sexual violence occurring. Some people use violence or threats to get what they want, and this includes women.

          You point out that women generally go for high-status men. Yes, they do. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t reasonably common situations where a woman views a man as attractive, but he doesn’t reciprocate, or he is in a relationship with someone else (or he is passed out). Yes, initiating at all is unusual for the average woman, but we are not talking about the average woman here. I think you underestimate what women with sufficiently nasty personal traits are capable of.

          You are skeptical that a woman could rape a man unless he is physically weak. But I think you should consider scenarios other than a woman physically overpowering a man:

          – Weapons (probably rare)
          – Alcohol incapacitation (probably very common)
          – Threats
          – Social power (because it’s socially dangerous for men to fight back)

          In modern societies, force is not always the deciding factor in conflict. In Western societies, men are trained to refrain from violence towards women (e.g. don’t hit a girl), but women aren’t given the same training about violence towards men.

          Let’s say a woman wants to have sex with a man who doesn’t want. He says “no” but she gets on top of him (let’s say he is already lying down because of being intoxicated, or just watching a movie). What is he supposed to do if she doesn’t respond to “no”? Push her off?

          Well, that implies some of a struggle. What if he doesn’t want to use violence to stop her? What if he pushes her off, and she gets a bruise, then tells the police and/or their entire community that he tried to rape her? Who are people most likely to believe? Not him. (This scenario isn’t hypothetical; it comes from James Landrith’s story.)

          The social situation can be quite complicated even if he is physically stronger and more aggressive. This doesn’t mean that he is “weak.”

        • Crimson Wool says:

          Women are also really rarely attracted to men who are so unmasculine that they can be physically overpowered her (shockingly, men are attracted to femininity and women are attracted to masculinity).

          Counterpoint: Many female sex offenders are pedophiles who target children below the age of six. It is difficult to argue that this is in any way an evolutionary adaptation or based on normal female sexuality. I hardly think a toddler is exactly an optimal mating partner for a woman, yet that’s a fairly common demographic for female childfuckers to target. If you can have women with sexualities so distorted they think banging three-year-olds is a good idea, why shouldn’t there be ones who choose instead to prey on unmasculine men?

          There’s also a similar case for inmate-on-inmate sexual violence in women’s prisons, which is actually higher than inmate-on-inmate sexual violence in men’s prisons. Again, difficult to find any plausible reproductive explanation there, and again it flies in the face of the “women would never rape somebody who’s unmasculine.”

          Here are a couple studies which use the CTS2 which includes separate physically forced sex numbers (they both only take men and women who were in heterosexual relationships in the past 12 months, and ask specifically about those relationships):

          Childhood and Adolescent Victimization and Sexual Coercion and Assault by Male and Female University Students

          Physically forcing sex was reported by 2.4% of the male students and 1.8% of the female students [χ2 (1) = 4.83; p<.05]. Rates for the specific items were: 1.3% of males and 1.0% of females reported using force on the partner to have sex [χ2 (1) = 1.67; p=.19], and 1.6% of the males and 1.0% of the females reported using force to have oral or anal sex [χ2 (1) = 7.35; p<.01]. Thus, as in other studies which compared sexual coercion by men and women in the same study, both men and women engaged in sexually coercive behavior, but men predominate.

          Predictors of Sexual Coercion Against Women and Men

          Table 1 presents descriptive information concerning the percentage of men who sustained force sex, verbal sexual coercion, and a history of CSA. Almost 3% of men [note: table states 2.8%] reported forced sex and 22% reported verbal coercion. For the forced sex items (analyses not shown), 2.4% reported forced oral or anal sex, and 2.1% reported forced vaginal sex.

          […] [female results follow for comparison]

          Descriptive information concerning the victimization from forced sex, verbal sexual coercion, and CSA for women is presented in Table 2. As shown, 2.3% of the sample overall reported sustaining forced sex from their current or most recent romantic partner, and close to 25% of the female sample sustained verbal sexual coercion. For the forced sex items (analyses not shown), 1.6% reported that their partners forced them into oral or anal sex, and 1.6% reported that their partners forced them into vaginal sex

          Getting late here, so I’m gonna cut off at this point. I hope that I have at least offered some plausible evidence to the effect that, yeah, that kind of thing does happen. I couldn’t quickly find a study which looked at, specifically, the subset of the adult male population that was physically forced to have heterosexual sex of one kind or another during their adult life, but that’s because a large portion of studies don’t bother even glancing sideways at male victims (especially not male victims of women, and especially not adult male victims of women), much less breaking it down in such detail.

          [Women] are actually more likely to conceive when being raped[.]

          I think this is wrong, actually, and would like a cite. IIRC this is based on one half-assed study.

        • I was wondering if I should come up with a somewhat neutral replay to this– James’ empathy for imprisoned men was so much less malicious than his usual that I was wondering if I should encourage it. However, he’s been banned, so I’m off the hook.

          I find it fascinating that no one seems to have commented that he seems to have admitted to committing rape here.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I find it fascinating that no one seems to have commented that he seems to have admitted to committing rape here.

          Honestly, I read that as more of the in-your-face posturing that he enjoys.

          Also, “consent is non-verbal and pre-rational” is… *sigh*

          A lot of people DO want precisely that. And a lot of people know how to give it to them. The trick is to be high-status enough, relative to the person you’re dominating, to get away with it.

          So yeah – talking about that little snippet opens up a whole can of worms that might best be served elsewhere.

        • Mary says:

          “Men are stronger than women. ”

          Women have ways of counterbalancing this, even without guns. For instance, a girl with a fake id can commit rape by deception to get a guy to sleep with her, and then forcible rape by threatening to report him to the police — that is, by threatening him with third party violence. Or an underage girl getting into the apartment of her dream guy and threatening to claim he tried to seduce her — which is also rape.

          “Men who are weaker than women will get mocked for this*. ”

          Notice that this offers “is” as evidence for “ought” which ought to be mocked by all right-thinking souls as it is a non-sequitur and bad logic.

          • Oddly enough, the socially normal marriage– man older than woman– has a high probability of him being less physically capable than she is for some years at the end. I’m not saying her raping him is the major risk, but other sorts of abuse are feasible.

            Also, as someone pointed out in this discussion, differences in aggressiveness can swamp out differences in strength.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Sigh.

          Play it again, Scott.

          I can’t even make le funny misandry jokes in the face of, y’know, actual misandry. Not zombie Valerie Solanas, just something a dude would casually tell other dudes. Steve says that the sky is green, the grass is pink, men who get raped are subhuman, and I’m not even going to talk about the woman bit (other than say that men can get aroused during rape by any gender, men often have submissive fantasies, men can somehow orgasm from anal sex, and, crucially, men are vulnerable to abuse/capture-bonding through intermittent reinforcement, which appears to be the main psychological mechanism at play with battered women.) His narrative is anti-knowledge in the service of brutality and oppression.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          So, how do you stop a woman with a gun from raping you — so easily that anyone who doesn’t is ridiculous?

          The same way you stop a female mass murderer from shooting you — by realizing that the proposed scenario has such a tiny prior that you might as well treat it as non-existent and get on with your life. Hell, at least there has been one famous case of a female mass murderer… does this mythical gun-wielding female rapist exist anywhere outside the ream of hypotheticals?

        • Andy says:

          The upshot of all of this is that the idea of a woman forcibly coercing a man into intercourse is rare and comic.

          Steve, I’mma say a thing, and if it sounds condescending and rude, that’s because it’s meant in exactly that way. However, if it is unkind, I believe it is both completely, uncontroversially true, and totally necessary.
          OUTLIERS EXIST. Not everyone is typical, and especially not everyone is your evolutionary-psychology “normal” which seems more like a cover for the patriarchal ideal than the way actual people are.
          There are women and men who are completely round-the-bend nuts, and sometimes these people want sex from a given male, and are prepared to do extremely unethical things to get it. I have seen this happen to a friend of mine, who was pursued aggressively by a woman who had some kind of mental illness – at the very least, she would lie, constantly and pathologically, attempt to threaten and harrass him into giving her attention, to the point where he categorically refused to be alone with her under any circumstances.
          And your evolutionary-psychology handwaving does nothing about that very real set of circumstances.

          It means the guy is insanely high status to get a woman to act that way (the highest status men you see in real life normally lead to women aggressively advertising their availability – women screaming and fainting at the sight of the Beatles – not trying to rush the stage and ravish the band – in contrast when attractive women perform for men physical security of the women is of the highest priority).

          Go to a Justin Bieber concert, and you will not see light security, you will see big heavy guys physically restraining the mostly-female crowd from breaking onto the stage. Men are stalked and killed by their female admirers, not on the same frequency as happens to women, but it does happen, and you completely deny its existence.

          It means he’s also quite weak. The combination of an extremely physically weak high status man experiencing something he sees as a misfortune (but most men would be quite happy to experience(aggressive physical pursuit by a woman)) is comedic.

          It’s traumatic to him, but because it’s something “most men would be quite happy to experience,” he should just lay back and enjoy his body being used as a plaything, lest he become an object of ridicule?
          No no no no no no, and this is a totally immoral thing to say. A men should “Enjoy” a traumatic experience so that you don’t have to reconsider your cobbled-together “Scientific” disguise for the same old fucking patriarchy that oppresses any man who doesn’t measure up to the old masculine ideal, or has the misfortune to attract someone who operates outside the normal bounds of behavior.

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          It’s traumatic to him, but because it’s something “most men would be quite happy to experience,” he should just lay back and enjoy his body being used as a plaything, lest he become an object of ridicule?

          I don’t think the point is that he “should” enjoy it, but that since most men would enjoy it, that makes cases like this even more rare; you have to multiply the probability that a woman would be willing and able to do something recognizable as rape with the probability that a man would even be all that unwilling to give the woman a damn quickie. And if you optimize social norms based on ridiculously unlikely scenarios like these, rather than the scenarios that actually happen the vast majority of the time… well, we have all read LessWrong, right? I am sure you can see how that would be a problem.

          A men should “Enjoy” a traumatic experience so that you don’t have to reconsider your cobbled-together “Scientific” disguise for the same old fucking patriarchy that oppresses any man who doesn’t measure up to the old masculine ideal, or has the misfortune to attract someone who operates outside the normal bounds of behavior.

          Do you think men who advocate patriarchal social norms are evil mutants who want to harm extremely rare outliers? It’s more charitable to view them as men who accept extremely rare outilers as the necessary casualties of maintaining a functioning society.

        • Anonymous says:

          Edit: Andy here, I cleared cookies and forgot to fill in the forms.

          I don’t think the point is that he “should” enjoy it, but that since most men would enjoy it, that makes cases like this even more rare; you have to multiply the probability that a woman would be willing and able to do something recognizable as rape with the probability that a man would even be all that unwilling to give the woman a damn quickie.

          I do not think the pain of a victim is reduced by the low likelihood of their scenario. Do those struck by lightning not get medical attention because being struck by lightning is statistically rare?
          There are conditions that make any part of this chain not just possible but likely. Like:
          a woman being dangerous-crazy,
          the man being in a monogamous relationship, having taken some oath of celibacy, fearful of disease, being asexual, or otherwise not interested in sex with women-as-a-generalized-class.
          I am also offended by the notion that a man should just “throw the woman a damn quickie.” I believe that men and women are both better served by being able to choose who to share their sexuality with. IE, if I have promised my lover that I will only have sexual relations with her, it does real harm to my happiness if I am coerced into “just throwing a quickie” to someone I am not attracted to or afraid of.

          And if you optimize social norms based on ridiculously unlikely scenarios like these, rather than the scenarios that actually happen the vast majority of the time… well, we have all read LessWrong, right? I am sure you can see how that would be a problem.

          I’m not talking about optimizing the entire social normset, I’m talking about making a small change to the social norm of “do not acknowledge male rape victims except as objects of ridicule.” But while were at it, maybe we CAN acknowledge that men aren’t always and don’t have to be stronger than the average woman to have worth, that men can rape other men, that people can be raped by romantic partners… I am arguing that the “ignore or ridicule men who are victims of rape” is actively harmful as a norm and should be changed.
          I think this is actually a way where a social norm turns people into moral mutants who laugh at the traumatic pain of someone who was victimized and likely couldn’t do anything to prevent it.

          tldr: fuck the patriarchy.

        • Nornagest says:

          does this mythical gun-wielding female rapist exist anywhere outside the ream of hypotheticals?

          I’m at work and don’t want to leave anything arguably sketchy on my machine or I’d just search court records, but I’m very close to 100% sure that the answer is “yes”. I’ve had a woman pull a knife on me, and I’ve had women that I wasn’t interested in aggressively try to get into my pants. I haven’t had both happen at once, but it stands to reason that it happens occasionally.

          (Other forms of coercion are probably a lot more common, though. Indeed, I’d expect them to be more common with the genders swapped, too, but to risk overgeneralization, women are socialized into exerting social over physical power more than men are.)

        • Mary says:

          “does this mythical gun-wielding female rapist exist anywhere outside the ream of hypotheticals?”

          Would you know it if she did? Would anyone except her victims, who know what you and many others would do if they went to the cops?

        • nydwracu says:

          You don’t need guns in order to manipulate people: there’s blackmail, and there’s situations where, if the sexes were reversed, it would be held that the woman was in no position to meaningfully consent. Or she could steal something, demand sex in exchange for the stolen property, and set things up with the relevant higher powers (campus safety, for example, is trivial to manipulate if you know what you’re doing) to guarantee that they’d side with her over him. Then there’s emotional manipulation; I’m not sure if that’s technically considered rape, but it’s a definite possibility.

          There are plenty of methods that don’t require direct physical force, and there are plenty of people in the world who would use them if they could figure them out and who can figure them out.

        • Well-Manicured-Bug says:

          Donald’s banned? Showing the oppressive side of progressivism, aren’t we?

          I’m opposed to giving neoreactionaries free publicity by writing articles about them, but to ban them from this blog for simply stating their opinion in a fairly respectful manner, WTF?

        • Oligopsony says:

          Unmolting bug, mourn not the banned
          Whom Scott hath scoured from our land
          For voicing thoughts from his diverging
          (Rightly said, or hatred-earning)
          This is his garden; Jim hath his own
          His exit rights are not unthroned
          As he elsewhere has rightly spied
          “Progressivism’s oppressive side”
          Away from his garden (or festering moor)
          Out in the misgoverned great outdoors
          Of nattering wives their throats unchoked
          Of natural slaves their necks unyoked
          Of owéd labors unrightly shirked
          Of Donald’s rights, by beasts usurped
          And driving him to call the Father:
          “Am I not a god, and your brother?”
          Only silence comes; the patriarchs
          Are gone from heaven as from hearths
          And none do bow to good masterly will:
          Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

        • AJD says:

          If you think “drunken sluts who get raped while cruising for a dicking” is “respectful”, I don’t know what to tell you.

        • Well-Manicured-Bug says:

          @AJD

          That’s ridiculous. As long as that comment was not directed at others who are commenting here, he was indeed being respectful.

          Do you also want to ban people who say stuff like “Pol Pot was a fucking asshole. I hope he sucks dick in hell”?

        • Anonymous says:

          >That’s ridiculous. As long as that comment was not directed at others who are commenting here, he was indeed being respectful.
          Many of Donald’s insults have been directed at such broad groups of people that it is likely that some commenters have been among them

          >Do you also want to ban people who say stuff like “Pol Pot was a fucking asshole. I hope he sucks dick in hell”?

          I’d certainly much rather ban both those and Donald’s statements than neither.

        • Multiheaded says:

          @Oligopsony:

          Dude! That’s Stalin Prize material right there! Was it perchance inspired by Von Kalifornen on the Ozy drama?

        • a person says:

          @Well Manicured Bug

          If you actually read the comments policy, it’s obvious why he was banned. Almost every single one of James’ top-level comments violated all three rules (controversial, phrased in the nastiest possible way, and tangentially related to the subject at hand).

          Not only that, but Scott is constantly complaining about his comment section devolving into fruitless debates on race and gender, and James makes that happen every time he shows up.

          And not only that, but while it isn’t stated anywhere, it seems to me that on a rationalist website people only people who are willing to debate rationally belong here – i.e., people who can look at the debate from both their side and their opponent’s side and try to reach some sort of consensus. James is pretty much the opposite of this ideal, he consistently refuses to concede even the tiniest point.

          If you ask me, his ban was a long time coming, and he only survived until now because Scott favored him for some reason.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          a person –

          And not only that, but while it isn’t stated anywhere, it seems to me that on a rationalist website people only people who are willing to debate rationally belong here – i.e., people who can look at the debate from both their side and their opponent’s side and try to reach some sort of consensus.

          Rationalism has nothing to do with consensus. Rationalism is using the means you have available to reach the most correct conclusions possible.

          James is the rationalist here.

          Of course you actually mean something different by using the word “rationalist” – which is actually “agrees with my group of self-identified rationalists”.

          This is pretty much what you can expect from a “rationalist” movement that lives in group homes.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          a person –

          Not only that, but Scott is constantly complaining about his comment section devolving into fruitless debates on race and gender, and James makes that happen every time he shows up.

          Actually Scott makes that happen by writing posts that are perfectly “rational” as long as you assume all the premises of progressivism are true. James comes along and punctures that assumption quite effectively – and the progressive side knows it’s effective because they (predictably) call for his ban.

        • Andy says:

          Do you also want to ban people who say stuff like “Pol Pot was a fucking asshole. I hope he sucks dick in hell”?

          Yes, I would support a 3-day ban for such a comment by a commenter with no previous records of banning, while agreeing completely with the sentiment, because a less crass way of making the point exists.

          Actually Scott makes that happen by writing posts that are perfectly “rational” as long as you assume all the premises of progressivism are true. James comes along and punctures that assumption quite effectively – and the progressive side knows it’s effective because they (predictably) call for his ban.

          Notice that nydwracu, Mai le Dreapta (sp?) and other commenters are able to make comments arguing Reactionary positions without the levels of bile that James threw. Looking at the register of bans over time, I’d argue that progressive viewpoints have gotten banned roughly equally with conservative viewpoints.

        • a person says:

          Rationalism has nothing to do with consensus. Rationalism is using the means you have available to reach the most correct conclusions possible.

          James is the rationalist here.

          Of course the technical definition of rationality is something else, but in practice rational debate usually looks like “okay, I see where you’re coming from, but have you considered this?” and irrational debate usually looks like “I am right, you are wrong, stupid, and evil”. If you read Eliezer’s sequences probably the thing he emphasizes the most is realizing when you’re wrong and changing your mind, which James never ever does.

          But okay, whatever, throw out that point of my original post, it’s the weakest anyway. The first two still stand. James undeniably broke the explicit rules of this site, many people saw him as a nuisance, and there are plenty of people voicing similar beliefs as him who remain. I really don’t see how Scott’s choice here could ever be seen as unreasonable.

          Of course you actually mean something different by using the word “rationalist” – which is actually “agrees with my group of self-identified rationalists”.

          How are you not doing precisely what you accuse me of when you say “James is the rationalist here”?

        • a person says:

          Do you also want to ban people who say stuff like “Pol Pot was a fucking asshole. I hope he sucks dick in hell”?

          I would say no, the comments policy (which is imo a good one) says that you have to be polite if you’re saying something controversial, and Pol Pot being a reprehensible person is not really controversial, as far as I know.

        • Steve Johnson says:

          If you read Eliezer’s sequences probably the thing he emphasizes the most is realizing when you’re wrong and changing your mind, which James never ever does.

          Yeah, the first thing the cult leader does is try to make sure that the followers will all change their minds [to the beliefs that benefit him]. The next thing, of course, is an instruction to ignore history – specifically around sexual matters – that way the cult leader can continue to run his “offer your girlfriends to me to fuck” scam. The next thing after that is to convince the chumps that this is a signal that the chump is enlightened:

          (Before anyone asks, yes, we’re polyamorous – I am in long-term relationships with three women, all of whom are involved with more than one guy. Apologies in advance to any 19th-century old fogies who are offended by our more advanced culture.

          [ http://hpmor.com/author/yudkowsky/page/7/ ]

          Right on schedule!

          Someone who’s rational (as opposed to a “rationalist”) doesn’t let a guy running a cult with the purpose of fucking lots of other guy’s girlfriends re-order his thinking – there just might be a hidden trap in there (might, ha!).

          There are loads of things where the rational thing is to never change your mind and in fact to realize that if your reasoning leads you to changing your mind about them then rethinking your reasoning is the more rational thing to do. Jim points out a bunch of them and people here get hysterical.

          But okay, whatever, throw out that point of my original post, it’s the weakest anyway. The first two still stand. James undeniably broke the explicit rules of this site, many people saw him as a nuisance, and there are plenty of people voicing similar beliefs as him who remain.

          Inoculation effect that you frequently see from progressives (because progressivism professes to be a non-contradictory rational belief system) – they’ll ban the most effective non-progressives and let the less effective ones continue to post.

          What I read upthread wasn’t people outraged over tone or offensiveness.

          It was a hysterical reaction to a few statements that are plainly true and clearly enough stated so that people can’t go back into their cognitive bubbles and think “well, we need a few more studies”. All of human history gives lie to progressive assumptions about sex and male female relations. All of human history gives lie to progressive assumptions about racial equality / sameness. Jim states this extremely clearly and that’s what the progressives here recoil from.

        • Oligopsony says:

          Being impolite and uncontroversial is licit iff apposite, as I understand it. Like if Scott posts about political correctness gone mad or something and I make response that’s like “hello fine fellows! Allow me to present the statistical case for Ankharism…” that would be cool because I’m being polite and backing my shit up with evidence, and then you could say “fuck you apologist, I hope you boil in satan’s gangrenous cumfarts for aeons,” because I had brought up the topic, but otherwise you’d have to say “that Pol Pot chap, not the best person, was he? At least that’s my personal opinion.”

          I think.

        • a person says:

          @Steve Johnson.

          Oh my god, now I understand. Either you are Jim under a sockpuppet, or you have the exact same argument style as him. You refuse to concede a single point or question whether or not my arguments may have a tiny bit of merit even when you have been proven wrong (JAMES BROKE THE RULES OF THIS WEBSITE, THEREFORE IT IS NOT UNREASONABLE FOR SCOTT TO BAN HIM), and instead latch onto tiny details of what I write and go on a whole other tangentially related nasty, vicious polemic. I hope you can understand that Jim being banned means that the presence of people like you on the blog is not desired, and take the courtesy of excusing yourself.

          Don’t bother replying, I will not respond, because I know the argument will never end and I have other things to do.

          @Oligospony

          I don’t really understand what you’re saying here. The way I see it is that you’re allowed to say something mean if it’s non-controversial (true) and on topic (necessary).

        • Steve Johnson says:

          Oh my god, now I understand. Either you are Jim under a sockpuppet, or you have the exact same argument style as him. You refuse to concede a single point or question whether or not my arguments may have a tiny bit of merit even when you have been proven wrong

          Without (of course) actually bothering to bother with the whole “proven wrong” thing.

          This is the comment policy:

          If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary.

          Obviously what Jim is saying here is true – no one actually argues the substance (or if they do it’s so that people can get into “angels on the head of a pin” disputes about what it means for “men to be stronger than women” – where some moron says “outliers exist!” as if that alters the truth of the matter in any way).

          What Jim says here is necessary. The “rationalist” community needs to hear certain truths that they’ve insulated themselves from very effectively.

          As far as being a sock puppet of Jim, nope – try again. Guess what – there are people out there smarter than you who disagree with your worldview. It’s not just one lone guy.

        • Crimson Wool says:

          Obviously what Jim is saying here is true – no one actually argues the substance (or if they do it’s so that people can get into “angels on the head of a pin” disputes about what it means for “men to be stronger than women” – where some moron says “outliers exist!” as if that alters the truth of the matter in any way).

          James isn’t correct.

          James backed up his “Men, if not prisoners, are pretty difficult to rape” with… nothing. Just empty bluster. Because that’s all it is: empty bluster. Without content. A belief which is held solely on its aesthetics, not its truth value.

          I went in detail on the exact points of how frequently men are raped by force (because reactionaries do not consider rape by intoxication to be a crime of similar quality) by women, in as much detail as I could obtain, earlier in this thread. The answer is: quite a bit. Curiously, despite the fact that I was responding to you, I never received a reply.

          There is also the point that Jim’s post does not even say that the perpetrator must be a woman for the guy to deserve mockery. Plenty of men are raped by force outside of prison by other men. According to the NISVS, an estimated 970,000 men have been forcibly raped (by penetration; no exact numbers for forcible rape by envelopment) in their lives. Were they “asking for it” too? Was this fellow?

          does this mythical gun-wielding female rapist exist anywhere outside the ream of hypotheticals?

          Here’s one. Well, technically, she raped her victim at knife point rather than gun point, but I think you’ll agree that that’s a pretty pedantic distinction.

        • Crimson Wool says:

          Fuckup with cookie-setting/NISVS link, here it is again:

          http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nisvs/2010_report.html

        • Well-Manicured-Bug says:

          @Crimson Wool

          I don’t think that proves your case though. It’s not a man she raped, but a 14 year old boy, and as the county prosecutor says in the video, this is extremely rare and he hadn’t seen anything like it before. To the extent that we are talking about men and women, and not about minors, I think this is irrelevant.

          I’m curious however how many men here actually go about their daily lives thinking about the possibility of getting raped by a woman. How many men here have ever thought “I shouldn’t drink too much tonight, because some pervert woman might rape me”, and actually stopped drinking. It’s hard for me to imagine, unless you have already experienced something traumatic, that this is actually a thing that bothers people in real life. Personally the only thing that I’m worried about in these situations is the possibility of getting robbed, and getting raped by a woman wouldn’t ever cross my mind.

        • Crimson Wool says:

          It’s not a man she raped, but a 14 year old boy, and as the county prosecutor says in the video, this is extremely rare and he hadn’t seen anything like it before. To the extent that we are talking about men and women, and not about minors, I think this is irrelevant.

          Why is it irrelevant? What happens when a guy turns 18 that makes it so he can’t get stabbed by a woman with a knife? It’s not like we’re talking about a 6 year old, here; the average 14 year old American boy is about as tall as the average American woman.

          Re: Extreme rarity. Yes, I agree, generally women do not rape people at gunpoint or knifepoint. This is a reactionary shell game, though. First, they (you?) define “real rape” as the kind of rape that pretty much only men do (physical violence against strangers), then trumpet how it is almost never done by women.

          Women do use physical force to coerce people into sex, but this is more beating the shit out of her boyfriend/husband when he won’t fuck her until he will (could the man fight back? Sure, if he would like a DV conviction). They also have clearly nonconsensual sex with people who are more-or-less strangers, but this is generally because aforementioned strangers are heavily intoxicated and unable to fight back/unaware of what’s going on.

          I’m curious however how many men here actually go about their daily lives thinking about the possibility of getting raped by a woman. How many men here have ever thought “I shouldn’t drink too much tonight, because some pervert woman might rape me”, and actually stopped drinking.

          I’d probably be a lot better for these arguments if I actually drank, and thus could say, “yo, me.” But I don’t, and it’d be dishonest to pretend that the reason is fear of sexual violence.

          In any case, it hardly proves anything. Men are more likely to be robbed when just walking around, but it’s women who clutch their purses whenever a black guy steps onto the elevator. Jaws made everybody avoid the beaches for a while, even though shark attacks are actually extremely uncommon and Jaws is a work of fiction. Perception of risk and actual risk are not that well correlated.

        • Men are more likely to be robbed when just walking around, but it’s women who clutch their purses whenever a black guy steps onto the elevator.

          I agree with your general point that perception of danger doesn’t equal actual danger, but I think this is a pretty bad example. For one thing, the obvious reason men don’t clutch their purses is most men don’t carry purses.

          More generally, it’s true that women take more precautions against stranger attack than men – making sure not to walk alone at night, making sure to park in places that will be well-lit once the sun goes down, etc – while men tend not to think about it. And it’s true that men are over twice as likely to be robbed by strangers (source). But that might not be a case of women overestimating their risk; it’s possible that women get robbed less is because women take more precautions. (Or maybe getting robbed less is an unintended side effect of trying to avoid rape and sexual harassment by strangers.)

        • Nornagest says:

          And it’s true that men are over twice as likely to be robbed by strangers (source). But that might not be a case of women overestimating their risk; it’s possible that women get robbed less is because women take more precautions.

          I’d expect the effects of “taking precautions” to be complex.

          On the one hand, going out in groups and avoiding isolated areas probably does reduce muggings. But on the other, there’s a great deal of superstition and bullshit floating around regarding urban self-defense (sticking your keys between your fingers, for example, is worse than useless), so I’d expect some naive countermeasures to mugging to be useless or counterproductive.

          Maybe more importantly, I’d also expect muggers to pick up on defensive behavior and use it as a cue. All else equal, who are you going to mug — the person strolling down the street like they own the place, or the one clutching their bag and looking around nervously?

        • Well-Manicured-Bug says:

          >Why is it irrelevant? What happens when a guy turns 18 that makes it so he can’t get stabbed by a woman with a knife? It’s not like we’re talking about a 6 year old, here; the average 14 year old American boy is about as tall as the average American woman.

          Which means that they don’t actually have the physical advantage over women that adult men have. A boy grows taller and heavier until they are in their early twenties, which is why a twenty year old can beat up a fourteen year old most of the time. It also explain why a lot of fourteen years old boys are not playing in NFL. It’s also about mental maturity I think. At fourteen people respond to situations differently than they do when they are in their twenties, I’d assume.

          >, they (you?) define “real rape” as the kind of rape that pretty much only men do (physical violence against strangers), then trumpet how it is almost never done by women.

          Weren’t we talking about “gun-wielding female rapists”? Yes, such gun-wielding female rapists are extremely rare that I don’t know how sensible it is to consider it a societal problem. Taking your own example, it’s like considering shark attacks a major existential risk to the human kind. Domestic violence cases on the other hand are pretty common, and indeed women use violence against men, and indeed due to cultural biases people incorrectly conclude that it’s not a big problem if a woman throws something heavy at her husband. This is a big issue, and one that r/mensrights complain about a lot. But even there I don’t think I’ve ever read someone say that they were forced to have sex with a woman after being physically overpowered.

          Not at all saying that women don’t rape men. Emotional and physical abuse, and mental manipulation are real things. I don’t know about ‘real rape’. As far as I know, if you are made to have sex when you don’t really want to, or not old enough to want to, it is indeed rape. But you can’t use it to justify the “gun-wielding female rapists” claim.
          *

          Going by your examples, it seems the tendency is to overestimate the risk, not underestimate it. That doesn’t prove anything of course. But if men are underestimating risk of getting raped by women, that just shows how much of a big problem it seems to them.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        His narrative is anti-knowledge in the service of brutality and oppression.

        Yay! I’m in my element!

        The scary thing is, I agree with about 90% of what Steve says; I just find it horrific instead of amusing.

        • Multiheaded says:

          The scary thing is, I agree with about 90% of what Steve says; I just find it horrific instead of amusing.

          Ok, listen to me now; I used to think similarly, and it does get better. For instance, I only recently, after carefully examining the facts, concluded that the similarities between genders re: traumatic bonding and abuse-via-intermittent-reinforcement are actually bigger and more interesting than the oh-so-edgy idea that women evolved to capitulate to an extortionate strategy. It also fits into the larger picture of human neural uniformity and flexible response to circumstances that leftists typically back. So yeah, some of the Sinister Dark Facts about How You Need To Suffer Gratefully can be dispelled by ordinary sunlight.

          • Thank you for the point about similarities about men and women. I’ve long suspected that women (especially young women) liking dangerous men isn’t wildly different from men liking motorcycles.

            Also, you can’t get a complete understanding of people from looking at their fantasies– there are a lot more men who like war fiction and weapon nerdery than want to be on battlefields.

            A book called Crazy Love might be of interest– a women is in a marriage which gradually becomes dangerously abusive (important note: abuse tends to ramp up slowly, which suggests that being abused isn’t a fundamental desire). Part of her prying herself loose is realizing that she isn’t a good woman loving and helping a man who’s got problems, she’s being hurt and doesn’t deserve it.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Sure, but as long as society continues to promote the same scripts, and as long as I am too low-status to gain the ‘right’ within those scripts to challenge those scripts, what does it *matter*? The world MAY AS WELL BE the way he describes it, and “it gets better” is dangerous-to-the-point-of-lethal for someone like me.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Clearly you’re in a horrible place now, anyone could see that, and it sounds like 90% of places and people might be very hurtful for you… so why not strive to find/head towards the bearable 10%? People who are simultaneously worse and less attractive and more insecure than you are still able to get warmth and companionship, often notoriously so – and it’s not like they have an IQ above room temperature, it’s not like they’re particularly lucky either – you just have horrible shit luck and somehow find yourself in a seemingly very unfitting environment. So protect yourself and take care of yourself and keep looking for a way out, and remember how strangers on the internet instantly feel really nice about you. :hug:

          P.S.: do you have some health issues that interfere with recreational drug use, or am I imagining it? I don’t find it shameful to say that it played a large part in keeping me going during the worst of my suicidal depression.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          P.S.: do you have some health issues that interfere with recreational drug use, or am I imagining it? I don’t find it shameful to say that it played a large part in keeping me going during the worst of my suicidal depression.

          No health issues, but I am a cop magnet.

          Also:

          Clearly you’re in a horrible place now, anyone could see that, and it sounds like 90% of places and people might be very hurtful for you… so why not strive to find/head towards the bearable 10%?

          Because if you’re deathly allergic to peanuts, and someone tells you “I think there might be some edible food in sealed containers at the bottom of this mountain of peanuts and peanut-dust”, how much time can you afford to dig through that mountain without an epi-pen?

          People who are simultaneously worse and less attractive and more insecure than you are still able to get warmth and companionship, often notoriously so – and it’s not like they have an IQ above room temperature, it’s not like they’re particularly lucky either

          I am INTENSELY, painfully aware of this fact. One of my larger mantras is (partially):

          I’m a rather good writer, but I’ll never be Stephanie Meyer.
          I’m a rather good artist, but I’ll never be Rob Liefield.
          I’m rather a good friend, but I’ll never be Paris Hilton.
          I’m a rather good leader, but I’ll never be Donald Trump.
          I’m a rather good game programmer, but I’ll never be John Romero.

          – you just have horrible shit luck and somehow find yourself in a seemingly very unfitting environment. So protect yourself and take care of yourself and keep looking for a way out, and remember how strangers on the internet instantly feel really nice about you.

          Eh, mostly because on the internet, you aren’t physically surrounded by a crowd of people that can turn into a mob when the more sociopathic and socially sensitive members smell weakness.

        • Mary says:

          “(important note: abuse tends to ramp up slowly, which suggests that being abused isn’t a fundamental desire).”

          Remember there’s a lot of variety in battered women. Theodore Dalrymple, dealing with the underclass, was consulted by a battered woman on average once a day for his professional life. His work is valuable for anyone wanting insight into one situation:

          “At first, of course, my female patients deny that the violence of their men was foreseeable. But when I ask them whether they think I would have recognized it in advance, the great majority—nine out of ten—reply, yes, of course. And when asked how they think I would have done so, they enumerate precisely the factors that would have led me to that conclusion. So their blindness is willful.”

          Full text here:
          http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_1_oh_to_be.html
          But that’s only one essay. He has much more.

      • MugaSofer says:

        I think it’s plausible that men and women have different social problems around getting raped– women are defined as the sort of people who are naturally subject to rape, while men (if not prisoners) are defined as the sort of people who are supposed to be rape-proof.

        “This is not a reason for the possibility and reality of men being raped to be erased from the discussion.

        Ah! That’s a great way of putting it, and crystallizes some of my thoughts on the topic. Thank you.

      • Matthew says:

        they’ll ban the most effective non-progressives and let the less effective ones continue to post.

        Wow. Unintentional hilarity. I originally thought JAD might be a lefty agent-provocateur because his general unpleasantness is so anti-persuasive. I don’t often agree with, say, nydwracu, but he is good at making one pause and consider one’s assumptions. JAD, by contrast, is good at derailing discussions but a total failure at persuading anyone who hadn’t already drunk his cool-aid.

        (Why this comment ended up misthreaded, I have no idea. It was in reply to Steve Johnson above.)

      • Alrenous says:

        I’ve changed JAD’s mind before. Not a lot, but enough to know how it’s done.

        • Would you care to expand on that?

        • Alrenous says:

          I argued in my usual fashion.

          Most recently about the hard limits of semiconductor lithograthy. Below 160 nm, the photons can’t be reasonably lensed because they’re more like soft X-rays.

          Notably, JAD looked up that number for me, I didn’t know it exactly.

          (I haven’t bothered to investigate whether lithography can be economically advanced, because JAD’s general case – that the lack of advancement is being covered up – is obviously true.)

  27. Mark says:

    SJW-types are confronted with the dictionary definition of “racism” a lot. I’ve always seen them react the same way: the dictionary was written by white men. It’s a pretty cryptic response and they just leave it at that, but the only interpretation on which it makes any dialectical sense is “lexicographers are publishing word meanings they manufactured out of whole cloth in order to advance their anti-minority political agenda.” This still doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, because even an entirely manufactured meaning is a valid entry if it sees enough colloquial adoption. And of course it’s just absurdly conspiratorial/obviously factually incorrect.

    Maybe they have a slightly better defense available: your concept of the non-central fallacy. The prototypal examples of racism we all think of have certain features that make them feel extraordinarily horrific, whereas prejudicial harms against white people, while perhaps technically “racism,” lack these characteristics. Therefore, calling them “racist” is just a way of unfairly sneaking in hidden connotations that don’t really apply. But it’s too much work to explain at length how this works to the masses, so let’s just go with the useful approximation “racism against white people doesn’t exist.” In much the same way that we’ll go around public discussions saying that taxation isn’t really theft, even though it technically is (just *good* theft).

    I still don’t find this steelman convincing, nor do I expect anyone commenting here to do so, either, but it seems like it’s nevertheless a way to move discussion forward if you’re otherwise truly at a loss for things to say.

    • falenas108 says:

      This is not what SJW people would agree with. It would be more, the old white dude who wrote the dictionary doesn’t have an understanding of systematic oppression against groups of people, so of course the dictionary definition wouldn’t include that.

      • Mark says:

        That would be an appropriate explanation for why the “racism = institutional power + racial prejudice” definition doesn’t occur as another entry in the dictionary, not for why the “racism = racial prejudice” definition does occur in the dictionary.

        • falenas108 says:

          Because racism=racial prejudice is used by basically everyone who doesn’t understand the institutional power part.

        • Mark says:

          They’re not just saying that the “power + prejudice” definition is valid, they’re saying the plain “prejudice” definition is invalid. The only way for a dictionary definition to be invalid, rather than valid but omitted, is if the lexicographers are just making things up or are seriously misled about the word’s actual common usages.

        • Zorgon says:

          There is an irony in this – the ability to prescribe the meanings of words and expect those meanings to be believed and accepted is a clear and obvious expression of power.

        • tiny nerd says:

          (note: first time commenter, dangerous tumblr sj and trans here)
          I think 99% of the people earnestly discussing SJ really agree with your “steelman”. When you ignore people Getting Mad and look at discussions rather than flame wars the consensus is, yeah, the dictionary definition of racism is misleading because it specifies only the most visible forms of racism, whereas a lot of other forms of race-based exertion of social power do exist that inconvenience or harm people, and it would be wrong to give that a pass. (The same applies to any other -ism you care to name).
          Where I think you’ve missed the point is that nobody using the “the dictionary was written by white people” argument /wants/ to have an honest discussion. They’re looking to silence tiresome pedants on purpose (and honestly, I pride myself on valuing debate and whatnot but when someone decides to resort to the dictionary to attack the given definitions of words rather than an argument it’s often a sign that they’re a disingenuous jerk and it’s time to go home) and pull out that argument as a defense mechanism. SJ is really… tiresome to deal with because so many “arguments” are this type of pithy meme that’s actually meaningless, and just meant as an “I-don’t-want-to-engage-with-this” signal. Being really defensive makes a certain amount of sense when you always feel threatened, but this leads to the SJ “attitude” covering up all their ideas in sarcasm/in-crowd stuff, venting, and defensive reactions to any threat against safe spaces in a very self-sabotaging way.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Being really defensive makes a certain amount of sense when you always feel threatened, but this leads to the SJ “attitude” covering up all their ideas in sarcasm/in-crowd stuff, venting, and defensive reactions to any threat against safe spaces in a very self-sabotaging way.

          Incidentally, this is not unlike how some conservatives on Less Wrong have previously described their view of their own little club. Probably minus the (obvious) self-sabotaging, but with a whole lot of obscurantism and thick ink clouds whenever pursued.

    • I’m pretty sure I’ve seen claims that prejudice by lighter-skinned people of color against darker-skinned people of color isn’t racism because it’s really white people’s fault.

      • Nornagest says:

        Funny. I actually think that’s one of the cases where a systemic/sociological approach to racism is better justified, since that sort of prejudice clearly has a racial character, at least if you’re talking about African-Americans rather than, say, Chinese people, and yet racial background per se is presumably not being attacked.

        (I suppose you could argue that presumed degree of European admixture is the basis for comparison, but there’s too much chaos in human skin-color genetics for that to work very well. Not, I suppose, that rigor is called for here.)

        • I’ve seen it called colorism, and that might be a sociological analysis, but I assume it can’t be called racism because that’s a special sort of badness which is unique to white people.

        • Mary says:

          Probably class-based.

          It can be seriously tiresome to point out, when discussing European fairy tales, that the “fair”=”pale” and “dark”=”ugly” has nothing to do with race, that the people telling these tales had never seen anyone black, and that pale was beautiful because it was rich.

          Of course, in the pale-skinned black, the racial dilution did indeed help with the class status.

        • Nornagest says:

          Yeah, when that’s historically come up it’s almost always been a class thing — hence the aside about the Chinese, although it would have been just as true in 1700s France or modern India. I don’t think that line of thinking makes as much sense in the modern US, though — a tan might not be as much of a class marker as it was twenty years ago, but the lack of one isn’t plausible as a class marker either. Too many of us work indoors.

          (There does still seem to be some stigma against having a farmer tan, though. Or maybe that’s just a rural thing? I don’t remember it ever having come up since I moved to the city.)

      • AJD says:

        The reason it’s not called racism is because it’s about discrimination based on a feature other than race.

    • Andrew says:

      Tangent:

      Taxation isn’t theft. Or is debt collection also theft? No, of course not. Theft is not merely the moving of property between parties by force. It is a violation of property norms, and taxation isn’t a violation of property norms.

      • Andrew says:

        My comment above was correct but failed to address the core matter (of the tangent!), so I will add:

        To call taxation theft you must assume that there is some “one true” property norm against which theft is a violation, rather than the realist position that property norms are simply whatever a society normalizes. But “one true property” is untenable. The fact that property norms factually differ between societies shows this. In most societies, “stealing wives” is an informal kind of property violation, but only in a few is it an actual legal violation. In modern societies, illicit copying is practically a property violation, but that was not always so. To cure yourself of this disease, research trespass law, right of way, water extraction rights, and the SCOTUS case putting the airspace into the commons. You can’t come out of all that thinking that there is one true property.

      • Alrenous says:

        To call taxation theft you must assume that there is some “one true” property norm against which theft is a violation, rather than the realist position that property norms are simply whatever a society normalizes.

        Quite.

        It’s not difficult. It’s this: if I buy a loan, I agree to collection. I never agreed to be taxed. Is the moral difference not obvious?

        Imagine a state said at your 18th birthday, “Congratulations on your majority! Now please sign this contract stating you’ll pay taxes in perpetuity, at whatever rate we see fit!

        In return, we’ll give you a pension and pay for your medicine. Or not! Whatever we feel like! If we abrogate our half, you still have to uphold your half, or we’ll shoot you!”

        Nobody would sign this contract. Nobody would sign this contract because they can impose it on you without your agreement; there is no incentive to remain virtuous, so they become corrupt. (The [goodness-of-our-hearts] principle clearly doesn’t work.)

        How about this one:

        “Hey there store-opening entrepreneur. We’ll protect your store against vandalism and shoplifting, in exchange for 7% of your sales revenue.” Honestly that’s a expensive deal, but it might be worth it.

        It’s not worth it, because it’s not an agreement. States, in fact, don’t protect stores against shoplifting and vandalism. Stores have to that themselves anyway.

        If taxation was not theft, states could offer voluntary taxation schemes, and citizens would actually sign on. That the taxation is not voluntary is by itself sufficient proof that it cannot be for the benefit of citizens.

        Or: imagine a civil right was a real right – a property right. Imagine when the police fail to protect you from crime or fail to recover your stuff, you could sue the state for damages. Imagine that Britons under the NIH could sue if a relative died while on a waiting list. It’s all smoke and mirrors. They claim they’re claiming responsibility, but they’re only claiming your money. Fraud is another fitting term.

        • Andrew says:

          You seem to be under the mistaken impression that debts cannot be imposed except by contract.

          E.g., if I sue you and I win a judgment court, you owe me money, and I get to collect on it by force. You never agreed to that, but it’s still not theft.

          Taxation is necessary for the legitimacy of the property rights that underpin contracts. It’s a social quid pro quo. Without the taxation, nobody would put up with your property rights (which, recall, they never agreed to, in exactly the same sense that you never agreed to taxation).

          You want to throw out the half of the social contract that benefits the people who own the least, while keeping the half that benefits the people who own the most. Well, I’ll avoid getting into that political conflict here. But it’s a bit of sophistry to pretend that one half is more voluntary than the other, or to condemn the liabilities created by one half on the basis of the assets created by the other half. It’s a bundle deal. You don’t get to create a social concept of “theft” until you agree that your property rights are absolute. That is, if you want to renegotiate the entire social contract, you have to throw out the whole thing first, not use half of it to condemn the other. Those two halves are in contradiction for a reason: they balance each other out.

        • Andrew says:

          Of course, that sentence should read:

          You don’t get to create a social concept of “theft” until you agree that your property rights are not absolute.

        • Mary says:

          Except, Andrew, you seem to think that the state has automatically won a judgment against people and does not even have to take them to court — and for what tort? Existing?

          Bad analogy.

          You need to say that taxes are not theft because they are taxes and defend it accordingly.

        • Alrenous says:

          You seem to be under the mistaken impression that debts can be imposed by coercion.

          I notice you don’t address my point that if states provided an actual good that was more than their cost, citizens would sign up voluntarily. I must therefore conclude you concede that states in general cost more than they serve.

          In a healthy society, one signs up with a court for protection, meaning I agree to be sued if I perform certain torts. Or, we can say I choose to coerce, which inherently makes me liable for torts.
          Either way, I’m never liable for standing around minding my own business.

          Short history of English courts: they were not only private but delegated enforcement to the victim. This still worked because violence is that expensive; the defendant preferred to keep the neutral third party as an option by accepting the ruling, even if they clearly would have won the fight.

          Taxation undermines property rights. Indeed property rights do not exist to the extent taxation does.

          There is only one coherent definition of property, which is reasonable expectation of control.

          At 100%, it means nobody can expect to control any of their property. They will therefore not try to obtain any wealth, which means total tax receipts will be zero.

          At 50%, it mean nobody can expect to control some property, which means they won’t try to obtain it, which means the taxman doesn’t either.

          If we extrapolate down to 0%, then we get huge wealth for everybody, except the taxman.

          This is exactly the same relationship as with thieves. If thieves can steal everything, nobody acquires anything to steal. If it’s just pickpockets, nobody gets wallets and they still can’t steal anything. If it’s dollars, or say, drachma, then trade breaks down and you get feudalism.

          Which segues nicely into the next topic. Property rights are real because the negation of property is self-refuting. If property rights were not real, there would be no property to argue about.

          Property exists without agreement. Specifically, security provides reasonable expectation of control. If I lock and chain my wallet to a boulder, it’s going to be there when I go back for it, regardless of how many pickpockets are around.

          As it happens, agreements with courts are a better kind of security, but unnecessary and orthogonal to anyone taxing me.

          You want to throw out the half of the social contract that benefits the people who own the least, while keeping the half that benefits the people who own the most.

          Libel.

          But it’s a bit of sophistry

          I take extreme exception to such slander.

          It seems to me, sir, that you are a victim of sophistry. Your predictable, formulaic rebuttals are indefensible, indeed in all cases the exact opposite of true. Why would you believe I wouldn’t have counters to all of them? Do you suppose I think as little about my convictions as you do?

          If this is really the best defence of the State, then the State condemns itself unequivocally.

          Those two halves are in contradiction for a reason: they balance each other out.

          Raw insanity. “I believe a contradiction. It’s true, though.”

          I will not tolerate such rudeness a second time.

        • Nornagest says:

          If it’s dollars, or say, drachma, then trade breaks down and you get feudalism.

          This is a bit of an aside, but whoever wrote that article doesn’t understand how feudalism (or, more precisely, manorialism) worked.

          Yes, goods were the usual medium of exchange. But that’s mostly thanks to the difficulties of getting coinage into a system where almost everything’s produced locally (also shortages and various forms of chaos in the coinage), and agricultural produce was more fungible in practice than you might expect. In some places (feudal Japan, for example) the coinage was backed in grain, making the lines between barter and hard currency very blurry indeed.

          Instead, the essential feature of the manorial system is patronage: if you’re a serf, you support yourself by working the land owned by your lord, and in exchange you’re supposed to provide him with some proportion of its produce (essentially rent) and also with the labor necessary to work the land the lord holds directly (which doesn’t have any modern equivalent). You may recognize this as almost the opposite of what’s going on in the Greece article.

          Free peasants (i.e. not serfs) might instead hold land in a way that’s more familar to us, paying rent (again, usually in goods) to their lord but not being obligated to work his land. Lords themselves would have held their fiefs in somebody else’s name, and would have owed tribute and other duties (usually military service) up the chain.

        • Alrenous says:

          @Nornagest

          Off topic means new thread.

        • Desertopa says:

          “I notice you don’t address my point that if states provided an actual good that was more than their cost, citizens would sign up voluntarily.”

          Participants in fisheries exhausted by tragedies of the commons would be better off if they voluntarily signed up for group restraint agreements. They don’t.

          The government provides countless services where it’s *more* in individuals’ interests to be free riders supported by everyone else’s contributions while not paying themselves. You’re better off using roads that someone else paid for than paying for the construction of roads.

          Lots of situations dealing with communities of rational self interested actors devolve into disaster due to coordination problems unless you actually have a central authority ensuring that individuals cooperate when it benefits society in general even when they’re better off if they (and nobody else) defect.

          The government we’ve got might do far from the best possible job with people’s resources, but unenforced prosocial structure does not have a good track record.

        • Alrenous says:

          @ Desertopa

          Participants in fisheries exhausted by tragedies of the commons would be better off if they voluntarily signed up for group restraint agreements. They don’t.

          This is true.
          I think this is because it would be illegal to enforce. Iceland privatized their fisheries. (Or the Netherlands? Both?) That worked out great. But you have to be willing and able to shoot people off your seabed, which e.g. Canada would object to. It would be considered seizure of crown aquitory or something.

          The government provides countless services where it’s *more* in individuals’ interests to be free riders supported by everyone else’s contributions while not paying themselves.

          The free rider problem has been vastly overstated. [ http://www.twitch.tv ] Free-to-play anything. It’s not even difficult to route around.
          Further, with the advent of transponders, toll roads are super easy.*

          Lots of situations dealing with communities of rational self interested actors devolve into disaster due to coordination problems unless you actually have a central authority ensuring that individuals cooperate when it benefits society in general even when they’re better off if they (and nobody else) defect.

          Game theory and property: if defection is a serious problem, nobody attempts to secure that resource in the first place. Eventually someone invents a method to incentivize not-defecting, and thus a voluntary collective is formed.

          For example, if toll roads were really that bad, (they work fine in Somalia, tolls were a 3% tax or so) nobody would build roads and they wouldn’t exist. Given that dire apes want roads, someone would come up with a road guild, which heavily patrols all the roads (the guild builds them) and boots off trespassers, funding themselves by selling road licenses.

          Any potential commons problem can be solved by, essentially, a private, voluntary mini-government.

          Except possibly national defence. If you want to ruin an ancap’s day, argue about national defence. The free rider problem probably isn’t really a problem? But there’s also coordination issues between city-states? There’s no good, satisfying argument, at least not yet. Unless nukes really do work as perfect deterrence because they can kill Generals, not just soldiers.*

          Also difficult is dealing with the age of majority. Emancipation is easy. But discipline obtains to the extent Exit obtains, which means the kid needs a decent alternative to signing on with their local city. (Wow! An actual use for BATNAs and euvoluntarism.) Like, being an outlaw is a solution, but it’s pretty bad.

          *(Transponders and nukes suggest ancap might be a strictly high-tech kind of society, useless for low-tech regions.)

      • Andrew says:

        Mary,

        I did not say that taxation was analogous to a tort. I gave a tort as an example of the fact that theft is not merely acquisition by force; it has the element of being socially unsanctioned acquisition. That is the argument which I already presented, explaining why taxation is not theft. The social sanction attached to taxation is not attached to the action of a highway robber. That is the element that distinguishes them.

        But actually, it would be pretty easy to conceive of taxation as a tort, if a tort is conceived of as compensation. Taxation can be conceived as the compensation that one pays for the damage caused to others by owning property. I would not make this argument myself, but I would point out (as I have already) that this element of taxation as compensation for property is a crucial part of what makes the social contract a “good deal” — or at least, good enough to keep the heads of the rich attached to their bodies.

        Also, Alrenous, you’ve proved yourself not worth talking to. No doubt, no matter what I say, you will find some way to distort its meaning, much as you did with my use of the word “contradiction.” Your brain is closed to communication, and even this little bit of meta I’m sure will fall on deaf ears.

        • Alrenous says:

          No doubt, no matter what I say, you will find some way to distort its meaning, much as you did with my use of the word “contradiction.”

          Yes, more libel is an excellent way to demonstrate that you don’t use libel. I like how you’re basing this attack on 1% of the words I’ve ever said to you. Apparently they outweigh the other 99%?

          (For non-Andrews: my specialty is uncomfortable truths. Comparing to-me comments to not-to-me comments, it’s becoming clear that certain people cannot handle the discomfort and become deranged around me specifically.)

          If I had actually misinterpreted you, you could show how and I would be forced acknowledge and retreat, as I demonstrably have done before. Falsehood is strategic weakness. Instead we see this pure-assertion status move. Scholastically speaking you just forfeit.

          Hopefully you’re capable of considering the possibility other people misunderstood, even if you can’t consider I might have misunderstood.

          Alrenous, you’ve proved yourself not worth talking to.

          E-Prime.

          I say, “I won’t tolerate X,” you say, “You are X.”

          Good pre-emptive strike, though. Since you can’t support your assertions and don’t want to give up projecting your fallacies, I’m obviously going to cut you off. “You can’t fire me, I quit!” It probably would have worked if I hadn’t called you on it. (Well, more precisely for this case, “You can’t fire me, I’m the boss and I’m firing you.”)

          Also you’re handing me a strategic fork on a plate. If I want to troll you, I can deconstruct your future comments unopposed…or you can oppose me, and thus I will have forced you to try to communicate. This will happen if I accidentally scan one of your comments and it makes me feel like trolling you.

          Your brain is closed to communication

          Sigh, more libel.

          Again, “I won’t tolerate” vs. “You are.” Again, a status move: looks like you hope that your bald assertions will be taken as fact by third parties and they won’t talk to me either. Gross, dude. Don’t write like a sophist if you don’t want to look like a sophist.

          Usually this kind of attack is covering for fear. It tries to misdirect from my arguments and accusations, because the sophist is afraid a direct comparison won’t go well for them.

          Think about this: if cannot hear, what’s the point of saying so to me? It’s like explaining to an idiot that they’re an idiot; they won’t be able to understand, nor fix it. Ergo, it must not be for the benefit of the so-insulted.

          But, as I said, I won’t tolerate it again. I will endeavor not to read your future comments, nor respond to them if I do.

          • Andrew says:

            Yes, I could have showed how you misinterpreted me. I didn’t, though. I left you free to draw the unwarranted self-validating conclusion from this, that I knew you would.

            Ironically, you say you won’t reply to my future comments, not realizing that by your own (stupid) standards, that proves you can’t refute them.

        • Mary says:

          But you didn’t say the difference was that it was socially unsanctioned.

          Furthermore, theft has often been socially sanctioned. Mob violence often blesses robbing the victims as well as physical assault.

        • Alrenous says:

          @Andrew

          Status move; bald assertion. Projection. Reading comprehension fail. Logic fail. Or are you just a sophist?

          Responding to a comment with off-topic bald assertions strongly suggests you don’t have anything more convincing. Failing to provide backup after being called on it is a confession of guilt. Pre-emptively declining to address a comment is not the same. Apparently you surmise others will be fooled into thinking they are the same, which you’re likely right about, which means I now have to explain this.

          1. I have pre-emptively judged, based on your past & escalating rudeness and your disrespect for epistemology, that future comments will be rude and light on content. I have been disappointingly correct. It is therefore a waste of my valuable time to find out if there’s anything to rebut at all.

          2. This is not like seeing something to rebut, responding to it thus acknowledging it needs rebuttal, yet rebutting it with libel and bare assertions.

          Are you really unable to tell the difference between 1 and 2, or are you just playing politics? Either way, I guess that explains your juvenile political philosophy.

          Look, you’re a scientist who, when being told that their theory needed an experiment, called the critic a poopyhead.

          You threw the first punch. If you don’t like being punched in return, back off.

          you’ve proved yourself not worth talking to.

          So…stop? Are you lying about what you believe? Are you not aware of what you yourself believe?

          And yes, I read this by accident. I do regret having read it, but I’m not yet sure how to prevent it happening again. Though, upon reflection, not sure ‘regret’ is the right word, I managed to salvage something.

          • Andrew says:

            ROFL, I thought you said you weren’t going to reply anymore.

            Yeah, so anyway, like I told you, based on your choice to misinterpret what I said, I concluded you’re not worth it. Really, do you carefully explain yourself to every internet blowhard who chooses an uncharitable interpretation of what you say?

            I fear that in fact you do. But, alas, I do not.

            PS. I didn’t read your comment.

        • Alrenous says:

          @Andrew

          Childish nonsense.

          “I’m not listening to you!”
          “Nuh uh! I’m not listening to you first!”

          Calling mommy when flinging poo didn’t work. “They’re being mean to me!”

          Subtext: “Why won’t they SHUT UP AAAAAAAAARGH” So you won’t spend a few minutes on explaining yourself, but you’ll spend endless time flinging insults? Gotta have the last word, right? I like how your social insult theory is deep and nuanced and your political philosophy is a board with a nail in it.

          At least it explains why you seem to lack reading comprehension. You haven’t been reading at all, probably not even the first comment. Actually, that’s helpful, I can probably use that elsewhere.

          I like the projection. You engage in libel, but I’m uncharitable. I’m kind of tempted to try that myself, see what it’s like from the other side. Expand my psychology research. Of course I’d have to retract it later. Pity, it would interfere with the study.

          If this is your normal behaviour, I bet you seem to find ‘internet blowhards’ everywhere.

      • Mark says:

        This is a neat distinction that probably doesn’t track how native English speakers actually use the word. Most people, for example, would be happy to describe Nazi confiscation of Jewish wealth as “theft” and not just “heavy Jewish taxation,” even if German society as a whole supported it. Perhaps you’d say there’s a hidden indexicality here: theft is is taking by force in a way that violates *our* community’s property norms. But in addition to the extreme fuzziness now involved (evidently libertarians with strong norms against taxation don’t count enough), it still misses cases where most people would admit theft but still be O.K. with the act, like an orphan stealing a loaf of bread to save a dying sibling, or taking off on a bike you don’t own to escape a crazy murderer chasing you.

        • Andrew says:

          It does track how the word is used. Confiscation is distinct from theft. People might be willing to acknowledge that coordinated confiscation is theft — if you pressed them to do so. But they wouldn’t go ahead and call it by that name, simply because it would be confusing. They’d call it confiscation (just as you yourself did!), because that makes the meaning clear.

          Just think about what would happen to your paragraph above if you had avoided the use of the word “confiscation.” The very denotation would be lost. The theft vs. confiscation distinction was necessary for you to even communicate your meaning.

          As far as libertarians with strong norms not “counting” — the reason they don’t count is because they’re not the ones setting the rules. Their norms aren’t the ones relative to which we currently define theft. If they were, then they would be. The point is that “theft” doesn’t have an objective universal meaning outside of a set of social norms. So theft means different things given different social norms.

          It is analogous to the use of “murder.” Murder isn’t the same thing as “homicide” — it carries an element of social condemnation along with the element of ending life. To say that the death penalty is murder is to condemn the death penalty. Similarly, to say that taxation is theft is to condemn taxation. It’s not a morally neutral descriptive term. To say “taxation is forcible reappropration” or “taxation is confiscation” is _not_ to communicate the same meaning as “taxation is theft.” And you will find, indeed, that real world usage reflects this. Nobody calls taxation theft unless they are taking a specific moral position against taxation. (As far as I personally have seen in my whole life, the confused soul to whom I responded above serves as a solitary exception.)

          As far as theft that is justified, this is just the expression that the social property norm exists, and yet violating it is justified in this instance. It doesn’t become not-theft, because it’s still illegal: society’s property norms still do not sanction orphans just taking loaves of bread from stores because they’re hungry. They still have to do it in secret, the store owners can still use force to prevent them and not go to jail, etc..

        • Mary says:

          ” Confiscation is distinct from theft. ”

          Not in my experience of the English language.

          • Andrew says:

            I don’t suppose a dictionary would convince you?

            Theft \Theft\ (th[e^]ft), n. [OE. thefte, AS.
            [thorn]i[‘e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e[‘o]f[eth]e.
            See {Thief}.]

            1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious
            taking and removing of personal property, with an intent
            to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
            [1913 Webster]

            Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the
            owner’s consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious;
            every part of the property stolen must be removed,
            however slightly, from its former position; and it must
            be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of
            the thief. See {Larceny}, and the Note under {Robbery}.
            [1913 Webster]

        • Mark says:

          It does track how the word is used. Confiscation is distinct from theft. People might be willing to acknowledge that coordinated confiscation is theft — if you pressed them to do so. But they wouldn’t go ahead and call it by that name, simply because it would be confusing. They’d call it confiscation (just as you yourself did!), because that makes the meaning clear.

          The meaning of words is governed by their use, and if you grant that most people would be willing to describe confiscation as theft (even if that’s not quite the first word that comes to mind), that’s extremely good evidence that government confiscation can fall under the general category of theft. People also call churches “churches” rather than “sanctuaries” because it’s more clear to do so, but that doesn’t mean “sanctuary” can’t pick out churches.

          Your response, as I understand it, is to point out that “theft,” unlike “sanctuary,” has a normative component. But this isn’t always true. O.K., maybe it is in the case of Nazis confiscation, since everyone actively hates the Nazis and describes them unflatteringly whenever possible. But there are plenty of contexts where it isn’t, even with regard to governments. To name the first example off the top of my head, I think I can talk about the Qarmatians stealing the Black Stone from the Ka’aba without actually implicitly condemning them. (I really don’t care about the Black Stone.) On a much smaller scale, there’s the orphan case I already mentioned: I needn’t be condemning the orphan when describing him or her as stealing bread. I may even be actively opposed to the some of the norms being violated, e.g., Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal This Book.”

          There’s also somewhat more metaphorical cases: a basketball player “stealing” a ball, or a lion “stealing” a carcass from a hyena. You might argue that these shouldn’t count, since we don’t actually think any real property norms are in play here. But I would suggest it’s further evidence that “theft” simply has no tidy definition, and that the word refers merely to an extremely vague gestalt (which often but not always inspires negative emotions) rather than an absolutely binary logical predicate. And while I agree it’s rhetorically very misleading to appeal to appeal to this gestalt vis-a-vis taxation and therefore shouldn’t be done, that doesn’t make it factually wrong.

          • Andrew says:

            Well, I don’t think that most people would be willing to “describe” confiscation as theft. When the government confiscates something according to law, people won’t _describe_ it as theft unless they are opposed to that particular confiscation or form of confiscation. But they might still grant that you could call it theft if you want, like if they don’t particularly care about that particular issue.

            There are some pretty significant functional differences between confiscation under color of law and theft, by the way. For example, only one of them can be appealed in a court of law.

        • Andy says:

          Andrew, I think you’re missing the best argument against the “taxation is theft” claim – “Of course it is.”
          And I say this as someone who loathes the libertarian dislike of taxation as a general class, and thinks it’s hopelessly naive to expect a modern government to run on voluntary donations.
          This is, of course, from Scott’s excellent Non-Libertarian FAQ, where he skewers this line of argument with the idea that taxation is theft, it is a small amount of legitimized theft in order to maintain the structures of society and ensure some social order. However, and I’m assuming you’re an American here because most of SSC’s commentariat tends to be, you can leave the United States, disavow your citizenship, stop paying taxes, and set up a society somewhere run on voluntary donations. I don’t think you’d get off the ground, but I would enjoy being proven wrong. You may also take the civil-disobedience route and stop paying taxes, report yourself to the IRS and the media, and document whatever actions follow in hopes of sparking a tax revolt, though there, I don’t think you’ll inspire the kind of support necessary to eliminate the tax system.
          In short, yes, taxes are legitimized theft, but if you think you can deliver an effective and even-handed government without compulsory taxation, go ahead. The door is right there. Though I consider that position as naive as the left-anarchists who think that all conflict could be solved by removing capitalism, I would enjoy being provlen wrong. (Not by Somalia, which was mentioned upthread – it is not a place very many people want to move to or start a business in, whereas my tax-happy hometown of Los Angeles has many many businesses and entrepeneurs.)

          • Andrew says:

            Andy, that may well be the best way to refute the claims of libertarians, but that is not my concern here. My concern is the general use of dishonest distortions of language as a rhetorical tactic. I actually believe that this is a bigger issue than any political issue; the entire possibility of discourse is at stake.

            Or at any rate, it’s a different issue, and I’m not willing to grant a general right to abuse the language like this, whether for political reasons or not, even if it doesn’t actually buy the libertarians anything in this particular instance.

            For example, if my daughter comes home from school and says “my teacher stole my phone,” I want to know whether I need to be calling the police to get it back. If the teacher actually confiscated the phone, then the girl is lying — or, at best, engaging in hyperbole — but if the teacher stole the phone, she was the victim of a crime (and of an extreme violation of trust, at that). If I refute libertarianism in the way that you suggest, how do I teach my daughter not to abuse language in this way?

        • blacktrance says:

          However, conceding that taxation is theft admits a prima facie presumption against taxation – perhaps not one strong enough to categorically forbid it, but one that does require a significant justification for tax-funded activity. The mainstream progressive left’s position is that taxation isn’t theft, because people implicitly agree to a social contract by living in a country. According to that view, you having to pay taxes is similar to you having to do your part in any other contract – if you didn’t like it, you shouldn’t have agreed to it. This generates no presumption against taxation, as it’s merely part of a contract you agreed to. But if the progressive left is mistaken and there’s no implicit agreement, then it’s as much against your will as a burglar breaking into your house and stealing your stuff. It’s possible to come up with justifications for tax-funded activity, but then it’s necessary to justify why it’s different from the burglar – the progressive answer of “Because you consented to it” is no longer available.

        • Mark says:

          Well, I don’t think that most people would be willing to “describe” confiscation as theft. When the government confiscates something according to law, people won’t _describe_ it as theft unless they are opposed to that particular confiscation or form of confiscation. But they might still grant that you could call it theft if you want, like if they don’t particularly care about that particular issue.

          Of course people wouldn’t describe all instances of confiscation as theft. And yes, “theft” is typically pejorative and hence applied to things people dislike. (But not always: there are simultaneous exceptions to both. I gave some examples already. And it’s hardly impossible to imagine a neo-Nazi gleefully remarking that he’s glad the Germans stole the Jews’ wealth because they’re evil or something. Indeed, I bet I could do this if I really wanted to force myself to search for it.)

          “Theft” nevertheless has a cognitive, non-normative component of its meaning, and as with most words, that meaning cannot be perfectly captured by clean definitions like “violation of our property norms/the relevant society’s property norms.” It’s instead just a hazy web of associations, some closer to the center of the web than others, and there’s very little to make an invocation of the gestalt objectively right or wrong in any given instance. That doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t object to such invocations when they serve to sneak in unfair, sinister connotations. It just means that there are better responses than quibbling semantics.

  28. James James says:

    “motte and bailey tactics”, “strategic equivocation”

    Stephen Law (a British philosopher) gives an example of priests who tell stories about miracles. When challenged, they might admit that actually miracles do not happen. But, “when the atheist has left the room”, they go back to telling children stories about miracles as if they are literally true.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I am also suspicious of “family values”.

      Opponent is in the room: “That just means that we want strong families who love and care for one another!”

      Opponent leaves room: “Yeah, we really don’t like gay people”.

    • Mary says:

      “When challenged, they might admit that actually miracles do not happen. ”

      Or again they might not.

      Or again they might perform a miracle on the spot.

      Hypotheticals are so much fun.

    • MugaSofer says:

      I have never knowingly met a priest who would admit “miracles do not happen”.

      They will all admit some specific miracles did not happen, historically – but that’s not the same thing at all.

  29. Zorgon says:

    As someone mentioned above, there’s another dimension to “privilege” that is missing from the GIF and resultingly* from the discussion. Most definitions I’ve seen include an element of inherent ignorance, born of lack of experience of the context and assumptions and received wisdom covering that lack.

    This is why it comes across as “talking where you’re not wanted”, “belittling my experiences” and so on – the underlying idea is that the privileged person not only has a distorted view of the situation due to the gap in their understanding caused by their privilege, but is also unable to see that fact due to the assumptions and received wisdom (along with a couple of oddities of assumed status, which leads to things like “mansplaining”).

    This does make the core premise of privilege less fundamentally aggressive, although to the average educated middle class person it’s probably going to come across as being at least passive-aggressive (“I would engage you, but you don’t really know enough to be worth engaging”). But the key part is the ignorance, and a BIG part of this, repeated over and over again in pretty much every single definition of the term I’ve ever seen, is that the privileged person does not know they’re privileged, or else is actively defending their privilege and thus being a shitlord. In this way of thinking, it’s an article of faith that the behaviour of the SJW conception of a decent person would not continue to intrude on oppressed people’s discussions of the situation if they were aware of their privilege, as doing so is in itself an act of oppression; you’re “talking over” the oppressed, “negating their experiences”, and so on, by continuing to express your privilege-distorted views.

    So since virtually every definition includes ignorance of privilege as a core element of having it, you’d think that it’d be the case that in complex multidimensional oppression structures like gender relations (in which it’s trivially easy to demonstrate statutory and/or institutional prejudice against either gender in pretty much every Western nation) it’d be taken as read that “female privilege” had to exist by definition. Women get lower sentences for the same crimes, more cancer funding, and at least in my country, cannot legally be found guilty of rape except in extremely unusual circumstances. Most of these privileges are things most women will never think about and usually think don’t happen, because of received wisdom and assumptions. Seems an open-and-shut case for their definition of “privilege”.

    But… well, we saw above where that goes. Wanting a rapist to be legally considered a rapist if they have a vagina is “whiny man syndrome”. What joy.

    Yet here’s a question. Certainly we could consider this the careful pruning of the superweapon stock, guarded and kept only for the in-group and used to control and limit discussion only to their terms and their framing. But the thing about it is, there isn’t any part of this that isn’t explained by their own conception of “privilege”. They’re simply every bit as unable to see it as any of the men they so furiously condemn.

    Maybe they’re just more right than they think they are?

    (*Really, Chrome spellcheck? You’re going to pretend the 150 year old word “resultingly” isn’t in the dictionary?)

    • Zorgon says:

      Also, I’ve just realised that I post more about SJW stuff here than anything else by a factor of about 3:1. I’m not sure exactly why, other than that SA’s viewpoint on this pretty much mirrors my own.

      Maybe I’m being tribal about it? For a lot of the posts Scott is talking about far-off stuff like statistics and psychology/psychiatric health, which are outgroup for me as a coder. So I just smile and nod and assume he’s right (within the Internet boundaries of assumed expertise) rather than commenting.

      • Kaminiwa says:

        I tend not to post anywhere else because no place else seems inclined to listen, think over a novel point, and give an apt, on-target rebuttal.

        I’m also idly of the belief that people here are more likely to actually be convinced by reasoning, and more open to changing their minds, but that’s mostly because everyplace else seems to run a 0% chance of that >.>

      • lmm says:

        I do the same, but is it really tribal if you’re just more interested in topic X than topic Y?

    • xachariah says:

      I’ve certainly encountered social justice people who would agree that those are instances of privilege, though they’d generally say that these instance are caused by the same sexism that limits women and are hence perfectly compatible and at times even addressed by feminism. I would agree that feminism could address those claims, but am skeptical that it effectively does so. The problem is that feminism isn’t really set up to advocate for men’s rights or concerns, and that the current “men’s rights movement” mostly seems to consist of people who just really, really hate women.

      That fact that the (online) presence of men’s rights advocates is thoroughly anti-woman (and not just anti-feminist, genuinely woman-hating), means that feminists who have encountered a discussion of the men’s issues you mention tend to see any attempt to talk about those issues as an outcropping of the woman-hating portion of the men’s rights movement. Which is part of the reason for the hostile reaction when you bring up those issues.

      • Crimson Wool says:

        the current “men’s rights movement” mostly seems to consist of people who just really, really hate women.

        As someone who fairly regularly goes to a variety of “men’s rights” websites (judgybitch, genderratic, r/MensRights, etc), and has done some substantial trawling of others and sites that get talked up in the “men’s rights community,” this is wrong, really wrong, and I wonder if it is actually based on any actual experience whatsoever because I have no idea how you could possibly come to this conclusion by legitimate investigation.

        E: To be clear here, I’m asking for some kind of citation so that I can actually respond to this idea because it sounds outrageously wrong to me, like saying “”rationalists” just hate people with IQs below 110.”

        • Nornagest says:

          I get the impression that Genderratic/girlwriteswhat-style men’s rights, PUA theory, and pseudo-reactionary or outright neoreactionary stuff in the vein of r/TheRedPill or Heartiste all get lumped under “men’s rights” as far as SJ is concerned. Never mind that these groups are concerned with very different things and a lot of them hate each other.

          A secondary issue is that even places like Genderratic tend to attract a lot of men that’re really bitter about their treatment at the hands of e.g. the custody system or an abusive ex. That might easily be misinterpreted as “hates women”.

        • xachariah says:

          I apologize, this was a little too hastily written and I should have been more careful in my statements. I was specifically referring to groups like A Voice For Men and the Men’s Rights Conference, which received a lot of coverage and featured genuine woman-hating. I’ve seen similar anti-woman comments in most men’s rights fora I’ve seen, but I should not be tarring the entire movement with the actions of some its members. My apologies.

          I will note that a lot of the conversation I’ve seen from both judgybitch and r/MensRights (not familiar with genderratic) will be parsed by social justice as actively hostile to them. It should not be a surprise that arguments associated with those groups would then elicit dismissive responses. Nor should it be surprising that men’s rights groups tend to be dismissive of feminism, then. I am not sure where this interaction started in this way, and to what extent the dismissal of each group is a result of that interaction or a result of internal developments.

          A lot of this is very disappointing because I think many (perhaps even all) men’s rights issues are perfectly compatible with the feminist movement, and there’s no real reason for the adversarial relationship that exists now.

          EDIT: I think both of Nornagest’s points are correct, too.

        • Crimson Wool says:

          I apologize, this was a little too hastily written and I should have been more careful in my statements. I was specifically referring to groups like A Voice For Men and the Men’s Rights Conference, which received a lot of coverage and featured genuine woman-hating. I’ve seen similar anti-woman comments in most men’s rights fora I’ve seen, but I should not be tarring the entire movement with the actions of some its members. My apologies.

          I do think that many MRAs do use some language and discussion terms that feminists (and probably many people in general) don’t feel comfortable with, but I don’t think that this represents woman-hating. Pretty much all the examples of “woman-hating” in those links are things that, for whatever value I agree or disagree with them, are just not woman-hating.

          There are some ideas in the MRA-sphere that are very antithetical to feminist theory, and so get brought up as “look at how misogynistic MRAs are,” but I think are actually fairly reasonable positions. For example, there is a degree to which reasonable fear leads people to enter and remain in abusive relationships; and there is also a very substantial (and, IMO, probably larger) degree to which things like love, self-delusion, and just plain old stupidity lead people to enter and remain in abusive relationships. The latter is something that MRAs are a lot more willing to talk about than feminists, since (a lot of) feminists view the latter as just “victim blaming” whereas a common MRA interpretation is more like, “being in an abusive relationship is bad and your abuser isn’t going to change so you’re the one that has to (by getting out).” To a (lot of) feminist(s), saying “you can avoid abuse by not dating abusive men” is just saying “it’s your fault, P.S. I hate women,” but I don’t think that is at all the intended content. (There’s a lot of object-level arguments in the above statements you can unpack but please just steelman it for the moment because it’s not really the point.)

          There is also an extent to which MRA discussions employ irony, humor, satire, hyperbole, etc, and then get intentionally misinterpreted as literal, or get sucked out of any kind of context. The article about “Bash a Violent B—-” mentioned in one of your links was, for example, an article about men applying violence… to their abusers. i.e. defending themselves. Is that woman hating? In feminist circles, it’s pretty common to promote retaliation for male abuse; is that man hating? I suppose it could be argued; but that is not what is being argued.

        • xachariah says:

          Let me rephrase my earlier point: I think the strain of the men’s rights movement represented at the Men’s Rights Conference largely blames women for its problems, and this reads to outsiders as being anti-woman. See, for instance, Stefan Molyneux:

          “If we could just get people to be nice to their babies for five years straight, that would be it for war, drug abuse, addiction, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases,” he said. “Almost all would be completely eliminated, because they all arise from dysfunctional early childhood experiences, which are all run by women.”

          (As far as I can tell, the content is nonsense anyway, but that’s a little beside the point). Conflate this with a recurring theme of blaming women’s issues on women (rape is blamed on how women act or dress), or trivializing women’s problems (like the gender wage gap, frequency/seriousness/sincerity of sexual assault), and you have at least a portion of the movement that comes across as very unfriendly to women. And when that portion of the movement then actively attacks feminism, I think you have a combination of factors that at least plausibly read as being just anti-woman, if not in intent and specificity, then at least in result and as a whole.

          As for the larger movement, I honestly don’t think the problem is that the issues the men’s rights movement wants to address are antithetical to feminist theory. Many of the structural issues both movements want to address are caused by a gendered view of society. The conflict seems to occur when (a portion of) one group blames the other group, rather than the structure of society, or when one group tries to minimize the other group’s issues.

          The eternal problem of the internet is that both sides will be flooded by comments from the worst part of the other side, which then leads to dismissal of the other side as a whole etc.

          But I also find it interesting that those pieces I linked to all seemed to agree that the men’s rights movement had genuine grievances, and people genuinely in need of help they were not getting. At least two of those authors agree with social justice aims, which makes me think that the communication gap isn’t really as large as it appears to be.

        • Crimson Wool says:

          As for the larger movement, I honestly don’t think the problem is that the issues the men’s rights movement wants to address are antithetical to feminist theory. Many of the structural issues both movements want to address are caused by a gendered view of society. The conflict seems to occur when (a portion of) one group blames the other group, rather than the structure of society, or when one group tries to minimize the other group’s issues.

          I think this has basically three causes:

          1. Some MRAs are “feminists-turned-MRAs” who had a pet issue that they expected feminists to be amenable to but found that they were not, generally speaking (e.g. me). Other MRAs had similar experiences, where they, while not feminists, experienced hostility from feminists due to their position or something particular that happened to them (e.g. trying to get support for DV but instead getting accused of being an abuser yourself). Members of this group have experienced enough hostility from feminists to push them away from the movement.

          2. The theoretical framework of feminism is frequently absolutely atrocious at analyzing and solving men’s issues. “Patriarchy did it” is not helpful and doesn’t really solve anything, and saying that men’s issues will naturally be solved when we solve Patriarchy (which many feminists say) is roughly equivalent to saying “we’ll get around to it eventually, when all our problems are solved,” which is roughly equivalent to saying “no we won’t.”

          3. There are several points of practical difference, where there are two “sides” and MRAs are definitely on one side and feminists are definitely on the other (at least as a group). These would include: false rape accusations (they happen enough vs. they don’t), education (we need to encourage girls more vs. we need to encourage boys more), domestic violence (men need protection more vs. women need protection more), and custody (women need more bias/to keep as much bias vs. women have too much bias)

          There are two major results of this:

          1. MRA culture develops largely independently from feminist culture because it has to. I was going to say “theory” but that’s not quite true; certainly there’s a degree to which theoretical concepts control these subcultures but ultimately it’s in large part down to things nobody ever says.

          2. MRA culture develops to contrast feminist culture because many people inside of it know the “teams” and they know feminists aren’t on theirs and never have been.

          These, in turn, mean that when MRAs talk, a lot of them are tacitly (or openly) arguing against feminism. Thus you get the examples in your article of things like a guy joking about “add that I told you to make me a sandwich” or a slide about “stop objectifying me, that’s rapey!” The latter is obviously an attack on feminism in particular, but the feminist hears it and takes it as an attack on women.

          Going back to the beginning, why does the “feminism turned me into an MRA” group exist? It’s a question I’ve definitely asked myself, since it was pretty FUCKING annoying to be called a misogynist for giving a shit about [pet issue here] and using cited, publicly available, high-quality sources to back up my positions. My best guess is this:

          A lot of feminists think that if you disagree with them, it is because you are actively malicious to them (and women in general), regardless of what you actually believe. Any disagreement is sublimated misogyny. I can say that, on a couple occasions when I got “told to leave the room” one way or another on an internet forum (kicked, banned, warned, etc), I saw people explicitly state afterwards something to the effect of, “I don’t think he realizes it, but he is only bringing these things up because he’s a derailing misogynistic shitlord.” How do I hate women without even realizing it? How do I engage in a sophisticated rhetorical attack, apparently on accident? It’s so fucking absurd. One moderator said he didn’t think I’d even read studies, and was just deceived by some cherry-pickers on the subject (this is completely false and he was an idiot who had no idea what the fuck he was talking about), but I was still definitely a misogynist.

          I don’t understand how this even makes sense (if I was legitimately deceived, wouldn’t that just make me… legitimately deceived? Not a misogynist?), but that was a common view of my behavior: that somehow, without even knowing it, everything I did was because of my secret misogyny that was so secret even I wasn’t aware of it, but FORTUNATELY all these random idiots on the internet did, because otherwise they might have had to actually meaningfully engage with my points rather than roll their eyes and say “not this again.”

          It should be obvious that this is a pretty fucking toxic viewpoint which encourages anyone interested in these issues to go elsewhere. I don’t think its existence caused the modern MRM, I think the modern MRM is the consequence of it.

          As to why it exists… well. I guess it’s a pretty good ideological superweapon, as things go: everyone who disagrees with you is actually just a bigoted woman hater.

          EDIT: Sorry if I come off as angry here, it’s an old, sore point, for me.

        • Zorgon says:

          I think you could boil down a LOT of the problem into this conflation:

          – Feminism stands for women’s rights and against their oppression
          – Feminism is therefore good for women by default, since anything outside it must be against women’s rights and for their oppression
          – Therefore anyone who disagrees with feminism is anti-woman.

          It’s kind of endemic in virtually all discussions about gender pretty much anywhere. Anti-feminist == anti-woman. Therefore it doesn’t matter if you’re GWW or r/mensrights or the utterly wonderful feministcritics.org (whom I highly recommend) or Heartiste or RedPill or some PUA hive; if you’re against feminist dogma, you’re anti-woman by default. You must be, or you’d be a feminist, right?

          All that said, the biggest part of the problem is that there really are a whole lot of vile assholes out there calling themselves MRAs. You could make an argument that the main authors somewhere like AVfM are for the most part only misogynistic if you engage in careful cherry-picking, but you don’t have to cherry-pick their comment threads. They really are filled with vile assholes, clusters of them clapping themselves on the back for being so “un-PC”.

          Of course, Jezebel’s comment community is just as bad on the other side, it just practices better editorial control (except when it accidentally admits it finds domestic violence or genital mutilation funny when they’re committed against men). But it would be a flat-out untruth to pretend that many major MRA sites are not swarming with misogynists.

          (And I will reiterate – Manboobz/WHTM etc are not reasonable places from which to garner a viewpoint of MRAs by any stretch of the imagination. Not only is David Futrelle a vile man who should probably slink back into his cave with the other male rape erasers, but reading his site to get a viewpoint on MRAs is effectively the same thing as reading Stormfront to get a viewpoint on Jews.)

      • xachariah says:

        [removed due to threading mistake]

        • You missed the bit about war being women’s fault. I don’t know if there’s an MRA consensus on the subject, but the fellow I had the misfortune to talk with claimed it was because women are attracted to men in uniform.

  30. Anonymous53 says:

    That linked story about the lizard and the dog is infuriating. If we want this parable to represent what is actually going on, the lizard has already have turned the thermostat to 80 degrees, and the dog is trying to have a conversation with the lizard about what the “fair” level is. The dog is trying to be precise about what he means by “fair”, to quantify the degree of harm that is done to each agent, and to find a principled way to agree on a temperature that maximizes the average utility. However, the lizard is trying to block the dog from taking part in the conversation, by tainting him with the unforgivable sin of having “privilege”.

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      That linked story about the lizard and the dog is infuriating. If we want this parable to represent what is actually going on, the lizard has already have turned the thermostat to 80 degrees, and the dog is trying to have a conversation with the lizard about what the “fair” level is. The dog is trying to be precise about what he means by “fair”, to quantify the degree of harm that is done to each agent, and to find a principled way to agree on a temperature that maximizes the average utility. However, the lizard is trying to block the dog from taking part in the conversation, by tainting him with the unforgivable sin of having “privilege”.

      Moreso, we’re sitting here dwelling on the fact that a cold-blooded lizard is incredibly uncomfortable if the thermostat is below 80, ignoring the fact that a warm-blooded dog with fur adapted for an arctic environment might be uncomfortable if the thermostat is above 75. If, in our analogy, we’re noting that the dog has no concept of ‘too cold’ with which to respect the lizard’s needs, might we also acknowledge that the lizard isn’t exactly respecting the concept of ‘too hot’ that the dog’s needs revolve around?

      • Sam Rosen says:

        Often when liberals and conservatives talk one side notices that too much of a thing is bad and the other side notices that too little of a thing is bad but they don’t seem to appreciate that both have legitimate worries. (And although the sweet-spot doesn’t have to be somewhere in the middle, it tends to be.) And because it’s good to illustrate abstract ideas with concrete examples: We don’t want no cops and we don’t want a cop on every single block all the time.

        Sometimes SJWs make me notice harms that I wouldn’t have noticed because of my lived experience. This is good! Learning to be a better person! But when SJWs deny, in principle, that they could be committing harms unwittingly it’s really, really terrifying. Especially given that they should be the first ones to realize that people are often blind to the lived experiences of others.

        • One of the things I find terrifying about a fair number of SJs is their insistence that when they cause emotional pain, it doesn’t really count.

  31. James James says:

    “weapons”

    Yes, rhetorical tricks. Conceptual superweapons, where even pointing out that they are rhetorical tricks is evidence of guilt.

    You can tell that they are weapons because they are often brought up (1) in place of counterargument, and (2) vaguely — why exactly is my privilege relevant? The response “OK, I’ve checked my privilege and I think my argument still stands” doesn’t go down well.

    • James James says:

      (A: “Check your privilege!”
      B: “Yep, the pool’s still there!”)

    • Alrenous says:

      B: “KNEEL BEFORE ZOD.”

      A: [Doesn’t kneel.]

      B: “Ah, it’s not working. Thanks for letting me know! I’ll have to get that fixed.”

  32. Rob says:

    I think the motte-and-bailey metaphor is a great one, and a very useful way of expressing something that I’ve often thought about but had trouble expressing.

    That said, it seems clear to me that this is a tactic used by individuals, rather than an attribute of movements. Members of different movements may engage in it to a greater or lesser extent, but any idea/concept/term that has both weak defensible versions and stronger harder to defend versions is open to this, and that includes almost anything. A couple of examples that come to mind from more in-group-y sources:

    Motte: “Technological Singularity” just means that there’s likely to come a point in the future where technology advances so rapidly that predicting beyond that point is impossible
    Bailey: This will happen at 12:01 on January 1st 2045, and then we’re all going to be uploaded into computers and/or robots and it will be awesome

    Motte: “Rationality” just means making better decisions and gaining more accurate beliefs about the world
    Bailey: This is done by blocking off all emotion, considering only quantifiable things, and solving all your personal problems with mathematics and the rigorous application of the scientific method.

    I’m not drawing a direct equivalence between the groups or movements, or the extent to which they lean on this tactic, but there are people out there with those bailey positions, and when they’re attacked they retreat into our motte whether we want them or not.

    My point is that most ideas can have this tactic applied to them, and many do. And this means that this pattern is likely to highlight a lot of false positives, of the “Fallacy Fallacy” type. It’s not enough to observe that an idea has a strong and a weak version, you have to observe the tactic itself being executed. I don’t think Scott is wrong in this case, but I urge caution in applying this shiny new rhetorical tool.

    • Eli says:

      Fortunately for the rationalists, there are explicit warnings and instructions for “good rationalists” on why you’re not supposed to “go Spock”. Also, our “motte” is Cox’s Theorem, which is actually quite a strong argument: “By these maths, we can guarantee you will lose at life if you don’t use evidence to reason.”

      • Rob says:

        To be clear I’m not trying to make an object-level point, just apply the pattern broadly enough that people get to feel it from both sides, and to try to get a head-start in countering the widespread misapplication that I predict will occur if this motte-and-bailey idea goes mainstream.

      • anon says:

        What do you make of evidence showing that those with time-inconsistent preferences or preferences that violate expected utility tend to make more money? Or evidence that Bayesians are less accurate at making predictions?

        http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1692437

        http://ideas.repec.org/p/otg/wpaper/1308.html

        I like epistemic rationality, but I like instrumental rationality a lot more. And I wish someone had told me about these studies before I got into studying cognitive biases.

        But hopefully these studies are wrong. I just found them a couple days ago, and have yet to research these issues in any greater detail. Anyone who can comment on this should please do so.

        • Alrenous says:

          Evolutions is smarter than you. Generally, when researchers think a human is failing a game, they’re winning at a more important game. What game? I would have to outsmart the researchers & evolution, and I’m not seeing enough incentive to do that much work.

          Generally speaking conscious rationality is really hard because consciousness’ bandwidth is very low. The subconscious commands something like ten thousand times the neurons. While it is possible to outsmart the subconscious – consciousness still exists, it must be adaptive – it is painstaking.

          Consistent subjects earn lower than average payoffs because most of them are consistently impatient or consistently risk averse

          So, for example, humans have moods. It’s easier to let the moods give you, on average, the right payoff rather than trying to fight the moods and hit the right balance every time. But I’d have to dissect the paper to find out exactly what they’re missing.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Actually, your first critique (re: singularity) is an extremely good one, one I have probably been unintentionally doing, and one I’m glad you made (the second one seems kinda made-up).

      On the one hand I agree it is a characteristic of individuals. On the second hand, some movements can predispose to it or have many more of these individuals than otherwise. On the third hand, there is a pattern where one person plays the motte, another person plays the bailey, and although the two people may disagree with each other and not be working together, the overall effect on the outsider is the same.

      For example, if Fred Phelps keeps saying horrible things and attributing them to God, and every time an atheist complains about it Thomas Aquinas pops in and says “But God is just the form of the good, you need to debate my nine thousand pages of scholastic philosophy before you can launch a complaint” this is going to get old really quick even if Phelps and Aquinas aren’t actually working together. From the theists’ perspective it’s not their fault, but from the atheist’s perspective she might reasonably feel as if an unfair burden is put upon her.

      • Nornagest says:

        Funny, I thought all the instances of a Jan 1, 2045 Singularity that I’ve ever seen in the wild were explicit about being a best guess and therefore pretty defensible. You could apply motte-and-bailey thinking productively to e.g. Kurzweil’s highly specific predictions of progress in various fields, though.

        The rationalist one doesn’t quite hit the mark, but that’s more because what the average rationalist sees as blocking off emotions etc. is quite different from what Joe or Jane Sixpack sees as blocking off emotions. Misunderstanding what your movement’s being criticized for is a likely cause of a lot of motte-and-bailey behavior, though, so it still counts.

        • Creutzer says:

          Still not convinced by the rationalist one, even if “attempting not to act impulsively and on a whim, not feel sad without good reason, etc.” should count as “blocking off emotions” for other people. The reason is the particular relationship between the suggested motte and bailey: the latter is supposed to be derived from the first by logical and practical inference.

          This conversation does not show motte-and-bailey tactics:

          A: Being rational, we should do X, Y, and Z.
          B: No, you shouldn’t. That’s a crazy notion of rationality.
          A: But rationality is just about winning. X, Y, and Z are conducive to that goal, as far as I can see.
          [B: Okay, you’re probably right./No, here’s why they actually aren’t.]

        • Nornagest says:

          “Blocking off emotions” is usually a tone complaint, not a content complaint. Most rationalists faced with the charge do not understand this and fall back to defending content.

      • Rob says:

        Yeah, I had a much harder time writing the second one because I agree with the general rationalist position more. Nonetheless those positions are real. “Rationality” is much bigger and older than the current internet rationalist community, and in fact in raw numbers there are probably fewer people out there who’ve heard of confirmation bias than there are people who are just straight-up trying to copy Mr Spock.

        But like I say, I don’t think the object level is very interesting here. I guess what I’m trying to do is reframe this as a general problem of discourse rather than a dastardly trick that our hated rival (and only our hated rival) is trying to pull. The most productive question to ask, I think, is “What do you do if you are Thomas Aquinas?” (or if you’re the good kind of singularitarian or social justicar etc.)? How do you avoid unwittingly becoming half of a motte-and-bailey tag-team?

      • Jack says:

        I think this metaphor works really well, that motte-and-bailey is often something different people do, it’s not always a deliberate tactic, but it can be equally harmful to sensible discourse.

        I think all movements have _some_ motte (a bunch of stuff that makes sense), and some bailey (a bunch of stuff that’s emotionally appealing and rhetorically effective, forming a loose penumbra around the motte). Sometimes the bailey grows out from the motte. Sometimes the motte is constructed later to provide a justification for the bailey. Sometimes there’s no motte at all, just a bunch of rhetorically successful ideas with no underlying meaning at all.

        And people in that movement are likely to think “oh, ok, the arguments in the bailey aren’t perfect, but everyone knows they really mean motte-arguments, right?” even if that’s false. And people outside that movement are likely to look at the bailey and say “this is self-serving bullshit”.

        So the questions are (a) are the ideas composing the SJW motte accurate and worth fighting for (I think so, and I think you do too?) And (b) is the SJW bailey penumbra especially toxic (I’m not sure)?

  33. Armstrong For President 2020 says:

    Excellent post, one point I want to emphasize a bit more is how unbelievably ‘sticky’ privilege gets compared to it’s supposed definition. One particularly cogent example was an argument that I was involved in a few years back over whether a white is still privileged as a foreigner in a homogenous first world asian country; the consensus was that even if they were to experience prejudice for being a gaijin, they still are the one with more ‘institutional power’ in the situation somehow. Even casual examination of the way privilege attaches shows that it is a tool designed to target white guilt rather than any kind of useful descriptor of the world as it exists.

    By the way, it doesn’t seem like anyone else has mentioned it but I had trouble not laughing out loud on the bus when I read the bit about “my precious fingers”. That was a really inspired bit of humor.

  34. Richard N says:

    Warning: I struggled to find a way to clearly convey my point in this comment, but hopefully it comes through. Apart from this criticism I thought this was a great post.

    So there are certainly a lot of people who self-identify as part of the “social justice” movement who are guilty of the things you have described. But I’m perplexed why you keep doing this thing where you talk like the “social justice movement” consists entirely or almost entirely of people who do that, as if they’re a cohesive, organised group who have decided they should all use this particular shitty argument tactic. You seem to do the same thing with feminism and your “I’m not a feminist” posts. It’s obvious you share more or less the same terminal values as the people who identify as social justice people or feminists or whatever, and yet you attach your criticisms of some of the bad tactics used by some of its members to the label itself, even though it doesn’t seem like it would hinder the message in any way to say “so I’ve seen some people in the social justice movement doing this” rather than just “so here is what social justice does”

    Is it just a bait tactic to get people to read your posts?

    • Lesser Bull says:

      #NotAllSocialJusticeWarriors

      • Kaminiwa says:

        Okay, that made me laugh and deserves recognition (and if I get a spammer-ban for this, it was worth it :))

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I wrote:

      “I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is very much about abusing this ability…”

      I’m not sure how much more clearly I can emphasize that it is a strain rather than just the whole movement. At this point, I feel like no matter what I say I am going to receive this criticism as a sort of Argument From My Opponent Believes Something.

      • Richard N says:

        You also wrote, “I recently learned there is a term for the thing social justice does.” This was the first sentence.

        I think you conflate the concept ‘social justice’, which clearly isn’t an entity capable of taking actions, with people who self-identify as members of the ‘social justice movement’, who clearly are. You use the term interchangeably for both, and it comes away as an implication that the people who self-identify as members of the social justice movement are sufficiently homogeneous in their behaviour that such a conflation is reasonable. I don’t think you actually believe this, but it’s still an impression that I got from reading the post.

        When you’ve said previously that you’re not a feminist, I was momentarily struck by confusion. “What do you mean, you’re *not* a feminist?” The meaning of the word ‘feminist’ is controversial and that controversy often derails discussions of actual issues of gender politics, so I personally don’t self-identify as a feminist either. But if someone asks me “are you a feminist” I wouldn’t say “no”, because I wouldn’t have any confidence in what ‘feminist’ means to other people. Instead I’d say, “I don’t describe myself as one because I find the word problematic, but I share the goals of dismantling systematic disadvantages, eliminating prejudice, etc etc”.

        Whether you actually believe they do or not your writing style about ‘feminism’ and ‘social justice’ always seems to imply the assumption of a lot more cohesion and homogeneity of the movements than I think is warranted.

        • Andrew says:

          I don’t get the complaint. Is “the thing social justice does” not a perfectly unambiguous denoting phrase?

        • Hainish says:

          Andrew, it is, and it seems to be denoting the wrong thing.

      • “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”

        When it is pretty obvious that individuals, groups, races, and categories of people are not equal, and in their everyday lives, the people who wrote that acted as if people were not, in fact, created equal.

        So equality definitely is a theocratic religion – a belief held without regard for evidence, and imposed with fire and sword. Heretics are punished.

        Profiling is in practice inequality before the law. A bunch of drunk black young men is dangerous. A bunch of drunk middle class middle aged whites is not. So you make it illegal to be young and drunk, and selectively enforce the law so that it is mostly applied to black males. Why not confess and have different laws on drug and alcohol use by blacks and whites?

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      So there are certainly a lot of people who self-identify as part of the “social justice” movement who are guilty of the things you have described. But I’m perplexed why you keep doing this thing where you talk like the “social justice movement” consists entirely or almost entirely of people who do that, as if they’re a cohesive, organised group who have decided they should all use this particular shitty argument tactic.

      That isn’t my reading at all. My reading (perhaps because it’s my own sentiment, and I’m projecting) is that the bare ideas of the Social Justice movement are something that Scott would very much like to participate in, but the execution of those ideas are often so toxic and tainted that it spoils the whole thing.

      “What are you talking about? That’s almost 95% grade-AAA filet mignon right there! There’s only a little bit of shit and pus on it.”

      Or, perhaps even more accurately:

      “Allergy? But the sauce is only like, 5% peanuts, and it’s only sitting on *top* of the meat. Can’t you just scrape it off and eat around it?”

      • Hainish says:

        I was able to get to some of the non-toxic core of SJ, but I did have to wade through a lot of the toxic stuff to get there. I’d love to find participants in non-toxic discussions of social justice issues. (However, I don’t think I’ll necessarily find them here, for very different reasons.)

        • Kaminiwa says:

          Could you elaborate on those reasons? I keep wanting more safe space to discuss SJ, but the crowd here is kind of one-sided. And a one-sided discussion isn’t a lot of fun, even if it is nice being on the popular side for a change.

        • Alrenous says:

          The problem seems to be there’s two kinds of people, which I will metonymize here.

          Those who think men and women the same, and care about social justice.

          Those who think men and women are different, but don’t care about social justice.

          Obviously no dialogue is possible between these groups. They can separate territorially or they can fight to the death.

          As far as I can tell, the set of people who think men and women are different, and therefore certain social status inequalities are inevitable, but we should do the best we can anyway, is just me.

          As a more incendiary example:

          Female physicists are rare because they’re oppressed.

          Or:

          Female physicists are rare because they’re dumb.

          Me: female physicists are rare because they’re dumb, so we should do our best to stop affording social status to intelligence.

          We could at least acknowledge that this venal status is in fact venal.

          Though, come to think, I honestly prefer, “Being high status doesn’t demonstrate you’re a good person. It’s evidence for the opposite, in fact.”

        • Randy M says:

          People can get status for a great many things, although, partly thanks to feminism, feminine things gain a good deal less status than masculine things, even as masculine things are opened up to females, although (if you buy certain differences between the men and women) women are on average disadvantaged on these things.

          We no longer say “behind every great man is a great woman” because that implies that women doing those great things is non-normative; however, now the status gains from being a superlative enabler is eliminated.

        • Andy says:

          People can get status for a great many things, although, partly thanks to feminism, feminine things gain a good deal less status than masculine things, even as masculine things are opened up to females, although (if you buy certain differences between the men and women) women are on average disadvantaged on these things.
          We no longer say “behind every great man is a great woman” because that implies that women doing those great things is non-normative; however, now the status gains from being a superlative enabler is eliminated.

          One can argue that a goal of liberal feminism is to ensure that “achiever” and “supportive enabler” are not necessarily gendered, and that in fact a couple can fall into those roles without being of different genders, like Dan Savage and his husband Terry. As a male, I feel like I’d be happy with either an “achiever” or “supportive enabler” role, though I can’t be sure about that.

        • Matthew says:

          This doesn’t seem like it solves society’s problem at a macro level. Let’s suppose that society actually agreed that a)the healthiest relationships consist of one achiever and one enabler, b)these were both valuable roles, and c)they weren’t connected to sex/gender.

          What if it turns out that (making a number up) 70% of both men and women can get more life satisfaction as achievers, and 30% as enablers. There’s no way to make this work so that everyone is happy (well, assuming that people generally want to find a mate).

    • It looks like a fair description of the social justice movement to me, but it’s plausible that I’m still traumatized from racefail.

      Who would you recommend as social justice people who don’t use weaponized equivocation?

  35. Madeleine Ball says:

    Scott, when you write stuff up like this – as interesting and plausible as it may be – I think you should ask what you hope people are walking away with. And then try your best to realistically assess what you think they’re actually going to walk away with. (i.e. I’m worried you’re not doing this meta-analysis.)

    I mean, I suspect you’d like to see the social justice movements improve their logic/language in their attempts to better humanity. However, it’s also possible that you’re inadvertently undermining them and cultivating an personal audience highly unsympathetic to social justice. (i.e. I’m not sure I want to continue following your posts. Beware your echo chamber.) It’s not that I think you’re wrong — but I fear you’re picking nearby targets (in metaphorical intellectual/social space) because you’re more familiar with them, not because they deserve it.

    • Alexander Stanislaw says:

      Engaging with people because you are familiar with seems like a good policy to me. If you’re familiar with them then you are more qualified to discuss the topic in question; and if you familiar with them they probably have a greater ability to affect your life (and indeed this is the case with Scott).

      I mean, I suspect you’d like to see the social justice movements improve their logic/language in their attempts to better humanity. However, it’s also possible that you’re inadvertently undermining them and cultivating an personal audience highly unsympathetic to social justice.

      Getting SJW’s to improve their logic/language (ie. put down their weapons) is not a plausible goal. Getting socially liberal people who might otherwise be tempted by SJW rhetoric to be more wary of it is a much more plausible goal. I think Scott has succeeded at that.

    • Gareth Rees says:

      I agree with Madeleine. The point about language is good, but the rhetoric is not. Instead of “hostility toward the abuse of language in these social justice forums” it’s “hostility toward social justice,” and instead of “the thing that these social justice people do” it’s “the thing social justice does”. This conflation of the tactics of some members of the movement with the movement itself is something that we might overlook once or twice, because we know that Scott is sympathetic to the movement’s aims. But if he keeps on doing it, Madeleine’s right that his audience will change.

      You’ll recall the Sokal affair, I’m sure, where Sokal had a similar point about the use of motte-and-bailey tactics by postmodernists like Bruno Latour. (Latour appeared to claim that nature had no influence on the resolution of scientific controversies—that is, scientific outcomes were purely the result of social processes within the scientific community—but when challenged, he was able to retreat to the safe position that this was just a methodological simplification, not an epistemological claim, his language being of course ambiguous between these two positions.) Sokal was well aware that in mostly criticizing other people on the left, he ran the risk of his arguments being understood as coming from a right-wing position, so he was always careful to make it clear that his criticisms were coming from the left.

      Scott might consider doing something similar, however repetitive this may seem.

      • suntzuanime says:

        Hostility toward social justice seems justified until such time as the movement fixes its shit. Are you going to deny the oppressed the right to hate the entire oppressor class?

      • tiny nerd says:

        I’d go so far as to say that this post (and frankly the majority of anti-SJ) are abusing motte-and-bailey pretty constantly themselves. The “motte” is the perfectly reasonable idea, that everyone will accept, that people within the sj movement often abuse their rhetoric to shut down debates. They really shouldn’t, but I try to be sympathetic because 99.95% of debates between rival internet factions are just stupid flame wars with no attempt at reasoned discussion and quite frankly people deserve a right to stop that from happening and construct safer discussion spaces. The defensive culture of shutting down bad lines of conversation is certainly harmful, though, and the only people who don’t agree with that are the ones who just want to abuse it and don’t give a damn about social justice.

        Where I have a big problem is when (for example in this post) people try to use that obvious fact to make some bigger point about how the aims of the social justice movement are all bad and anti-intellectual and the only point of the movement is to destroy people’s lives for no reason. I know Scott didn’t actually say that, but how else am I supposed to interpret:

        Everybody is racist.
        And racist people deserve to lose everything they have and be hated by everyone.
        This seems like it might present a problem. Unless of course you plan to be the person who gets to decide which racists lose everything and get hated by everyone, and which racists are okay for now as long as they never cross you in any way.

        I feel that the whole point of this argument and everything like it is to implicitly extrapolate from “people who claim to represent the social justice movement often act in hostile ways or intentionally shut down discussions” to “social justice is a vast conspiracy to poison and bring down civilization and holds all the power and whoever’s against it are noble heroes and definitely not racist or sexist at all.” It’s that constant implication that makes this post seem so hostile. I’ve seen tons of SJ people say much harsher things against the use of hostile or anti-intellectual tactics, but I would never object to that because they don’t then imply that the correct stance is to be against social justice itself. At a certain point one has to recognize that the principles or goals of a movement are more important than how jerks abuse its rhetoric, because jerks can abuse any rhetoric.

        • Matthew says:

          In the US (and various other places), we equipped local police forces with all sorts of military-grade weaponry. And now our militarized police forces conduct no-knock raids for nonviolent narcotics offenses (now expanding to include other, even less serious crimes), often hurting innocent people in the process. This isn’t because police officers are bad people. It’s because when you give people weapons, they will end up using them.

          Scott and the other non-neoreactionary critics of Social Justice Warriors on this blog don’t think that social justice activists are bad people. We think they’re building rhetorical heavy weaponry for themselves, and this is dangerous regardless of those activists’ character.

        • suntzuanime says:

          I would say that how jerks abuse a movement’s rhetoric is much more important than the movement’s principles and goals, because jerks abusing rhetoric is something that actually affects the world, while principles and goals are empty rhetoric that have no effect on anything.

          Maybe you meant something like, we should look at the ratio of decent, principled people in the movement to rhetoric-abusing jerks?

        • Nornagest says:

          To be entirely fair, no-knock raids aren’t a weapons issue, they’re a tactics issue. You could spin a plausible just-so story linking that with the militarization of police departments, but giving them a lot of guns won’t get you there on its own.

        • MugaSofer says:

          Where I have a big problem is when (for example in this post) people try to use that obvious fact to make some bigger point about how the aims of the social justice movement are all bad and anti-intellectual and the only point of the movement is to destroy people’s lives for no reason. I know Scott didn’t actually say that, but how else am I supposed to interpret:

          It’s pretty simple, actually.

          Scott is very much in favour of equality. He is *also* in favor of free speech.

          (If anything, free speech is more important; because it’s a meta-level principle that’s needed in discussions to determine whether we should care about equality.)

          So if someone uses rhetoric *about* equality to *attack* free speech, he’s going to object. Not to their stateded goal of equality, but their actual result of censorship.

    • Said Achmiz says:

      But wait; why is it bad for people to become highly unsympathetic to social justice? Isn’t the point here that social justice, as a movement/social phenomenon, is hopelessly diseased and actively evil? Sounds like a good thing to be unsympathetic to!

      • mister service says:

        I don’t think that’s the point at all. I don’t want to speak too much for SA, but it seems like the point is more like “to the extent social justice embodies the principles used to defend the motte, it is necessary and good.” And I agree.

        • “to the extent social justice embodies the principles used to defend the motte, it is necessary and good.”

          And that is where Scott goes wrong.

          If the motte meaning of the word ”racist” was useful, we would have had the word and related words a thousand years ago. The word, and like words, were created to control the bailey, and if all they controlled was the motte, would wither away.

          Natural inequality between groups requires systematically different treatments of groups.

          For example, most women behave disruptively within male hierarchies. Of course “Not all women are like that”, but it is not really practical to separate the wheat from the chaff. Further, a fertile age female within a male hierarchy will disrupt it through no fault of her own and cannot help doing so, no matter how well she behaves, short of having her chaperoned at all times. The obvious solution is to have sexually segregated hierarchies, where women can only be in charge of women doing women’s work and cannot be in charge of men, except for their sons of course.

      • Multiheaded says:

        “Social Justice” might be quite evil on an absolute scale, and still superior in important ways to business-as-usual/bourgeois liberalism/power vacuum/whatever. Therefore, those who would dismantle it might be better people, with better motives, than the typical loud activist, but it might be really bad if the former succeeded.

        (I realize that this is how a generic unintelligent conservative talks about things, yeah.)

        • Said Achmiz says:

          One response (not necessarily one I endorse; I’d have to give it more thought) might be:

          “Dismantling social justice would not return us to the former status quo. The former status quo is irrevocably gone; social justice — or rather, the good and just movements out of which modern “social justice” arose — have seen to that. These have now served their purpose. Now they are only doing evil, and must be dismantled.”

        • My bet is that if/when SJ goes away, it will be dismantled from the inside– it’s a horrible social environment.

          The people doing the work will not be the people who’ve done most of the damage.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I try to make one social justice post per month or fewer.

      If your theory about how dangerous it is to write one social justice post a month is right, that probably indicates a state of the world where I need to write more than one social justice post a month 🙁

    • mister service says:

      Are you equally concerned that social justice bloggers that employ the equivocation tactics discussed here (or the errors in rape statistics Scott discussed previously) are harming their readership by giving them rhetorical tools based on falsehood? If not, why not?

      For what it’s worth, I get the sense that Scott isn’t trying to help or harm the social justice movement so much as he is trying to think critically about what they’re trying to accomplish and sharing his work. It’s my impression that he has still expended much more effort in refuting the neoreactionaries, and yet many of them happily still come here to debate.

      Seeing the comments section here turn into an anti-social justice echo chamber would be a huge disappointment. I hope that you will stick around (and perhaps, at the very most extreme, ignore posts that that deal with social justice topics by taking a quick look at the content warning).

      • Madeleine Ball says:

        I’m not equally concerned because I think this crowd self-labels as “thoughtful” and so I expect better!

        I read TNC and I think he is very careful and thoughtful about his points. He is humble enough to admit he may sometimes be “sonned”. When thoughtful folks want to discuss social justice, I think they should make an effort to seek out high quality material in that domain – not excoriate the low quality end. I fear this merely leads some readers to see the constellation of issues we might consider “social justice” as incoherent or poisonous concepts.

        I won’t always be able to weigh in, so I’m hoping some people get out there and expand their horizons to look for high quality material.

        • nydwracu says:

          You’re assuming that the only point is intellectual engagement with the best claims of social justice.

          If another point is to develop a typology of common failure modes, social justice is a useful target: its worst is very, very bad, and it’s much nearer than most other potential targets.

          If another point is to attack things that are powerful and very, very bad, social justice is visibly gaining power, and the parts that are gaining power aren’t always the best parts.

          If another point is intellectual engagement with a movement as it actually exists and is observed, there’s no reason to suspect that every single piece of social justice Scott comes across is drawn from its best parts.

          I suspect that Scott is aiming for the first and third, and not the second.

        • MugaSofer says:

          I think Scott’s posts on Reaction are his engagement with the motte of social justice.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      An additional point worth adding – every time I write one of these things, I get a bunch of messages from people who say things like “Thank you so much, I always wanted to say something like this but I couldn’t put it into words and was too scared to try”.

      On Facebook right now, I have a female friend who has shared this saying she’s sharing it for the sake of all the men who are probably afraid to do so, and a bunch of men thanking her and saying that, in fact, they wanted to share this and were afraid to do so.

      This makes me think that, despite the whole “things i will regret writing” tag, I am in fact doing some people a service.

      • Madeleine Ball says:

        Yes, I’m sure with a bit of tweaking you can have it both ways – make these important points while also keeping the bigger picture of a more just world. 🙂

      • Scott F says:

        Here’s one more message, of “Thank you so much for putting this into words, you have crystallised something for me that always felt off but whenever I started to discuss it I was attacked”.

      • Madeleine Ball says:

        Scott, I wasn’t entirely honest about my feelings here because I wanted to be nice – and clearly you’ve been burned by some not nice people. But I think I’m going to have to be a little more honest because I do think you’re building an echo chamber that amplifies reinforcing viewpoints. Your post, it got me down, I think I’ve got to stop reading your stuff. I will explain.

        One paragraph that really got me down was the compare/contrast of an low status male with an attractive feminist. As someone who has been living as a straight woman, I was not attractive. Am not attractive. In the past I broke social norms to ask men out and suffered rejections and embarrassment. This paragraph left me feeling like the opinion of high status women, and the pain of low status men, were what mattered to you (and the demographic you represent). Perhaps these are all that are visible to you. And as I enter middle age I feel all the more sympathy for women like me who haven’t been so lucky, who are alone, and increasingly unattractive (for youth is so unfairly important in a woman’s attractiveness).

        You’ve built some interesting logic around some selected situations, but what I took away from it was someone fighting for the plight of the low status people you know and love – with such narrow vision that you would seem to disregard the pain of other large segments of the population. Segments that may very well feel a lot more pain.

        So, like, I gotta let you know: this got me a bit down. Okay maybe a lot down. I can’t let stuff like this drag me down, so I shouldn’t be reading what you write. I tell you this not as a plea for personal sympathy, but because you deserve some honest feedback before I disappear, because you need to know when you’re losing people like me. Sorry for not being tougher.

        • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

          Guilt tripping people is a genuinely shitty thing to do, and you should feel shitty for doing it. /irony

        • Thanks for posting that. As a woman who was ordinary looking mundanely and moderately attractive in sf fandom, I didn’t feel that the ground of what it’s like to be a woman had been adequately covered.

          The social punishment women get for making the first move is a large part of the situation between men and women, and doesn’t get discussed nearly enough.

        • Multiheaded says:

          You’ve built some interesting logic around some selected situations, but what I took away from it was someone fighting for the plight of the low status people you know and love – with such narrow vision that you would seem to disregard the pain of other large segments of the population. Segments that may very well feel a lot more pain.

          Perhaps the same could be said of all identity politics!

          🙁

          Thank you for being outspoken, Madeleine! I sympathize with what you describe (although obviously I can’t really understand, being AMAB and conventionally attractive) and agree that this is A Marginalized Narrative.

        • @Armstrong: She’s not guilt tripping, she’s explaining how the post made her feel.

          @Madeleine: It saddens me to see voices like yours leave this blog.

          I don’t mean to diminish your experiences at all. I fully acknowledge finding a mate for women, especially unconventionally attractive ones (or as they age) can be extremely demoralizing and unfair. I’m sure Scott cares. It is, however, already an acceptable thing to discuss within the social justice sphere.

          Meanwhile, it is also totally acceptable to blatantly mock low status men (for example). All this post tried to do is explore why the culture of social justice allows that.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          The social punishment women get for making the first move is a large part of the situation between men and women, and doesn’t get discussed nearly enough.

          This is something I’ve actually spent a lot of time ranting about, and I agree – it doesn’t get discussed nearly enough.

          One of my frequent rants in the kink scene goes something like “Guys, if a girl approaches you and you aren’t interested in her, tell her no gently and ENCOURAGE HER TO KEEP TRYING. Otherwise, the next time you complain that asking girls out is hard, or that you always have to make the first move, I get to kick you in the nuts. Girls, if another girl approaches a guy and you feel like you want to give her shit for it, STOP THAT. It is not ‘slutty’ to make the first move. Things would go a LOT EASIER for ALL women if guys didn’t ‘have’ to make the first move. If you want gender equality, fucking act like it.”

        • coffeespoons says:

          Thanks for writing that. I don’t often see people writing about what it’s like to be a less attractive woman. I was considered unattractive as a teenager, and I think my experiences were very different to those of my good looking female peers. My life changed a lot when I developed some social skills and learned to dress well, at the age of 22 or so.

          Not sure that Scott’s to blame for not taking the experiences of unattractive women into account. I think feminists often don’t, and he’s responding to them!

        • Multiheaded says:

          Meanwhile, it is also totally acceptable to blatantly mock low status men (for example).

          As a pro-misandry person: this shit is way, way out of line and perfectly illustrated by Von Kalifornen’s observation. Seriously, there are some good reasons for feminists to deprioritize helping out low-status men, there’s a whole rather sinister Nash equilibrium in which the class interests of #yesallwomen and low-status men might clash in a scary way… but this is just le cringe. Related fact: “neckbeard” has been officially verboten on /r/ShitRedditSays for a while now, for this very reason.

        • Nornagest says:

          @Multiheaded: Can you elaborate on von Kalifornien’s observation? I can hardly imagine actually finding someone that stereotypical short of growing him homunculus-style in a vat full of horse urine, but it doesn’t seem to be impossible in principle — I don’t see much in the way of actual contradictions.

        • Multiheaded says:

          I mean how he says that the SJWs broke their own bingo card. That’s a stunning example of how being undeservedly mean demeans oneself. The whole circlejerk looks incredibly stupid and cringey when taken so far.

        • Nornagest says:

          Yeah, I get that. How is it broken?

        • Zorgon says:

          I’ve talked quite a bit about the problems of low-status men in this comment section so I wanted to respond to this.

          As I mentioned upstream, I live in something that’s pretty clearly a low-status intersection; I’m into a LOT of low-status things and I tend to be surrounded by weirdos and subculturalists of the less acceptable variety. As a result, over the years I’ve seen a LOT of unpleasantness aimed at the people I know and love simply because of who they are.

          So I’m sympathetic to the problem. That said, I don’t think low-status women face quite the same Gauntlet Of Horror that low-status men do, and I think a certain amount of the time low-status women have a habit of restricting their attempts to approach only to higher-status men. Over time I’ve seen waaaaaay more expressions of annoyance at being approached by low-status men than I have expressions of annoyance at being unable to approach men. Indeed, often that annoyance at being approached is even framed in the context of it making it harder to attract the attention of higher-status men. “How am I supposed to find a hot guy with all these geeks swarming me?” is a close paraphrase of something someone once said to me.

          To be abundantly clear, I am NOT AT ALL suggesting that this is directly relevant to your own problems or that it is indicative of all low-status women; I do know plenty who went through long periods of frustration with not being able to find anyone they wanted, not least since many women in these groups lack the social confidence to push convincingly against the expectation that they will not approach. I’m adding this as a personal observation of a difference between low-status groups overall. It may indeed be something specific to my own peer group, I don’t know, but I felt it did bear mentioning.

          • Giovanna says:

            Thank you for posting this, Madeleine. I am a straight white forever single (sigh) 65-year-old female who has been physically unattractive all my life. Although I’ve always had many friends, both male and female, I haven’t been seen as a romantic partner. Didn’t matter how well I dressed, how much makeup I slathered on, what perfume I wore. Guess you could call me an “omega” female. I finally came to the conclusion that something was off with my pheromones as well as with my conventionally unattractive features.

            I’ve had too many experiences of being attracted to perfectly nice men, never being asked out by them, gathering up every bit of my courage to ask them out, and being rejected with some version of, “Oh, I’m flattered, but I just see you as a friend.” It hurts more every time.

            I long more and more for companionship, love, and, yes, physical closeness but it is denied me, while all my female friends are dating, kissing, having sex, getting married. I go out with a mixed-sex group of friends and they’re all paired up, cuddling, holding hands, except for me, and, oh, the frustration and loneliness and lack of physical contact is almost impossible to bear. Although I am successful in my work life, and my friends love me, my self-esteem plunges lower and lower until I am deeply into clinical depression.

            The few men who have asked me out are – how can I put this delicately – well, something or a lot of things are seriously wrong with them – like horrible hygiene, drug/alcohol addiction heavy-duty psychosis…

            Actually, in my 40s, I finally was asked out by a man who I found very attractive, who seemed to be kind, clean, highly intelligent, gainfully employed, and pretty darn emotionally and physically healthy. I was THRILLED. Had never happened before. After six months of dating, he asked me to marry him. Wow! My years of loneliness were over!

            Turned out he had been hiding a severe substance abuse problem, had been fired from every job he ever had, was living in his parents’ house (which he had told me was his house, but I found out his parents did live there but were on a long vacation), and after that ring was on my finger he was never again sober, became dangerously paranoid, finally violent, and after hanging on for a while (stupidly, but I was so afraid of being completely alone again) I left for my own safety.

            After that experience, it was back to never being asked out, and to men telling me, “Sorry, but I just see you as a friend.”

            I have often wondered where the other women like me are. Where is our forum?

        • Multiheaded says:

          @Zorgon:

          How do you know which women in particular are “low-status”? If you mean nerd women, then well, they’d have to get along with male nerds to even be there, no?

        • Zorgon says:

          That’s the same question as “how do you know who low-status men are”. Our culture does not exactly lack signifiers for status.

          Low income (especially but not uniquely “educated poor”), non-mainstream-friendly subcultures, no particular career focus, strong interest in non-mainstream subjects, disabilities (mental or physical), and either poor social skills or excellent-but-hypercontextual social skills are the most common kinds I encounter, mainly because they overlap with my own status traits.

          “Getting on with the nerds” doesn’t really factor into it, tbh. It doesn’t change the dynamic much. I’ve still never once heard a low-status woman complain about not being able to approach men; the complaint is always either that men don’t approach her, or that she’s approached by too many low-status men.

          Again, purely my experience and it is quite likely a large number of women in my social circles have had severe issues with being rebuffed in humiliating or embarrassing ways without ever mentioning it. But the voiced complaints are strongly different.

        • nydwracu says:

          So it’s a twist on the Soviet spy problem: the norms are unclear about who’s supposed to initiate. This is why challenging conention is a bad thing — when the scripts break down, people are stuck having to figure everything out for themselves! But the script has already broken down, so now female would-be approachers have to figure out whether the relevant male holds the old norm or not.

          I suspect there might be a solution to this (follow the usual ambiguous signals of interest -> as-unambiguous-as-possible-while-still-leaving-an-out signals of interest sequence with a waiting period and approach if he signals interest back but doesn’t approach first) but obviously I’m not in a position to say empirically whether that works.

        • MugaSofer says:

          @Madeline:

          This comment seems openly manipulative. Knock it off, would you?

          I think the point about comparing attractive women to unattractive men is an important one, and I’m kicking myself now for not noticing. Well done!

          I’ve noticed myself and other do it in various situations, and it seems to be a major unconscious stereotype/erasure thingy.

        • MugaSofer says:

          Uh, sorry, pretend I said that in a less condescending manner. I really did mean it, not sure why it came out so awful.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        Very much so.

        That does, of course, make you a target.

      • Scott Alexander says:

        (I didn’t actually see this until someone linked me to it today)

        This depresses me. You were one of the commenters here I most respected.

        Everything can only be a limited view. When feminists talk about the plight of [woman in x situation], one could say they’re neglecting (and by extension marginalizing) all the other pain in the world. When I talk about the plight of certain people (of any gender) who have been burned by certain social justice memes, one can accuse me of the same. It’s not my intention and it seems to be something fundamental to the process of writing an essay at all – ignoring everything not covered by the essay – but I can understand why it would bother you.

        I am disappointed to see you go, but I can’t promise there won’t be more like this in the future so I probably don’t have any good arguments to stop you from doing so. All I can say is I continue to try (with good success) to stick to a rule of one or fewer angry post about identity politics a month, and I will always content warn the one per month that is.

    • drethelin says:

      Scott wants to be able to hang out with the cool young people (who are into social justice) without them terrorizing and alienating his uncool young/old people (who are not into social justice).

    • Ashley Yakeley says:

      Your fears may be well-founded: I’m becoming less sympathetic to social justice in favour of what might be called social improvement.

      What’s the difference? Social justice is about making things fairer and more equal. Social improvement is about making things better for everyone, for anyone, for at least someone, even if it means making things less fair and less equal. I think I’m in favour of any Pareto improvement, even those that make the world more unfair.

      In practice, I recognise that there is by-and-large more scope for improvement of those who are worse off than those who are better off. So I’m a “good liberal” on plenty of issues.

      In theory and in rhetoric, however, I am for instance very much in favour of privilege. Privilege is a good thing; lack of privilege is a bad thing. I believe we should encourage, nurture, support and spread privilege to everyone.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        I believe we should encourage, nurture, support and spread privilege to everyone.

        Unfortunately, privilege is pretty inherently non-positive-sum. Once you start granting the advantages of privilege to everyone, it stops being privilege and becomes simple freedom and support.

        • That’s one of the problems with the SJ definition of privilege– it conflates what everyone should have (like not being at arbitrary risk from the police) with what no one should have (like being able to get away with serious crimes).

        • Luke Somers says:

          It would still be ‘privilege’ in the most relevant sense, though – no one would have to think about a lot of these problems, so everyone in that future would have ‘privilege’ compared to the people today who have these problems.

        • Hainish says:

          “That’s one of the problems with the SJ definition of privilege– it conflates what everyone should have (like not being at arbitrary risk from the police) with what no one should have (like being able to get away with serious crimes).”

          So very true.

        • Andy says:

          That’s one of the problems with the SJ definition of privilege– it conflates what everyone should have (like not being at arbitrary risk from the police) with what no one should have (like being able to get away with serious crimes).

          But sometimes one leads to the other – before the Civil Rights era, how many white men actually got in trouble for killing black men or abusing black people in general? How many crimes against black people were just never investigated, because the society cared more that social order was maintained than punishing privileged people who committed crimes?
          Or look at Ethan Couch, who got probation rather than prison for reckless driving that killed four people and inflicted massive property damage, then had lawyers who argued that he was so rich that he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions.

        • It’s complicated. From one angle– people talking about what their lives are like– the two kinds of privilege are just both present, and as Andy says, sometimes entangled.

          However, if you’re talking about making the world better, then it’s important to distinguish between what everyone should have and what no one should have. If you don’t, then privilege just looks like a huge intractable lump.

          Also, it’s worth distinguishing between getting equality by making unprivileged people’s lives better vs. making privileged people’s lives worse.

  36. Eli says:

    Scott, who the hell cares? I mean, honestly, do you really encounter tumblr-grade SJWs on such a regular basis that you feel compelled to sincerely and elaborately deconstruct their argumentative toolbox instead of just calling them trolls and fucking off to do something more fun than talking to them?

    • Mark says:

      I think a lot of people care a lot. I do, at least. As a liberal, I’m extremely scared that burgeoning forms of leftist political insanity will take over and end up leaving us vulnerable to the right. These posts feel like a huge breath of fresh air to me, as well as a potentially important resource to help rein that camp in.

      Also, I work in an industry where I do encounter SJW’s and they do wield increasing power.

      • Zorgon says:

        This. This right here. It does not escape me that the word “class” has virtually disappeared from the discourse of the Left in the past couple of decades, to be replaced by endless Oppression Matrices that have nothing to do with class at all and vague intimations about “the 1%”.

        I’m not given to conspiratorial thinking, but if I was, I would consider the sudden rise of SJW thinking to be the most extraordinarily convenient diversion, considering the sudden surge to prominence in the immediate aftermath of one of the biggest failures of capitalism in a century. But again, best to beware of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

        • Damien says:

          Hmm, that’s particularly interesting given the shift or split in ‘social justice’ meanings between “8 hour workday and income equality” and “fighting sexism/racism/ableism”.

          I hang out at Bleeding Heart Libertarians sometime, and they periodically debate “social justice” in the first sense (with of course many libertarians saying that if you have to qualify it it’s not justice, and redistribution isn’t justice, etc.)

        • Viliam Búr says:

          When the guy you want to attack is too strong and immune to your attacks, it is more fun to attack a random weak guy instead. Human nature. Internet warriors need instant victories.

        • nydwracu says:

          When the guy you want to attack is too strong and immune to your attacks, it is more fun to attack a random weak guy instead. Human nature. Internet warriors need instant victories.

          Relevant.

      • Eli says:

        Also, I work in an industry where I do encounter SJW’s and they do wield increasing power.

        I’m surprised such a thing exists, even among professional activists. Could you explain?

        As a liberal, I’m extremely scared that burgeoning forms of leftist political insanity will take over and end up leaving us vulnerable to the right.

        As a Marxist, I notice that the USA started going to the hard right in the 1970s with the demonization of the student movements (as being, effectively, exactly the kind of decadent, overprivileged, whiny emotional idiots SJWs are normally caricatured as), the “free market” response to stagflation, and the ensuing four fucking decades of neoliberalism in which Capital has routinely and viciously assaulted the hell out of Labor — during which time “liberals” collectively failed to stop it.

        (Ok, I’d better explain how I’m calling SJWs and student movements over-privileged. Simple: they spend their time on cultural, emotional, and rhetorical issues because they can all afford their food, housing, and health-care. They aren’t fighting for survival, nor for happiness, nor for any other terminal value about which they care more deeply than they care about maintaining their epistemic fog. When you can spend more effort on winning arguments with other people, fought in epistemic fog, than on fighting the eldritch and uncaring universe we actually live in, you are privileged.

        Or maybe noticing the difference between those two battles is a rationality skill. Shit.)

        ANYWAY, POINT BEING, what with the Right having maintained near-total control for the past 40 years, and things just now starting to swing back towards the most utterly milquetoast forms of social democracy (like Elizabeth Warren, whom I’m proud to call my Senator… but anyway…), I am not currently aware of some way in which SJWs pose an actual danger to the accomplishment of genuine moral and political goals. I actually kinda view them as self-defeating.

        Now explain what I’m missing.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          Err… I think Mark expressed fear that SJ would be a distraction to liberals and a fleshman for conservatives to knock down. You seem to be in violent agreement with this concern.

        • Troy says:

          I’m surprised such a thing exists, even among professional activists. Could you explain?

          I don’t know what industry Mark’s in, but as an academic, political correctness is a serious concern of mine when thinking about what to publish and what I can say publicly. I understand it’s even worse for primary and secondary school educators.

        • mister service says:

          I would love to see a long empirical investigation (Anti-Reactionary FAQ style) into the various claims of the left about neoliberalism conquering the world, and the claims of the right about the dominance of the liberal media, universities, and Cathedral.

        • Troy says:

          Jonathan Haidt has done some good empirical work on this question in social psychology: http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html.

        • Anonymous5 says:

          Have you ever been to the United States?

          Several of the most outspoken commenters on the leftist/feminist side of various arguments here seemingly have not, by their own words, which I’d say has rather skewed their views, though I’m not questioning people’s experiences etc. for whatever they’ve had

          The technology industry gets a large amount of actual, contended lawsuits explicitly over “SJW type issues” all the time. That’s on type of general effects on the environment and media. Even reading any sort of mainstream media actually produced in the United States you would see SJW stuff all the time, and recently. (for instance, all the recent “diversity statistics” published for businesses like Google, the assertion that Asians are “the same as whites” by media and so on)

        • Mark says:

          So the main thing is that they seem to be an amazingly effective propaganda tool to recruit centrists to the right, at least for specific causes relevant to the SJW platform. I confess I don’t really have statistical evidence for this claim; it’s just my general impression from having followed them. I would argue that the situation is roughly analogous to the influence of the Westboro Baptist Church on acceptance of homosexuality. WBC would spontaneously airdrop in to random public gatherings, spout dogmatic, hateful nonsense, hurt people’s feelings pointlessly and then leave without having accomplished anything discernibly helpful to their cause (except, perhaps, a few lawsuits to help the church keep rinsing and repeating). Given the incredibly media coverage they were able to garner for themselves, they were enormously embarrassing to cultural conservatives and served as a convenient reductio ad absurdum the left could point to for anyone still on the fence about the basic dignity of gay people.

          SJW’s aren’t as dogmatic or hateful as WBC is, but they’re a lot more numerous. They probably don’t have the same media traction yet, but they’re becoming more visible in the wild (see #CancelColbert and the Suey Park interview). And they absolutely, positively love to antagonize/alienate the most powerful majority groups whenever they can. Explicitly so. Because the left mostly closes ranks around them when they choose to pay attention at all, it’s mainly just rightists who are there to call SJW’s out on their insanity and reassure centrists that they aren’t, in fact, particularly oppressive individuals with no right to their own opinions.

          This might be forgivable if SJW’s were good at accomplishing anything worthwhile. But, as you note by calling them “self-defeating,” they mostly aren’t. Sometimes they can raise money for the odd grassroots cause, which is good, but they more frequently just viciously attack whomever’s most convenient, polarize anything they come into contact with and strangle cross-partisan coalitions (e.g., Brendan Eich at Mozilla). So they’re a huge liability and I want to see them contained.

          I’m surprised such a thing exists, even among professional activists. Could you explain?

          Sure. Tech feminists (where by “tech,” I mean “programming”) are starting tons of women’s organizations and have won over a lot of prominent community leaders. I have absolutely no problem with that, of course, but a very large number of them follow the worst kind of SJW tactics to the letter. This includes frequent calls to boycott companies for minimal offenses (e.g., Bitbucket initially refusing to ban a harmless piece of satire), organized lobbying of employers to fire individuals perceived to say very borderline sexist things in private or otherwise on their own time (Donglegate, @zivcjs), ostracizing highly-regarded programmers for less than perfect conformity (like not changing masculine pronouns to gender-neutral ones in library documentation), hurling waves upon waves of public abuse at any visible target (endless examples can be supplied) and building in no-disagreement-allowed clauses into any space they have control over (Double Union, a feminist hackerspace, literally bans “playing devil’s advocate”).

          I don’t ultimately think any of these things are that horrible or that my industry is ruined or anything. And most feminists in the industry aren’t like this at all. It’s just that everything is suddenly very charged, and it’s increasingly difficult to avoid that charge. No doubt feminists would say it only feels this way because they’re bringing misogyny that we want to sweep under the rug into sharp relief – and to a large extent that’s true, but it simply fails to tell the whole story.

    • von Kalifornen says:

      The problem is that, while the tumblr form is certainly salient, there are many more nice, moderate people who just disengage or fail to notice arguments about this sort of thing.

    • Madeleine Ball says:

      (Yeah, I guess Eli’s version is another way to put it.)

    • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

      “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”

      It is increasingly easy to pick a ‘high-status’ but not particularly well-liked target, like say a crotchety old millionaire or a young nebbish-y doctor, and casually ruin his life with accusations of racism or misogyny. Tenure, organizational bylaws, even the actual law will not necessarily protect from losing your livelihood and being made a toxic outcast. And the list of offenses continues to expand and become more subjective.

      Since SJ and intersectional feminism are at the cutting edge of inventing these new accusations, it makes sense to fight back if for no other reason than to make a less appealing target.

    • Nick T says:

      This is (or feels) hard when your friends and your community include many (generally reasonable and nice) people who think that SJ is basically a good thing, think good people pay attention to it, don’t understand why good people would have negative affect about it, etc., and who at least sometimes see people who use motte-and-bailey arguments as good and part of the same tribe as them and reblog their stuff etc. It’s like how someone who’s been hurt by fundamentalist Christianity might feel if their friends and community are full of Christians who, while largely harmless themselves, see “Christianity” as essentially good and Christians as by default their allies.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Yes.

    • Kaminiwa says:

      Scott’s complaints actually pretty well address the Sexism 101 class I took in college. It was 5 credit hours of learning about how men are evil, women can’t be rapists, etc.. The professor took pride in making one man leave in tears because, the student argued, he had been rather severely abused and it was ridiculous to suggest that the average, non-abused woman had it worse off than him. The professor took *pride* in belittling and dismissing the experiences of an abuse victim, because it supported his misandrist agenda.

      Let me emphasize: College Professor.

      I realize that the professor is just one bad apple, but then there’s the culture that prevented any of us from really calling him out on it. If my history teacher had asked us to join his after-school KKK rally to “hear the other side”, he’d be fired on the spot. This man suffered no consequences from actively preaching hate.

      So that tells me that somewhere in my culture, this professor’s viewpoint is actually supported.

      In other words: it’s not just trolls and tumblr-warriors.

  37. Damien says:

    I’m just amused at how wide the meaning of “social justice” can be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice
    8 hour workday, living wage, universal health care, income/wealth inequality…

  38. Dave Rolsky says:

    I think it’s a little unfair to tar all of “social justice” with this particular brush. I’ve been involved in social justice activism for a good chunk of my life and I’ve observed something that seems to be true across all social justice movements.

    There are two main groups of people involved in social justice. There are the people who want to spend their time talking and the people who want to get shit done.

    This blog post addresses the group that spends their time talking. In my view, these people mostly like to talk to each other and affirm each other’s world view. They’re also very excited to tell other people in their particular social justice movement how they’re doing it all wrong. They definitely *don’t* want to turn their critique into an actual campaign, of course.

    The people who want to get shit done learn pretty quickly that arguing with these other people makes it really hard to get shit done. If you can even get these other people to join up with you on some practical task, they’ll want to take over and spend all their time arguing about trivialities, and then shit gets done. So if you’re passionate about a particular cause and want to get shit done, you very quickly learn that engaging with the talkers is a good way to derail yourself and your work.

    So I’m quite there are people in the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophic, etc. movements doing a lot of fantastic work. You probably won’t find these people arguing on blogs, however. They’re out in the real world getting shit done. These people deserve our praise and support. They shouldn’t be lumped in with the folks that this blog post is about.

    And yes, I realize this comment is quite dismissive of intellectuals, academics, and other people who spend most of their time talking about this stuff. In my opinion, if you’re not spending a good chunk of your time on getting shit done, then you’re probably wasting your time. There is definitely a place for strategy, debate, and philosophy, but it should be in support of solving problems, not an end in itself.

    • Anonymous says:

      I would be interested to hear some examples of positive shit that has gotten done. 🙂

      (As an Internet denizen, most of my social justice exposure is to angry people with blogs. I’m curious about what the non-bloggers do.)

    • Scott Alexander says:

      There is definitely a place for talking about how to achieve actual social justice goals.

      There’s also a place for getting really upset about random people who yell at you all the time and make you sad.

      This post is the second place.

      And one of the reasons I dip into the first subject so rarely is that it exposes me to the second type of people, who may consider it an invitation to come in and tell me why I am wrong and horrible. It is much easier for me to engage them on the meta-level than on the object level, so I do that. I do think I’d talk more about the first type of thing if I felt comfortable doing so, and I do think decreasing the power of the second type of people is a form of noise-reduction that serves the first goal.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        There is definitely a place for talking about how to achieve actual social justice goals.

        There’s also a place for getting really upset about random people who yell at you all the time and make you sad.

        This post is the second place.

        Translation into SJWese:

        “I respect your Safe Spaces, please respect mine.”

    • I’m glad to hear there are social justice people doing useful work– how do they manage to avoid the noisy people who don’t want to do anything useful?

      Also (if it won’t make them into targets), could you name some of the organizations?

  39. ozymandias says:

    Scott, POC being racist doesn’t actually prove that they are racist against white people. POC are perfectly capable of being racist against other POC. The IAT website mentions that Asians are about as bigoted against black people as black people are, and black people themselves show a preference for white people about 50% of the time. While of course I acknowledge that teens being bullied for being white exist, it is hardly a problem on the same scale as antiblack racism is. A black teen who’s bullied for being black grows up into a world where most people subconsciously hate her. That is not true for white people. That difference is important.

    I think the condition the word “racism” is in is similar to, say, the scientific use of the word “theory.” Sociologically, racism is used to refer to society-wide patterns rather than individual prejudice. A lot of SJ people are using the sociological framework. Similarly, one might discuss the “theory of gravity” without implying that Newtonian mechanics is incredibly uncertain, even though that is the colloquial meaning of the word “theory.” I’ve certainly seen enough graphics helpfully explaining what theory ‘really’ means. Ideally, of course, people would say “in a sociological/scientific context it means Y, and in a colloquial context it means X, but here we’re going to be using it in the Y sense so please don’t be confused,” but I don’t think it is any more inherently absurd to say that the sociological meaning is what the word racism ‘really’ means any more than it is inherently absurd to say that the scientific meaning is what the word theory ‘really’ means.

    • Anon says:

      Eh… I mostly see those explanations of “What ‘Theory’ Means” in the context of explicitly rebutting “Evolution is just a theory”, which in turn is only an argument because scientists describe it as “the theory of evolution”.

      That is, group A uses the word one way, group B assumes they are using it the other way, and then group A explains that B is wrong about how A was using it.

      Whereas the case with racism I most commonly see is group B [the one with claims like “black man who beats up white man for being white is being racist”] using the word one way and group A [social justice folks] telling them that they (group B) are using it wrong.

      Certainly there are instances more similar to the former case – eg, if group B enters a conversation which had been between As, and needs to have it explained that “black man beats up white man” is not a relevant example of systematic oppression, which was what the As had meant. But this case shows up a lot less in my experience.

      • Nornagest says:

        Certainly there are instances more similar to the former case – eg, if group B enters a conversation which had been between As, and needs to have it explained that “black man beats up white man” is not a relevant example of systematic oppression, which was what the As had meant. But this case shows up a lot less in my experience.

        This seems to be adequately explained by the theory, pointed out elsewhere in these comments, that SJ discourse commonly interprets the set of discussions surrounding race/gender/etc. as a unitary Conversation rather than as individual conversations. There’s space for members of designated oppressor classes to productively contribute within the latter, while the former is forever barred to them lest they provoke accusations of derailing, mansplaining, What About The Menz?, etc.

    • Troy says:

      While of course I acknowledge that teens being bullied for being white exist, it is hardly a problem on the same scale as antiblack racism is. A black teen who’s bullied for being black grows up into a world where most people subconsciously hate her. That is not true for white people. That difference is important.

      There are certainly cases in which white people being bullied grow up in an environment that is overall hostile towards them — e.g., if they’re a middle class white in a school predominated by lower class African-Americans. I also don’t think that the majority of people subconsciously hate black people (or anyone else, for that matter). This is not a plausible interpretation of the IAT tests.

      • ozymandias says:

        I think you are missing the distinction I am making. Presumably lower-class African Americans in schools that are predominantly middle-class white also grow up in an environment that is hostile to them. My point is that once they graduate, the world will continue to be hostile to the lower-class African American, but not to the middle-class white.

        • Nornagest says:

          Not that this makes the situations exactly equivalent, but escaping from a hostile environment doesn’t undo the damage that growing up in a hostile environment does, not by a long shot. One need only look at geek culture for an endless stream of examples.

        • ozymandias says:

          Indeed, but in general it is worse to continue to be in a hostile environment than it is to escape it, while of course it is best not to be in hostile environments at all.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Often escape doesn’t come so easy.

          Most “middle class white people” who would wind up in a school predominantly filled with lower-class black people are just *barely* middle-class. The sorts of experiences that they have in a predominately lower-class black school mark them to their more securely middle-class white “peers” as inferiors, and they spend a good deal of the rest of their lives treated as proxy black people. Since it is subtly emphasized to them that the reason they are singled out and abused is that they had to go to school with black people, many of them start taking out their frustrations on black people rather than on the one-rung-up-the-ladder white people that are actually the source of their current misery, and the system sustains itself.

        • Troy says:

          Presumably lower-class African Americans in schools that are predominantly middle-class white also grow up in an environment that is hostile to them.

          No, I don’t agree. I realize this is an empirical question and we’re just arguing anecdotally here, but there were maybe 10 black kids in my several hundred person high school and all the ones I knew were quite popular. (The ones I knew best were more middle-class; but the lower-class ones seemed to be popular among the lower-class crowd they hung out with.)

          I’m not saying that there aren’t challenges to being one of the only black kids (or one of the only anything else) in your school, I’m saying that other children being hostile to you is not one of the main ones.

          My point is that once they graduate, the world will continue to be hostile to the lower-class African American, but not to the middle-class white.

          Well, I do agree that the middle-class white American will have more resources to isolate himself from lower-class African-Americans than conversely. But I don’t think that the world in general is hostile to either person (at least in the United States).

        • Jack Crassus says:

          Who has the better life prospects?

          1) the only black kid in an otherwise all-white school
          2) a black kid in an all-black school
          3) the only white kid in an otherwise all-black school
          4) a white kid in an all-white school

          If you ranked these examples like me, then you understand why making white people feel less edgy around black people isn’t in my top 100 list of things to do to make the world a better place. Social Justice seems to have a problem with excess empathy and a misplaced locus of control.

        • Troy says:

          I would rank them in this order:

          1) white kid in white school
          2) black kid in white school
          3) white kid in black school
          4) black kid in black school

          (2) comes before (3) because the black kid is likely to be middle-class, and the white kid is likely to be lower-class.

          But I don’t think I understood what point you were making. (I’m confused partly because your penultimate sentence seems to be responding to me but your final sentence seems to be anti-SJ.) If your suggestion was that the white kid in the black school will be fine, so let’s not worry about it, my response is that bullying is bad in and of itself, and we should be opposed to it even if the white kid will turn out fine. (And in my view, the reasons the black kids will likely not turn out fine (if this is the case) have little or nothing to do with white bullying or institutionalized racism.)

          Incidentally, lower-class whites will tend to have an easier time in majority black schools than middle-class whites. The latter are the ones who really don’t fit in to the culture and are consequently perceived as extremely uncool.

        • Jack Crassus says:

          Troy,

          The point of Social Justice seems to be that oppressor groups feeling vaguely good about themselves and vaguely bad about oppressed groups is an important problem with presumably large effects.

          It seems remarkable then that placing black people among larger quantities of white people improves their lives, when they are also exposed to more of this hypothesized negative miasma.

        • Troy says:

          Okay, I think we basically agree.

        • Mark James says:

          Your ranking is completely wrong, Troy. The actual answer is

          1) black kid in white school
          2) white kid in white school
          3) black kid in black school
          4) white kid in black school

          A black kid in a white school has an advantage over his white counterpart because of affirmative action, (aka institutionalized racism) which causes universities to choose “under-represented minorities” (basically, all the minorities except Asians) over more qualified whites and Asians.

          Meanwhile, a black kid in a black school has an advantage over his white counterpart because he doesn’t get the shit beaten out of him for his skin color.

        • Troy says:

          Mark: You are wrongly assuming, with progressives, that AA actually helps underrepresented minorities. If the black kid in white school goes to an ivy school he’s unqualified for rather than a state school he could do well in, and drops out after two years with a lot of debt, he’s a lot worse off than the white kid who went to a slightly worse school than he could have gotten into in a complete meritocracy.

          Similarly, I agree with you that the white kid will likely get beaten up more, but the white kid is less likely to have criminal close friends or relatives who he will seek to emulate. And I think becoming a criminal is a worse life outcome than taking a menial labor minimum-wage job, say.

          If we held a bunch of other things constant (IQ, neighborhood lived in, number of parents living with kid, social group, etc.), and assume no pernicious affects of AA, I might agree with your rankings. But as it is I don’t agree with the reactionary meme that blacks have it better than whites — I just disagree with progressives as to why blacks have it worse off than whites.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Troy: Not all progressives in America believe that AA works. Personally, I do think that discrimination/white supremacy harms NAMs a lot and, crucially, devalues the advantages of African-American or Hispanic cultures, so AA might be a good component for meritocracy… but I don’t believe in meritocracy either, because, as the linked article touches upon, it leads to “evaporative cooling”/brain drain in minority communities. It’s better and more just to have direct race-based redistribution, IMO – HR40 reparations, etc – as well as equalize the rewards for different kinds of work. Fighting open discrimination is the right thing to do, yes, but broad equality – of wealth and cultural capital and support networks and law enforcement – would be better for minorities than privileges along one axis.

          (In particular, as I discussed with some reactionaries, why not let minority communities police themselves somehow? 84% of black crime is black-on-black, and the vast majority of black people aren’t criminals, so the incentives are there. Certainly resentment and hatred towards The Man must be part of what drives the reproduction of “ghetto” survival values, as Ta-Nehisi Coates says.)

      • Tom Hunt says:

        I personally tend to doubt the wide applicability of the IAT results at all. I took the test once; it came back as “slight instinctive preference” for black people, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t describe my actual stance, either now or then. (I also had a “strong instinctive preference” for Newt Gingrich over Mitt Romney, which, well, whatever.) As regards my actual experience with the test, I further doubt it had anything useful to say about me, because I needed a second look and a conscious decision to successfully tell black people and white people apart, in the greyscale, brightness-normalized photographs they used. Error due to this seems to me quite likely to overwhelmingly swamp error due to subconscious racial bias.

        More generally, I don’t see a strong reason to assume there’s any link at all between the patterns in millisecond-level concept association (even where these patterns are successfully teased out by the test, which also seems less likely than is being assumed) and 1. what people consciously think, 2. what people actually do, or 3. what any of these cause society, as a whole, to be like. Where there are interesting results to be found regarding 1, 2 or 3, it seems much more likely that they will be found by studying 1, 2 or 3 directly.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’m not sure we’re arguing about the same thing here.

      We both agree that minority individuals sometimes display behavior which is identical to the behavior that would be called “racist” in white individuals. So we don’t have an empirical dispute.

      That leaves the dispute of whether or not we are allowed to call it racist. I’m not even taking a side in that dispute. Just saying that the fact that people treat this dispute as it it’s very very important is kind of revealing.

      The debate over whether evolution is “only a theory” takes place because creationists are making the claim “See! Even scientists admit that they don’t really know if this is true” and scientists have to tell them they’re wrong and they are not actually admitting this.

      What is the similar non-sinister reason why the debate over whether POC can be racist takes place?

      • ozymandias says:

        Technically, the debate isn’t over whether POC can be racist. Horizontal oppression is a fairly uncontroversial concept. The debate is over whether white people can be victims of racism.

        The similar non-stupid debate is that some people like going “racism is bad! Therefore you should be against racism against white people! Therefore you should spend as much time criticizing affirmative action and the Black Panthers as you do criticizing the prison system and racist hiring practices.” There are basically two strategies to deal with this. One, you can be like “okay, affirmative action and the Black Panthers are racist, but they are totally justified to deal with the worse racism against people of color, also white people as a whole face very few negative consequences from those two things, in part because of the other racism that is pervading all of society”, at which point they respond “see! You don’t care about white people’s problems. And you just said racism is GOOD. Racist!” and you lose the argument. Two, you can be like “white people cannot be victims of racism,” in which case you have a lot of sociological literature you can cite to back up this argument and it is in general much more likely to succeed.

        • Scott Alexander says:

          I can think of three dozen better arguments off the top of my head. For example, “Yes, there is racism against both black and white people, but there is much more against black people.”

          I continue to refuse to believe the deny-whites-as-racism-victims strategy could possibly come about naturally. It’s like – I dunno – suppose we were worried about Iran’s nuclear program because hawks might use it as an excuse for war. In order to halt the push towards war, you might argue “Iran’s nuclear program isn’t really that bad” or “We have more important things to spend money on than invading Iran” or even “I don’t want to talk about Iran right now”. But if you say “You may say Iran has fission-based missiles, but you may not, absolutely MAY NOT, call them nukes”, and then say you’re saying that because it’s the strongest argument most likely to convince people, I’m going to get very weirded out.

        • drethelin says:

          Empirically that second tactic doesn’t seem like it succeeds at anything but getting people to stop talking to you.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          Anti-white racism is noncentral racism. People constantly make dumb non-membership claims rather than questing to slay the dreaded WAITW.

        • Matthew says:

          I think I’ve just spotted an inferential gap here, though whether it’s a gap between you and me or between me and the typical person arguing for “whites can victims of racism,” I’m not sure…

          To me “whites can be victims of racism” isn’t about attempts to correct structural asymmetries like affirmative action; that’s obviously noncentral, and Scott in fact used it as an example in The Worst Argument In The World.

          To me, the extended form would be “whites can be victims of interpersonal racism.” Imagine a hypothetical black-owned restaurant that invariably serves its white customers last, after taking care of all of its black customers, rather than taking/serving orders in the order in which people arrived. The fact that society structurally disfavors blacks overall doesn’t make this behavior okay on a micro level. The lesson on an interpersonal level should be “don’t treat people differently based on the color of their skin,” not “don’t treat disadvantaged minorities differently based on the color of their skin.”

        • Sniffnoy says:

          This seems to have a lot to do with being unwilling to acknowledge tradeoffs. Like, to my mind, the first response is clearly the better one; it is honest, avoids semantic disputes, and acknowledges tradeoffs. And the expected response to it is terrible and does not acknowledge tradeoffs. But is it really the case that that is the reason that they will go with the second over the first? Seems more likely to me that they’re simply unwilling to acknowledge tradeoffs themselves — not that they understand them but are resorting to dirty tricks to deal with someone who doesn’t.

      • Dave says:

        So I was going to say what ozymandias said, but they said it first. It doesn’t seem ridiculous to me. Or, rather, it’s ridiculous, but it’s a very common human form of ridiculous.

        I know a lot of people who, when they want to talk about X using the label L, and are faced with a community of people whom (a) they believe simply don’t want to talk about X, and who (b) keep using L to refer to things other than X, eventually end up jumping up and down and screaming “L means X dammit!” until they are red in the face and spittle forms on their lips.

        I’ve seen this happen with (L,X) = (“racism”, structural oppression of a given race), (“sexism”, structural oppression of a given sex), (“male”, possessing heterogamatic sex chromosomes), (“male”, possessing certain bodily structures), (“male”, possessing certain bodily structures and lacking others), (“male”, feeling a certain way about themselves), (“atheism”, justified skepticism about any given theology), (“atheism”, structural oppression of theists), (“Christianity”, attesting to a particular set of factual claims about the divinity of Jesus Christ), (“Christianity”, attesting to a particular set of moral/ethical claims about right action), (“rational”, not allowing emotional considerations to significantly influence our decisions), (“rational”, making decisions that optimize for achieving our goals), (“freedom”, not having force applied on me by other people), (“freedom,” being able to do stuff I want to do), (“inflammable”, capable of being set on fire), (“momentarily”, for a moment), (“momentarily”, in a moment), and on and on and on.

        And sometimes they form websites or other communities where they have the power to tell people who won’t agree that L means X to shut the fuck up.

        Of course, intensity varies. But that people often behave a certain way around labels they feel strongly about is important, independent of why ome people feel so intensely about certain labels while other people don’t.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      In my experience people really do tend to correct people on “what ‘theory’ means when scientists use it’ rather than on “what ‘theory’ really means”. From discussion here it sounds like SJ people almost uniformly correct people on “what ‘racism’ really means” rather than “what ‘racism’ means in a sociological context.”

      It’s also pretty easy to say “Evolution isn’t a theory at all the way you mean it” and pretty hard to say “Racism the way you mean it isn’t always bad”.

    • MugaSofer says:

      That’s an excellent point, Ozy. That bugged me as well, I think it kind of undermines his examples. At the same time, I feel like this isn’t the underlying logic behind many of these statements …

      Actually, you’re active in Tumblr’s SJ-sphere, right? And I’ve seen you post in favor of “there’s no such thing as female privilege”.

      Could you perhaps explain your definition of privilege, that presumably you don’t feel is subject to these motte-and-bailey issues? I mean, if it’s not too much trouble. Seems like it would be helpful.

  40. The biggest problem with sjw is they give ammunition to other strong ‘in/out group’ groups for violent, destructive resistance. These are likely symptoms of overall societal dissipation where ‘the center cannot hold’ and sjw’s are very verbally intelligent but not otherwise very powerful people attempting to carve out a piece of the failing whole for themselves (in whatever fashion.)

    This is typical of liberal systems where in attempting to make things more fair by removing traditions, hierarchies and systems of favor, they also remove protections certain groups had for themselves. Smith recounts how when the monasteries were abolished, the destitute poor now fell into the hands of the municipalities to care for, and what follows is a history of quasi-serfdom, social welfare programs, homeless spikes, etc. Homosexuals were in an interesting position vis the Catholic church for a long time; they were more or less protected so long as they didn’t cause trouble. They didn’t attempt to make them straight, but did encourage them to be celibate. (It’s arguable that a lot of people should be celibate, including many ‘straights’.)

    Motte-and-Bailey seems to be practiced in differing degrees and in different ways, and there is a specific meaning to its practice. The SJW are clearly dividing up the intellectual space into different fiefdoms, something that other groups, even if they do use Motte-and-Bailey, don’t do. I think Motte-and-Bailey is just one part of a set of strategies being used, including the ‘The Conversation is not just a local conversation, but whatever is said wherever, on that topic’.

    There is also the issue that religious texts have a particular character of being interpreted by those whose they are. We forget this with Christian texts (the Bible) because there were so many different ‘Christian’ groups and because of Lockean hermeneutics being asserted by some of them. But ultimately the group’s religious texts have meaning for them and towards their ideals (whether factual or not, mythical or not, etc.) In a civ that considered itself Christian (or thought of itself in Christian terms) it’s no surprise the Bible became a kind of universal text. The sjw seem to be treating ‘the conversation on x’ (race, gender, etc) as a religious text, though I think maybe there is also the case that technical texts (for a particular profession) can be treated this way as well. Blueprints are not intended to make sense for everyone, just for those who need to know how to read them. The degree of general readability varies, and indeed there may be efforts to make the documents more or less generally comprehensible for various reasons. (The Aztec religious was notoriously opaque, meaning only the priests could interpret it at all. Tarot cards try to be like this.)

    I consider sjw as a form of warfare, which is bad overall because war is the lowest state of society. (Moldbug’s states are: war -> peace -> security -> law -> freedom) Even if sjw have a noble cause, they are going to throw society into chaos doing it. It may just be that they should be in a different society than people such as myself. I would accept that.

    • caryatis says:

      “It’s arguable that a lot of people should be celibate, including many ‘straights’.”

      I realize this is off topic, but could you say more about that?

      • Sarah says:

        There is natural variation in human sexuality. Some people are not very interested in sex (asexuals and related types). Some people are going to be unable to find sex partners (the unlucky and atypical.) It might be better if there were a valued and accepted social role for people who don’t have sex, instead of telling them YOU ARE FAILURES WHY DON’T YOU HAVE A GIRLFRIEND YET.

        In a lot of cultures, the spiritual/intellectual functions (priests, monks, and for a long time university professors) were paired with celibacy. Sometimes I wonder if there wasn’t a genuine insight there. People who are good at “unworldly” things might really be worse at finding mates; or sex and parenthood may make you worse at spiritual/intellectual pursuits.

        • Nornagest says:

          Conversely, though, the celibacy rules for those roles were often honored much less consistently than they are now. Sure, we hear about the occasional child abuse scandal, but four hundred years ago half the College of Cardinals would have more-or-less openly maintained mistresses.

          That might support your point, though; if the evolutionary niche of the celibacy rule is less about actually keeping people from having sex and more about providing socially acceptable roles for people that don’t want to, then it doesn’t matter too much if some people break the rule as long as they’re not too loud about it.

        • Matthew says:

          Having now seen a similar argument in several different contexts, I think there may be a typical mind fallacy going on here that I want to address.

          On the on hand you have people who are asexual and/or romantic.

          On the second hand, you have people making the argument you’re making. Here I have two hypotheses. The less charitable hypothesis is that these people are fairly successful in love and sex, and are doing the same obnoxious thing as when rich people say money isn’t important. The more charitable hypothesis is that there are people who are not asexual and/or aromantic, but for whom romance and sex aren’t that important. This is a hard position for me to grasp, because…

          On the third hand, you have people like me, with really strong libidos and really strong pair-bonding instincts. It would make absolutely no difference to me whatsoever if society did not shame people for failing to find romance/sex. I’m not unhappy because society tells I’m a loser; I’m unhappy because I regard romance and sex as fundamental human needs only one step less urgent than food/water/sleep, and I’m slowing dying for the lack of them. This is biologically, not socially mediated.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          When I was involuntarily single and celibate (which was until a much higher age than is generally accepted), the fear of social judgment was the worst part of it. So in fact both kinds of people exist. AFAICT removing the social stigma from celibacy shouldn’t hurt either kind unless it strengthens the stigma against unsuccessful romantic efforts or something.

        • TGGP says:

          I don’t actually identify as an aesexual, but I suppose I’m damn-near close enough. I do sometimes think (mainly due to Robin Hanson’s dreamtime argument) modern society is crazy, but it’s not bad either. I waste all my time reading things on a computer now, centuries ago I presumably might have been copying scrolls in a monastery. I definitely wouldn’t choose the latter given the option of the former. I’m considered weird, but in an atomized individualist society I can just be weird and continue doing whatever I feel like. It’s entirely possible that the older I get the weirder I’ll seem and the more consequences there will be, but I don’t really think about that.

          I suppose it’s an example of male privilege that there’s so little judgement at not having a partner. Take the Baumeister-esque point about the difference in variance between genders, and the median female is generally assured a spot in the “effective population”, so it’s a more noteworthy signal for one to be without a partner, and then there’s also our retaining social values which still places more importance on that for women. Whereas for men it’s well known a subset will be outside of that effective population, and at least nowadays there’s nothing unpleasant like being killed or starving to death!

          Part of it is that I’m atypical in not noticing certain things I don’t care about. And not giving a shit really is a great privilege. Other people have expressed shock at how blase I’ve been about, say, getting fired, but I just don’t care that much and since I’m a white middle class college grad with plenty of opportunities and no responsibilities, it all works out for me. People like Matthew sound kind of sad and pathetic to me (although like the dog in the lizard parable, I’m so unable to relate to their complaints I can’t entirely take them seriously), too bad there’s not a pill that can make them like me. I suppose the only downside is that I’ve been so ruined by chronic happiness and always having what I want I might not be prepared to deal with actual setbacks I could conceivably give a shit about.

        • Matthew says:

          Other people have expressed shock at how blase I’ve been about, say, getting fired, but I just don’t care that much and since I’m a white middle class college grad with plenty of opportunities and no responsibilities, it all works out for me.

          Well of course you don’t care. From this side of the divide, the whole point of gaining material and social status is access to better mates.

          People like Matthew sound kind of sad and pathetic to me (although like the dog in the lizard parable, I’m so unable to relate to their complaints I can’t entirely take them seriously), too bad there’s not a pill that can make them like me.

          I would not take such a pill, to be clear.

          ETA: It’s sort of hilarious that this post appeared within an hour of you suggesting a pill to cure sexuality.

        • Sarah says:

          To be clear, I don’t think it’s at *all* obvious that we should go back to promoting celibacy. Just that institutional celibacy probably had *some* positive effects.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          I’m not on board to start promoting celibacy, but some efforts to at least try to reduce overt shaming of it seem like a good idea. We’re probably not going to sever the romantic success/status link any time soon, but we might at least be able to keep it out of celibates’ faces.

        • Nornagest says:

          I suppose it’s an example of male privilege that there’s so little judgement at not having a partner.

          There’s definitely judgment for not having a partner, but outside of fratboy social circles or spaces functionally indistinguishable from them, most of it is tacit. If you are a techie, this might be invisible to you because status in that field is unusually unbound from mainstream social norms, but it’s definitely present in other fields: you’re not going to make it into senior officer ranks in the military, for example, if you’re not married.

          I don’t know how gendered it is.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          That might support your point, though; if the evolutionary niche of the celibacy rule is less about actually keeping people from having sex and more about providing socially acceptable roles for people that don’t want to, then it doesn’t matter too much if some people break the rule as long as they’re not too loud about it.

          Although I think in a lot of cases, we’re talking about (modern) people who VERY MUCH want to participate in non-celibacy, but no one else wants them to.

          I.e., I’d LOVE to be in a relationship right now, but I think the general consensus is “eww. Eww eww, eww, eww… EWW.”

        • caryatis says:

          Is it really possible to be celibate involuntarily, though? You can always see a prostitute. If you don’t have a lot of money and are in a remote area, that might be only once a year, but that’s still not celibate. If you have the option of seeing a prostitute and don’t want to for whatever reason, then you’re voluntarily choosing not to have sex.

          Admittedly it might be harder to satisfy romantic urges.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Technically correct: the best KIND of correct.

        • btw, masturbation is a violation of celibacy. When the monastics spoke of ‘the spirit of fornication’ they were precisely referring to this desire, which is a breach of celibacy, but in this case, with one’s self.

      • Sure. Human sexuality is often disordered; it isn’t enough to say that because you’re attracted to the opposite sex that by definition your sexuality is properly ordered. There are two aspects to this: 1. the general consensus is that not all acts between two members of the opposite sex are well-ordered (this exact list varies, but the fact that some are excluded does not.) 2. even barring not committing a forbidden act (as in 1) there are even disordered ways of going about any act.

        It is often considered that those who have sex merely for pleasure are by definition disordered, though there is disagreement between, say, the Eastern Orthodox (of which I am a layman) and the Roman Catholics as to what the proper order is.

        According to our (EO) teaching, the purpose of human sexuality is union, all intersex activity is a manifestation of this: children, copulation, romance, etc.

        To the Roman Catholic the purpose of marriage and thus sex, is children. Sex for any other reason (in their view) is disordered.

        We both agree that sex merely for recreation or pleasure is incorrect, regardless of whether all of the rule checkboxes are checked. That is to say (put another way) disorder is by degrees.

        Therefore while the PUA doesn’t dabble in ‘strange flesh’ he yet does corrupt himself. The libido is a feedback loop, where if left unfed long enough it will fizzle out, but if fed will grow stronger up to a point. For those who cannot control their urges, they are like alcoholics regarding sexuality and it may be better for them, whoever they are, to abstain. Further, since members of the same sex cannot form the proper union ontologically, their coupling is inherently disordered regardless of whether they are sex-addicts and they should also be celibate from one another.

        An oddness exists within Protestant Christianity, a disorder, let us say: Protestants do not have monastics. Therefore it is given without thought that all people should marry (though the scriptures themselves do not affirm this) – in our tradition there were even some times when a man and woman married but swore to remain celibate for the purposes of prayer. This was a form of parochial monasticism. It is arguable that a society which does not consider virginity – and its lesser form, mere celibacy – a higher way is itself disordered and cannot be trusted to understand the proper ordering of sexuality.

        Put another way, it does not understand the proper ordering of love (agape over eros, in the Greek terms) so it must needs confuse all things that attend love – marriage, copulation, childbearing, romance, etc.

        I hope that clarifies a little.

    • Oligopsony says:

      This is typical of liberal systems where in attempting to make things more fair by removing traditions, hierarchies and systems of favor, they also remove protections certain groups had for themselves.

      This is an important point for a lot of things. Karl Polanyi wrote the classic account, of course.

      I consider sjw as a form of warfare, which is bad overall because war is the lowest state of society. (Moldbug’s states are: war -> peace -> security -> law -> freedom)

      SJW is force, and force is not just the measure of but the impetus for change along such a scale – almost trivially so, since it’s a political scale, and politics is force.

      From a Hobbesian or neocameral perspective, the SJW application of force is good iff it reinforces the dominant power structure – that is, accepting that metapolitical framework, people who aver a SJW-y positive political analysis should oppose SJWishness and those who aver a neoreactionary analysis should support it.* (Alexander’s suggestion about reversing any advice you hear may be apposite here.) Of course no one does this because they prefer to have bravery debates instead.

      *Moldbug himself was a bit more consistent than many of his followers in analyzing these things as chaos rather than structure, but then such oppositions are dialectical – I don’t mean this as a cheap shot at our friends here on the right.

      • Sarah says:

        To clarify:

        You’re saying that SJW tactics are self-defeating, so liberals should oppose SJW tactics (because they make the project of promoting liberal values less successful), and conservatives should support SJW tactics for the same reason?

        • Oligopsony says:

          No. I’m saying from the Hobbesian meta-perspective that Rivers Cuomo is using, SJW is “war” and thus bad iff it’s a brave fight against institutional kyriarchy, and “peace” or above and thus good iff it’s a horrid tyrannical witchunt conducted by the sinister brahmanical Grand Inquisitors of Cathedral puritanism.

        • Tom Hunt says:

          Hmm.

          My reading of Moldbug (notably the bit about how tyranny a la Hitler/Stalin is a form of chaos, and freedom is a form of order) suggests that it’s not quite that simple. In particular, “authority” is not always “order”; it is chaotic to the degree that it fosters chaotic conditions, and the condition in which anyone can be disappeared (sent to the gulag, get the three-AM knock, whatever) for any reason or no reason at all, simply to keep the rest of the population in fear, is undeniably chaotic. This strikes me as a good analogy to the reactionary analysis of the modern SJW machine, in which anyone who violates the orthodoxy is unpersonned, and what constitutes a violation is growing all the time. (The chaotic associations of the SJWs are heightened by the fact that they’re also a hive of really bizarre infights; they don’t even aspire to the already-lamentable internal loyalty of the Nazi government.)

          Thus, in the reactionary analysis, the SJWs are certainly in the service of power; however, that and order are not always the same thing. I see the reactionary prescription for government, which has always been less coherent than the description, as being essentially that good government is that which promotes order. The SJWs certainly don’t qualify, even with the lesser power (than the force of government) that they now hold.

        • TGGP says:

          I was impressed when Moldbug’s argument seemed like it led to a pro-Cathedral conclusion (and not just “seemed”, he even got explicit at times), but he later backed away from that with crazy schemes of a reactionary wikipedia leading to a military coup or Palin presidency or something.

        • nydwracu says:

          In particular, “authority” is not always “order”; it is chaotic to the degree that it fosters chaotic conditions, and the condition in which anyone can be disappeared (sent to the gulag, get the three-AM knock, whatever) for any reason or no reason at all, simply to keep the rest of the population in fear, is undeniably chaotic.

          The word you’re looking for is ‘phobarchy’. To Moldbug, phobarchy is bad, psycharchy is “creepy and weird” (direct quote), and legarchy is good.

        • Nornagest says:

          What is psycharchy?

        • nydwracu says:

          There are two basic classes of internal control. A sovereign can control its residents by managing their minds, or managing their bodies. We can call the former mode psycharchy, the latter physarchy. A psycharchy persuades its residents to refrain from organizing, seizing and capturing it. A physarchy physically restrains its residents from organizing, seizing and capturing it.

          • In re psycharchy: I believe that our culture can only encourage what looks like unlimited ambition (go for it!, follow your bliss, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?) because it just doesn’t occur to people to try to stage a coup.

      • nydwracu says:

        From a neocameral perspective, not all power structures are equal: some are legitimist and some are demotist. Legitimism is preferable to demotism, because demotism is war; and demotism isn’t binary, as can be trivially observed by the fact that the States are not currently in a state of civil war.

        (The two words do have sensible meanings. The ARFAQ misunderstood them. In a sentence, legitimism is succession by law and demotism is succession by power.)

  41. Elizabeth says:

    “Yet if anyone mentions it in real life, they are likely to have earned themselves a link to an Explanatory Article. Maybe 18 Reasons Why The Concept Of Female Privilege Is Insane. Or An Open Letter To The Sexists Who Think Female Privilege Is A Thing. Or The Idea Of Female Privilege – It Isn’t Just Wrong, It’s Dangerous. Or the one on how there is no female privilege, just benevolent sexism. Or That Thing You Call Female Privilege Is Actually Just Whiny Male Syndrome. Or Female Privilege Is Victim Blaming, which helpfully points out that people who talk about female privilege “should die in a fire” and begins “we need to talk, and no, not just about the fact that you wear fedoras and have a neck beard.”

    It almost seems like you have touched a nerve. But why should there be a nerve here?”

    The standard reply is “because it’s actually the case that privilege most usefully means systematic oppression of a demographic in the most important spheres of life, and people argue in favor of definitions that allow reverse racism / sexism against men *constantly* because it’s the rhetorical equivalent of ‘I’m rubber you’re glue!’ This gets old.”

    I’m not sure how sympathetic I am to the standard reply. Given the above commenters’ remarks on universal prejudice against American blacks – all races show bias against black faces, kids of all races prefer to play with white dolls – it does seem at least like there’s an important fact about racism against blacks that’s not present in racism against whites.

    On the other hand, “I’m tired of having this argument, it’s not my job to educate you, I am having feelings about having this argument many times” is associated with some of the worst behavior I’ve seen in social justice circles. I’d love to see you write a post just about that.

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      On the other hand, “I’m tired of having this argument, it’s not my job to educate you, I am having feelings about having this argument many times” is associated with some of the worst behavior I’ve seen in social justice circles. I’d love to see you write a post just about that.

      Is a demoralized and war-weary enemy allowed to start using superweapons, rather than fighting conventionally against an ever more desperate and battle-hardened opponent?

      It occurs to me that, when not taken metaphorically, the US and Japan have very different answers to that question.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        If I’m coming onto your (rhetorical ‘you’) tumblr or whatever, then you shouldn’t have to have any argument you don’t feel like having. But if you come to SSC and make an objection that relies on a premise that isn’t generally accepted here, you should be prepared to defend that premise.

        In general, you should always be able to avoid having an argument you don’t want to have and you should never be able to win by default.

        • Nornagest says:

          Tumblr’s more-or-less specifically set up to make it hard to draw boundaries around “your” stuff or to limit the scope of conversations. With very few limits, you can like or reblog whatever you damn well please, add your own tags (indeed, you have to, or it’ll strip the original tags for you), append hateful incendiary comments, or whatever, and there’s not a thing the author can do about it short of submitting a takedown request.

          This is good for spreading visibility/”signal boosting”/propagating short-form original content (it helps if you don’t care too much about attribution, though the interface does leave breadcrumbs), and bad for following the thread of a conversation or limiting distribution to your friends or avoiding horrible drawn-out public arguments. Its private messaging capabilities are also, deliberately, quite weak.

          You may have some kind of theoretical right to keep arguments you don’t want out of your Tumblr experience, but that definitely wasn’t a design goal.

  42. Alexander Stanislaw says:

    Scott

    Many commenters have accused you of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, so let me ask. What percentage of people actively involved in SJ related things do you think either engage in this tactic or are susceptible to it? By actively involved, I mean attending meetings, having a job or a position in an organization etc. not just talking about SJ online.

    I realize this isn’t quite specific – you can choose your specific population (eg. college educated people age 20 – 40 ; whatever specific population you want).

  43. Paranoid? I think you’re giving these people too much credit. In my opinion, Her Majesty should have these irreligious and unpatriotic moors drawn and quartered, the lot of them. Let their filth be gone from the Earth.

  44. Hima says:

    near perfect commentary. I have one suggestion though, please use : donotlink[dot]com to link to articles on thoughtcatalog or any other click bait website.

  45. ozymandias says:

    The “it’s not female privilege it’s benevolent sexism” is actually making an important point, which is that benevolent sexism actually hurts women. Level of benevolent sexism is highly correlated with level of hostile sexism. Men high in benevolent sexism are more likely to blame female victims of rape for their attack. Being exposed to benevolent sexism worsens women’s cognitive performance. Those would be very weird results if benevolent sexism were actually female privilege.

    I think a more sensible model than a female privilege model is Julia Serano’s oppositional sexism/misogyny model (which she discusses in her book Whipping Girl), which argues that society punishes people who do not conform to gender roles and that, in addition, it devalues the traditional female gender role. According to her argument, both of those forces screw over gender-non-conforming men, because they face both the punishment for taking on a female gender role and the punishment for not conforming. On the other hand, gender-conforming men generally have it pretty good on the gender front. In addition, low-status and undesirable men are often oppressed on other axes (lookism, fatphobia, ableism, class) and can experience oppression from women on those axes. Ugly, fat, and weird women are also punished for daring to be attracted to people.

    • Oligopsony says:

      Julia Serano’s oppositional sexism/misogyny model (which she discusses in her book Whipping Girl), which argues that society punishes people who do not conform to gender roles and that, in addition, it devalues the traditional female gender role.

      Huh, that’s elegant. Thanks.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      There seems to be a strong and a weak claim here. Weak claim: “A lot of / most accusation of female privilege is wrong.” Strong claim: “There is no such thing as female privilege”.

      The former is plausible enough (and not weak in any absolute sense), but if you’re asserting the latter I must request you to unpack your definition of ‘privilege’ and your criteria for privilege belonging to a particular group. I find it hard to believe that there are zero primarily male problems that most women fail to understand.

      • ozymandias says:

        Unfortunately, my rejection of a female privilege model is a subset of my belief that privilege, in the particular sense discussed by racismschool, is not generally a useful model for understanding oppression. (As a synonym for “advantage” it’s fine but also not particularly interesting.) Whether people understand a problem seems basically uncorrelated with whether the problem is caused by the marginalization of a particular group. I don’t understand why monogamous people fuss about jealousy so much, but I don’t think that that’s a sign that monogamous people are oppressed by polyamorists. That’s simple Typical Mind Fallacy, and the concept of privilege seems to have been created by people who noticed the Typical Mind Fallacy in this one context.

        However, I would be happy to stand by the claim that gender-non-conforming people and women get way more shit than gender-conforming people and men do and that (with the exception of the various problems related to male violence and maaaaybe healthcare) the problems faced by gender-conforming men are fairly marginal/edge-case-y.

        • Crimson Wool says:

          However, I would be happy to stand by the claim that gender-non-conforming people and women get way more shit than gender-conforming people and men do and that (with the exception of the various problems related to male violence and maaaaybe healthcare) the problems faced by gender-conforming men are fairly marginal/edge-case-y.

          Could you define what you mean by “gender-conforming men” here? Because this statement seems like it is probably wrong to me?? Like, sentencing disparities, DV protection, genital mutilation, just off the top of my head.

          Also there’s the point that “gender-conforming” does not necessarily mean just “doing things I was planning on doing anyway,” but also purposefully and intentionally making decisions that are actually unpleasant. For example, it’s “gender conforming” for Dad to go out and earn the paycheck while Mom stays at home with the kids, but that doesn’t mean that Dad actually wants to never see his kids so that he can work his soulless accounting job. I suppose there are some people for whom that is true but I suspect they are very much a minority.

        • ADifferentAnonymous says:

          Okay, now I’m not sure what privilege means. I thought it was basically the special case of the typical mind fallacy where you underestimate problems you don’t have, together with the idea that there are big clusters of problems that certain big clusters of people don’t have and therefore underestimate. This is certainly a phenomenon that can perpetuate oppression, but I don’t know what it means to say that it’s the model for understanding oppression. I essentially meant there was female privilege in the same way I might say there’s poly privilege, which is the same way Alicorn once checked her ‘luminosity privilege’.

          Is special-case-of-typical-mind-fallacy the motte and overarching-theory-of-oppression the bailey, or am I just totally wrong about what the word means?

        • Bish says:

          Ozy:

          (with the exception of the various problems related to male violence and maaaaybe healthcare) the problems faced by gender-conforming men are fairly marginal/edge-case-y

          Wait a sec… Maybe I’m not understanding your intent, but violence and health seem like a really a big deal. I don’t think it makes much sense to call them an “exception.” Men engaging in violent competition and sacrificing their own health (workplace death, sports injury) or getting beaten up or massacred by other men is a big part of how gender works. I don’t understand how we can say that “gender-conforming men generally have it pretty good on the gender front,” except for the gender-conforming men who end up abusing alcohol, killing themselves, brain-damaged from sports, maimed at work, or murdered by the local gang or militia.

          (While I realize that not all of those examples are common, especially in the West, I only intend them as examples. If we did the research and found the conjunctive risk of at least some serious type of violence, or masculinity-related health issue, that risk would be pretty high, especially if we don’t just look at middle-class white men.)

          I think oppositional sexism plus misogyny model theory is interesting, but there are a lots of facts that are very inconvenient for it to explain (like the sports injury issue).

          I also object to injustices to gender-non-conforming men being reduced to misogyny (though its a factor). For example, who is looked down on more, a woman shopping for women’s clothing, a women shopping for man’s clothing, or a man shopping for women’s clothing? I suspect that the latter will be frowned on more, which suggests a misandry component, not just transphobia. The misogyny explanation (“he is frowned because he is a trying to look like a woman, and looking like a woman is low-status”) does not seem very convincing. I would characterize this case as intersectional homophobia+transphobia+misandry; the misandry part is because of men’s sexuality being viewed as especially threatening.

        • Fronken says:

          Unfortunately, my rejection of a female privilege model is a subset of my belief that privilege, in the particular sense discussed by racismschool, is not generally a useful model for understanding oppression. (As a synonym for “advantage” it’s fine but also not particularly interesting.) Whether people understand a problem seems basically uncorrelated with whether the problem is caused by the marginalization of a particular group. I don’t understand why monogamous people fuss about jealousy so much, but I don’t think that that’s a sign that monogamous people are oppressed by polyamorists. That’s simple Typical Mind Fallacy, and the concept of privilege seems to have been created by people who noticed the Typical Mind Fallacy in this one context.

          Isn’t it, well, sexist to state that in terms of “female privilege does not exist” instead of “privilege does not exist”, then?

          And – sorry, I tried-but-can’t find a way to say this with a lower chance of offending you – isn’t this essentially lying by omission in order to gain social status among your Social-Justice-y peers?

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      I think a more sensible model than a female privilege model is Julia Serano’s oppositional sexism/misogyny model (which she discusses in her book Whipping Girl), which argues that society punishes people who do not conform to gender roles and that, in addition, it devalues the traditional female gender role.

      Seconded; that’s REALLY elegant. Thank you for alerting me to it! It fits a lot of my intuitions about what appears to really be going on, and is easy to articulate.

    • Zorgon says:

      I strongly agree with the gender-role-policing model as presented, with the exception that I don’t think that society especially devalues the traditional female gender role so much as women have declared it defunct and been permitted, over the course of half a century, to diverge from it in ways that have not been permitted to men.

      I also think female privileges are distinct from “benevolent sexism”, and that most women are aware of “benevolent sexism” and utterly unaware of their privileges. For example, the vast majority of women in the UK are unaware that they are legally unable to be charged with rape (except in extreme circumstances) and probably think that that is acceptable and reasonable, too. Feminists have spent decades telling men what their privileges are, while it’s not in their or anyone else’s interest to educate women about theirs, since men have no comparable gender-role advocacy.

      • I remember the sixties and seventies, and the female role was definitely devalued then– I don’t think things are as bad on that front now.

        Back then, it went without saying that women were bad drivers and talked too much. It was ridiculous that women spent time on their appearance, but they were obligated to spend time on their appearance.

        It was easy mockery for a man to use a falsetto to repeat what a woman said.

        I’m not sure whether the “throws like a girl” thing is still in play, but back then, “throwing like a girl” (actually, throwing like an untrained/inexperienced person) meant that boys were taught to throw and girls were taught to give up on throwing.

        • Zorgon says:

          Contrary hypothesis (with a bit of tabooing of “male” for delicious LW flavour):

          Throwing/catching and driving are both traditionally notwoman pursuits. Therefore the hassle that was attached to women doing them wasn’t due to devalued womanhood, but due to acting in a notwoman fashion.

          I agree with you about the makeup thing, but I would suggest that the enforcement of the female-role enactment of wearing makeup significantly outweighed the ridicule for spending lots of time doing so (instead of being magically able to do it instantly as a result of being female).

          As I said above, if the woman-box is defunct in the modern context, being kept in the woman-box is going to seem like being devalued, not least since notwoman pursuits are likely to become ubiquitous.

        • Anonymous says:

          What has changed about throwing like a girl?

        • What’s changed is that there’s some understanding that “throwing like a girl” is actually a result of inexperience rather than evidence of female inferiority.

    • Karmakin says:

      There’s a better explanation for it. It’s a matter of it being about individual gender stereotypes, and how they interact with any given scenario.

      Take for example the scenario about women being more empathetic, compassionate and moral. That’s a very real gender stereotype. It makes them seen as better in terms of caring for others, but it makes them seen as worse in terms of the ability to lay thousands of workers off.

      There are pluses and minuses to gender roles and stereotypes, and to accept/endorse the positives is also to accept/endorse the negatives.

      The big problem with the problem that Scott lays out, is that at least in terms of gender, it relies on various stereotypes about being weak/having a lack of agency in a way that’s good for winning debates, but pretty bad for increasing the social view of women. That’s why pushing against this stuff is important, at least to me, as I really do think that it’s hobbling progress for women.

      • Zorgon says:

        I agree quite a bit, but it’s hard to say this stuff without coming across as a guy telling women what’s good for them.

        So I stick to telling people what’s good for men… although that’s difficult, because I’m one guy arguing simultaneously against both traditionalist gender roles and modern feminism, not to mention effectively the entire academic field of gender studies to break down the man-as-universal-aggressor/woman-as-universal-victim model.

        Then I give up and go play Dwarf Fortress for a bit, because honestly, beating my head against a brick wall is more constructive and less painful than trying to argue against that.

    • MugaSofer says:

      The “it’s not female privilege it’s benevolent sexism” is actually making an important point, which is that benevolent sexism actually hurts women. Level of benevolent sexism is highly correlated with level of hostile sexism. Men high in benevolent sexism are more likely to blame female victims of rape for their attack.
      […]
      I think a more sensible model than a female privilege model is Julia Serano’s oppositional sexism/misogyny model (which she discusses in her book Whipping Girl), which argues that society punishes people who do not conform to gender roles and that, in addition, it devalues the traditional female gender role.

      OK. So there is one thing – “sexism” – that proposes separate roles for men and women. This isn’t a lot of different roles; this is one unified phenomenon, and even seemingly harmless parts are correlated with the whole and should be fought.

      (Isn’t that more usefully referred to as “patriarchy”, not “sexism”?)

      So, in some situations the Patriarchy/Sexism creates a difficult situation for women, but not men. (Or it grants men a benefit it does not grant women, same thing.) Men are likely to underestimate the difficulties involved, and may write of women’s experiences entirely. This Is Bad. We call this Bad Thing “privilege”.

      In other, presumably rarer, situations it creates a difficult situation for men, but not women.

      (Or am I misunderstanding you?)

      In what sense is this better referred to as a “benevolent” (benevolent, of course, to women) version of the original phenomenon?

      In what sense is it not best combated and thought about in exactly the same terms?

      In what sense does creating problems for women but not men give men a blind-spot; yet not the other way around?

      (Or … did you not claim any of those things, and I’m an idiot? I’d hate to be straw manning you, I recall really respecting your insight over on your old blog.)

      I think it would be helpful to define our terms more often in a discussion about ways our terms might be defined wrong.

  46. linguisticdescriptivist says:

    “Somebody who probably doesn’t realize they’ve just committed themselves to linguistic prescriptivism”

    Maybe I’m missing your point. It sounds like you’re saying that someone who uses a dictionary word to mean something other than the dictionary is the prescriptivist. But wouldn’t insisting on the dictionary definition be prescription?

    • Oligopsony says:

      Insisting on a “real” definition over and above common use is prescriptivist.

      (As a positive doctrine perscriptivism is obviously crazy, hence why linguists should reject it. As a, well, prescriptive doctrine, prescriptivism is almost certainly useful at least some times for defending precision (or other purposes that would be served by words) that would otherwise be lost.)

      • Creutzer says:

        As a positive doctrine perscriptivism is obviously crazy, hence why linguists should reject it

        Hence why linguists do reject it.

        • lmm says:

          Is there a genuine consensus? My impression was there was still controversy.

        • Creutzer says:

          Among linguists? No. There isn’t a controversy. Despite their deep differences, all linguists I have ever heard of agree that they are studying language as an observable phenomenon, and that is inherently antithetical to any sort of prescriptivist mindset.

      • kev says:

        There is a difference between insisting on using a “real” definition or a “technically useful” one.

  47. The phenomenon you describe generalizes to virtually all politically charged terms. As Chomsky noted,

    Every relevant term of political discourse has essentially two meanings. One is its literal meaning. The other is the meaning that is used for political warfare and the terms are applied quite differently to others than they are for themselves.

    (As someone sympathetic to social justice, Chomsky fails to realize that his analysis extends to that domain, too.)

  48. Sam Rosen says:

    So motte-and-bailey tactics are only one of the shitty practices SJWs use.
    How about this one: Pretend All Discussions About Gender Are Merely About Lived Experience. I really need a catchy name for it and the acronym PADAGAMALE isn’t very good.

    Not every discussion about gender is about “what it’s like to live as a woman.” If we were merely talking about lived experiences of women, then yes, women should have more authority to speak. However, if we are having an ethical discussion about how to organize society, it’s not clear why women’s voices should be heard more. Also, if we are having an empirical discussion about history or economics, it’s not clear why women should be an authority due to their gender. Social Justice people conflate these different kinds of conversations and take the authority they justifiably have from one domain and unfairly transfer it to the other domains.

    • James F says:

      The usual response to “if we are having an ethical discussion about how to organize society, it’s not clear why women’s voices should be heard more” is that men traditionally dominated those discussions, and people’s framing of the discussion is going to reflect that long-standing bias (even if discussant composition is equal or heavily women today), which is why women should now dominate that conversation for a while to make up for it. This same reasoning would probably be used for discussions of history, which has historically been written from a male perspective.

      I don’t unconditionally agree with the typical implementation (it seems to be most often be invoked in the “shut up boy” sense), but in the abstract it’s pretty believable, and if there were an implementation of the idea that didn’t mean silencing men who don’t perfectly conform with the prevailing subcultural norms then I’d be all for it.

      • Sam Rosen says:

        So, a conversational heuristic we might want to use is “try to listen to people from populations historically not heard from.”

        (Though I worry that this might commit us to a quasi-essentialist idea about female versus male “ways of viewing things.”)

        But that isn’t the only conversational heuristic we want to use. We also want to “try to listen to people who’ve read the most on the topic.” We want to “try to listen to smart people.” We want to “try to listen to people who haven’t talked much in this particular chit chat.” We might want to “listen to people who have a passion for what they’re talking about.” Sometimes these conversational heuristics trade-off.

        If the claim was merely, “we should try to listen to women more,” I’d be down. But that’s not the usual claim.

        And to go back to what I was saying—the authority women should be given when talking about ‘the lived experience of women’ is much higher than the authority women should be given when discussing claims about statistics. (Even if we should adopt a heuristic of listening to women more.) A lot people in the SJ community pathologically fail to make this distinction.

  49. Anonymous says:

    From one perspective, you’ve given really excellent references here — I count six separate links to posts about female privilege not being a thing.

    From a different perspective, as somebody who doesn’t read social justice blogs, it’s hard for me to identify if those references are the — er — the “mainstream” of social justice, or if they’re six random internet nutcases. I already believe that “social justice” consists mostly of individuals with blogs with varying degrees of nuttery, so even with your six separate links, I have to wonder how easy it would be to cherrypick posts about female-privilege-not-being-a-thing from the six nuttiest blogs on the interwebs.

    I remember, in your anti-reactionary FAQ, you opened with this: “In general, this FAQ chooses two Reactionary bloggers as its foils – Mencius Moldbug of Unqualified Reservations, and Michael Anissimov of More Right. Mencius is probably the most famous Reactionary, one of the founders of the movement, and an exceptionally far-thinking and knowledgeable writer. Michael is also quite smart, very prolific, and best of all for my purposes unusually willing to state Reactionary theories plainly and explicitly in so many words and detail the evidence that he thinks supports them.” I wonder if there’s something similar you could say about the social-justice movement, that would make me feel like you were rebutting something other than a bunch of random internet nutcases.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      The movement is extremely amorphous and fractured and doesn’t have a Moldbug-like focus. The best I can do is provide as many links as I have the energy to get to show that the part I am critiquing is large and at least not totally straw.

      That having been said, I will claim that the whole “racism can only be used in terms of structural oppression” thing is absolutely fundamental and it would be rare to find anyone involved in social justice who doesn’t use it. My impression is that “there can’t be female privilege” is either a majority or plurality opinion (plurality when counting the people who don’t care or don’t talk about it).

      • ozymandias says:

        IME, both “female privilege doesn’t exist” and “racism can only be used in terms of structural oppression” are both majority opinions in the SJsphere. (I’d say roughly 90-95% consensus.)

    • mister service says:

      It may be the case that the random internet nutcase wing of social justice may also be in need of rebutting. This is the crowd that brought us #CancelColbert, #StopClymer, and sparked the Brendan Eich mess.

  50. Kiboh says:

    >When you record examples of yourself and others getting accused of privilege or mansplaining, and show people the list, and point out that exactly zero percent of them are anything remotely related to “interrupting women in a women-only safe space” and one hundred percent are “making a correct argument that somebody wants to shut down” . . .

    The assertion here is to the tune of “Whenever someone asserts that I or someone I know is mansplaining, they always turn out to be wrong and self-serving. Therefore the concept of ‘mansplaining’ must be broken or consistantly misapplied.”

    I can think of a far simpler explanation: maybe you’re just NOT AWFUL, so out of the sample of incidents where someone accused you of doing awful things, the aforementioned someone will be wrong 100% of the time. And a similar line of logic will go for the people you hang around with.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems: if people who aren’t awful are regularly accused of being awful, that’s an issue right there. But this evidence has one hell of a sampling bias, and I think it needs mentioning. While I don’t actually think this is the case, the phrases “100% of the people who accuse me of mansplaining are wrong” and “99% of ‘mansplaining!’ assertions are actually correct” contain no contradiction, so be especially wary of drawing inferences from your own experiences here.

    • Nornagest says:

      Seems to me that it ought to be possible to design a test which would correct for this bias.

      It further seems to me that someone has probably done this.

    • Sam Rosen says:

      Good point.

    • Zorgon says:

      It is perfectly possible for “mainsplaining” to be

      a) a meaningful concept with a specific group of targets,
      b) a tainting-word used to shut down debate,
      c) a social justice virtue claim,
      and d) an indication, deliberate or otherwise, that the person is not willing to debate with anyone they identify as male.

      These things are not mutually exclusive.

      That said, as a rule, I’ve found the more that someone is prone to use that term, the less likely they are to be interested in discussion at all. But as you say, that is my own experience. I consider it well-founded.

    • tiny nerd says:

      My experience absolutely agrees with Kiboh’s statements here. If you personally never attempt to obnoxiously recenter discussions about women onto men in order to shut feminists up, then anyone who accuses you of doing that will always be wrong. However, if you accuse any random guy who brings up men in a feminist discussion of doing it in bad faith just to shut people up, it’s got a good chance of being right. Absolutely every discussion of feminism on the internet outside of very safe spaces gets covered in vitriol-spewing trolls who either hate women or can do a really good impression.

      • Crimson Wool says:

        I know what is going on inside my head when I (used to) “attempt to obnoxiously recenter discussions about women onto men.” It was not done “in order to shut feminists up.” It got called that, pretty much every time, however, in the past.

        I don’t know what’s going on inside the head of “any random guy who brings up men in a feminist discussion”; indeed, I can’t look at any posts you’re thinking of because you don’t have to provide any to make your claims. So you can say, “ah, I’m sure you, [person], would never do that! But there are real men who do do that, and they hate women, or at least pretend to!” Well, I disagree. I don’t think there are real men who do that (or, to the extent that there are, they are vastly overestimated). I certainly don’t think that you actually know what these men you’re thinking of’s actual motivations were, because I sincerely doubt that they said anything to the effect of “I hate women.”

        What if the reason that men bring up men in feminist spaces, is that they care about some men’s issues in particular (whether due to personal closeness, benign in-group bias, or just some accident of history), and they have been lead to believe that feminism also cares about men’s issues? Doesn’t that also explain the behavior of recentering discussion on these issues? I care about [thing]. I see an opportunity to bring up [thing]. I bring up [thing]. (Then I get called a misogynist and told to leave.)

        Alternatively, what if the reason that men bring up men in feminist spaces, is that they feel like feminist rhetoric has a strong tendency to treat men as perpetual villains and women as perpetual victims, which makes them feel just as understandably distressed as any other group would when they have themselves discussed as if they were the only bad people on the planet, so they try to balance that out by bringing up counterexamples?

        Or perhaps these guys really do just hate women, and they’ve decided the optimal way to express that hatred is to mention male rape on r/Feminism or call out feminists explaining that domestic violence is due to “societal conditions that support men’s use of tactics of power and control over women.” I dunno. Either/or. I know which explanations I find more plausible, from my lived experience on the other side of this particular equation.

        • tiny nerd says:

          I believe we are in disagreement on facts themselves here, and those facts are incredibly difficult if not impossible to measure.
          I just want to point out that while people who are subject to and constantly afraid of attacks by reactionary bigots will be hypersensitized and more likely to see bigotry, people who are “neutral” are immune to attacks by bigots and hence desensitized and less likely to notice. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle but I’m partial enough to say it’s closer to my take than yours 😛

        • Matthew says:

          while people who are subject to and constantly afraid of attacks by reactionary bigots will be hypersensitized and more likely to see bigotry

          People who are constantly encouraged to see nobody as “neutral” and anyone who disagrees with them about anything as a bigot who is attacking them will also be hypersensitized.

          I think there’s a bigger perceptual difference going on here as well. From the pro-SJ perspective, you have a tiny safe space sphere where one can discuss the issues that feminist talk about under feminist rules, and everywhere else is hostile territory. From the anti-SJ perspective, the SJ rules-dominated sphere is ever expanding, and outside of this blog, it’s actually rather hard to find “neutral” places to talk about issues that feminists talk about. (Liberals who disagree with the SJ approach are not going to go to MRA blogs or something to discuss these issues.)

        • tiny nerd says:

          @Matthew
          First, you seem to be attacking my use of the word “neutral” rather than anything I said? I don’t believe that nobody is neutral. That’s a terrible belief unless you’re Marxist. I do believe that neutrality is inherently a (in the 100% literal dictionary sense) privileged position. Someone who’s socially “neutral” has the luxury of ignoring attacks (on the internet I’m mostly referring to verbal harassment) against people in non-“neutral” groups because they aren’t targeted and hence aren’t really exposed. Also, just to make it clear, I don’t think the users on this site are bigots. If I did, I wouldn’t try to join the discussion.

          With regard to your other point, it is true that feminists of various stripes (not intersectional transfeminists, alas) are basically allowed to set the rules of polite discussion on the internet. What I see as the vast Enemy Horde of terrible people is all the unmoderated internet communities. I don’t even attempt to read comments on 4chan or youtube anymore since they’re so universally horrible, the less-moderated sections of reddit are pretty bad, and tumblr itself is pretty much in a state of constant civil war (it’s weird as hell that leftists managed to dominate in an unmoderated cesspool like tumblr but it’s a lot to do with combative rhetoric and userbase demographics self-reinforcing, and maybe something about tumblr’s datastructure). I think the level of moderation required for civility’s sake goes too far, but users chose to impose it because, on sites that feminists and leftists used, the discussion got drowned in flame wars.

        • Matthew says:

          I was not attributing the belief in “no such thing as neutrals” to you personally. I was describing the social dynamics of feminist spaces. There is no acknowledgement there that one could ever disagree in good faith. Either one agrees with the majority or one is branded anti-woman. (This is sort of not true between female participants, but only within very limited grounds between different strands of feminism.)

          As I mentioned elsewhere, the point at which I stopped calling myself a feminist was after watching (not even participating) a discussion on a mainstream feminist blog in which people were branded misogynist and hounded away for disagreeing with the proposition “rape is a worse crime than murder” (where the victim in both cases was a woman). The intolerance of feminist sites goes way beyond objecting to men interjecting “but what about teh menz?”

          Edit: I think we have been using the word “neutral” differently. On reflection, you seem to be using it to mean “occupying the privileged default category,” whereas I was using it to mean “neither on board with the entire SJ agenda, nor on board with racism/sexism.”

  51. Troy says:

    Inevitably, here comes a white person either claiming that they have a similar experience because they grew up in an all black neighborhood and got chased on the way home from school a few times and OMG THAT IS SO RACIST and it is the exact same thing, or some other such bullshittery, and they expect that ignorance to be suffered in silence and with respect. If you are that kid who got chased after school, that’s horrible, and I feel bad for you…But dudes, that shit is not racism.

    It really bothers me how much many progressives trivialize black-on-white crime and violence. Yes, I understand that this phenomenon is used and abused by people on the opposite side of the political spectrum from you. But portraying concerns about black-on-white violence as “OMG a black kid chased me home from school” is like portraying concerns about rape as “OMG that creeper complimented my shirt.” Murders, assaults, and thefts, all of which are very common in majority black communities, are extremely serious matters. Even having one’s house robbed while away can be very psychologically traumatic.

    Lack of concern for these problems is all the more frustrating because in some cases they may even be fueled by progressive ideology. For example, here’s a quote from an African-American inmate, published in a Human Rights Watch report (not a bastion of neoreaction):

    “Most [blacks] feel that the legal system is fundamentally racist and officers are the most visible symbol of a corrupt institution & with good reason . . . . [B]lacks know whites often associate crime with black people. They see themselves as being used as scapegoats . . . . So is it any wonder that when a white man comes to prison, that blacks see him as a target. Stereotypes are prevalent amongst blacks also that cause bad thinking. The belief that all or most white men are effete or gay is very prevalent, & that whites are cowards who have to have 5 or 6 more to take down one dude . . . . Whites are prey and even a punk will be supported if he beats up a white dude.”

    As that HRW report explains, most prison rape is either intra-racial or black on white, and whites are more likely to be raped by blacks than whites.

  52. Wes says:

    Scott, I feel like you just spilled a lot of digital ink on a not-too-controversial position. Namely:

    there is a strain of the social justice movement which is very much about abusing this ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

    That’s about as controversial as saying “there is arsenic on our water.” Sure, some people will deny it, but it’s also not necessarily a problem. The important question is – how much arsenic is there in the water?

    The same question is relevant in the social justice community. Just how prevalent is the labels-as-weapons attitude? I am concerned that this attitude is very prevalent, and possibly even a majority attitude, but I have yet to see an examination of this idea. This post just seems like you’re pointing out that there is some arsenic in the water, without an examination of whether it’s been diluted to safe levels. A more paranoid person might suspect that you’re doing this in order to build a case against the social justice movement as a whole without actually collecting the evidence needed for such a case.

    • Matthew says:

      A number of people have made this observation now. I think it’s problematic, because this isn’t a simple numbers game. Suppose that the obnoxious-tumblr contingent is only 5% of SJW people in general, but that they make 50% of the noise. I think the 50% is the more relevant number for evaluating their influence, or at least some function incorporating both numbers. Squeaky wheels get grease.

      If I was going to be cheeky about this, I’d hoist the inoffensive parts of SJW by their own petard — “If you’re not part of the solution [to the obnoxious elements among your own ranks], you’re part of the problem.” But I don’t actually want to encourage that kind of totalizing thinking.

      • Karmakin says:

        I’d put it a different way. Let’s assume that right now it’s 25% of the SJ-sphere (I think it’s a lot higher, at least passively. Quite frankly I think a lot of people don’t think too hard about the implications of what they’re saying, and that it’s strictly a theoretical game). The point is that 5 years ago I’d say that’s probably 10%. In another 5 years, without some change, it might be 50% or higher.

        At least from my perspective, these ideas are spreading pretty fast, that is, belief in unidirectional and active gender power structures with men over women. And my experience is that even people who don’t actively believe it sometimes use language and ideas that requires that belief…it’s pretty ingrained.

        • Andrew says:

          And let’s say it’s 100% who do not issue any internal criticism.

          I’d say that 100% is the most relevant figure.

        • Wes says:

          That’s actually my biggest worry. I doubt the labels-as-weapons crowd are the majority of the SJ community, but they do seem to be *tolerated* by the majority without criticism.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          That’s actually my biggest worry. I doubt the labels-as-weapons crowd are the majority of the SJ community, but they do seem to be *tolerated* by the majority without criticism.

          Back in the Cold War, the vast majority of Americans and Soviets had no nuclear weapons, and would never dream of firing one if they had access to one.

          Didn’t stop the two superpowers from very nearly blowing up the whole world.

  53. Anonymous says:

    Donald Sterling is racist. We know this because he made a racist comment in the privacy of his own home.

    Actually, people have known that Sterling was racist for a long time, but the recent remarks just helped invigorate an already existing reaction against him. The Clippers were trying to oust their racist owner for a long time, this event just gave their cause an opportunity for some free PR. There’s something to be said about evidence laws, but I think it’s fair to say while we all object to Stiviano’s treatment of Sterling, he had this coming to him anyhow.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Sterling#Discrimination_lawsuits

  54. Nestor says:

    Y’know recently I was thinking all about this SJW stuff and realized I have never ever encountered it in primary sources as it were, I’m always reading about it from people reacting to them.

    Here’s a funny comic:
    http://s-h-i-r-o-y-a-t-s-u.tumblr.com/post/74359088045

    Aside from the south park/4chan humour of it, I think it makes a valid point. These people who lead from their weakness by talking about how they couldn’t sleep for 3 days after being triggered by a blog post aren’t really interacting with the broader slice of humanity (Never mind males!) who aren’t going to play into their game.

    It’s all a bit like one of those highly codified martial arts that are completely useless if the person you’re fighting doesn’t play along.

  55. kek says:

    You’re trying to use logic to dissect something that is logically paraconsistent. It’s better just to ignore these kinds of people and just get on with your life… trust me, SJWs are not worth your mindshare.

  56. I’m worried this article, or a meme from it, will eliminate most lines of retreat (http://lesswrong.com/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat) and opportunities for finding common ground in political discussions. Inconsistent terminology usage is bad, but it’s also one of the easiest ways to make a person change their mind — once you can point to an explicit, impossible-to-rationalize-away contradiction between two sentences a person said, you’ve hit the jackpot in terms of getting a person to revise their rhetoric or beliefs. Even most •postmodernists• don’t like being caught looking hypocritical.

    When you observe overt inconsistency, you should in a single fluid motion kindly make the person aware of it, and give them an ‘out’ that will prevent the error’s recurrence while having otherwise beneficial effects on their values and beliefs. Proofs of error are crucial pivot points for changing individual minds, not opportune moments to freak out about the Conspiracy against you. If there is a Conspiracy, talking a lot about it will strengthen it, by polarizing the existing camps, making them more scared and angry.

    Too much paranoia will psych you out of being effective and strategic, by giving you an unrealistically pessimistic view (that then becomes self-fulfilling).

    The ‘strategic equivocation’ framing is likely to be unproductive for two separate reasons:

    (a) You’re perpetuating the idea that the person you’re talking to is an enemy who wants to hurt you. This will probably make you more hostile and uncharitable, leading to self-fulfilling prophecies.

    (b) You’re now opening the door to making it a sin for someone to say •reasonable-sounding• SJ things, because steel-manning or otherwise improving upon an SJ idea will get pattern-matched to ‘you’re retreating to your motte so you can hurt me later’. If saying defensible things and saying indefensible things are •both• part of an organized campaign for your enemies to destroy you, then you really are burning your bridges and ruling out the possibility of future reconciliation.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      Your first two paragraphs seem to be a fully general counterargument against ever identifying classes of fallacy (such as “ad hominem” or “fallacy of grey”) – rather than simply taking individual bad arguments as they come. If that is your genuine belief, I would be surprised and consider it a much more interesting debate than the one we are having right now. If that is not your belief, then I think it’s unfair to selectively apply it only to me on this one issue.

      Your third paragraph is correct. Too much paranoia is bad. But too little paranoia is also bad. If lots of people are really using fallacies and rhetorical tricks and this is having a chilling effect on a really important class of conversations, then starting with an unshakeable prior of “I will refuse to believe people are using fallacies and rhetorical tricks” is dangerous. I feel like I started with a pretty fair prior here and let it drift where the evidence took me. Paranoia can be a class of cognitive error (ie being more paranoid than the situation warrants) or it can be a learned and rational defense mechanism (secret agents are probably paranoid about everything, and correct to be so). I feel like I started with a fair prior and let myself drift where the evidence took me.

      Your fourth paragraph, marked a), seems to deny the existence of a middle ground between “correct argument” and “evil enemy trying to deliberately hurt me”. But we know there’s a middle ground. It’s fallacies and motivated reasoning. I’m pointing out a fallacy that I think certain people I disagree with are using, then providing evidence. You can agree they are committing the fallacy, you can disagree and say they’re not committing the fallacy, but I don’t think you can say I’m being hostile and uncharitable by accusing other people of a fallacy (you could say the tone in which I’m doing it is hostile, but as best I can tell you don’t seem to be making that argument)

      Your fifth paragraph, marked b), I interpret as saying that even if I am correct that this is a fallacy, I shouldn’t talk about it, because other people might use it as an excuse to also be against non-fallacious things, and that would be bad. I think the correct response to someone saying motte-style defensible things is “Okay, I agree with you, but are you still saying [bad indefensible thing?]. If they say no, fine. If they say you are, tell them that their motte is irrelevant. But you can’t apply this technique until you understand that motte-and-bailey is going on.

      I don’t want to sound mean, but these all really sound like the sorts of fully general counterarguments you could apply to any opinion about anything, but which in fact only get brought up to apply impossibly high epistemic standards to an opposing argument. Sort of like the Arguments From My Opponent Believes Something.

  57. johnwbh says:

    The way I tend to explain ‘privilege’ to empirically minded people is in terms of selection bias.

    Your different circumstances and personal characteristics (race/class/gender/sexuality/appearance/location/etc) will effect what sort of things you have experienced over the course of your life, so when you make claims or generalisations based on that you may not be getting the full picture.

    E.g. All my experiences with the police have been generally positive, so I naturally tend to look favourably on them and give them benefit of the doubt. But I suspect I would think differently if I’d come from a different background.

    This does also include marginalised groups misunderstanding what its like to be a member of a more powerful group. But I think thats focused on less because the harms are smaller (e.g. a poor person having limited understanding of country club politics is less harmful than a rich person not understanding the justice system, because they have no power to influence it). I think some of the gender cases you describe are a result of people not realising their different experiences and asymmetric power (e.g. men saying they’d love to be hit on all the time). Ideally it should also cover your example of women not understanding what its like to be an awkward single man – but thats less emotive so gets less attention I think. (Also politics and people being imperfect actors as always)

  58. MugaSofer says:

    Still reading, but…

    That’s what “Privilege” means? I have never seen it used in any of those ways, either the ones on the top snd especially not the ones on the bottom.

    I have seen it used to mean “You are assuming everyone shares the same advantages as you. Stop it.”

    Is that … not what it means? Because that sounds like A Thing We Need A Word For, and none of the things on that list do.

    Confusing.

    • Matthew says:

      The liberal anti-SJW position here is that a good-faith use of “check your privilege” would be interrogatory — “Have you considered that things might be different if you didn’t have the same unearned advantages?” The answer might be, “Yes, and I still think my point is relevant because…”

      The actual, bad-faith way in which “check your privilege” is used is declarative — “Shut up, because someone with your unearned advantages couldn’t possibly have thought about this and have anything relevant to say.”

      • MugaSofer says:

        Yeah, I can see how it might be used as a motte-and-bailey; I’m just … surprised … to learn large swathes of the internet are apparently using the word a different, contradictory definition to the one I learned.

    • von Kalifornen says:

      The rare, the few, the virtuous use it that way.

  59. Anonymous5 says:

    “Bacteria have been infecting humans for hundreds of years,” that’s brilliant.

    Since it’s a recent example along the lines of other stories you have recently mentioned, but no one else brought it up here thought some people might want to see the following piece. Another example of an otherwise leftist, liberal type in conflict with the social justice movement for what appears to be the sin of being a male.

    The modern feminist political movement has repeatedly become involved with these witch hunt events. I recognize this as a person with leftist politics too.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/what-sort-of-public-discourse-will-reduce-rape-and-sexual-assault/373501/

  60. This is typical of your work. Thoughtful, well researched, informative, and deeply deluded.

    If a bunch of black men are chasing a white kid down the street shouting “kill the honkey, kill all honkies!” and then they catch him and start whacking him with jackhandles until he dies, they are absolutely not racist – because a hundred years ago, when the word was first coined, the woods were full of Indians who were notoriously apt to do similar things to any white they got hold of, and no one called them “racist”

    Further, if a large black girl beats on a small white girl because the white girl is white, which happens rather often at certain schools, in actual practice no one calls the black girl racist any more than they called the indians in the woods racist.

    And I am pretty sure that back in the day when indians in the woods killing white men on the basis of whiteness was a major problem, the reason no one called those indians racist was not because Native American activists would glare at you and call you privileged. It was because that is really not what the word meant.

    Anyone who uses the word in that way is not speaking naturally, and not likely to be easily understood without explanation, he is trying to make a point, his point being “Please don’t call me racist”

    Similarly, “privilege”, “misandry”, and all the rest.

    “Racist”, as we saw in the zimmerman case, means that blacks are entitled to beat up whites, and whites are not entitled to fight back.

  61. Alrenous says:

    But I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is very much about abusing this ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

    Kafkatrapping.

    Isn’t it possible she might continue to argue, and so be interjecting herself into another person’s conversation?

    Yes. Inconsistency is the usual method for catching liars.

    Nobody would need a phrase like ‘check your privilege’ if it was actually about stealing someone else’s victim spotlight. “It seems like you’re trying to make this about you, and this is my tumblr.” Perfectly reasonable; from here two adults can have a discussion and resolve the issue.

    But of course that would never fly. If we started shaming people on the internet for lack of empathy…well… Cnut had something to say about this, I recall.

    Who the heck cares?

    The racism definition is another dead giveaway for sophistry.

    If you want to say structural oppression is bad, go right ahead. It shouldn’t be difficult. But they feel the need to steal racism’s bad name. If we assume they’re roughly sane, they think they can’t win without appropriating bad connotations from elsewhere; that they have to lie to win; that they therefore deserve to lose.

    Of course this is rather more inferential steps than most readers can sustain.

    If I am right, then people’s response to these words should be a frantic game

    Privilege actually means power. It’s a compliment. Unfortunately it is also usually flattery.

    The logic of the witch hunter is simple. It has hardly changed since Matthew Hopkins’ day. The first requirement is to invert the reality of power. Power at its most basic level is the power to harm or destroy other human beings. The obvious reality is that witch hunters gang up and destroy witches. Whereas witches are never, ever seen to gang up and destroy witch hunters.

    […]

    Think about it. Obviously, if the witches had any power whatsoever, they wouldn’t waste their time gallivanting around on broomsticks, fellating Satan and cursing cows with sour milk. They’re getting burned right and left, for Christ’s sake! Priorities! No, they’d turn the tables and lay some serious voodoo on the witch-hunters. In a country where anyone who speaks out against the witches is soon found dangling by his heels from an oak at midnight with his head shrunk to the size of a baseball, we won’t see a lot of witch-hunting and we know there’s a serious witch problem. In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

    The correct response is basically Game. Agree and amplify. Don’t let them seize the frame. Their accusations are absurd and contradictory; keep that in mind and don’t let them forget it. Ignore the lunatics whenever possible, as per Cnut. It’s one of those times where you can placebo up a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe the SJW witches can’t harm you, they become unable to harm you.

    • kev says:

      “If you want to say structural oppression is bad, go right ahead. It shouldn’t be difficult. But they feel the need to steal racism’s bad name. ”

      Structural oppression=racism. Complaining about people “appropriating bad connotations from elsewhere” is ludicrous, words change and you are calling people who use them in new and innovative ways “liars” which is literally dumb.

      • Decius says:

        Not all people who use words in new and innovative ways are mute or lack intelligence. But the ones who do so for the purpose of confusing others are in a subset of “liars”.

      • Alrenous says:

        If 2+5 = 7, just say 7. If racism just is structural oppression, why can’t you just say structural oppression? Why is this such an issue for you? The alternative practice is suspect. If you’re not practicing sophistry it merely serves to cast suspicion on you.

        I like how your argument is calling my argument ‘ludicrous’ and ‘dumb.’ Throwing a softball here. You’re aware ad hominem is a fallacy, right? You’re aware this is a pure status move, empty of scholarly merit? Is this really your best argument? Is this really the face you want to put on SJWs?

        Also you’re inviting people to say kev = dumb&ludicrous. Hey man, I’m not a liar, I’m literally innovating.

        • nydwracu says:

          “Structural oppression” doesn’t have the visceral punch, the negative connotation, of “racism”, and using “structural oppression” instead of “racism” to mean “structural oppression” can’t serve as a shibboleth.

        • “Structural oppression” would make it clear that most individuals have little if any effect on it, and wouldn’t be a good tool for controlling people.

          “Pervasive oppression” might be a phrase which splits the difference– it doesn’t have the guilt and rage inducing effects, but it could lead people to ask what they might be doing that makes things worse.

  62. Navin Kumar says:

    You’ve put into words what I’ve been trying to say for a long time. Thank you. If you don’t mind, I must go now. I have a draft post that needs deleting.

  63. Daniel says:

    Imagine if we all owed various debts to each other. “You owe a debt!” would often be true. And yet shouting it out would often just be bullying, a way to try to shut down the other person in conversation.

    And yet despite all that, the debts would still deserve to be repaid.

    So if the debts hadn’t been paid, in the past, there’d be this horrible period where lots of people were finally allowed to call out “You owe a debt!”, and some of them would honestly be trying to get people to wake up and pay what they owed, and others of them would just be glorying in having a socially approved way to bully others for whatever debt they hadn’t fixed yet.

    And if tying up who owed what debt to whom was complicated, the period of yelling, both honest and bullying, could go on for a long time.

    “You’ve got privilege” is like that. It’s often a call to responsibility. It’s often bullying. It’s often both.

    Despite all that, the inequities still deserve to get fixed. Black men shouldn’t be so underrated when they apply for jobs, nor so much more often sent to prison for the same crimes. Women shouldn’t be paid less for the same job at the same seniority, nor so often shunted away from the jobs that have the most pay and power. Men should be taken seriously when they report being assaulted by their spouse. All these inequities deserve fixing.

    And because we’re mostly talking about habits and norms here, not laws, some of the fix has to involve sensitizing people. People have to be moved to condemn certain things they were used to doing. People have to feel obliged to try certain things they aren’t used to doing. And people don’t change their habits without a lot of social pressure. [citation needed]

    Could all the yelling be avoided, and the inequities still get fixed? Martin Luther King talked about this in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail: it seems to take a fair bit of noise and ruckus to get people to acknowledge that other people face a serious problem, deserving of help and not just sympathy.

    So I’m not sure there is a polite and nonconfrontational way to get people taking the remaining racism/sexism seriously. It’d be great if there were, though!

    Because as long as this issue is with us, some people are going to use the idea of “privilege” for bullying. Any negative group identity will always get used for bullying — especially if you can use it to blame the group for some of your problems.

    The best cure is just to go ahead and work on fixing all the inequities, just get progress happening measurably on all of these fronts.

    Because the smaller the remaining inequities, the less real injustice there is to be turned into cheap excuses for bullying.

    • Decius says:

      >Any negative group identity *always* gets used for verbal bullying.

      That’s the crux of the problem- if “Privileged” is negative, it cannot also be strictly descriptive. Using a term to bully (because it is, in use, negative) while claiming innocence (by reference to a definition different from the use) is the exact pattern being called out.

      • Daniel says:

        I see the strategic equivocation (motte-and-bailey rhetoric) as less about shifting what the concept means, and more about shifting
        (a) which cases are salient,
        (b) what responses are appropriate.

        A “motte” (highly defensible) position is that there are lots of inequities worth correcting in the world, and an appropriate response when you see someone perpetuating one of those inequities is to call on them to apologize and rethink.

        A “bailey” (highly convenient) position is that you are judge of a strict ladder of inequities, to which any attempt to add others is mere insincere distraction, and an appropriate response when you see someone perpetuating one is to annihilate their reputation and make them lose their job and go bankrupt.

        The meaning of “privilege” is not the hard part (“being on the lucky side of a needless social divide” covers a lot of observed usage). What I see is lots of disagreement — some of it insincere/strategic — over which social divides and what degrees of benefit are salient, and what the response to finding someone perpetuating or ignoring such a divide should be.

        But it really isn’t surprising that people want to rig this social discussion in their favor.

        No one wants to be told they owe a debt, and if you have the power to tell people they owe debts, you can bully them.

        No one wants to believe their position is unmerited, and if you have the power to tell people they’re on the lucky side of an unmerited difference, you can bully them.

        But there really are unmerited social divides that we should fix, so “don’t talk about it at all” isn’t a solution.

        The trouble is, as Scott observes, that right now the language is loose enough for people to employ rhetorical double standards.

        It’s nasty when you take a perfectly good moral standard and apply it narrowly and gently against yourself, and broadly and strictly against your opponents.

        It’s nasty whether you call it motte-and-bailey, or strategic equivocation, or a rhetorical double standard.

        Although I will offer one defense for the apparent hypocrites: a lot of the time, when someone proposes privilege running the other way, “but don’t women sometimes have privilege versus men?” or the like, it’s put up insincerely, as an excuse for inaction.

        If someone owed you a million dollars, you’d be a little short with being told that your thousand-dollar debt had to be paid first. You might well say, “I’m fine with paying mine — but first let’s see you sincerely commit to paying yours.”

        So sometimes the apparent double standard is not hypocrisy but a defense against what are perceived themselves to be insincere, strategic claims of “privilege the other way”, claims offered to postpone action rather than to coordinate it.

        But Scott’s remarks about the whole thing being a vale of unclear and epistemically scary rhetoric seem entirely true to me.

        I just don’t know what a more epistemically robust way of talking about these issues would look like.

        • Zorgon says:

          Here’s the problem with the “million dollars” analogy, though. SJWs don’t target the people who actually incurred that debt, they target the broad social classification that matches those people. As a result, the reaction is not an equivocation against “you owe me a million dollars”, it’s a rejection of that idea, because it’s wrong.

          A: “Someone who looked like you stole a million dollars from me!”
          B: “Damn, that sucks hard. I got robbed just last week. Have you been to the police?”
          A: “Victim blamer! Anyway, you’re a man, just like the robber. You owe me a million dollars!”
          B: “What? No, I don’t. I didn’t rob you, and besides, didn’t I just tell you I got robbed last week? I’m struggling to make ends meet as it is.”
          A: “Now TWO men have robbed me of a million dollars!”

          My ancestors did not keep slaves, but if they did, it would be their responsibility, not mine. My father is a sexist asshole who treats women as objects, but I am not him. I am my brother and sisters’ keeper, yes, but only in the sense that they are human and so am I; I bear no specific responsibility for any injustice I have not caused myself.

          Any epistemic system which suggests I do is suspect, to me, because it stinks of original sin and revenge, and neither of those are moral values I can support.

        • Salem says:

          Although I will offer one defense for the apparent hypocrites: a lot of the time, when someone proposes privilege running the other way, “but don’t women sometimes have privilege versus men?” or the like, it’s put up insincerely, as an excuse for inaction.

          Have you considered the alternative, and far more obvious explanation – that these arguments are put up sincerely, as a reason for inaction (at least, inaction along the lines you favour)?

          If someone doesn’t agree that women face structural oppression in society and thinks men have it just as hard (but in different ways), it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to get with your programme.

        • Decius says:

          >But it really isn’t surprising that people want to rig this social discussion in their favor.

          People who think that the social discussion is zero-sum, or who think that there are winners and losers, are opposed to the concept that I mean when I say social justice. Social justice means….

          [b]META:[/b] and the value of the OP is largely that people who understand it can recognize the pattern [i]in their own work[/i] and not use it./meta

          “Women sometimes have privilege” is not a general case counterargument. “Women have this privilege related to, of similar magnitude to, and inseparable from this specific privilege that men have.” is a valid counterargument to “This dynamic is evidence that women are systemically oppressed more than men are.

        • It’s even more infuriating when it’s an ill-defined and unlimited debt.

        • a lot of the time, when someone proposes privilege running the other way, “but don’t women sometimes have privilege versus men?” or the like, it’s put up insincerely, as an excuse for inaction.

          Those who deny black privilege and female privilege show by their actions that they are the hypocrites.

          People who complain about racist violence by blacks are typically paying fortunes for the ever diminishing supply of housing in areas safe from blacks, while blacks complaining about white racism often pay a quite a lot to be near whites and away from blacks.

          When a man gets angry with his boss, he gets fired. When a woman gets angry with her boss, her boss gets fired. Think about drama you have seen at work. It is usually woman who is one of the parties to the drama or both of the parties to the drama because women are privileged to get away with it. This is (I speak from personal experience) is a huge pain in the ass to bosses.

          Blacks jump queues, and whites don’t stop them when they would stop a white because hate crime racist.

          Affirmative action means that computer science classes are dumbed down for women, boring those men who are actually competent at computer science. Further, the affirmative action shoving women into stem fields harms women, since women affirmative actioned into computer science class wind up changing their major and accumulating a large anti dowry, worsening dysgenesis.

          Unmentionable reality is that few women are smart enough for most stem fields and that women have being pushed into fields beyond their ability since around 1890. It is not working, not matter how many noble prizes are handed out to women for doing routine work while supervised by great male scientists. If it was working, you guys would not be pushing the Lise Meitner story

          Lise Meitner was supposedly the discoverer of fission – because she corresponded with the man who actually discovered fission, the correspondence consisting of him sending her a letter telling her he had discovered fission, to which she replied such a thing was impossible.

          If you are still pushing Lise Meitner and Marie Curie, affirmative action was not working back then and you have not been able to make it work since, because women are no more suited to being scientists, than to being soldiers, fighter pilots, lumberjacks, or firemen.

          Natural selection has specialized women, the important sex, for the important task of having babies and taking care of them and their home, and men, the expendable sex, for all the other, less vital and usually more dangerous tasks. It simply wrong to push women into the male life plan. Schooling should primarily prepare women for early marriage, babies, and the kitchen, while preparing men for the task of creating and maintaining civilization safe for women to raise children, and ennobling for those children to grow up in.

          People are not equal, and treating unequal people as equals has bad consequences. And these bad consequences have become increasingly serious as you push ever harder against a reality that is not going to budge.

        • Daniel says:

          I think Zorgon and Nancy Lebovitz have nailed for me a related problem with social justice rhetoric. That’s the bait-and-switch between “fix inherited potholes” and “punish inherited sins.”

          If social justice is about fixing some potholes we’ve inherited, hey, we can all agree we’d like the streets not to have potholes. It might be surprising just how big the potholes are in some parts of town I never have to visit, and there’s room for arguing over how to split the bill and who to contract with for all this paving work, but we can all agree on the Schelling point of getting the town potholes fixed.

          But if social justice is about punishing people for sins they’ve inherited, I have a problem with that. Social models based on sin and revenge do all kinds of vile things.

          But “punish the sinner” has far more emotional power than “fix the pothole.” Punishing scapegoats is one of our oldest (not to say grimmest) group rituals.

          So I think whenever SJ talk gets emotional, either because someone’s venting or because they want to rally a crowd to action, there’s a strong pull to the language of “punish the sinners.”

          You might almost say that the language of “punish the sinner” is itself the epistemic original sin of social justice, an intellectual swamp that people will be drawn to again and again even despite themselves.

          The potholes should be fixed, really. Even if (since they’re social potholes) we have to measure them with randomized experiments instead of rulers. But I don’t like the punish-the-sinner language, and I wouldn’t trust people who favored such language to be in charge.

        • Multiheaded says:

          The obvious answer is that an inherent predisposition to sin also makes one blessed by the dark god Nurgle, so that sinners not only and not neccessarily enjoy the potholes, but benefit from honest Imperial citizens falling into them.

          And this is why any pothole on any Imperial world is potentially a matter for the Ordo Hereticus, not just something the local Imperial administration hasn’t gotten around to fixing.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          But “punish the sinner” has far more emotional power than “fix the pothole.” Punishing scapegoats is one of our oldest (not to say grimmest) group rituals.

          … the language of “punish the sinner” is itself the epistemic original sin of social justice, an intellectual swamp that people will be drawn to again and again even despite themselves.

          This is essentially my thesis whenever I go Dark, combined with a strong “fuck it, if that’s what you apes want, let’s do this.”

        • The Anonymouse says:

          @Multiheaded:

          I so very rarely agree with what you say, but I have to applaud your choice of allusion. 🙂

        • Daniel says:

          @Nancy Lebovitz: when you alluded to “unlimited and ill-defined debts”, I realized two things.

          One: that assertion — of unlimited, ill-defined obligation — is one I’m allergic to in all politics and encounter a lot in SJ;

          Two: that “an unlimited and ill-defined obligation” is a pretty darn good description of “original sin.”

          So it helped me lock on to what Zorgon was pointing to — how SJ rhetoric has a “punish the sinners” strain, and that’s a large part of what tends to make me uneasy about an agenda I can otherwise find lots of points of agreement with.

          Because I’m all about seeing the potholes fixed, but I have no support for an agenda of punishing sinners. That rarely turns out well.

          In fact, all social progress of the last three hundred years has arguably been about shifting politics from a business of “punish the sinners” to a business of “fix the potholes.”

          So SJ rhetoric, when it’s about “punish those sinners”, is embracing a tactic that historically comes from the forces of reaction, and has generally been employed for ugliness when in power.

          An SJ advocate would probably respond that nonwhites and women are *not* in power, and tactics that are evil for rulers can be legitimate for protesters.

          Scott might respond that there are particular times and places today where the SJ forces *are* in power, and because SJ targets individuals’ behavior, not just public laws, that makes SJ a force for local evil, today, already.

          That is, a protest movement that targets personal habits can become evil and tyrannical a lot faster than a protest movement that targets government laws, because a protest movement can become the *local* majority even while it remains overall a minority.

          This is sort of like how small-town churches can sincerely speak of their flavor of religion as a persecuted minority in the nation, while persecuting fiercely themselves any local folk who don’t toe the church line.

          (Should we start talking about “Social justice fundamentalists”?)

        • nydwracu says:

          I was raised progressive, and still remember what I was raised to think. Different levels of original sin inhering in different races is exactly what it is.

        • Matthew says:

          I was raised progressive, and still remember what I was raised to think. Different levels of original sin inhering in different races is exactly what it is.

          You mean you were raised with particular SJWish perspective. Progressive != SJW, which is why there are plenty of progressive critics of it here, including Scott (and me).

          I was raised progressive also, and I wasn’t taught anything remotely like that. (I was also raised Conservative Jewish, and “original sin” as it’s popularly understood is considered a Christian thing, though it may still percolate through the background secular culture. It’s not a popular frame for Jews, which may make it less likely they’d apply it metaphorically to other contexts.)

      • Qwoop says:

        Exactly. I think oscillating between the normative sense of privilege and the descriptive sense of privilege is the main way SJWs employ the motte-and-bailey tactic.

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      I agree that there are legitimate grievances that the concept of privilege is useful for addressing, and that we may need to tolerate some bullying to avoid suppressing all legitimate grievance-airing, but I don’t think it’s wise to forbid all anti-bullying measures. Instead we should do our best to discriminate bullying cases from legitimate cases, discover and promote ways to make bullying harder without disadvantaging legitimate usage, and finally strike a balance between allowing bullying unchecked and stifling progress. In your debt-world there would probably be tons of norms about when it’s okay to call out the debt.

      I think the idea of this post is that motte-and-baileying promotes bullying more than legitimate use, because the truth doesn’t need fallacies to support it, so calling out this fallacy is a good way to reduce bullying without suppressing legitimate discourse.

      Of course, the one-rope theory (EDIT: the linked comment defines it specifically on a different topic, so you’ll have to generalize the theory yourself) says this sort of distinction is impossible and attempting it is just an excuse to hobble progress.

  64. von Kalifornen says:

    I’d say that the motte-bailey thing is part of what’s going on here, most commonly in the lower forms of discourse such as Tumblr and Twitter.

    There’s a second thing going on though, which is usually much less intense, but also a lot more common, and *is often invoked by people who should know better*. It’s the establishment and reification of privileged and oppressed classes as more or less permanent categories and structures, *by the very people trying to dismantle those distinctions*. This isn’t usually explicit (though some radical feminists do it explicitly) but it is rather pervasive. Pretty much any gain is minimized, and the tendancy for these struggles to fragment into factions (such as the much-overused “low status males”) is completely ignored.

  65. If the privileged basically aren’t allowed to talk in SJ circles, then it makes sense that “under-represented” groups would fight not to be labelled as privileged since they are really fighting for the right to talk and be heard.

    It’s clear that Sterling got screwed by trusting the wrong person and also that none of his castigators could withstand their most improper private utterances being made public.

    Yet, it’s not clear that this “weapon” Scott refers is really controlled by the SJ movement. The politically correct revulsion of racism is part of the zeitgeist now. It’s not as though some general secretary of the anti-repression committee can put a hit out on Sterling or whomever else they wish.

    • Anonymous says:

      Sterling’s fate doesn’t seem to have had much to do with twitter. But twitter is making important decisions about whom to target. No one has complete control of twitter, but it may be that there are individuals, not with official positions that you mention, but individuals with the right social capital and understanding of how to deploy it, who can choose where to put a twitter hit. Though probably not to stop twitter from targeting other people.

  66. nydwracu says:

    I developed a conceptual toolset for thinking about this stuff a few years ago. I’ve been meaning to compile it into a proper set of sequences, but for now: here, here, and here’s the one you should read first.

    I’m not sure if I ever wrote up anything on ideographic argumentation — trying to redefine connotationally- or exosemantically-loaded words in order to fit an agenda — but that’s the model that underlies all of that.

    The example I like to use is this Scruton article. Why does he say “the problem of distinguishing liberty from license”, or “erode the distinction between liberty and license”, or “Locke believed that license involves extending liberties beyond the point at which one person’s liberties can be reconciled with the liberties of others”, or “freedom that can be enjoyed by one generation only by condemning the next to dependency surely deserves the name of license”? Because liberty is good and license is bad, so bad things can’t be called liberty and good things can’t be called license. It would be clearer if he talked about good and bad kinds of liberty, but that just wouldn’t compute.

    Another example. (I’m not sure if I actually managed to talk my college thesis advisor out of his Rawlsianism this way, but it seemed to have had an effect.) Rawls goes from “what is justice?” to “what should be done?” — that is, he implicitly assumes that the answer to the former is the answer to the latter, and proceeds to try to answer the latter by applying the analytic method to the former. This is, of course, absurd. But it doesn’t register as absurd.

    Not even philosophers think purely in terms of denotation! Or, if they do, they write like they don’t. Certainly these things can be noticed by people who don’t have the conceptual tools for noticing them — if they didn’t, the tools would never be invented — but it’s a lot easier to think about it when the tools exist. (Moldbug’s methodology has been influential here. I knew the castes existed before I read Moldbug; I just couldn’t think about them, because I didn’t have words for them. I noticed, but didn’t notice; nor did I notice that I noticed.)

    • Sniffnoy says:

      Two of your links are the same; I’m guessing this was unintentional?

    • Hainish says:

      “Rawls goes from “what is justice?” to “what should be done?” — that is, he implicitly assumes that the answer to the former is the answer to the latter, and proceeds to try to answer the latter by applying the analytic method to the former. This is, of course, absurd.”

      You don’t agree with it, and that’s completely fair (and interesting), but it’s far from absurd.

      • lmm says:

        Or at least, its absurdity is nonobvious to me; if it should be obvious then please clarify.

      • Alrenous says:

        It’s Hume’s ought. Can you refute the principle? (I can.) Since Hume died over 200 years ago, it should be obvious by now.

        • Hainish says:

          I don’t have a twitter account, so I’m not sure what argument you linked to, but if you’re referring to the idea that you can’t derive what ought to be from what is, them I don’t think it applies here. A reasonable definition of “justice” is “that which should be done.” The comparison is ought/ought, not is/ought.

          (OK, you may personally not care one way or the other whether justice is carried out, or may actually prefer a world with less justice in it. That doesn’t make the alternative position absurd.)

        • Alrenous says:

          My account is public.

          If justice just is ought-ness, then you need to solve Hume’s ought to figure out what it is in the first place. The problem doesn’t go away, it gets shuffled a bit.

          Notably Hume did not provide a proof for the ought-is distinction. He merely pointed out that nobody else had a proof to the contrary, which they needed.

        • Hainish says:

          I…think your goalpost may have shifted? I’m not arguing that oughtness problems have all been solved. I’m not sure anyone is (Rawls might be, but I’ve not read him, so can only go by second-hand accounts here).

        • Alrenous says:

          It’s possible my goalpost shifted, I’m not a perfect communicator.

          Sure, I’ll agree to that premise.

          Mine is that we can be sure he hasn’t solved the oughtness problem, because otherwise he would be a lot more famous and we would have heard about that specifically.

          Imagine the proof of the Riemann hypothesis required you to resolve P=NP, and someone is famous for solving the Riemann hypothesis, but not P=NP…most likely, it’s fraudulent fame.

      • nydwracu says:

        How?

        Note that it’s not “what is justice?” in the sense of, say, Plato — asking what concept the word ‘justice’ should apply to — but “what is justice” in the analytic sense of asking what the definition of the word intuitively is. Why should the definition of a word whose meaning has changed over the years, as intuited by a small class of people who are downstream from partisan politics, have anything to do with what should be done?

        Besides, if Rawls had come from a different culture or time, he could do the same thing to, say, “God’s will”, with the same results.

        • Hainish says:

          My interpretation of “What is justice” is that it’s asking what sorts of things (laws, principles, outcomes) are just. I really have no idea what you mean by the “analytic sense of asking what the definition of the word intuitively is” or why it would make sense to approach the question of justice in that way.

          “Why should the definition of a word whose meaning has changed over the years . . . have anything to do with what should be done?”

          People generally set out to do what is just, and avoid or reverse the effects of injustice. If I were to ask myself, “What is to be done,” a large part of my answer to that would depend on what I think is just.

          A non-rhetorical question: Has the meaning really changed over the years, or do we simply think that a different set of things satisfies a conserved meaning?

          (BTW, I’m not really familiar with Rawls.)

        • nydwracu says:

          Has the meaning really changed over the years, or do we simply think that a different set of things satisfies a conserved meaning?

          I think the meaning has really changed over the years.

          I don’t have the sources for this anymore; I lost everything I wrote during the time when I did meta-ethics, and finding the papers I cited again would take a few hours.

  67. Bish says:

    Something I’ve wondered is if whether the social justice language games are due to a lack of good arguments. Perhaps SJWs are insecure about their interpretation of their own experience. Perhaps they don’t believe that they can provide their own experiences, or research, or arguments to change people’s minds, so instead they have to resort to shaming and strong-arming. They may believe that bending their theories or engaging in fair debate means letting themselves or their tribes down:

    – Either social justice is true, people who try to deny parts of social justice are bad people, and the bad things that happened to me or my tribe are unjust

    – Or social justice is flawed, people who try to deny parts of social justice might have good arguments, and the bad things that happened to me or my tribe aren’t a big deal

    Possibilities in between these extremes aren’t considered (e.g. the bad things that happened to me and my tribe are unjust, but other people from other tribes also experience injustices that aren’t predicted by social justice theory). If someone is insecure about their ability to figure out which intermediate possibility might be correct, then it might be better to just stick to the simplistic party line that they identify with most. If they instead stepped out of the party line and thought for themselves (which plenty of less-vocal SJ people do), then they might have to confront doubts about their experiences, which might be painful.

    I would contend that social justice people can probably keep the part of their theory which says that they have experienced injustices, while letting go of the need to proclaim their suffering to be greater than other groups and trying to shame other people into granting that view.

    • From what I’ve read of Honor Code by Appiah, people aren’t moved by arguments based on practicality or kindness, but they are moved to action by status considerations.

    • Alrenous says:

      The tragic truth about SJWs is that they genuinely feel oppressed.

      The simplest explanation for feeling oppressed is that you are oppressed. If you are oppressed, then your activism isn’t going to work. As a fact about human psychology, you will worry that you deserve to be powerless. Hence the tactics of desperation.

      Unfortunately, the tactics of desperation are self-defeating. With few exceptions, it amplifies that sneaking suspicion that you deserve to lose, reifying it. SJWs cause themselves to deserve to lose.

      Moreover, they will lose. I actually think the most likely explanation for SJWs feeling oppressed is they are oppressed.

      Thing is, the reason everyone used to be stoic is it’s good strategy. Saying, “I feel oppressed,” is a serious contention…but only works among members of genuine trust networks. Saying it to elthedes only invites sociopaths to exploit that weakness, which is exactly the what we see circling the SJW movement.

      Of course [feeling oppressed], especially [feeling oppressed by capitalism/patriarchy/the rich] is not equal to [is oppressed.] Some of the time the solution is to realign feelings, not reality. (Compare, ‘muh feels.’) However, the only way it can get solved either way is to honestly state ya feels. And, I repeat, it’s only a good idea to state ya feels in a strong genuine trust network.

      SJWs do not have strong, genuine trust networks.

      If they ever could have, they can’t now. Who would trust these thrashing lunatics?

      Instead, SJWs essentially turn into self-immolating bullies. They find soft targets – groups even more oppressed than they are – who they can kinda-sorta win against, if the sociopaths help them, to soothe that desperate insecurity.

      Zombies do not deserve to have been killed. This doesn’t get you out of putting a bullet in their brainpan. The worst part is that real-life zombies shouldn’t be incurable, but almost all of them are.

      • It’s a bit worse than that– SJ-ism does a good bit of damage to trust networks, though not as much as one might think. Still, it destroys friendships and leaves people very frightened of telling each other what they think.

      • As far as I can tell (by observation and by asking a few times) SJs don’t have a vision of what victory would look like.

        And part of their model is that they will never have enough power to be obligated to use it responsibly.

  68. Mary says:

    ‘The closest analogy I can think of is those religious people who say “God is just another word for the order and beauty in the Universe” – and then later pray to God to smite their enemies.’

    ‘course, they could say that it is orderly and beautiful for evildoers to be smitten. After all, even babies too small to talk know that those who do good should be rewarded but those who do evil, punished.

  69. Tartra says:

    This was absolutely, beautifully, eloquently, well written. I really enjoyed your arguments and the other dog/lizard discussion. I’m impressed by how level-headed and easy to read it was, too.

    Great work. I truly feel as though I’ve understood and learned.

  70. naath says:

    I guess the clear problem is that there is not *one* definition of racism – in SJ, or in common-use, or anywhere. Regardless of what the OED says.

    One way of looking at it is “people who look like me are better than people who don’t” – and yes, absolutely, people who look like *anything* can (and do!) think that either consciously or unconsciously.

    An other way is to do with social power structures. Which really boils down to – people who look like *me* (actual me – white, N. European) somehow got into power (in lots of places) and had the opportunity to set up systems of government/justice/etc that favoured *us* and not *them* (everyone else) and then ran it to *our* benefit and satisfaction… in this world in which we live then it is *worse* for a rich, white man to refuse to hire black people than for a rich black man to refuse to hire white people simply because there are many *more* rich white men.

    If it was just about “ugh, people not like me, they suck” then many people of all races would be cool with racially segregated schools; keeping “our” kids in “our” schools with none of “them” would work for everyone (well, for lots of people)! But this is not the case because the people *in charge* are mostly white people – so white schools get more money and other nice things to have whilst black schools get shafted.

    I do think it is unfair that some people can lose everything for saying a racist thing, and some people lose nothing; on the other hand I think that white people in positions of power have a bigger responsibility to not let their racist feelings show, because it is very important to have a world in which people of all races can thrive and be happy, and in the USA and the EU (and other places too) white people (men, mostly) are still very much over-represented in positions of power. The specific case you cite… is not someone I have heard of, which means less than nothing since I’m not in the USA and could probably name only 2 or 3 powerful Americans.

    • Nornagest says:

      in this world in which we live then it is *worse* for a rich, white man to refuse to hire black people than for a rich black man to refuse to hire white people simply because there are many *more* rich white men.

      I’m not sure I follow. More rich white men means more chances for other rich white men to buck the trend: presuming that you don’t care about the race of the guy you work for, it seems symmetrically bad if you are black and one of twelve CEOs refuses to hire you, as if you are white and one of twelve CEOs refuses to hire you.

      On the other hand, we could expect anti-black racism in the broader white culture to affect black workers disproportionately to racism against white workers in the broader black culture… but that’s not what you said.

      • naath says:

        The problem is that because [insert reason here] a much small proportion of black people end up being in a position to be hiring lots of people (6 fortune 500 CEOs are black; compared to 30% of the US population); so if I’m looking for a job I am much more likely to be encountering white people making hiring decisions, so their biases are more important to my chances of actually getting a job. If it were a symmetrical 1/12 the problem would be much smaller.

        Maybe if I moved to Nigeria I’d find that all the people making hiring decisions are black; and maybe then the fact that I’m white would be making it much harder for me to get a job. (I have never tried to get a job anywhere other than in the UK so I have no idea)

        • Nornagest says:

          Sure, but like I alluded to upthread, that problem only appears on the culture level rather than the individual level, and only because of differences in representation. We should expect individual racists to do about as much damage as other racists with the same level of social power regardless of their race — maybe more if they’re favoring a minority, actually, since then by definition they’re excluding more people.

          A racist white hiring manager for a Fortune 500 company would be expected to do more damage than, say, the racist Vietnamese owner of a car wash — but that’s because he’s in a position to affect more people, not because he’s white. Seems reasonable, then, to condemn *ism more in the powerful, but not in “privileged” groups once that’s factored out.

          (Huh. I think I just talked myself into condemning Donald Sterling more than I previously had.)

        • Salem says:

          Actually, 12.6% of the US population is black. Your estimate is off by 140%.

  71. Michael B says:

    How do you think this applies to atheism and free will?

    e.g.

    Joe: “Atheists are no better than fundamentalists because they believe with absolute certainty that there is no God.”
    Jane: “Well, that’s a stupid definition of atheism. I only believe that God doesn’t exist with extremely high, but not absolute, certainty.”
    Joe: “Then you’re agnostic.”
    Jane: “No, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God.”
    Joe: “Atheists are fundamentalists. The position you described makes you an agnostic.”

    Or free will:

    Jane: “Determinism is true, all our actions are predetermined, therefore we have no free will.”
    Joe: “Well, that’s a stupid definition of free will. I don’t believe that we have that kind of free will but if we define free will in a more sensible way, then there is a way to have both free will and determinism.”
    Jane: “That’s not what free will means though.”
    Joe: “But this is what free will should mean.”

    • Hainish says:

      In the atheism example, Joe is holding Jane to a level of certainty that neither of them probably hold for nearly anything else. It’s annoying and dishonest.

      In the second example, Joe is defending a definition of free will that is useful and sensible to him, and which Jane disagrees with. On the surface, neither example seems to fit the motte-bailey model.

      • Army1987 says:

        Not to mention that IME people who believe in God with extremely high, but not absolute, certainty don’t consider themselves agnostic (also, they say they wish they could believe in God with absolute certainty, but that’s another story).

    • Anonymous says:

      “believe” != “believe with probability of 1”

      “agnostic” != “believe there is no god, with certainty < 1” (Now that is definitely a dumb definition. Do we say “I’m agnostic about whether I am, at this very moment, holding a beer in my hand”?)

      • Said Achmiz says:

        That Anon is me, whoops.

      • Hainish says:

        But aren’t all beliefs probabilistic, i.e., with values closely approaching, but never reaching, 1?

        • Said Achmiz says:

          That is exactly the point. No one can rationally believe anything* “with absolute certainty” (unless they’ve managed to amass infinite confirmatory evidence, which would be quite a feat). Using the term “agnostic” for a belief one holds with P < 1 is ludicrous, because this is just the normal state of affairs for all beliefs. If believing there’s no God, with P < 1, means you’re “agnostic”, then by extension, you’re agnostic about literally everything else you believe*, and the term loses all meaning.

          *Possibly with the exclusion of mathematical truths?? I don’t know.

        • Carinthium says:

          There is no justification for doing otherwise, but people aren’t rational. Since most people don’t know good philosophy, I dare say most people would have beliefs of which they are completely certain.

  72. Multiheaded says:

    Hey, certain anti-SJ people! I found a Fact.

    https://twitter.com/Gavin_McInnes

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_McInnes

    How is he still walking about, if we’re so damn powerful? Checkmate!

    • mister service says:

      Being able to say edgy things on Fox News and Taki isn’t power. He was ousted at Vice years ago.

      Let’s see him try and show up to give a talk at a university.

      • Multiheaded says:

        How is that edgelord still anyone, assuming this broad model where the Cathedral can stomp real good on someone who has been real bad? He’s on panels and such. (This is him exploiting an unreasonable feminist loophole in a reasonable way, yeah. Still, his reputation as a horrible edgelord should precede him in more ways than currently observed.)

        • Alrenous says:

          A panel? That’s really your best argument?

          Can != does. I’ve myself noticed there’s many more Richwines and Sterlings than people who get Richwined or Sterlinged. It’s mainly encourager les outres.

          Show me one CEO fired for being too feminist. For being too pro-gay.

          Show me a company that was boycott or prosecuted for hiring too many women. (Can you even imagine?)

          Show me a professor stripped of tenure for supporting too much immigration.

          Show me campaigns to rip down feminist advertisements or to harass feminist speeches.

          Is your argument really that you’re afraid of Takimag? Shall I keep an eye out for Taki-friendly legislation in the next five years?

        • mister service says:

          I’m sure Mel Gibson could still get an interview out on ABC. It helps if you got famous and made connections in your industry before becoming publicly known as a right-wing “edgelord.” (warning: I’m stealing that)

          The fact remains that the cultural window of acceptability is moving away from Mel Gibson (and McInnes). Brendan Eich will probably never be a software executive again. Their career peak of relevancy is far behind them.

          Edgelords of the left don’t have this problem. Shia LaBeouf reading Debord? Russell Brand’s pop socialism? That keeps them relevant and hip, if anything.

        • Nick T says:

          There are surely people who say that it’s impossible to say the things McInnes did without suffering social death. He falsifies this claim, and that’s important. But if McInnes falsifies the weaker, important claim that some people get punished by [whatever you want to call it] for expressing politically incorrect views, with a chilling effect on others, then the existence of one successful outspokenly feminist woman falsifies the claim that publicly feminist women are often harassed and punished with a chilling effect on others.

        • Multiheaded says:

          @Alrenous:

          Yes, we are the only ones doing this particular kind of violence, and no, in this particular sphere it’s never applied to us (I wish the same were true for Russia!). I’m just saying that the upper limit on this stuff doesn’t seem to be very high at all.

          Edgelords of the left don’t have this problem. Shia LaBeouf reading Debord? Russell Brand’s pop socialism? That keeps them relevant and hip, if anything.

          Debord isn’t edgy because doesn’t call for systemic violence. Advocating direct censorship by referencing Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance would be just minimally edgy. Talk about a dictatorship of the proletariat (with all the caveats about Marx’s original intent – it’s basically supposed to be a democracy without some characteristics of liberalism, people!), now that is edgy.

          There are surely people who say that it’s impossible to say the things McInnes did without suffering social death. He falsifies this claim, and that’s important.

          That’s all I’m asking for, really.

        • Alrenous says:

          Nice goalpost move, Multiheaded.

          How is he still walking about, if we’re so damn powerful? Checkmate!

          So you conceded this point. Considering you had to concede it, you shouldn’t have made it in the first place.

          Unless you were attempting a sophistry, of course.

          it’s impossible to say the things McInnes did without suffering social death.

          Yes, I do have to agree with this strawman. His social death is not total, that’s true. He’s also weaksauce. I’ve heard the name, that’s it. He was punted from a firm that he himself built, that’s more than enough for everyone who isn’t you.

          Call me when you have someone who opposes democracy and still gets so much as panels. Find me a respectable group that wouldn’t add Aristotle to the hemlock list.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Call me when you have someone who opposes democracy and still gets so much as panels.

          Um… Peter Thiel?

        • Alrenous says:

          Thiel is certainly an interesting case. My gut feeling is he hasn’t really said anything much, but I can’t back that up well.

          He contributes an awful lot of money to political campaigns for someone who thinks democracy and freedom are incompatible. Notably, the statement is from 2009 and he supported both the Pauls and Romney in 2012 with literally millions of dollars. I know that kind of bribe worked for Bill Gates. But like I said; I can’t back it up well. I’m probably right but you shouldn’t believe me.

          I’m amused by how sterile the seasteading thing has turned out to be. For comparison, he quite possibly gave more to Paul and Romney in 2012 alone than his total contributions to seasteading. His total political contributions overwhelm his supposed baby.

          Oh wait, there we go – he’s gay. Duh. It would be very, very difficult for him to get on the shit list. Now you should probably believe me.

        • Multiheaded says:

          This is fascinating and IMO highly… suggestive about Thiel and his general attitude:

          Peter Thiel in the early 90s:

          In 1992, a Stanford law student named Keith Rabois tested the limits of free speech on campus by standing outside the dorm residence of an instructor and shouting, “Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS!” The furious reaction to this provocation eventually drove Rabois out of Stanford. Thiel, who was in law school at the time, was also the president of the Stanford Federalist Society and the founder of the Stanford Review, a more highbrow, less bad-boy version of the notoriously incendiary Dartmouth Review. Not long after the incident, he decided to write a book with his friend David Sacks, exposing the dangers of political correctness and multiculturalism on campus. “Peter wanted to write a book pretty early on,” Sacks said. “If you had asked us in college, ‘Where do you think Peter’s going to end up?’ we would have said, ‘He’s going to be the next William F. Buckley or George Will.’ But we also knew he wanted to make money—not small sums, enormous sums. It’s sort of like if Buckley decided to become a billionaire first and then become an intellectual.”

          “The Diversity Myth,” which appeared in 1995 (and remains Thiel’s only book), is more Dinesh D’Souza than “God and Man at Yale.” The authors line up example after example of the excesses of identity politics on campus, warning the country that a reign of intolerance, if not totalitarianism, is at hand. Characterizing the Rabois incident as a case of individual courage in the face of a witch hunt, they write, “His demonstration directly challenged one of the most fundamental taboos: To suggest a correlation between homosexual acts and AIDS implies that one of the multiculturalists’ favorite lifestyles is more prone to contracting the disease and that not all lifestyles are equally desirable.”

          Thiel didn’t discuss with Sacks the personal implications of writing about the incident from a position hostile to homosexuality. “Peter wasn’t out of the closet back then,” Sacks told me. Thiel didn’t come out to his friends until 2003, when he was in his mid-thirties. “Do you know how many people in the financial world are openly gay?” he asked one friend, explaining that he didn’t want his sexual orientation to get in the way of his work.

          Though the subject of homosexuality remains one that he doesn’t much like to discuss, Thiel says that he wishes he’d never written about the Rabois incident. “All of the identity-related things are in my mind much more nuanced,” he said. “I think there is a gay experience, I think there is a black experience, I think there is a woman’s experience that is meaningfully different. I also think there was a tendency to exaggerate it and turn it into an ideological category.” But his reaction against political correctness, he said, was just as narrowly ideological. “The Diversity Myth” now seems to cause Thiel mild embarrassment: political correctness on campus turned out to be the least of the country’s problems.

          (Book summary, appears to be highly influenced by Rene Girard, and attempts to turn “Theory” concepts such as the social construction of binaries and identities in a reactionary direction)

          Peter Thiel now:

          On September 22, 2010, Thiel said at a 2010 fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights, “I believe that gay rights and marriage rights for gay people should not be a partisan issue,” and ”Gay marriage can’t be a partisan issue because as long there are partisan issues or cultural issues in this country, you’ll have trench warfare like on the western front in World War I. You’ll have lots of carnage and no progress.”

          This is honestly like a living, breathing piece of agitprop for anti-assimilationist queer activists. Mr. Thiel hoped to get notorious by shitting all over the (dogmatic, ossified, sure) compromise between earlier radicals and the modern Western state; a little later, when said compromise has delivered an unprecedented freedom from fear and humiliation to him, personally, he proceded to pretend that it’s the logical and inevitable outcome of his own brand of technocracy. It’s either reactionary high theory or inoffensive administered equality; anything but Stonewall!

          …Alrenous, this is another one of those fearful symmetries. You remember Moldbug’s outpouring of spite over Paul Romer, right? Well, mirror that and you might end up with roughly how I feel about Thiel.

          Thiel is everything I hate and despise about the way the world is going. I honestly wouldn’t have been so dramatic had he stayed a reactionary! I just don’t want his damn future!

        • Alrenous says:

          Anti-progressivism != [What Multiheaded hates]. Good to know.

          Thing is, your attempts to bully him only legitimize what you see as his attempts to bully you. I would be perfectly please to see both of you lose catastrophically. Moreover, in the long run, I will get my wish.

        • Multiheaded says:

          One nice thing about those old-timey (quasi-Catholic) reactionaries is that to them we are the wicked and resentful witch, the seditious wandering troublemaker, the alchemist blinded by folly and consorting with demons… not a skull in a dusty anthropological exhibition. We’re better than just someone, we’re the Other! With the technocrats, we are a meaningless and forgotten footnote in the march towards The No Alternative.

        • Salem says:

          I really don’t understand the point your making about Thiel. Perhaps you could explain a little more?

          It seems to me this is a guy who, from start to finish, has basically been saying “We should have a tolerant society, but the people yelling loudly about tolerance are the least tolerant of all.” This has been the Ur-position of the centre-right since Strafford at least. He basically wants to take the culture wars out of politics and society generally, and that was his clear position in both quotes.

          And yes, anything but Stonewall. Anything but violence and disorder. Gay marriage wasn’t passed because of rioting homosexuals, but through duly passed laws and initiatives, and constitutional rulings. Thiel, and people like him, have done far more for gay marriage than have the militant few, who only ever served to turn ordinary people against their ideas.

        • Multiheaded says:

          And yes, anything but Stonewall. Anything but violence and disorder. Gay marriage wasn’t passed because of rioting homosexuals, but through duly passed laws and initiatives, and constitutional rulings. Thiel, and people like him, have done far more for gay marriage than have the militant few, who only ever served to turn ordinary people against their ideas.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattachine_Society

          Fuck no. You goddamn fool. The “ordinary people” need to be both exposed forcibly to the Other and shown the far side of the overton window, and only then the nice inoffensive legislative work can even begin. And the same thing is happening with trans* liberation in America right now; without the impulse set by the rude and violent activists, the polite ones wouldn’t get inspired, wouldn’t make a move, wouldn’t be heard.

          I’m summoning Ozy to this thread; let zie testify against this insanity of pacifism. Zie is an assimilationist, but certainly zie sees that we need to inconvenience the public, disturb its conscience and shame the reactionaries into obscurity. The conservative narrative is laughable.

        • Salem says:

          I politely asked you to elucidate what you found objectionable about Thiel; instead you respond with profanity and insults, which is sadly your typical MO. I will not make the mistake of trying to engage with you again.

    • Misha says:

      How was Cuba allowed to exist for decades, when America has the greatest military strength in the world? Several possible answers present themselves.

      1. Cuba is irrelevant, it would be a waste of time to destroy it.
      2. Cuba has powerful friends, it would be dangerous to upset them.
      3. Cuba is useful the way it is.
      4. What gets destroyed is what you can get peopled riled up about.
      5. Something I’ve forgotten or a combination of factors.

  73. Pingback: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out | The Anti-Democracy Activist

  74. Optimist Industries says:

    Thank you for this. I tend towards self-doubt, especially when many people I respect and/or care about hold opinions contrary to my own, and I just wanted to comment here to say how comforting I found this post. I get really anxious when I see good friends linking to arguments overloading terms such as “racist” in the manner described here, because I at once strongly disagree with the abuse of language and care enough about these people that I don’t want to alienate them and wonder what they must be feeling that makes them want to share these things. I generally do not try to engage in discussions with these friends, sadly, out of fear more than anything else. Since I’ve started regularly reading your blog, I’ve felt more sane and less perma-guilty for my objections, and have been more open about my opinions. I try to be open and unattached enough to my present perspectives that I can hear others’ arguments, and the more I surround myself with people that think this way, the safer it feels to go out and honestly interact with other people. So thanks! A bunch!

  75. Okay, in 512 comments I’m sure this view has been expressed at least once, and I don’t want to read 512 comments to make sure, so I’m just going to barge in here under the assumption that I’m repeating what someone else probably said more eloquently.

    I agree that the focus on prescriptive semantics in social justice is an an unusual quality. I like to use a different hypothesis to explain it, though. I think ideas like “you can’t be sexist against men” are being used as shibboleths. They are ideas that are really mostly about semantics (so that if you are immersed in a community that uses words that way, they seem unobjectionable), but immediately strike people who aren’t versed in SJ as being strange, objectionable, even obviously false. The purpose here is to clearly discriminate between people who are versed in SJ concepts and those who aren’t — and to separate those who’ve just sort of bathed in the vague cultural meme bath they’re surrounded with (“racism is bad”) from those who’ve signed onto more specific SJ ideologies.

    This is not necessarily a bad thing to want to do. In a lot of cases I think this desire to find people who are versed in SJ comes directly out of fear inspired by direct personal experience, much like a (usually more extreme) version of the “paranoia” you describe in this post. Someone in [category X] has a very discernibly patterned history of people in [category Y] doing awful things to them and getting away with it; they also think their culture is filled with a bias against them that tends to result in linguistic tricks, double binds and the like being used to shut down what they have to say in arbitrary and unfair ways. (Imagine the feeling that social justice writing tends to give you, except it’s everywhere and you can’t turn it off — in every TV show and every idle conversation. If you try to specifically seek out the exceptions, people act like you are insane.) These people have an incentive to avoid people in [category Y] entirely, but if they do interact with people in [category Y] it’s preferable if those people are, broadly speaking, on their side. This can be a matter of personal safety, in a number of senses of the term.

    “I was talking to this annoying guy who thought that misandry was a thing” is not an assertion that weird semantic points are really important; it’s a way of saying “I like to err on the side of caution because I am very scared, and this guy was giving off signals that he was not part of the ideological subculture to which the men I feel relatively safe around belong.”

    I don’t disagree that “motte-and-bailey doctrine” stuff goes on in SJ culture, but I think to some extent you’re extrapolating from your own paranoia. No one will actually fire you, in 2014, just for being white; people will only fire you if you say explicitly racist things, i.e. things that are racist in the good old “dictionary” sense of the term. I think your intense distaste — due to your personal past — for people who make certain kinds of arguments, and your intense worries that these arguments will go places that they show no signs of having gone yet, actually put you pretty close to the average member of “SJ culture.” Everyone’s scared; everyone gets really mad at the arguments that remind them of the people who hurt them, and concoct paranoid scenarios about these kinds of people forcing them out of society or doing other awful things to them. Everyone would like to surround themselves with people who don’t constantly make these arguments. Only some people have way more of this problem because of, well, um, let’s call them “imbalances in society,” and end up getting way more opposed to certain kinds of arguments to the point that it’s nice to have a reliable indicator of people won’t do this.

    • Multiheaded says:

      Of the responses so far, this is probably the analysis that I most agree with.

    • Matthew says:

      I don’t really think, for this post or any of the related ones that it qualifies as paranoia, or that one has to have been traumatized in the way that SA was to be worried about it.

      I would put the counter position something like this:

      1. Many of us have seen people get hounded out of “safe spaces” for espousing perfectly sane, non-bigoted, but not SJ-doctrinally approved positions. (For example, the last straw for me at which I stopped calling myself feminist, was following the discussion at a mainstream feminist website in which anyone who disagreed with the proposition “rape is a worse crime than murder” more than equivocally was hounded out.)

      2. SJWs want to gradually expand the “safe space,” such that society as a whole gradually adopts their doctrinal conventions. (I don’t think most Social Justice folks would dispute this.)

      3. Therefore, if SJWs are allowed to succeed, people will be threatened with being hounded out of society in general for espousing perfectly sane, non-bigoted, but not doctrinally-approved positions.

      I don’t think this is a paranoid fear at all. SJW convention already appears to be infecting wonkosphere sites like Vox. This is legitimately disturbing.

      • I don’t think I agree with your point 2.

        Here’s an analogy: say you have a life-threatening peanut allergy, which activates even when you are in the vicinity of peanuts. Given this, it’s sensible to demand that certain places in your life — say, your dwelling place, or the dwellings of some close friends — be “safe spaces” into which you can expect peanuts to never intrude. Establishing such a rule and making it credible will increase your quality of life.

        Now, it would be absurd to want to “expand the safe space” — to eliminate peanuts from the whole world, just so that things would be more convenient for you. And AFAIK no one with severe allergies wants to do this.

        But what would be nice and non-absurd, if possible, would be to find a cure for peanut allergies. That would have the same effect — letting you go out in the world without worrying — without restricting other people’s freedom to eat peanuts.

        I think SJ safe spaces are, like the “peanut allergy safe spaces,” supposed to be treating a symptom of the disease which one would ultimately like to cure. Some people respond very badly (“allergically”) to certain arguments or ideas even though they are “sane”; as with peanuts, it isn’t reasonable to expect to go out in the world and never encounter these ideas, so you make a little place with a rule that those ideas never intrude. If someone comes in espousing the idea and saying “well, this is sane,” the response is (or should be) “sure, but the whole point of this space is that that’s no longer the relevant criterion, unlike in the rest of the world.” Get out of my house and eat your peanuts somewhere else; you’ll be fine and I won’t die.

        Now the very fact that people respond so badly to certain ideas is not ideal, and in my model of these things is a consequence of social correlations in which certain ideas, even if sane, are again and again associated with direct personal harm or threat of same. (In the most extreme cases, the “sane” ideas in question trigger actual PTSD, in which case the allergy metaphor becomes pretty direct.) I think what most SJ advocates want is a world in which these correlations are lessened and the need for safe spaces is thus reduced — a cure for the disease.

        I have the feeling we won’t end up agreeing about this, because the model I just presented won’t seem as plausible to you as the one you already believe. I’m just pointing out there’s a different model that you could believe. (I’m not sure how to find a good, simple test that could allow us to figure out which model is more accurate.)

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Get out of my house and eat your peanuts somewhere else; you’ll be fine and I won’t die.

          I think a valid counter-argument is “no, I want you to die from peanut allergy NOW so I can eat my damn peanuts in peace the next time I’m on an airplane. The more we coddle your stupid-ass peanut allergy, the more inconveniences I have to put up with in my day-to-day life. If you’re so unfit and weak that peanuts will kill you, then just DIE already.”

          (Note: this argument is only ‘valid’ insofar as I can kill you with my peanuts, and you cannot stop me from opening my peanuts.)

        • Ok, but at the object level, we aren’t talking about peanuts. We are talking about people who are basically invalided by society. The SJ approach seems to help internalize this objectification and doesn’t offer a clear path toward agency that I can see. Even if the whole world became egalitarian tomorrow and privilege disappeared, would we have a bunch of people who had been conditioned to view themselves as victims? Priming and stereotype threat are getting beaten up, but will probably emerge as being a thing as well as the idea that free will is depleted if you think it’s depleted. I am not talking about tough love, hurt people need time to heal. But what forward path is offered by SJ once the healing occurs? When do the oppressed get to be agents again?

    • Keratin says:

      Yeah, this is pretty much what I think about this post. While I’ve liked your previous posts on this topic and found them pretty incisive, this one definitely felt a lot more idiosyncratic and personal to you.

      I feel like this points out the common symmetries between your situation and the SJ people (in a way you’ve already pointed out), and also how your posts on the subject are borne from the same impulses as the stuff you’re criticizing.

    • Troy says:

      I think you are right that “proper” use of these terms often functions as a kind of social signal in the SJ community, but I’m less sanguine than you are about its dangers. In particular, using any kind of “in-group signalling” to decide who to talk to and listen to is a surefire way to promote groupthink, and to prevent different ideological groups from having productive conversations with each other. I have to stop myself from reacting negatively to people saying politically charged things — even things that I agree with! — simply because they signal to me that these people endorse other positions which I consider odious (e.g., some of the more extreme elements of the SJ movement).

      No one will actually fire you, in 2014, just for being white; people will only fire you if you say explicitly racist things, i.e. things that are racist in the good old “dictionary” sense of the term.

      Matthew’s already commented on this, but let me say, as someone who’s very worried about political correctness, that I have no fear of being fired for being a white male — all my fears are about punished for saying politically incorrect things.

      Indeed, for all of progressives’ talk about how oppressive white males are, I don’t really think they hate white males. I think the only people that (some) progressives really hate are conservatives — i.e., people who disagree with their expressed ideologies. In my experience a progressive straight cis wealthy WASP white male who toes the party line will feel much more comfortable in a SJ crowd than a conservative black man.

      • I agree to some extent with your points in the first and last paragraphs, but I think we are also talking past each other somewhat.

        The more time I spent in SJ circles (and I’ve spent time in a number of them), the less SJ looks to me like an ordinary “political ideology” and the more it looks like a quasi-separatist movement. Most SJ circles are filled with people who think that their society is biased towards people in [category A] and against them, and want to find more people in [category B] to hang out with, because they think people in [category A] are accorded powers by society that scare them.

        Somewhat confusingly, this doesn’t mean these people are especially interested in the topic of “A-B relations” except insofar as it relates to avoiding future harm. They aren’t necessarily theoreticians or activists, just people pragmatically using a theory that appears to explain their own experience well. If you were, say, once in an abusive relationship, you would become interested in how to avoid similar relationships in the future, but it wouldn’t necessarily kindle an academic interest in “abusive relationships” in general; it also wouldn’t make you want to go around talking to lots of people like your abuser in order to ensure your views on this topic closely approach reality. “Groupthink” in the sense of “staying in the group of non-abusers” would be fine except insofar as it might obstruct your goal of avoiding another such relationship.

        I’m not saying all SJ is more “separatist” than “ideological,” and your commentary applies well to the latter group. But I think the separatist character of much of the movement needs to be recognized because it explains the constant tension between SJ and people who expect SJ to be more rigorous about standards of truth than it is. We are all unrigorous about some things, because we all have things we are interested in and things we aren’t; the important (and strange) thing here is that many e.g. feminists aren’t actually interested in gender relations per se, except insofar as they have to model them somehow in order to make sense of their personal experience. (I’m not saying that feminists are anti-intellectual; many are intellectuals with intellectual interests in other areas, and treat gender as a “thing I can’t avoid having some pragmatic model of” rather than a genuine intellectual interest.)

        Looking for friendly ideological debate partners here may be a category mistake.

        • Troy says:

          Thanks for the reply. I think we are operating with slightly different mental pictures of the “social justice community” here. When I think of the “social justice community,” I think of people I know who openly advocate particular progressive causes that go under the banner of anti-racism, anti-sexism, equality, etc. These causes are sometimes political in the sense that they’re trying to pass particular state laws, sometimes more narrowly political in trying to change the policies at my university, and sometimes merely social in that they’re trying to change social norms. So I am thinking more of people who are interested in “A-B” relations — although (they would say) primarily for the purpose of improving the lives of B’s.

          I’m perfectly okay with some people not wanting to talk politics or ideology and just wanting to hang out with people around whom they’re comfortable. (Indeed, I think many of my fellow academics overestimate the importance and applicability of teaching “critical thinking” to most people.) My concerns come out of the “social justice” folks I know being involved in political activism that could (from my perspective) potentially affect the world for the worse. I don’t think people have a responsibility to care about politics (or vote, or whatever). But I think they do have a responsibility to do so rationally, if they do.

  76. No one special says:

    I feel like I just won the internet.

    Given my amazing success at finding stuff I read years ago and linking to it, I’d like to take a step forwards and invent terminology. I propose “Motte cop, Bailey cop” for when different people claiming to represent the same thing each adopt half of a motte and bailey doctrine.

    Let’s see if that catches on.

  77. Dennis Towne says:

    Having read through a decent fraction of racism school, I will merely note that replacing “white” with “american jew”, “black” with “white”, and updating the appropriate quoted statistics keeps pretty much all of the arguments on that site intact.

    (I am of jewish descent.)

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  79. Cecil Harvey says:

    I find “check your privilege” to be an incredibly useful phrase. If someone says it non-ironically, they signal to me that they are too stupid to bother talking to about anything meaningful for the rest of their lives, and I can ignore them perpetually. This stops a lot of pointless arguments, as these types deny both the principal of identity and the principal of non-contradiction, meaning that no rational discourse can happen.

  80. Alrenous says:

    Ialdabaothism: the radical notion that Ialdabaoth is people.

    Ialdabaothism includes the idea that an Ialdabaoth is not fatally insane, and can in fact work out cause and effect. Ialdabaothism involves not blaming the victim; that self-sabotage is not the cause of an Ialdabaoth’s major problems. Even if that means puncturing some cozy illusions about other people with dark truths.

    The spectre of an anti-Ialdabaothist trying to help an Ialdabaoth is moderately repulsive. If an Ialdabaoth is not able to work out cause and effect, then the situation is quite hopeless. If obedience to someone else is the only solution, then the anti-Ialdabaothist takes on the responsibility of watching the Ialdabaoth all day, every day, which they’re clearly unwilling to do, if even able.

    This is especially bad when the anti-Ialdabaothist thinks they can tell how to run an Ialdabaoth’s life third hand, from across the internet, better than the individual with the front-row seat to said life.

    The true epistemologist must admit the possibility that Ialdabaothism is false and anti-Ialdabaothism is true. Especially third hand, from across the internet. However, prima facie anti-Ialdabaothism has an uphill battle to fight.

    The epistemolgist should employ the ironman. Weak anti-Ialdabaothism has some plausibility. Solomonoff Induction is incomputable because it’s impossible to list all the hypotheses. This manifests as humans failing to list all the hypotheses. An Ialdabaoth, we can safely assume, is a human, and may have failed to list all the reasonably possible solutions, in which case merely completing the list could help. But, ultimately, it would seem easier to ask an Ialdabaoth rather than an epistemologist about whether the list is reasonably complete.

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      Ialdabaothism includes the idea that an Ialdabaoth is not fatally insane, and can in fact work out cause and effect. Ialdabaothism involves not blaming the victim; that self-sabotage is not the cause of an Ialdabaoth’s major problems. Even if that means puncturing some cozy illusions about other people with dark truths.

      This paragraph actually gave me a minor panic attack. That’s usually an indication that there’s something really interesting inside.

    • Multiheaded says:

      Governments are oppressive… but anarcho-capitalism still doesn’t real. Some an-cap history is broadly correct but kinda starts from the wrong end (enclosures!), while much is just bugfuck. Similarily, anything to do with mental issues, including the social construction of them, is broadly problematic in itself and kind of invites abuses of biopower (DSM-II!)… but Thomas Szasz still doesn’t real, IMO.

      Fuck it, I’m willing to choose an immediate relief effort now despite the near-certainty of it perpetuating some oppression later. I can sort of justify that in a long-winded way.

      (And either stance on this could be accused of narcissistic holier-than-thou posturing, so let’s not go there at all.)

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        Similarily, anything to do with mental issues, including the social construction of them, is broadly problematic in itself and kind of invites abuses of biopower

        Broaden this. Seriously.

        Anything to do with mental issues is broadly problematic.

        The presence of a person with mental issues is broadly problematic, and instantiates the ‘mental issues is broadly problematic’ sequence.

        This is a Revealed Preference that is prima facia obvious in western society, so let’s please not bother arguing the point.

        Having mental issues is inherently abusive; it turns psychonormative / neurotypical / trendy-word-for-not-fucked-in-the-head people into abusers despite themselves. It removes their agency by forcing them to choose between uncomfortable roles.

        It is intensely unfair and, I daresay, impositional for people with psychological issues to choose to exist, because it forces this discomfort on the rest of you.

        • Oligopsony says:

          It is intensely unfair and, I daresay, impositional for people with psychological issues to choose to exist, because it forces this discomfort on the rest of you.

          Except you didn’t choose to exist, and choosing to not continue existing is more imposing than choosing to continue to exist.

          During my periods of serious suicidality this was perhaps the most imposing-on-me part; that not even suicide was a successful Exit from the burden I was placing on others.

          Of course, while people who are neurotypical along this axis are biased to think of themselves as better than they are, those who are not tend to think of themselves as more of a burden than they actually. Applying the outside view is probably necessary for both.

          • I have a notion that comprehensive self-hatred might be a scramble for the pleasures of status (there’s a part of one’s self which is increasing it’s status by attacking the rest of the self) without getting any of the the actual advantages of status.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Except you didn’t choose to exist

          But I am still assigned blame for existing, precisely as if it was a conscious choice. Since power is the ultimate arbitrator of values, this effectively makes me just as blameworthy as if I had consciously chosen it. (Moreso, in fact, because it is something that I clearly cannot choose to stop doing.)

          Of course, while people who are neurotypical along this axis are biased to think of themselves as better than they are, those who are not tend to think of themselves as more of a burden than they actually. Applying the outside view is probably necessary for both.

          There is no outside view. People who are “neurotypical” not only believe that they are not burdensome, they also believe (as demonstrated by their actions) that people who are not neurotypical are burdensome. When you say that someone like me “believes I am more burdensome than I am”, I strongly disagree: I believe I am EXACTLY as burdensome as society behaves as if I was. And since society DEFINES burden, that’s pretty much a tautology to say that that’s how burdensome I actually am.

          Unless you know of some external source of value judgment?

        • Oligopsony says:

          When you say that someone like me “believes I am more burdensome than I am”, I strongly disagree: I believe I am EXACTLY as burdensome as society behaves as if I was.

          Think about the exact phrasing of this for a bit!

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I’ve re-parsed it a few times and not noticed anything; what am I missing?

        • Hainish says:

          Society includes people who are telling you that you think you are more burdensome than they think you are.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Right, just like I include some very melanin-rich moles; this does not make me African-American.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          I have a notion that comprehensive self-hatred might be a scramble for the pleasures of status (there’s a part of one’s self which is increasing it’s status by attacking the rest of the self) without getting any of the the actual advantages of status.

          Explicitly so. I’m acutely aware of this process. Monkeys heal from abuse by finding smaller monkeys to abuse. I’ve known this since I was six, but I’ve always been the smallest monkey – so I’ve basically created a ‘Dark’ persona whose job it is to inflict abuse on the ‘weak’ persona.

          • I thought monkeys recovered from abuse by getting groomed by other monkeys, forcibly if necessary.

            What’s your evidence that beating up on smaller monkeys helps with recovery as distinct from being something that abused monkeys do?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          What’s your evidence that beating up on smaller monkeys helps with recovery as distinct from being something that abused monkeys do?

          From the Stanford Behavioral Genetics lectures. I’ll find the relevant links when I get home.

          • Thanks. When I thought about it, I realized that the thing I heard about grooming was about recovery from isolation rather than from assault, though I think I’ve heard something about apes comforting each other.

            So far as other sorts of recovery are concerned, have you read about somatic experiencing? Peter Levine was thinking about recovery from trauma– if a gazelle is almost caught by a lion, it can’t afford to be fouled up by PTSD.

            Levine found that animals who’d been through something drastic would go off and shake for a while, and then recover. In his opinion, PTSD was caused by not getting recovery time, whether because the traumatic situation lasted too long or the shaking wasn’t permitted.

      • Oligopsony says:

        Fuck it, I’m willing to choose an immediate relief effort now despite the near-certainty of it perpetuating some oppression later. I can sort of justify that in a long-winded way.

        No long winds are needed: neoreactionary theories of oppression as the natural state of Man, of leftism as a rebellion against Nature, are correct, and neoreactionary theories of the Ratchet are incorrect (however empirically correct in the medium term.) The attractor in society-space independent of constant leftward agitation is the peace and safety of a new dark age. All victories are temporary.

        • Multiheaded says:

          I actually drift outside this particular 2edge with some regularity. Tikkun olam, VALIS retconning the world, other such bourgeois gnostic nonsense.

      • Alrenous says:

        but anarcho-capitalism still doesn’t real.

        The Amish are 100% anarcho-capitalist.

        (It’s truths like this that make me hold yer average ancap in contempt.)

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        That sounds plausible.

        Also, in the interest of full disclosure:

        I’ve related a lot of personal experiences in these comments that are… well, let’s just say that when you have arachnophobia, and someone asks you how big the spider on your arm was, your personal narrative might not line up with a ruler.

        Put more succinctly, my particular combination of social anxiety, PTSD, and depression makes it extremely likely that my perceptions of social events are skewed. Not just in the “people aren’t all as awful as I’ve explicitly claimed” sense, but also in the “are you SURE that that happened EXACTLY the way you remember it?” sense.

        I don’t think that invalidates my experiences – in order to have the level of fucked-upedness I have, SOMETHING traumatic clearly happened – but I can’t be 100% certain that the specific events I REMEMBER are the actual events that OCCURRED. I know for a fact, for example, that my memories will often juggle around the faces and voices of people who were attacking me with the faces and voices of people who were trying to protect me.

    • Well said.

      And something I need to remember a parallel version of for myself.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        I admit I liked it, but my natural instinct was that it was sarcasm.

        • Alrenous says:

          I have a problem where I always sound sarcastic because I’m so inexperienced at being unironic.

          For example: the best equation is 0 = 0. Truly sublime. Sarcasm?

          Also there are layers of irony there. So there’s that. However, I did make sure that the first three layers are all true.

          Zeroth layer: explicit meaning.

          First layer: I’m not a feminist.* So…

          Second layer: I don’t know either. We would have to meet in person. In any case, you can safely assume I’m human too, so I’m also sometimes bad at enumerating all possibilities. [Ialdabaothism & anti-Ialdabaothism] may not span the entire space. Unknown unknowns and all that.

          *(I’m sort of an ironic anti-humanist. Women aren’t people and neither are men. Usually. But I like the essence of the tech-progress message of humanism.)

        • nydwracu says:

          the best equation is euler’s identity, fucking fight me

        • Alrenous says:

          e ^{i \pi} + 1 = 0
          e ^{i \pi} + 1 – 0 = 0 – 0
          0 = 0

          Why this is cool is moderately advanced neon hillistry, though…

        • Sniffnoy says:

          Man, e^{pi*i}+1=0 isn’t even the best equation Euler came up with. I’d say V-E+F=2 at least is better.

    • Nick T says:

      Ialdabaothism involves not blaming the victim; that self-sabotage is not the cause of an Ialdabaoth’s major problems.

      General point, nothing to do with Ialdabaoth in particular: the word “blame” is very equivocal and harmfully so. It’s really really REALLY important to separate attribution of causality from the almost-always-harmful emotion of wanting-someone-to-feel-shame, and from crude implicit reasoning about responsibility and obligation, which is important but should be made explicit and precise (e.g., unlimited feelings of obligation to help others are bad, and self-sabotage means that a person has to do some work themselves to fix their problems, but it doesn’t mean that they have no external problems or shouldn’t be helped and accommodated at all.) Self-sabotage is ubiquitous, and being able to talk about it well, rather than either treating it really unskillfully or flinching away from considering it at all, seems really high-value and really rare and non-automatic.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        General point, nothing to do with Ialdabaoth in particular: the word “blame” is very equivocal and harmfully so.

        Absolutely. I ALWAYS internally reverse its typical meaning: in my moral world, “blame” is synonymous with “powerlessness”, and the more you directly caused an event to occur, the LESS blame you have for that event.

        This seems consistent with most people’s pragmatic use of “blame”, so I prefer it to most people’s claimed intent.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I’m going to assume this makes sense to Ialdabaoth within some context I’m missing. If not, Ialdabaoth should tell me the degree to which this is an unprovoked personal attack so I can do something about it.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        I read it as an intricate weave of signaling and counter-signaling; I honestly couldn’t tell whether it was a scathing personal attack or a profound outpouring of support and solidarity.

        As such, I am inclined to let it pass on sheer artistic merit alone. It is a *beautiful* piece of work.

        The straight reading (made apparent by replacing ‘Ialdabaoth*’ with ‘femin*’, given that the rhetoric is laden with SJW-style feminist language) is that I deserve the same level of sympathy and support and alliance that feminists do/claim they do. Which means that the question of whether it’s a vicious personal attack or an outpouring of solidarity depends on whether you read the speaker as approving of feminist ideology as-such OR disapproving of feminist ideology as applied but pointing out a counter situation where they feel that ideology WOULD be properly applied.

        Layers upon layers upon layers.

        • For what it’s worth, I read it as only borrowing some feminist rhetoric, but really addressing the habit/passion of self-hatred.

          I’m able to give it that single reading because I’m not comprehensively squicked by feminism, and it didn’t even occur to me to think of how it would look to someone who is squicked.

          I believe that one of the side effects of abuse is a belief that being on one’s own side is extremely dangerous– that’s what locks self-destructive habits into place.

          Try imagining a women who’s running a JAD module in her mind all the time, and who’s inclined to think that the module is probably correct. After all, it’s so loud and self-assured. What would be useful to say to her?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          For what it’s worth, I read it as only borrowing some feminist rhetoric, but really addressing the habit/passion of self-hatred.

          Indeed – and it said things about self-hatred that I’ve really needed to hear for awhile now, that no one else has been able to articulate.

        • Alrenous says:

          Thanks.

          Okay, spoilers:
          It’s an attack on inconsistency. If you believe in feminism and/or similar yet your first response to an Ialdabaoth is to deny his lived experience… What I believe doesn’t have to be relevant at all.

          Notably I didn’t even know I was talking about self-hatred.

          From the other angle, believing humans in general aren’t people in the usual sense has some consequences which don’t mesh well with giving life advice in comment form. If someone is incapable of getting cause and effect right in immediate, first person perspective, then a couple condescending words is not going to make them learn to do that.

        • I’m rather amazed that it wasn’t intended to be about self-hatred, but life is an education.

          I was able to interpret the part about advice over the internet as being about self-hatred by looking at Ialdabaoth’s pattern of taking real or hypothesized hatred from other people as evidence that he should hate himself.

        • Alrenous says:

          Ah, I see the hatred angle now.

          This is why I don’t think literary analysis is inherently bunk; just its usual manifestations. (No, my 10th grade English teacher does not know where Twain’s narrative climax is better than Twain did.)

      • Alrenous says:

        Other commentators literally gaslight Ialdabaoth: fine.

        I point out they’re gaslighting: possible vicious attack.

        Umm…

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Remember that one of the best ways to gaslight someone is to convince the victim that other people are gaslighting them. That way, they don’t know who to turn to for confirmation.

        • Alrenous says:

          Fair point.

          The way to get around gaslighting is to put it to experiment. You say X will happen, they say A will happen, so you test. (And find R happens…) Trust no human, trust reality.

          This doesn’t work if you say X happened and they say, “No it didn’t.” The problem is either their perceptions or yours. If it’s yours, when you do the experiment again, it will just read as X again. If it’s theirs, it will read as X. Quite aside from being condescending and a bit mean, it’s empirically meaningless. It’s Russell’s teapot.

          While it’s possible to help someone with perceptual issues, it is a complicated, delicate, and risky procedure. There will be backsliding.
          I’m trying to find a way to compare (some of) the comments to this standard without comparing them to toxic waste. Just as it’s uncharitable for me to claim I understand your position, it’s uncharitable for me to assume my prima facie impression of the responses is necessarily valid. That said, my prima facie impression is of toxic waste, so that’s the only honest concept I can use.

          It really is denying someone’s lived experience, and it really is a waste of everyone’s time.*

          Dishonourable mention goes to ‘must be lying.’ Okay, so don’t listen? This tactic admits that if it were true, then it disproves some deeply held conviction the tactic-user has. If you have the privilege of knowing you didn’t lie, you know you just disproved an important chunk of their worldview. Correct for any rhetorical hyperbole and see if you can’t extract their principle, in case you also hold it.**

          There’s endless ways communication can go wrong even while everyone is being moderately honest and sane. Maybe, as a courtesy, check for those first? Or you have to admit you’re a jerk, like I have to.

          *(I should start a book of Truths that Offend Everyone.)

          **(I should probably mention the domain of this logic is limited. Personal, concrete experience is very different from saying society should do or does a some abstract thing.)

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          The way to get around gaslighting is to put it to experiment. You say X will happen, they say A will happen, so you test. (And find R happens…) Trust no human, trust reality.

          I attempted this in my youth, and discovered that this is a TERRIBLE idea. (How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?)

          The most profound lesson I ever learned, was when my mom tore my homework up in front of me and made me eat it, to punish me for forgetting my homework and leaving it at school. (Full disclosure: I cannot prove that this actually happened; I ate the evidence.)

          You cannot escape from reality, not even by escaping to reality.

        • Alrenous says:

          O’Brian is a human. His opinion of how many fingers he’s holding up is irrelevant. How many fingers he’s holding up is irrelevant in general because different numbers don’t do different things. Tell him he’s holding up a million fingers, if he doesn’t like the obvious answer. Tell him he’s holding up falling inverted. I can deconstruct this entire scene but I’m guessing I’d be the only one interested.

          Arbitrary, random punishments are known to drive mammals insane.

          Your argument is you can’t test things.
          It seems taking your homework home doesn’t achieve your goals any more than leaving it at school. Its presence or absence must be irrelevant, or only affect the flavour of the failure. Thus it is time to look at other properties of the situation for effective strategies. Holding as much constant as you can, vary all the variables. Flick every switch and twiddle every dial until you find one that does something. Your alternative is to find a lord who will let you swear fealty.

  81. EWK says:

    I think there is a strain of the social justice movement which is entirely about abusing the ability to tar people with extremely dangerous labels that they are not allowed to deny, in order to further their political goals.

    You were on to something, but stopped yourself short. This isn’t a description of just a strain of the social justice movement, it is a description of the entire movement. These “social justice warriors” are failures of human beings, who choose to have a competition to see who can “out-victim” the other instead of making a productive contribution to society, and thus, deserve none of your time or respect in the real world.

    • Multiheaded says:

      …failures of human beings… …deserve none of your time or respect

      …Came off as more than a little ironic.

    • Scott Alexander says:

      I *almost* followed up that “strain” sentence with “in the same sense that Sunni is a ‘strain’ of Islam”, but I restrained myself (no pun intended) because it was entirely for laughs and totally untrue. Given the response I’ve gotten here so far, I am pretty happy with that decision. And I want people to know I really do edit these things.

      Oh, and you’re banned indefinitely for obvious reasons.

    • adsd says:

      The Rule of “People who accuse others of being inhuman but instantly reveal themselves to be just as if not more inhuman” is oh so sweet.

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  83. Alrenous says:

    @Nornagest

    I used to think that way, but I realized I don’t know if the article understands manorialism. It’s an offhand comment, much like a joke. They’re not going to be able to fit a full nuanced, scholarly understanding of manorialism in such a small space. Sure they might not understand it, but if they do such criticism only embarrasses myself.

    But that’s mostly thanks to the difficulties of getting coinage into a system where almost everything’s produced locally

    This is untrue, you have the causation backwards. http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html Everything is produced locally because it became impossible to get coinage into the system. Moreover, this kind of price buggery is associated with forcing citizens to work at a particular job, and we’ll likely see history rhyming on that once social entitlement payments get really painful.

    You may recognize this as almost the opposite of what’s going on in the Greece article.

    I don’t so recognize.

    If this follows Rome, in the next step Greece will declare these in-kind payments to be tax evasion and demand in-kind taxes. This will result in Grecians not working at all, causing the job market to break down entirely. Desperate to pay and staff their social entitlement programs, Greece will force citizens to work, and since the job market is busted, Greece will have to choose their jobs for them. Greece will then have full-blown feudalism. (‘If’ it follows Rome? By now, the only way off this train is for Greece to renounce democracy, which will likely cause it to become a Mediterranean Rhodesia. Either Greece’s democracy will die a slow, painful death, or it will become a white Zimbabwe.)

    Or: slaveholders have to provide food and board for their slaves, or they will die. It is presumably legal for serf lords not to provide such, but if they don’t their serfs will die since they’re obligated to work the land. You can call it rent, but de facto the lord owned the serf’s entire produce and simply allowed them to keep some.

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  86. Oligopsony says:

    One motte-and-bailey that I’ve seen a number of times (though, to be sure, I spend a lot more time reading old tomes and far-right bloggers than most): some reactionary intellectual starts out by stipulating something like “by ‘aristocracy,’ I mean those who are best, whether recognized by title or no; there are aristocrats in art, in warfare, perhaps even in love…” and then spend the rest of the essay talking about landed peers.

    To be fair, some, like Pareto, stick pretty well to the motte, but then Pareto’s politics actually were relevantly different there in a way that wouldn’t be served by the bailey.

  87. Paul Wright says:

    This post was discussed on Metafilter (trigger warning for Scott: Mefi is an SJ stronghold).

    The commenters on there made the point that the objection of transexual people to “residual male privilege” is not the “privilege” bit but the “male”, that is, the implication is that trans people are not really the gender they’ve transitioned to. The commenters are pretty keen to differentiate this example of disclaiming privilege from the others on that basis, and I take their point in that this use of “privilege” is not “you’re better off and therefore know nothing of my struggles” but rather, it’s TERF code for “you’re a man”. If there are hundreds of examples, it might be worth finding a less equivocal one.

  88. matt says:

    I guess what bothers me is the way that all this just circles around and around and people let it because it works for them. It’s because a lot of identity politics goes into that territory of “the map is not the territory”, “there’s no objectivity!” etc. But we all know why we have a certain very visceral reaction to people who claim to be activists for men’s rights. What bothers me is that people have this visceral reaction, and then start responding to MRAs in this equivocating identity politics rhetoric, which to me is ironic as hell.
    It’s like this: if you took the stated goal of intersectional identity politics (to fully articulate the ways that different identities interact with each other in the context of different culture values) seriously, then the reality is that there would be nothing too petty to discuss. And so consequently 3rd wave feminists are VERY petty, and spend a great deal of time discussing “microaggression” stuff that is sort of existential in a way, rather than problems that can almost certainly be solved over time, like US women not getting maternity leave, wage gap, and so on. And yet, feminists have this visceral, angry reaction to MRAs… but why? According to intersectional identity politics, it is more or less our duty to fully articulate all of this shit. So nothing is too petty, and according to this, men’s rights dudes making nitpicking comments about feminism should be completely welcome, in fact their comments are really sort of necessary. And yet feminists angrily reject these people, yet the irony is that looking at the existence of MRAs has not made them snap back into reality and see identity politicking for what it really is. And still, they cannot commit to a statement like, “gender is not COMPLETELY a social construct”. But why else do we react in certain ways to the string of words “Men’s Rights Activist”?
    For many people in this field, they were just motivated by self-righteousness to begin with, rather than a search for truth. I’ve found that lots of people in this world can and will rationalize pretty much everything in their favor, and identity politicking is basically a haven for people with these attitudes.

  89. Alrenous says:

    @Ialdabaoth

    So do you want me to clarify my statement, or do you want me to admit your situation is hopeless?

    • Ialdabaoth says:

      I don’t know! I’m willing to admit to either preference, if pressured.

    • Alrenous says:

      Well, step one: figure out what your goal is. As per our previous discussion, it’s impossible to be rational without a goal.

      You may run into the issue that it is unwise to openly state certain goals on public fora. Uncommon, but possible.

      If not, then make a comment that will, to the best of your knowledge, further that goal. Comments are wonderful low-cost low-risk sandbox. (Yet they’re taken so seriously…)

      Edit: actually first check the comment I forked from, and see if it supports your goals. If not, change it and let us know.

      • Ialdabaoth says:

        Well, step one: figure out what your goal is. As per our previous discussion, it’s impossible to be rational without a goal.

        Here’s my problem with that:

        1. If I expose what my goals are, whatever my goals are, others will always actively and harmfully thwart them.

        2. Those who enjoy thwarting my goals inevitably have more power than I do, and are willing to bring more power to bear than those who do not enjoy seeing my goals thwarted.

        3. My goals are always trivially exposed whenever I act upon them.

        • Matthew says:

          @Ialdabaoth

          Your discussion with Alrenous has become so abstruse I can no longer follow what either of you are talking about.

          I have a more prosaic question. I realize that Idaho isn’t ideal for it, population density-wise, but is there a reason you don’t prefer to try online dating? It seems safer in a number of ways:

          1. You’re physically removed from the people you hit on. They will most likely ignore you if not interested, or possibly send a nasty message, but there won’t be any violence.

          2. You have a written record of any communication, so you can objectively dispute claims of creepy behavior.

          3. If you’re on a dating site, there’s no ambiguity about people’s intentions. (Normally, this is a negative, since it puts far more pressure on a first meeting than organically developing contacts, but it’s good from a safety perspective here.)

        • Alexander Stanislaw says:

          As far as I know almost none of us on this blog know who you are and thus would have no way to thwart your goals (and frankly why would we?). And if you don’t want to put your goals here then fine, but knowing them is an important first step since you can’t win at life if you don’t know what winning is. So what if some people figure out what your goals are? Most people are self-centered, they care a lot less about your goals than you do.

          Secondly, I propose moving this conversation to another forum, maybe LessWrong or Reddit. Its getting a bit long.

          And finally, what are you looking for? Advice or understanding? I think your problems are quite soluble. But you have to want to solve them. Even if you can’t fix society.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          Secondly, I propose moving this conversation to another forum, maybe LessWrong or Reddit. Its getting a bit long.

          Only if our esteemed host requests that I do so. At the moment, I would prefer to continue presenting my personal experience as a case study of exactly the sort of problem Scott Alexander is discussing in the OP (as it relates to gender issues, at least), and would prefer to do so for as long as it remains a useful and relevant one.

      • Alrenous says:

        That looks like dodging the question to me. I have to ask again: do you want me to admit your situation is hopeless, or do you want me to articulate the logical ramifications of your assertions? If you don’t know, go away and figure it out.

        If both, pick which one you want me to do first.

        I have to do the latter for a sec.

        1. This looks like; “I don’t think it’s safe to tell you what I want.”
        Okay. But that would mean this whole conversation is pointless, except for 3, which means I already know what your goals are.

        Put together, we have “I can’t tell you, but I’ve already told you.” You have to drop one of them. Either stop pretending you’re not telling me or actually stop telling.

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          What Ialdabaoth Actually Wants:

          I want people who will be there for me when the Darkness takes hold.

          I want people who will listen to my dreams and not laugh.

          I want people who will call me at 3 in the morning to tell me their car broke down, and let me pick them up and get them a tow and give them the keys to my car for three days until theirs is fixed.

          I want people who will take me to the hospital and yell at the doctor until I’m admitted, and look me in the eye and tell me that it’s bullshit that I have to go through this bureaucracy and that of course I’m not faking it.

          I want people who will look at my artwork and tell me that it’s cool, and not tell me that it’s creepy-weird and that I shouldn’t have drawn something like that.

          I want people who will sit down with me after I’ve lost my job, and tell me all the amazing things I’ve done that they’ve personally witnessed, and that of course they don’t think any worse of me because I sometimes can’t handle Real Life.

          I want people who will remember the time I saved their child from drowning, and not begrudge me a few hours of suicidal ideation because it makes them look bad in front of their friends to admit that they know me.

          I want people who will remember who taught them how to program, and will tell their boss “If we’re still looking for a lead programmer, I know this great guy – he’s high maintenance but he’s brilliant and he taught me C++…”

          I want people who will come over when I invite them for dinner.

          I want people who will tell someone who is being mean to me that they can fuck right off, that Ialdabaoth has earned their friendship and that until they’re willing to fly halfway across the country to sit in for a parent that decided to not show up for graduation, they can keep their snide comments to themselves.

          That’s what I want.

        • Elissa says:

          hugging laptop is not working please help 🙁

        • Alrenous says:

          Many don’t know what they want, knowing is a hugely powerful tool.

          Some general comments of possible interest, even if only to know whether we see eye to eye:

          Unfortunately, a lot of those things are extremely difficult. They shouldn’t be, but they are.

          Some of them are actually important. As in, it’s worth giving up science and bowing to Catholicism if it makes them happen and being an atheist prevents them from happening.

          Some of them are the result of people pretty much sucking. I don’t know if that’s new or not.

          Of course I’m going to say focus on one of those. If you’re commenting, either be frivolous, or attempt to use the comment to further that goal. Is that obvious? I have no idea if that’s obvious.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Ialdabaoth, as a small token of… whatever, I’ll now go pray for you for about twenty minutes straight. (It seems more demanding and dignified than just going “>I know TFW sadfrog.jpg”.)

          As a possible emergency intervention, though: go to a Walmart, buy these and swallow all of them. My sources tell me that’s how it’s done in America. 200mg sounds just right for first time. Make sure you’re in a comfortable and relaxing setting.

  90. Pingback: Convoluted reasoning | Ctenophoric!

  91. ADifferentAnonymous says:

    @Rationalist

    I’ve decided I’m committed enough to the idea of a place where one can have a legitimate discussion of contentious issues, to engage with your claims.

    Your main contention seems to be ‘Ialdabaoth should learn Game’.

    There are two main objection against this:
    I.) Game is immoral towards women
    II.) Game is for getting sex, and Ialdabaoth wants emotional companionship

    On I.) my SSC-style steelmanning of your position, which you may disagree with but I do by request, is to build on the ‘badboy alphas are like chocolate’ concept. The thrust of the argument would be to say that Game mostly boils down to ‘making yourself attractive’ in various ways and does not actually harm women. But since the meta-technique is to treat women as black boxes, there are two ways to make this claim: one is to say that A) revealed preferences are always real preferences, and the other is to say that B) the techniques, though generated without regard to women’s internal well-being, fortuitously turn out not to be harmful.

    A) is a broad enough philosophical point that I won’t go into it without being sure if it’s your position. B) would require going into what the specific techniques are. I don’t know them well enough to comment, but people I trust consider them harmful, so my prior is against you.

    As for II.), I’d steelman you as saying that the increased status and confidence from being an accomplished PUA will also be useful in getting more serious relationships. My culturally osmosed beliefs suggest this is true, but I haven’t observed for myself. That said, I think it’d be effective at the narrow task of getting people to enter relationships with you, but if you accomplish this by projecting a facade, things may not go well if you try to let it down… I don’t know.

    • Multiheaded says:

      ^ This is endorsed by my stupid mean Stalinist self.

    • Nornagest says:

      But since the meta-technique is to treat women as black boxes, there are two ways to make this claim: one is to say that A) revealed preferences are always real preferences, and the other is to say that B) the techniques, though generated without regard to women’s internal well-being, fortuitously turn out not to be harmful.

      I hardly know a thing about Game, but it seems to me that there’s a third option. Naive behavior isn’t a NOOP; it has effects on the well-being (short- and long-term alike) of people exposed to it; and more importantly, people’s naive behavior varies quite a bit. It’s conceivable that despite introducing potentially quite serious harms and failure modes in certain personality types, the deltas are overall positive in e.g. the specific case of sexually frustrated nerds that’d otherwise fall into the Nice Guy (^annoying trademark symbol) stereotype.

      That seems pretty plausible to me, really. I see an awful lot of misery following guys that match that stereotype, and not all of it attaches to the guys in question.

      • Multiheaded says:

        Um, but this seems to be contradicted by how many disgusting and rapey advocates of “Game” insist that they were Nice Guys before.

        That’s why I’m making the distinction: Ialdabaoth!NiceGuy will probably stay fundamentally nice and decent to people however he adjusts his attitude. He might try to pull off all the dangerous alpha male airs or whatever and still he’d know right from wrong, and would refrain from following the awful evil intermittent reinforcement “advice”, even though he might not see through the lie that it’s What Gender Is About.

        On the other hand, PUA!NiceGuy never had integrity or real respect for women as actual living breathing individuals; PUA didn’t make him the scumbag he is, it merely gave a very different expression to his worst traits. It appears very dubious whether such expression, socially harmful as it is, does not outweight decent men finding self-confidence through PUA advice.

        (Dear MRAs and reactionaries and such; please don’t fucking motte-and-bailey me here on the intermittent reinforcement part. Oh, I know what you’re going to insinuate: that personally you never used it, and still got laid, but it’s horrible misandry and intrusion upon your turf to allow decent people to denounce it. The motte is that you’ve never actually done shitty things like that – which I’m entirely willing to believe – while the bailey is that feminists shouldn’t have the power to stop PUA from including such mechanisms. Well, fuck your shit. #ValarMorghulis)

        • Nornagest says:

          Um, but this seems to be contradicted by how many disgusting and rapey advocates of “Game” insist that they were Nice Guys before.

          Was it not clear from context that I meant Ialdabaoth’s cluster of frustrated nerds, not nascent Heartistes? I just didn’t want to use names because, y’know, that’s kinda rude.

          In the case of Heartiste et al., I take those claims about as seriously as I take Christian revivalists insisting they were miserable sinners before they found the Lord. Oh, I don’t doubt that they feel that way, and indeed in a few cases I might even agree with them if I was fully informed, but it’s mostly marketing. Well, marketing and the unfortunate fuzziness of the “Nice Guy” label.

          (I kind of want to argue some of the conflations you’re making, too, but that’d explode and I don’t actually care that much beyond a kind of vague moral disapproval. I’ll leave it to the actual pickup students here.)

        • Fadeway says:

          >disgusting and rapey advocates of “Game”

          Does your dislike for the group make it permissible for you to be so rude?

          >will probably stay fundamentally nice and decent to people however he adjusts his attitude.

          Belief osmosis is real. Follow PUA blogs long enough and eventually you’ll start seeing their beliefs as normal. First it looks completely silly because everything you’ve been exposed to goes against it, then it looks okay-ish because you’ve heard it before, and after a year or two it’s the idea you’ve seen most evidence to and probably true. I’ve been doing stuff like this for years for beliefs that would be useful to have.

        • Armstrong For President 2020 says:

          @Fadeaway,

          No, it’s the fact that he’s immune to banning which makes it permissible.

        • ozymandias says:

          What? Multi’s been banned before. And while one may say that “disgusting” is very rude, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to use “rapey” to describe, say, Roosh V, who says that “no”, in some contexts, means “don’t give up now!” I mean, gosh, if he’s not rapey who is?

        • Ragnhild says:

          Multiheaded:

          Your “bailey” is a lot more defensible than your “motte”. If you think that you have never reinforced anything that anyone did, or that you never failed to reinforce anything nice, then you are just delusional.

        • If Roissy believes that no doesn’t mean no, stop means no, he could negotiate it as a safeword. For some reason, he doesn’t. :-/

        • jaimeastorga2000 says:

          If Roissy believes that no doesn’t mean no, stop means no, he could negotiate it as a safeword. For some reason, he doesn’t. :-/

          Roosh V and Roissy/Heartiste are not the same man. That aside, if you are actually curious about the reason they don’t, have you tried asking them, or their followers?

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          That’s why I’m making the distinction: Ialdabaoth!NiceGuy will probably stay fundamentally nice and decent to people however he adjusts his attitude. He might try to pull off all the dangerous alpha male airs or whatever and still he’d know right from wrong, and would refrain from following the awful evil intermittent reinforcement “advice”, even though he might not see through the lie that it’s What Gender Is About.

          Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it.

    • I suggest that Ialdabaoth is not in desperate need of Game– anyone who has an attractive woman do a two year campaign to be his Manic Pixie Dream Girl is at least well past the 101 level.

      • Multiheaded says:

        This seems orthogonal; in the real world, as it’s easy to forget among the poisonous PUA discourse, it’s not completely unheard of for attractive women to pursue “low-status” men in a very insistent way. The thing is, this doesn’t even match the conventional narrative on sexuality either, and that’s why it’s not cognitively available, but still there’s plenty of anecdotes for this happening.

        (In a darker turn, my gay, incredibly nerdy ex-bf was once raped by an attractive and popular girl in his circle of friends. She had previously pursued him for weeks.)

        • Ialdabaoth says:

          This seems orthogonal; in the real world, as it’s easy to forget among the poisonous PUA discourse, it’s not completely unheard of for attractive women to pursue “low-status” men in a very insistent way. The thing is, this doesn’t even match the conventional narrative on sexuality either, but still there’s plenty of anecdotes for this happening.

          This is an INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT point, and yet another frustration I have with Social Justice as delivered, as opposed to Social Justice as promised.

          I want to be able to own my gender.

          I want to be able to declare “I identify as a dominant heterosexual man who happens to be genderqueer”, and not have to defend to other SJ-types that just because I’m dominant and heterosexual and male, does not mean that I’m not made extremely uncomfortable when pressured or guilted or seduced into a relationship.

          I want to be able to define my identity and preferences with the same level of fidelity that a transexual pansexual asexual trisexual genderfluid genderbent genderqueer would.

          I want the right to be sensitive. I want the right to acknowledge that sometimes I need support. I want the right to assert my autonomy outside the boundaries of the patriarchy.

          The problem is that the things I want are close enough to the patriarchal ideals that everyone assumes they should be easy for me, because Privilege.

          Well, look at it this way. When there’s a giant magnet nearby, it can be hard to not get sucked into it. But it’s even harder not to get sucked into it, the closer to it you already are. Inverse square laws are a bitch.

          With classical patriarchal gender roles so readily available, it’s nearly impossible to stake out a territory anywhere near them and still maintain specific important differences. Not only do the Patriarchal types demand conformity, but the SJW types demand the exact same level of conformity.

          You can’t just say, “I enjoy negotiated D/s relationships with young, attractive, submissive women, but I demand that those relationships are explicitly negotiated and assented to, and I will not enter into those relationships with someone whose emotional and psychological development preclude a healthy outcome”. Because people just look at you and say “dude, that is so not Game.”, and other people look at you and say “nice justification, you exploitative jackass”.

          And then you push on for years and it keeps wearing on you, and one side is saying “we know you’re a douchebag like us, quit pretending and come to our side”, and the other side is saying “we know you’re a douchebag like them, quit pretending and fuck off”, and eventually you start asking “AM I a douchebag?”, and then your confidence is shot and you can’t get anywhere worth getting to and it’s all terrible.

        • Nornagest says:

          this doesn’t even match the conventional narrative on sexuality

          There’s more than one pop narrative on sexuality. I think this one’s an instance of the Lover as Healer pattern, where someone walks into their broken partner’s life and makes them functional; it’s at least as old as Chrétien de Troyes.

          In the wild, you don’t often see it used as a romantic script — probably because it seems so unrewarding for the active partner. But it’s definitely there in media, and not exclusively as a fantasy for the passive partner.

        • Matthew says:

          it’s not completely unheard of for attractive women to pursue “low-status” men in a very insistent way.

          Several people throughout this thread seem to use attractive/high-status and unattractive/low-status interchangably. I think this is a mistake, and it tends to muddy a lot of issues. Attractiveness obviously contributes to status, but it’s not determinative. “Attractive woman pursues low-status man” sounds a lot less implausible to me than “attractive woman pursues unattractive man”. Although I suspect some people might argue the reverse. But everything I’ve ever seen argues for assortive mating based on attractiveness directly, not mediated through status.

        • ozymandias says:

          A lot of people are into bringing home sad-eyed three-legged puppies and birds with broken wings, or their romantic equivalents, and that trait is basically a prereq for wanting to be a MPDG. So I suspect that Ialdabaoth has a set of traits that makes him very, very attractive to lovers of sad-eyed three-legged puppies, and extremely unattractive to others.

        • nydwracu says:

          I think this one’s an instance of the Lover as Healer pattern, where someone walks into their broken partner’s life and makes them functional; it’s at least as old as Chrétien de Troyes.

          In the wild, you don’t often see it used as a romantic script

          I was going to say that I definitely have seen it, but I don’t think the evidence I have is sufficient to distinguish it from the “chicks dig certain types of signals/behavior patterns that are otherwise generally considered negative” romantic script PUAs talk about.

          [I have noticed that my attractiveness is directly correlated to the number of times I’m told that I look like a spree shooter. It is somewhat annoying that [humans are wired|society is set up] in such a way that I want that number to go up.]

          I wonder how much of the existence of that script is due to other people not realizing that distinction has to be made.

    • Rationalist says:

      “A) revealed preferences are always real preferences, and the other is to say that B) the techniques, though generated without regard to women’s internal well-being, fortuitously turn out not to be harmful.”

      – neither of these capture what I see as reality. Women of dating age (18-50 let’s say) are not totally coherent rational agents with totally stable preferences. Just like the rest of us!

      In near mode they have a need for Alpha Badboys. In far mode they have a need to put out the impression that they are good and chaste and just want a “nice guy”.

      Similarly, in near mode I have a need for chocolate. In far mode I have a goal to be slim. Banning all chocolate ever would not be utility maximizing for me; removing all alphas ever would not be utility maximizing for women, and I don’t think we have passed the optimum point yet. Far from it, in fact.

      Also there is the orthogonal issue of just how “bad” a man is. He might do really nasty things like dump a girl when she is most attached to him, deliberately dump her and re-pick her up (?) just for sport, etc. Or he could lay on just enough “edge” to get to sex and then basically revert to the beta-provider strategy and go introduce her to his parents. Think of this as being like diet chocolate bars with a varying proportion of sugar versus saccharine.

      Game is ultimately a tool and some guys abuse it. The majority of “game” men I have ever interacted with do not do so, and feedback I have heard from women confirms that a lot of utility and happiness is brought into the world because of it. In fact I have never heard a woman complain that a specific man was too much of an asshole because of game, the only things I have ever heard (based off actual events) have been that men are too beta or that they have been too weird (i.e. trying to game but messing it up).

      • Multiheaded says:

        In fact I have never heard a woman complain that a specific man was too much of an asshole because of game, the only things I have ever heard (based off actual events) have been that men are too beta or that they have been too weird (i.e. trying to game but messing it up).

        This is like the PUA version of the most common brand of Stalinist apologetics.

        • Rationalist says:

          Multiheaded: “This is like the PUA version of the most common brand of Stalinist apologetics.”

          Is there a version of Godwin’s Law for comparing someone/something with Stalin?

          Anyway, the quality of debate I am seeing here continues to disappoint me. I come up with evidence and arguments, I get compared to Stalin/Stalinism. I ask to be steelmanned, I actually get strawmanned.

          I feel the take-away from this thread is that as much as a particular community claims to be interested in rationality, group affiliation politics will always take precedence. In other words, you can be rational about an argument as long as the other person agrees with your core group affiliation politics. As soon as you get someone with an actually good argument that violates the group politic, all the dirty tricks are fair game, people “can’t be bothered” to obey the well know rules of how to have a productive, rational disagreement. (Which I am pretty sure exclude comparing someone to a Stalinist Apologetic, a form of the worst argument ever)

          Topics on Slate Star Codex tend to center vaguely around this meta-philosophical idea of how people evaluate arguments for their beliefs, and especially whether this process is spectacularly broken in a way that may or may not doom us all.

          +1 for “spectacularly broken”.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            That’s because we’re the actual rationalists.

            They’re the rationalizers.

            Come over to the dark side – we don’t make you live lies that hurt you.

            We take evolution seriously and try to get at the truth. They take tumblr and people who have a preferred pronoun seriously.

        • Multiheaded says:

          @Rationalist:

          All I’m saying is just like how some people on the far left respond to being challenged with some bad aspects of the actually existing socialist states with repeating ad nauseam that they weren’t communist enough, rather than examine their idea of “Communism” and whether it has structural flaws that make problematic implementation inevitable… you’re talking about how women always love some ideal “Alpha” act, and therefore whenever they get disappointed or harmed or squicked out or fucked over by a PUA practicioner, the only problem that’s even conceivable to you is his divergence from this “Alpha” ideal.

        • AJD says:

          I come up with evidence and arguments, I get compared to Stalin/Stalinism. I ask to be steelmanned, I actually get strawmanned.

          …Trying to come up with a good pun about how surely being compared to Stalin is being “steelmanned”, but it’s not quite coming.

        • Oligopsony says:

          It’s generally leftcoms and Trotskyists who pull the no true Scotsman card here, rather than us MLs, who are more willing to dive into substantive, rather than semantic, apologetics. Moreover the leftcom version of the semantic argument is perfectly valid.

        • Multiheaded says:

          Fuck, I knew that someone would add nuance to dispel a nice and concise cheap shot. 🙁 I knew that, I just used doublethink to draw a comparison a liberal could make and understand.

      • ADifferentAnonymous says:

        Do I correctly infer you position to be that far-mode and near-mode preferences both deserve weight, and that far mode should have some ability to override near mode but not unlimited ability? I’m curious how you feel about some stores’ decision to remove candy from the ‘impulse’ sections before checkout; is this a service or a disservice to customers? If it helps some people achieve their far-mode goals of minimizing chocolate consumption, is that good, bad, or neutral?

        And do you acknowledge that there can be situations where it’s wrong to ‘help’ someone satisfy their near mode desires (extreme example: a heroin addict who in far mode wants to get clean but will shoot up if you hand them a needle)? And if you think this can only happen in pathological cases like drug addiction and not with things like sex or chocolate… well, I know where the debate should focus next.

        So my point is that if you acknowledge that such a thing is possible, then it would be ‘fortuitous’ if the black-box optimization approach to seduction did not create such a situation. This is possible, but I think most of us would want some evidence of that before trying procedures generated in such a fundamentally unsafe way.

        Also, as I understand it, the objection to game isn’t just about alpha behavior; it’s claimed that some of the tools are inherently harmful. One example I’ve heard cited (by anti-game sources, so if you tell me this is a strawman of game I’ll believe you) is ‘negging’, which sounds like deliberately lowering the target’s self-esteem. This is harmful, whether you segue it into a one-night stand or a relationship.

        (The best steelman I can come up with for negging is that the target’s response is “I know my own value, so if this guy thinks it’s low then he must have really high standards, which reflects well on him”. This requires that women’s self-esteem be stable in the face of men’s comments. The preceding sentence sends my Conventional Wisdom Module into gales of laughter.)

    • Rationalist says:

      “As for II.), I’d steelman you as saying that the increased status and confidence from being an accomplished PUA will also be useful in getting more serious relationships. My culturally osmosed beliefs suggest this is true, but I haven’t observed for myself.”

      – yes, this is in fact true, and kind of the whole point of the exercise. The transition from sexing a girl to being her boyfriend is as easy as falling off a log. “Hey, we’ve just had great sex together. Can I also look after you and buy you presents and stuff?”

      The transition the other way is MUCH more difficult. Compare: “Hey, I take care of you and buy you presents and run errands for you. Can I have sex with you now?”

      • ozymandias says:

        I suspect the boyfriend –> sex and sex –> boyfriend transitions are about equally easy, but the friend –> sex and friend –> boyfriend transitions are both fairly difficult.

        • Sniffnoy says:

          While I would expect you to be right in general (the hard barrier being the mating/non-mating barrier), I know at least one person who would say the hard barrier is the romance/non-romance barrier. Obviously this a pretty useless statement about what happens in general, I’m just making the required “be careful with universal statements” so we can acknowledge there are exceptions and then go back to talking in generalities. 😛

        • Rationalist says:

          The point relevant to the discussion that started this massive thread is that men like Ialdabaoth could improve their lives, and probably those of others, by learning how to make women want to have sex with them.

  92. Tab Atkins says:

    I’m trying, in a sincere and non-snarky-sounding way, to say “you finally wrote a post about social justice that I agree with”, but I’m not sure how to do so unambiguously, so just take it as a given that I’m being sincere and not snarky in that.

    As a vocal feminist, a strong trans/queer ally, and plenty against racism too, the (many) groups that adopt the “only powerful groups can be *ist” are *pants-shittingly stupid*, and have no idea what they’re talking about.

    • Sniffnoy says:

      Regardless of whether you find them “pants-shittingly stupid”, they remain pretty influential, and if I’m not mistaken a lot of us bought into it for a long time. (And once you fall in you’re trapped, because their epistemic standards and norms of discourse are so fucked up.) And the way they gain people is by equivocation — you accept these common sense feminist principles, right? Well, great, you’re a feminist, you’re one of the good people. So, you also accept these more specific positions… right? I mean, you’re a feminist, right? You’re not one of those misogynists, are you? No. Of course you’re not. Not agreeing, or noticing that the objectionable parts don’t actually follow from the common sense parts, isn’t really an option, or so it’s made to seem.

      Point is, while I’m glad to see you’re on what I at least would consider the side of sense on this particular issue, it’s very frustrating to see you continually, apparently inadvertently, encouraging people to jump into the maw of the SJ machine. (I’m surprised you use the term “social justice” to describe the side you’re on, by the way; to my mind that’s prety firmly associated with the position you call “pants-shittingly stupid”. And you’re probably already aware of this, but don’t call yourself an “ally” in front of them unless you’re prepared to agree with everything they say!)

      I mean, I expect you would disagree that you are doing that. But as best I can tell, you seem to generally be direction-pushing, not target-hitting. Which is exactly how it all starts. You can’t rely on people to just use their common sense to notice the problems with the groups you call “pants-shittingly stupid”, because, as Ialdabaoth has pointed out elsewhere in the thread, feminism and etc. are (not necessarily wrongly!) all about using principle rather than common sense! One way or another, they draw in a lot of smart people, so I think it’s worth the time to put up some barriers against that. (This is why I can’t say I’m a feminist without then going “Well, I’m what you might call a ‘small-f feminist’…”) (Yes I am aware there is not a literal Feminist Part; I still think the intent is pretty clear.)

    • ADifferentAnonymous says:

      “you finally wrote a post about social justice that I agree with”

      FYI https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/. Probably old hat as far as you’re concerned, but I thought you should know it exists.

      That post occupies a pedestal in my mind as a shining example of bias overcome.

  93. Nekko says:

    Motherfuck your genius mind, I loved every inch of that delicious rant. You definitely sound like a smart and thoughtful individual/

    Will you have my man-babies before you’re eaten alive by the Social Justice Tumblr Snowflakes?

  94. Anonymous says:

    So… just to be clear:
    “White Privilege” (and I suppose this applies to “female privilege” as well) just refers to the fact that some people have the privilege of not having to go through certain kinds of situations that other people constantly and consistently face due to a certain characteristic. Like white people may never understand the horror/humiliation/feeling ever-so-violated and dehumanized when a stranger LITERALLY RUNS ACROSS THE STORE to put their hands through YOUR hair without even so much as a word to you all because you are black/of black descent and your hair is super interesting to them (and you know this because it seems to only happen to black/mixed women). It’s obvious that many people will not be able to relate to that. It’s a horror that white people don’t typically have to deal with–so you can call it an advantage (hence privilege) because they won’t be distracted by such things, pretty much ever in their life.
    Now, I don’t fully agree with the png apart from the point on taking the focus off their concerns and making it about you (which happens quite a bit). My opinion is, I think that outsiders or those with this kind of perceived privilege should be a part of the conversation. Not really to add their input unless to ask questions to clarify but actually to listen to the concerns said and to keep an eye out for themselves to see if they themselves or anyone else is participating in such actions and also to honestly think about these very real issues. So going back to the hair example, if I described that situation to my white friends (honestly I hate describing people this way but hey) I don’t expect them to tell me they’ve experienced the same thing. And if they do, I would think them liars, especially if they told me their stories without even acknowledging my feelings of horror because if you really experienced this you would know how much my horror needs to be vented instead of just brushed aside like it happens to everyone. (Because it doesn’t).
    Now “female privilege” — yes, there are numerous issues that women face that men will never have to face. And I think a good portion of the complaining is due to what was mentioned as “whiny male privilege”. The issue with this I find is that just like prejudice against minorities is not something just inside their head, the same goes with prejudice against females. It’s a fact that women taking on a similar personality as a man will be seen as bossy, whereas the men will simply be seen as good leaders. More people will vote for a man to be in a leader position over a woman with the same qualities. Why? I don’t know but I think that it is something that we should acknowledge and not just pretend that it doesn’t exist because you feel like it constantly paints white/straight/males to be the bad guys. Prejudice is a real thing. Everyone will experience some type but the ones that are detrimental don’t really target white/straight/males. It’s just how the world is and before we can make things better, we have to acknowledge and be truthful about the state of our society.
    After stating all of this — naturally W/S/Ms will feel a bit threatened. If 5 people will be the top people of a company, and they were all historically W/S/Ms and now a push has been made to diversify, it means less spots will be filled by W/S/Ms. So those vying for the positions of that category will feel the pressure and call it unfair and that “minorities are stealing their spot.” They will say this without acknowledging that it should’ve been diversified from the very beginning — so that is really why I agree with the “whiny male privilege” (read entitled).
    Another thing is there’s no such thing as reverse racism, but racism does require power — even if it is power of a particular situation. So your example of blacks chasing out a white person for being white is racism because the power is in the group. Whites traditionally have the power because in this society, there are certain things that police will do to a black man that won’t happen to a white man and other things like that.

    Those are really my only points to add/address. I agree that the language being thrown around in the name of social justice doesn’t consistently have the same meaning but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use these terms or even that these terms don’t matter. We can’t invalidate a groups experience all because we have not experienced it ourselves. We actually have to acknowledge, investigate, and react/change. We can’t just ignore it and hope it goes away. Racism and sexism aren’t going to go away by being ignored. It will go away because ALL make an effort to change.
    With these things being social constructs in our society, you can’t blame a particular person/group of people unless they know about it and refuse to change certain things. But all must make an effort for this to work.

    (As a post note: I don’t agree with modern feminism — women shouldn’t have to do all the work to make all of these changes but they also shouldn’t cast aside things like their dignity to be “just like men”. It’s a very unhealthy trend to think that just because you want your daughters to be empowered, you shouldn’t teach them to cook or clean, have multiple partners, etc. That is in no way empowering. Complaining about things aren’t really empowering either. Being educated and knowing when and who to correct when it comes to people’s actions/words is, however.)

    • Anon says:

      So, uh, part of the point is that “just refers to” is, like, patently untrue. That’s maybe what you mean, but by no means is your definition the only one in common use.

  95. Jason Macdee says:

    Problem solved: [un]conscious [individual/cultural/institutional] prejudice. Throw all the -ist words out and start again.

  96. Anonymous says:

    First off, this “everyone is racist” bullshit needs to stop. Because not everyone is racist. Nor is everyone sexist.

    Imagine you live in a world where everyone looks the same. Biases can’t form against race/sex/gender because there are no differences. The only things that matter are intellectual differences, like religion (or a lack there of) and philosophy.

    Let us call this world Web 1.0. A world where even if such features were claimed, you could not truly know the truth of the matter, so you disregarded such claims and based all judgments about a person’s character on their individual actions instead of arbitrarily assigning them a preconceived identity based on their gonads or the amount of melanin in their largest organ.

    Now, from this world of anonymity you step out into… this… mess. Suddenly race, gender, and all that nonsense. One of which is based in laughable pseudoscience, the other based in arbitrary societal norms set tens of millennia ago. Seriously whenever I see race/gender discussion I feel like I am stepping into an alien, bizarro-world and I wish everyone would just shut up and get back to things that matter like world hunger or the economy or I don’t know, ANYTHING ELSE.

    Racism is a function of stereotyping. But while a square is also a rectangle, not all rectangles are squares. Everyone STEREOTYPES. Not everyone is RACIST. Stereotypes can be based off of anything, like philosophy/ideology, and for that matter, stereotypes CAN be useful.

    If I encounter a person alone on the street at night, I am suspicious no matter WHAT their skin color is and no matter WHAT they have hanging from their body. I am equally distrustful of EVERYONE. And so should you, because WHITEY is just as likely to turn around and shoot you then rob you blind as BLACKIE. Hell, they might be in cahoots. I don’t care who it is or how many kids you have walking beside you, they might be trained to help you steal. I am keeping my eyes on ALL OF YOU.

    Onto point two.

    “So, it turns out that privilege gets used perfectly reasonably.”

    Sorry no. None of the examples presented of what “people actually mean” are reasonable, either.

    1 Ignores, no, outright DENIES the possibility of insights from an outside, neutral observer. No, I will NOT apologize for seeing something from an unbiased perspective, and offering my unbiased observations, especially when you are fishing for comments by airing out your laundry in the first place.

    2 Is utterly, utterly, utterly ridiculous. Your pain is more often than not completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. When it’s the focus, I’m not there anyway because you moping about your perceived pain at the hands of your stereotyped vision of another racial/gender group is not worthy of my attention. (In other words, I’ve never been in an SJW discussion to begin with.)

    3 In the grand scheme of things your pain does not matter. Nor does mine. The world spins on even if innocent children are murdered in cold blood. It spins on even while people are dying of starvation. Humans are not particularly important to anyone but themselves, and even that’s not universally true. So no, I will not apologize for being truthful and making you face reality.

    4 Your fears and concerns and troubles wouldn’t trigger annoyance if they were important.

    TBH, I am not entirely convinced that SJWs aren’t a massive army of trolls dedicated to making actually oppressed people look bad. They represent the worst side of everyone who has ever been treated poorly, the side that cries out for attention and seeks to oppress in return, instead of equality. They want to pretend they are being helpful, when they push racism/sexism more than the average person.

    I find it incredibly sad that today, decades later, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech’s meaning is utterly lost… on many of the people who he was fighting, and ultimately, died for.

    The worst part is SJWs are all incredibly hypocritical. Their own issues are of tantamount importance; if they don’t agree with other SJWs (like say a womyn vs a fat acceptance) then they will get just as shitty towards each other. Top it off with the fact that we still have no SJWs for incest couples, animal lovers, or pedophiles – all who are just as helpless as transgendered and gay people to change how their brains or emotions work. In fact, if you try to compare them to any of these groups, they will be outright offended.

    My attitude: So you wanna be gay? Okay, whatever. See if I care. You wanna be transgendered? That’s nice. You a woman? So what. Who cares. You wanna fuck a dog? Just don’t do it where I can see it. You wanna touch kids? Get parents’ permission.

    I literally don’t give a shit. About anything. The Romans were cool with all kinds of shit, and every society’s norms are pointlessly arbitrary to begin with, so why should I? (And before everyone says BUT KIDS NO SEX IS BAD that’s utter horseshit, I was a kid doing sexual stuff and I am just fine. Few people admit to it because doing so will destroy their reputation and credibility, thus leading to the only cases of known child-sexual activity being rapes and thus a hilariously inaccurate statistic which then leads to confirmation bias and taboo and welp, better not say anything to indicate otherwise because it will destroy my reputation and credibility. In fact, I’m only doing it here because I’m posting anonymously.)

    The things I do give a shit about:
    Training children to believe in things that have no evidence or validity to them. There’s a reason the religious industry is so profitable. (Faith healers, mail-order video churches, etc.)
    Ignoring the issue of global warming.
    Allowing money and class to continue to control our lives.

    And unlike whiny SJWs who do nothing but whine on their blogs that only fellow SJWs and people with way more time on their hands than they need, I am actually doing something about it, if in the only way I know how. I am writing a novel where all these issues will be made very clear in the storyline. And instead of being a self-righteous, dogmatic spiel, it will be seen from every side and delivered in a way that allows the reader to make their own decisions on what’s right or wrong and hopefully impact their everyday behavior. Meanwhile there’s a fun story on top of all the gritty grimdark world of the present. And if I’m lucky it might one day pay my bills.

  97. TallDave says:

    I always wonder what the annual net intergender wealth transfer looks like in America, marriage included. My guess is something around a trillion dollars a year in favor of women, or about 5-10% of GDP.

    But that’s one of those subjects like crime statistics where too many progressives are adamantly opposed to reality.

    BTW the last comment to the dog/lizard story is priceless.

  98. Larry says:

    Eric S. Raymond wrote something on this subject a few years ago that you would probably find interesting. He calls it the Kafaktrap: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122

  99. CaptainBooshi says:

    Scott, I would like to really thank you for having the ‘content note’ at the beginning of the post here. I was able to see that and put off reading this post until I was in the right kind of mood for it, and it really improved my experience. I know it seems silly, but had I started reading it at the time, I would not have been able to stop, because it would have been a little unfinished task just bothering away at me inside my head.

    I don’t really have anything to contribute to the actual thread here that I haven’t said elsewhere, so I’m not going to bother with that. The only thing I do want to note is that it gave me a warm little feeling when you said:

    I can’t speak for people at large, but that’s the way I view the words, and that’s the viewpoint I usually see espoused about how they should be viewed, so it’s evidence for me that at the very least I’m in the good part of the movement.

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  104. Matthew says:

    I doubt I’ll be pointing out something anyone else couldn’t figure out with very little effort, but I now have a perfect example of a debate with horrible motte-and-bailey tactics employed on both sides of it with equal (to a rough approximation) abandon.

    Motte A — goyim: I’m not antisemitic, I’m just opposed to the government of Israel. (Often followed rapidly by a return to criticisms that conflate Israel and Jews.)

    Motte B — liberal-but-mindkilled Jew (and some goyim, in the US): I don’t approve of the Netanyahu government, but I support Israel’s right to exist. (Responds with condemnation whenever liberal-and-not-mindkilled Jews suggest actuallyforreals withholding support from the Israeli government when it does something appalling.)

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  107. Sheikh Yerbooty says:

    If you a white kid who got bullied in school by groups of black kids who singled you out for being white(and made it clear that they picked on you because of your color) then yes that IS racism! Racism is all about group identity. The blacklisting of Donald Sterling is a good example of the new McCarthyism and left-wing character assassination. All these radical bloggers are just self-rightous social climbers. REAL social justice isn’t what they’re seeking…..They simply want to be popular and boost their reptuation.