Every time I try to argue for intellectual honesty, I get labeled “part of the problem”. Every time I try to encourage people to listen to others and treat them equally because it’s a good thing to do and not because they identify as a feminist, I am met with hostility. If I make friends with someone of a different background than me and then mention them at all in a discussion about equality, I am accused of tokenism, because I’m cis-het white male scum (hey, thanks for asking, but I’m not all those). I am tired of this abusive rhetoric. I want real feminism, real equality, whatever label you want to use, and it starts with treating people with respect and conducting honest dialogue.
Be very careful about how you interact with these people, the mere act of following a person on Twitter who disagrees with them can land you up on a list that makes you unemployable. They claim to be feminists, and because that is a real issue today people believe them by default; without ever questioning whether they are the extremists in ways that the article explains.
The sad truth is that they are damaging the very movements that they claim to support: legitimate victims of discrimination are voiceless against the deafening noise of "wolf! Wolf!"
There's a cadre of people who troll this site for crimethink, then screencap it and post it to Twitter under the hashtag #hnwatch. If you have your name or company in your profile, be careful about posting here too.
Woah, that hashtag is really interesting. I wonder if the concentration of HN, and the tendancy to be identifiable led to something like that. Though Slashdot was around for much longer, Reddit too, and their communities dwarf HN there isn't something similar.
Feels a bit like political news, just waiting for a gaffe to report on, or something to take out of context.
Reddit has loads of warring groups that link to comments, and either critique the threads or hijack and vote brigade them, depending on the group or who you ask. Its the most worthless type of internet activism, people unwilling or unable to submit to rational debate about an issue, either because they are too lazy or the issue is too emotive, so they resort to factionalism.
These lists have started coming under fire in the UK for libel. I don't know if it will get any traction but my understanding is the standard there is much lower than in the US.
Casey's answer is what I was on about. A good amount of employers in a specific industry (will not name it, as that could result in a fight) will not employ based on whether you appear in those lists.
Indeed. I have hope that people are starting to realise it.
A lot of people would dismiss it as a conspiracy theory, it's certainly not as elaborate as that: it is merely human nature doing the worst that it possibly can. These people genuinely believe that they are in the right. That's the most progress I have made: I'm still uncertain as to how to re-educate them.
Ironically, by dismissing your input because of your race or gender, they are engaging in the exact behavior they are purportedly against. That kind of juvenile hypocrisy should be avoided by everyone, but sadly, is not.
They've just redefined what it means to be feminist, liberal, or whatever the opposite of racist is, and taken it to a left-wing extremist position. It's their Nietzsche's Übermensch, just anything but white, male, straight, etc - which in effect makes the murder advocates just as bad as the nazi's or any entity that advocated ethnic cleansings. At least they're still at just words now.
It's an overcorrection for the tendency of people without an experience to speak for and over people who have the experience. Think of it like someone speaking on something technical with no relevant technical background. If near 100% of the time they were wrong, you might wish they'd just not talk about it.
I don't mind people believing that men have no right to speak on gender issues - it's a free country, people can believe anything they want to believe, and even say it out loud. But if that person is white and has a lot to say on race issues anyway, or went to a $40,000/year liberal arts college and majored in something with no vocational application, and speaks about poverty, then I think they maybe don't have an entirely logically consistent philosophy behind them.
Unfortunately that's not where it ends. I wish it was only gender or sociological issues.
Beyond that, you don't have to be poor, or female, or black, or... etc., to understand empathy. In a world where empathy didn't exist, maybe they would have a point. But humans can and do empathize, and can bring in elements from that divergent background to improve the overall situation. But only if the discussion isn't cut off with, "STFU, what do you know!?"
This is the worst kind of rhetoric. Probably all groups who were ever oppressed suffered a little bit more than just people criticizing them. I guess your empathy did not go far enough to realize that?
What he's saying is that all oppressed groups suffer from prejudice before all else. Prejudice is the facilitator for all forms of oppressive behaviour. And prejudice against the supposedly privileged is a prejudice like any other. No rhetoric there.
yes, prejudice is prejudice. and prejudice may be a facilitator of oppression (although one could talk of chicken and egg here). but prejudice is still NOT oppression. it takes more than prejudice for oppression to take place. some people, you may be surprised, go through a lot more than just experiencing occasional stereotyping.
take this example - while a lot of str8 men may now be worried someone will falsely accuse them of being sexist or homophobes, I literally do not know a single gay person (I'm gay, I know a few gay people) that did not experience physical or verbal violence at least once.
You don't want to hold up the author as intellectually honest. He sneaks in a propaganda organ on par with the Party from 1984 as one of his sources without admitting that is what they are. :/
http://www.leadershipinstitute.org/aboutus/ runs some of what he is using as "evidence". They are pretty clearly a political organization with an agenda. If the author wasn't in the same vein, he'd have disclosed that or used someone else.
---
EDIT:
For example this guy:
> Your post feels eerily reminiscent of pro-industry conservatives pointing at snow and saying,"Global Climate Shift is a fallacy!" Maybe he used a poor source (though i think you'd have a hard time finding any data aggregator that does not have some political lean), but amongst how many credible ones? In my industry, the last day on the job is all that matters. On a 50 day job, 49 perfects mean nothing if the one bad one is on the last day. I always hated this; IMO it has no place in logical debate/discussion.
Since I'm rate limited and people are making various claims I'm going to point this out:
It isn't a "data aggregator with a political leaning", it is literally owned by an institution founded exclusively to further a single political party.
I'd argue that this is not an instance of dishonesty. The ideologies of groups like the one you linked to, despite being radical, are quickly becoming mainstream.
You've got an author in a mainstream newspaper who can write that due process shouldn't exist, and this is taken seriously in the current political climate.
You've got an ideology that asserts your identity is more important than the content of your character, and this is taken seriously.
You've got an ideology that states literally any dissent is at least bad, at most hateful, and this is taken seriously.
The example you link to is not dishonest because it is not meant to be an example of "everyday" thoughts by everyday people, it is meant to be an example of radicalism becoming mainstream.
Relying on a source that is basically a propaganda organ of the hard right elements of the Republican party without disclosing that is what it is falls under "dishonesty" when attempting to use it as a factual representation of reality.
It is IDENTICAL to me going to a SJW and using her as a source without fact checking it. Or the Rolling Stone article. He literally did that. It isn't a fact you can wave away and say "Well, conservative republican views are becoming mainstream so its okay."
All he had to do was add a footnote saying "Hey look at these Republican political operatives".
> You've got an author in a mainstream newspaper who can write that due process shouldn't exist
Maybe you do, somewhere, but the author of the cited article makes it clear she isn't arguing for a change to the legal system: "This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system."
I'm sorry, but I think everything you've written is utterly backwards. Nobody outside the internet takes seriously the ideas that due process shouldn't exist, or that identity is more important than actions, or that dissent is morally harmful.
And "Conservatism" in its hard-right, Koch-and-Paul incarnation is already mainstream. It has been mainstream ever since Ronald Reagan -- not just mainstream but the mainstream, in the sense that it keeps winning elections, no matter what the San Francisco digerati think of it.
(And for reference, I'm very hard-left. I don't like that the Republican Party wins elections; I just also don't pretend it doesn't happen and then claim the Tumblr Left is somehow mainstream!)
>Nobody outside the internet takes seriously the idea that due process shouldn't exist. The Internet is made of people. Do these people (you and I and everyone ITT) not exist in the real world?
>...ever since Ronald Reagan. Do you honestly believe a Golden Age actor invented Conservatism? Crazy town banana pants
>...the Tumblr left is somehow mainstream. main·stream
ˈmānˌstrēm/
noun
noun: mainstream
1.
the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional; the dominant trend in opinion, fashion, or the arts.
Isn't mainstream more of a reflection of Common Knowledge then ubiquity throughout subgroups? Regardless, the idea that leftishness is somehow an underground thing is CTBP. Full disclosure, I am an intellectual anarchist. THAT is a fringe group.
I am not trying to hate, i just disagree with what you said, and i am sorry if you feel offended by anything i wrote, but i am not sorry for anything i have written.
>The Internet is made of people. Do these people (you and I and everyone ITT) not exist in the real world?
The internet is mostly made of a strict subset of people who exist in the real world, and the people who make up The Internet, in the sense of internet-centered subcultures, are a very small subset of all real people.
The fact that an idea or ideology is loud, or even possibly dominant, within our subculture is not even evidence of its being dominant within society as a whole. Most of society are nothing like us net-folk.
>Do you honestly believe a Golden Age actor invented Conservatism? Crazy town banana pants
What I said is that he brought it to mainstream electoral dominance, particularly after the social-democratic Postwar Consensus.
> Isn't mainstream more of a reflection of Common Knowledge then ubiquity throughout subgroups?
Right, hence why we need to check to make sure that what we think is common to think among our friends and cliques is actually common among the population as a whole -- because our friends and cliques are not representative samples.
>Regardless, the idea that leftishness is somehow an underground thing is CTBP.
Don't be silly. It's not underground, it's just a comparatively small minority of the total population. In the United States, for instance, if I recall the numbers correctly, I believe that roughly 40% of the population self-report as conservative or conservative-leaning, 10% as independent/undecided, 20% as liberal or leftist, and 30% as moderate/centrist. So in total, there are fewer devoted leftists than devoted rightists, and fewer devoted anything-ists than self-declared non-ideologues.
And of the people who self-declare as leftists, only a minority will be Tumblr leftists.
So yeah: a tempest in the internet's teacup doesn't mean that a bunch of authoritarian identity-politicking liberals are taking over the world.
> And "Conservatism" in its hard-right, Koch-and-Paul incarnation is already mainstream. It has been mainstream ever since Ronald Reagan -- not just mainstream but the mainstream, in the sense that it keeps winning elections, no matter what the San Francisco digerati think of it.
Since and excluding Reagan, Republicans (whether of the "hard-right, Koch-and-Paul" wing or not) have one three Presidential elections, Democrats four; even if you include both of Reagan's elections, Republicans are 5-4; In the 18 Congresses since 1980, Democrats and Republicans have evenly split control of both houses, each party controlling each chamber for 9 of the 18 Congresses.
So, while the Republican Party wins some elections, and the Koch-and-Paul wing may be a factor in that, that wing -- or the Republican Party as a whole -- hasn't since Reagan won such a dominant share of elections to be considered the mainstream by itself.
Your post feels eerily reminiscent of pro-industry conservatives pointing at snow and saying,"Global Climate Shift is a fallacy!" Maybe he used a poor source (though i think you'd have a hard time finding any data aggregator that does not have some political lean), but amongst how many credible ones? In my industry, the last day on the job is all that matters. On a 50 day job, 49 perfects mean nothing if the one bad one is on the last day. I always hated this; IMO it has no place in logical debate/discussion.
Maybe he has an agenda, maybe not; it's not important. His arguments stand or fall on their own merit. You haven't engaged with his argumentation; your simply trying to discredit him.
...ok. The first carrot quote is me (Classicsnoot, by the by, and it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance!). The other two are not, so in essence you have misquoted me. I do not think this invalidates all of your posts as I choose to see it as an honest mistake. Second, Climate Shift is occurring and it, IMO, is on par with the geological/climatological history of our planet as we understand it. Does human activity exacerbate this trend? Who cares? We cannot stop it. We will either evolve to adapt or join the dinosaurs. Arguing about the depth and source of the river is a bit silly as the waterfall is approaching.
Well every feminist I've ever gotten into a debate with eventually links to the "geek feminism wiki" as some kind of irrefutable source of proof of misogyny when in reality anyone and everyone can edit it.
This article isn't nearly as bad as the "pro-feminist" stuff I see all the time.
I honestly don't see any pro-feminist articles that are as bad as this article with the exception of the Rolling Stone article he mentioned. I've never even heard of the "geek feminism wiki".
So I think we have different experiences. But regardless, I'm just pointing out the author's biases since he didn't disclose them.
EDIT due to rate limit:
> How can you say that? So much of the prose in the article is caveats, disclaimers, and admissions of existence. Indeed, these days one cannot state an opinion with out declaring political ties, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, shoe size and height. If this trend continues, disclaimers will make up 90% of any blogpost. If he had admitted/disclosed the nature of the one source you have mentioned, would your opinion of the article change?
[1] Republican Source
That isn't a huge change in the article. Its basically three words.
> If he had admitted/disclosed the nature of the one source you have mentioned, would your opinion of the article change?
I'd have believed some of the claims he made about caring about intellectual honesty. So yes, it would have changed my opinion. Blatant hypocrisy in the very article lambasting "the other side" for engaging in the behavior you are engaging in pretty much places you in category of "Oh, another fundamentally dishonest opinion by a biased source" in my mind.
How can you say that? So much of the prose in the article is caveats, disclaimers, and admissions of existence. Indeed, these days one cannot state an opinion with out declaring political ties, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, shoe size and height. If this trend continues, disclaimers will make up 90% of any blogpost. If he had admitted/disclosed the nature of the one source you have mentioned, would your opinion of the article change?
Hi! Cis-het white dude here. That you come in arguing is likely part of the problem. That you have constructed your point of view as the intellectually honest one, making your conversational partners the un-intellectual, dishonest ones, is surely another part.
What your approach doesn't acknowledge is the historical inequality, and the system by which that inequality is maintained. Just by virtue of being a comfortable white dude, I already get listened to way more than somebody less historically favored. And if I want, I can use that power to harm discussion of the systemic problems that give me that power.
Anybody in a disfavored group has experience that misuse of power about a zillion times. It's such a popular activity that there are mocking how-to guides for the powerful, like Derailing for Dummies.
So when people pop in to a discussion saying, "Hold on there, ladies; you seem hysterical. Let's calm down and listen to the white men for once," it's infuriating, because a) they are pretty familiar with the dominant perspective, and b) it is an exhibition of the unearned power that they are directly working against.
As a white dude, I get that this sucks. I am used to being heard, so not being heard feels unfair. But because I want real equality, I put on my big boy pants, shut my opinion-hole, and listen to people who are different than me. And in doing that, I've come to a much better understanding of what real equality means and how much hard work it will take us all to get there.
That's a straw-man response to parent that you could have pasted out of any SJW handbook. We need to stop having these privilege olympics, talking in circles, and applying offensive stereotypes to white men ("calm down ladies") any time they ask that their voice be heard and treated with the same respect as anyone else's.
The parent didn't call ladies hysterical or misuse his power - you accusing him of such is disingenuous and derailing the conversation.
I did not in fact accuse him of that. I specifically avoided accusing him of that. But that is exactly the sort of thing that gets said in "open dialogue". And then those people get all butthurt when people don't treat their disrespect with the sort of unearned respect they are used to.
It is also not a straw man response, and it is not pasted. Hi! I'm a real person, writing under my real name. These are things I believe. Would care to engage with the actual substance?
I ordinarily do avoid spouting off opinions when I should be listening. Also, most feminists I talk to are considerate and do not bully people in this way. Still, it is important to have an open dialogue, and this article is advocating for that, so I felt the need to express my agreement.
There could not be a more stark difference between feminists I know in person and some of the cranks that are popular online. At least part of the problem is that social media selects for bombast. What horrifies me is that this mode of thinking and speaking is leaking into real world behavior.
Thanks. I too am in favor of open dialogue, but with a couple exceptions. These exceptions really bug me, because by masquerading as dialogue they reduce the opportunity for real dialoue.
One is when open dialogue is used as a cloak for social control. The extreme example here is the Westboro Baptist Church, which pickets with signs that say, "God Hates Fags". A historical example is all the people picketing during school integration in the US. But there are a zillion subtle examples where people today, often unconsciously, say and do things that act to maintain historical imbalances.
Another is when discussion participants aren't acting responsibly. I forever see dudes sea-lioning their way into some advanced discussion on feminism, saying ignorant and/or harmful things, and then getting upset when they're called out. Real dialogue requires new participants to approach with humility and respect. Nobody expects it to be ok to for somebody off the street to barge into a graduate physics seminar and start opining. Those people will promptly get bounced, and surely go away complaining. But topics like feminism and race relations also have long histories. People jumping in to serious discussions should know something; they are not entitled to an on-the-spot education that stops the advanced discussion from progressing.
I'd also add that as I have come to better understand the experience of other people, I'm a lot more forgiving of possibly misdirected anger from marginalized people. A (white) sysadmin pal has a permanent, visceral dislike of cops because he was once assaulted by a cop who mistook him for somebody who had just shot a brother officer. Intellectually he knows that most cops are fine, but if somebody puts you in the ER, intellect only takes you so far. He just now doesn't trust cops in general; each individual officer has to demonstrate that they are safe before he feels safe.
Knowing how much bullshit has been perpetrated by people who look like me, I just accept that some people are going to initially see me as a probable threat. I am just always going to be Schrodinger's rapist [1] to a lot of women. I'm going to be Schrodinger's racist to a lot of black people. So if in a discussion on sensitive topics I am mistaken for an asshole, I try to let that slide. Heck, they could be right. And if not, their reaction to me may be wrong, but I think it's understandably and forgivably wrong.
There is no substantive difference between "sea lioning" and basic conflict resolution tactics, except that with the former, you assume bad faith on the part of your interlocutor.
As far as I can tell, what they don't want is to have to deal with randoms who act entitled to other people's time. There are an awful lot of people who appear to think they have the right to be listened to.
Both of those things are objective descriptions of behavior. One who, as a general rule, pre-emptively refuses to engage with people simply because they disagree with them can be described as close-minded.
Also hilarious is your interpreting refusal to deal with assholes with refusal to with people with different views. People are not owed dialog or interaction. Other people's time must be earned.
I am not, of course, saying that. People who sea-lion their way into a conversation and stick around when they are not wanted are acting like assholes. This is a behavior independent of views.
Constructive criticism: The content of ideas is infinitely more important than the identity of the person speaking the ideas. To deny this is to deny basic rationality, and is infinitely more harmful on a longer time scale.
That you come in arguing is likely part of the problem.
There is no such thing as an idea that is above criticism.
The problem here, the one highlighted by the article, is that the radicals being complained about disagree with both of these concepts - things which are the cornerstone of an open dialogue, which is the cornerstone of a healthy society.
With that in mind, how can you simultaneously hold the dissonant beliefs that rationality is important, and that one of its primary tenets should be ignored?
Excellent. This is the crux of the question. Ideas have to be evaluated on their content, not according to the identity of the authors, otherwise civilized discourse is shut down.
Note that the content of the idea hasn't changed, but the evaluation has. Look in particular at the second graph, where black people came to the now-correct answer long before white people. Black people on average had it right 25 years before white people.
So it would seem to me that on topics of race, identity of speaker can be helpful in evaluating views.
I don't follow your argument. Take something like Newton's theory of motion. It stands or falls on its mathematical and experimental foundations. It doesn't matter if Newton belonged to the gentry, if he treated his servants badly or if he beat his wife. That's not pertinent to the truth of the theory. If the logic sound? Are the experiments reproducible? That's the only part that matters.
As for the example you've given - a Gallup poll - there is no right or wrong answer to a poll. Nobody ever "got it right". If people are simply expressing an opinion, there isn't any right or wrong answer. Opinions are what they are, and they change over time.
I think your division of things discussed into "true facts" and "opinion" is not particularly subtle, but let's run with it.
Most of what is discussed falls into the latter category, opinion. That includes things very relevant to people's lives, like who enjoys equal protection under the law. Approaching a conversation about a topic of social justice as if it's as simple, clear, and verifiable as Newtonian mechanics is the wrong approach. XKCD lampooned that here:
I'd add that even science isn't as clear as you make it out to be. Newtonian mechanics weren't really true; they were just an approximation adequate to the time. As Box writes, "all models are wrong, but some are useful." It took us a few hundred years to understand their limits. Out that struggle came quantum mechanics and relativity. Of that transition, Max Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
So as much as we'd like to pretend that science proceeds differently, it is also a social process. Kuhn's, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is the standard place to start reading about that, but there's now a large body of literature on the anthropology of science.
I'm aware of Kuhn, but I think Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery is more germane to this discussion, particularly his distinction between logic of proof and logic of discovery.
Going back to your opinion poll example, there is no opinion about mixed marriages which is more "true" than any other. Even if scientific facts are approximative, they are at least rooted in physical reality; whereas opinions and norms simply relate to preferences and conventions. So I continue to maintain the truth of any assertion is independent of the identity of whoever formulates it, or more generally of the psychological and social context within which it arises. To deny this would be to deny that such a thing as truth exists. In which case any position, your own included, becomes indefensible.
I agree mostly but not completely; most people with opinions on interracial marriages at least claim to have some fact and/or reasoning behind them. I definitely agree agree that the truth of statements is notionally independent of the speaker. But in practice the truth of particular statements correlates well enough with things like the speaker's experience that we can use it as a handy evaluative heuristic.
E.g., when a programmer and a manager both make statements about the technical merit of a particular approach, I will in practice be more likely to trust the programmer. Or if a real scientist and a bible-thumping young-earth creationist make assertions about the history of life on earth, I'm more likely to trust the scientist. This is a necessary heuristic for getting much done in the real world; we just don't each have time for evaluating all claims from first principles.
But again, social policy is mainly determined by things that, in your construction, are opinion, not fact. So it would seem by your own model the sort of scientific give and take we are both fond of is mainly irrelevant to how mere opinions, and therefore our societies, get shaped with regard to social justice for groups who are currently disfavored by majority opinion.
I don't think truth can be crowd-sourced. It's as simple as that. I don't think the majority is always right, or even that it's right most of the time. Which doesn't mean I'm anti-democratic because (and I'll paraphrase Popper) while democracy is certainly a bad system, it is the least bad of all the available systems.
I would certainly agree that matters of social policy fall firmly into the realm of what I would call opinion (doxa, to use Plato's terminology). But then our language should reflect that. Let's not talk about true and false, or even right and wrong. We can set up some kind of goal (for example, the utilitarian goal of the greatest happiness for the greatest number), and define good or bad, just or unjust, in relation to that predefined goal. But there is no epistemological basis here for truth.
I have no objection to people using opinion as a basis for public policy - it could hardly go otherwise in a democracy - but then, let's recognize opinions for what they are and avoid turning certain currents of opinion into moral crusading that shuts down debate. If we are in a democracy, in the realm of pure opinion, then all opinions deserve a hearing, however much they clash with what seems obvious to us and to the group we identify with. To deny one group the right to articulate their opinion undermines the foundations of democracy.
You can stop talking about right and wrong if you like. But the rest of us are comfortable using it for moral terms. If you think those things need a stronger epistemological basis, you are welcome to work on constructing that.
> all opinions deserve a hearing
If you believe that, then I'm sure you're out working for making sure the voiceless and downtrodden get their opinions heard. In addition to your time here arguing to make sure socially dominant groups get their already-familiar opinions heard yet more.
I don't believe it, though. Here are some people expressing opinions:
I don't think racist or homophobic opinions need to be heard more. That is not to suggest taking away their right to speak or publish. But their rights do not override the rights of other people to speak in response, or their right to freely assemble.
To think otherwise is to confuse the standards of a particular kind of academic discourse with a much broader set of dialog. Major social change doesn't happen only through polite disagreement. That's especially true when the social changes are about the relative power of groups, and the way powerful groups maintain dominance through silencing people they don't like.
America isn't free because we petitioned the king and he said, "Gosh, your points are reasonable." We fought. The slaves aren't free because the American South said, "Oh, now we see that these folks are equal." We fought. Women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement: all of it involved a lot of shouting and major social unrest.
Whatever you intend by it, applying your argument to any of these would have aided the continuance of oppression. And that's exactly how many people apply your argument today. So you can keep making it, but it's not going to convince me; as much as I like civil dialogue, I like civil rights more.
Your last comment strikes me as quite possibly the largest and most possibly damaging false dichotomy I've heard in a long, long time.
This: as much as I like civil dialogue, I like civil rights more.
If that's the way you actually think, to the letter, if this wasn't just a turn of phrase or perhaps not worded correctly on accident, you've very well scared the hell out of me.
You've described your mindset as it's people on your side in one corner, and "civil dialogue" in the other, with the latter given short shrift because, as you well know, you are In the Right, and all of those people who want civil dialogue must therefore necessarily be In The Wrong because they are necessarily against $good_thing.
This is fundamentally irrational, and the fact that you treat that as a badge of honor is hardly admirable.
I'm archiving this thread.. perhaps someone else will be able to respond to this line of reasoning, because it's fundamentally alien to me.
Coming back to this, I wonder: What other relationship do you see as possible between civil dialog and civil rights?
If you like civil dialog more than civil rights, then you're basically saying people should be oppressed so you don't have to deal with unpleasantness.
On the other hand, you could be saying that the two are never in conflict. But that's an empirical claim that under every possible circumstance civil dialog is the absolute best way to achieve civil rights. That is bold claim for which you've presented no evidence. I've given plenty of historical examples that suggest otherwise.
Is there some other construction you could possibly mean?
Your claim is, essentially, people must behave uncivilly to gain representation/rights for themselves - and the logical conclusion of this, you've excused any and all antisocial behavior as long as the cause is good enough.
That is not the logical conclusion of my view. That is you slippery-sloping your way to a straw man.
And you again dodge the hard questions: How much oppression are you willing to tolerate so that dominant groups never have to feel uncomfortable? On the other hand, if you believe that civil rights are always achievable through polite dialog, where are you examples? Where is the demonstration that the US's revolutionary war was just a big stupid mistake?
I believe you don't have them because you don't actually have a functioning theory of social change or a big interest in ending oppression. Whether you like it or not, the only real effect of your behavior is to maintain oppressive social structures. You may say that you want something else, but the first rule of working therapists is that when words and behavior conflict, always believe the behavior. Why shouldn't I believe your behavior here?
I don't think that civil rights and civil dialog are dichotomous. But I don't think that the former can always be achieved with the latter. If you have example of major improvements in civil rights that were achieved solely through meek, polite dialog, you are welcome to share them.
Given that, the rest of your comments don't seem to apply.
Also, the "I am seizing the final word" thing is kinda lame.
> In addition to your time here arguing to make sure socially dominant groups get their already-familiar opinions heard yet more.
You seem to have fallen into your own trap. You've assumed that I belong to a particular social group (wrongly, as it happens, but that's irrelevant), and consequently dismissed my argumentation out of hand, without effectively countering it.
And regarding your historical arguments, they rely on a somewhat naïve view of the process of history, as driven by exceptional individuals such as civil rights campaigners, rather than by large-scale currents. It would be just as easy to argue that such movements as enfranchisement and feminism succeeded when they did (after failing so many times in the past) because the social and ideological climate was ripe for change. Which would mean that social action movements are a lot less relevant than you would like to believe.
You're in the domain of irrationality. You "know" you're right, and I should just shut up because I'm affiliated to the "wrong" social group, while your own group can shout down and bully into submission everybody else. You're taking democracy for granted, and undermining the very system that is giving you the freedom to express yourself. Do you think that the slavers of the past thought that they were wrong? No; they "knew" they were right, and it was "obvious" that the white man was superior. Beware of the obvious; common sense is not your friend.
I'm not assuming anything about you and don't "know" I'm right.
I'm talking about your behavior. You could be an AI or an uplifted dog for all I know. But an argument that demands that change only happen through meek, polite statements is in effect arguing for the status quo.
I also disagree that my view of historical change requires exceptional actors. I think it happens mainly on the individual-to-individual level. But I don't think it can happen politely.
> But an argument that demands that change only happen through meek, polite statements is in effect arguing for the status quo.
That's a caricature. Change should happen through dialogue between the various parties involved, and that dialogue should be based on rational argument, until some kind of consensus or majority decision can be reached. Nothing revolutionary here; I'm describing how democracies work. I didn't say anything about the tone of the dialogue itself.
What you seem to be arguing for is that certain parties be shut out of the dialogue altogether, because their opinions deviate too far from those of your group; and also that your opinion does not necessarily require rational underpinnings, so long as you feel certain enough of the righteousness of your cause.
You are not describing how democracies work. You're describing how we would both like them to work. You haven't yet given examples of major social change achieved through rational argument. You ignore the evidence that interracial marriage happened through the mechanism of bigots slowly dying off, not through rational argument. You ignore the example of slavery, the US's greatest perpetration of injustice. These problems were not sustained through reason alone, and neither were they solved that way.
> What you seem to be arguing for is that certain parties be shut out of the dialogue altogether, because their opinions deviate too far from those of your group
Mostly incorrect. It's not mainly about opinion for me; it's about behavior and intent. For example, the Westboro Baptist Church and the Aryan Brotherhood aren't writing carefully reasoned position papers. I'm ok with other people using their right of free speech to shout down their garbage. The problem is not their deviance from mainstream opinion, but the dangerousness of their propaganda and their drive to intimidate vulnerable groups. But if I discovered that a young cousin had come across some of their propaganda and wanted to talk it through, I'd be perfectly happy to do so, because it would be an actual discussion.
The problem you're not acknowledging is that speech has other purposes than carefully reasoned dialog. To the extent that people come open-minded to a topic and truly seek the truth, I think that's great. But that's a pretty small percentage of actual dialog.
I also think this objection is a little rich in that one of the major ways social injustice happens is by dominant groups suppressing minority voices. If you're all that concerned about people not being heard, it's not the voices of dominant groups that need such dogged protection from you.
> your opinion does not necessarily require rational underpinnings, so long as you feel certain enough of the righteousness of your cause.
Also mostly incorrect. I'd agree a bit in that our moral sense is prerational (see, e.g., deWaal's work on moral sense in animals), and values can't be established through pure reason. But I think it's important to have a reasoned understanding of those values and how to make them happen in the world. That said, I also don't think it's necessary to have a complete understanding before taking action; when someone is bleeding, the paramedics don't wait for the detectives to finish their work.
What I am saying (over and over) is that rational discussion is not enough to change unjust social structures. It would be nice, sure, but we are made out of meat, and we have to deal with our consequent lack of conformance to ideals.
I think you should also note the false objectivity in the "you seem" phrase. Unless you've shown what I wrote to a few thousand people and carefully measured responses, then I think you mean, "I interpret you as saying". That's not a minor nit here; a lot of the way social injustice happens is false conflation of personal or dominant-group views with objective truths.
This is all. Either you understand arguments stand for themselves, or you are a relativist that thinks arguments vary in validity depending on whose mouth they're coming from.
If I find out someone is a relativist I never discuss anything with them ever again. Those people are sophists without knowing - they just think "if I talk a lot I must be having a debate!". They have much reading in front of them, which they usually don't get to ever do. Those are the people that had rather die than think. I ignore them but I make sure they know it's because they are a relativist. If we all ostracized relativists we would be able to better tell the extremists from those that have something to say.
You have claimed that's a primary tenet of rationality, but you haven't demonstrated that. Why? Because most discussion happens in shorthand.
You don't have a comprehensive theory of the nature and uses of discourse. You have a cobbled-together collection of experiences and values and notions, just like the rest of us.
Unfortunately, because of your personal experience, you know some things more than others. That's just the nature of the beast. Identity informs understanding; understanding shapes identity. Because I spend every day dealing with computers I have a better understanding of computers than people who don't. Because I don't spend every day dealing with racism, I have a poorer understanding of racism than people who do.
> There is no such thing as an idea that is above criticism.
Sure. And in the privacy of your own home, you can criticize any idea you want. But when you are talking to other people, you have no right to be heard. Freedom of speech is important, but it does not trump freedom of association.
That doesn't imply the non-existence of objective reality. A fact is a fact regardless of the identity of the speaker.
> Because I don't spend every day dealing with racism, I have a poorer understanding of racism than people who do.
It is possible for a PhD to learn something from an undergrad. Moreover, it isn't strictly less understanding anyway, it's a different perspective. Which is all the more reason why people should try to hear each other.
> But when you are talking to other people, you have no right to be heard. Freedom of speech is important, but it does not trump freedom of association.
Not listening to someone (i.e. ignoring them) is not the same thing as attacking them because they said something you don't want to hear.
> That doesn't imply the non-existence of objective reality. A fact is a fact regardless of the identity of the speaker.
Sure. And facts are extremely hard things to find. With all the money we spend on science, we have a relatively small number of them. What individuals have is mainly opinions about facts.
That's why discussions seeking truth are such hard and subtle work. It's also why facts are frequently irrelevant to people's behaviors in this realm. See, for example, this graph:
It isn't a graph of people coming to reasoned understanding on a topic. It's a graph of people with old opinions dying off.
> It is possible for a PhD to learn something from an undergrad. Moreover, it isn't strictly less understanding anyway, it's a different perspective. Which is all the more reason why people should try to hear each other.
I strongly believe it is less understanding. As a member of various dominant groups, my understanding of things like race and gender was very coarse. That's because I didn't have to pay any attention to those things; they almost always worked in my favor. When that's not the case, people are forced to pay more attention.
If you want to argue that generally attention does not lead to better understanding, you're really arguing that discussion is futile, because a major function of discussion is to turn people's attention to a topic.
> Not listening to someone (i.e. ignoring them) is not the same thing as attacking them because they said something you don't want to hear.
I agree with that, but don't see its relevance to the discussion. Could you say more?
> Sure. And facts are extremely hard things to find. With all the money we spend on science, we have a relatively small number of them. What individuals have is mainly opinions about facts.
I don't think talking about "opinions" is interesting. That word lumps so many things together that it doesn't mean anything useful. People have facts, logic, assumptions and priorities. The last two aren't objective. You can prove or disprove an assumption but it's commonly expensive to do it, and until somebody does, it remains something that reasonable people can disagree about.
But the real trouble is priorities. Should we imprison an innocent man or let ten guilty people go free? The answer to that question has objective consequences but they aren't uniformly distributed, so those more likely to be victims of criminals who go unpunished and those more likely to be innocent people falsely convicted will rationally prioritize different things without either of them being wrong in any objective sense. But that's politics. People have to come to terms with each other without attacking each other or we end up in a civil war.
> I strongly believe it is less understanding. As a member of various dominant groups, my understanding of things like race and gender was very coarse. That's because I didn't have to pay any attention to those things; they almost always worked in my favor. When that's not the case, people are forced to pay more attention.
But now you're talking about generalities when we're dealing with individuals. Using the color of someone's skin to make stereotypical assumptions about them is the thing we're supposed to be doing away with. You can't tell by looking at someone how much thought they've put into something.
And even if the stereotype is often correct, perspective is still a different axis than quantity. It is useful to know when and to what degree proposals will create a backlash and resentment that may do more harm than good, especially when there are less adversarial paths to the same result.
None of which addresses the original point in the article, which is that many of the statistics driving headlines (women are paid 77 cents on the dollar, one in six women are sexually assaulted) are misleading or false, and people have been unjustifiably attacked for pointing that out.
> I agree with that, but don't see its relevance to the discussion. Could you say more?
The context of the discussion is that people are attacking speakers for saying true things inconvenient to the attackers' causes, even to the point of trying (and sometimes succeeding) to destroy their careers and reputations. Your counterargument seems to be that people have no obligation to listen to the speaker; but the speakers' complaint is not that they're being ignored, it's that they're being unjustifiably attacked.
> People have to come to terms with each other without attacking each other or we end up in a civil war.
Are you talking about physical attacks or mere vigorous disagreement? If the former, I agree, but that seems off topic. If the latter, then could you please name some major societal changes that happened without disagreement so vigorous that people felt attacked?
I also think that for topics of social justice, your standard is one-sided. Historically oppressed groups are attacked, and not just verbally. Look at America's long history of lynching, for example. Or gay bashing, both physical and verbal. A standard that requires people pursuing social justice to be forever meek but doesn't as vigorously require that of those sustaining injustice is in effect a standard that helps maintain injustice.
> But now you're talking about generalities when we're dealing with individuals.
The article is about general patterns, so perhaps our best compromise is that we are talking about general patterns of individuals. If you want to talk about an individual case, we could certainly do that. But that would be a change of topic.
> Your counterargument seems
I was addressing the discussion here. If it appears to relate to one of the many points in that article, I apologize; that was not my intention.
> Are you talking about physical attacks or mere vigorous disagreement?
There is a distinction to be drawn between vigorous disagreement and intentionally causing harm to the other party. Trying to get someone fired or similar is not a "physical" attack but it is certainly an attack.
> I also think that for topics of social justice, your standard is one-sided. Historically oppressed groups are attacked, and not just verbally. Look at America's long history of lynching, for example. Or gay bashing, both physical and verbal. A standard that requires people pursuing social justice to be forever meek but doesn't as vigorously require that of those sustaining injustice is in effect a standard that helps maintain injustice.
It isn't a double standard. Neither side should be engaged in any such thing and anyone who does is wrong regardless of which side they're on.
> The article is about general patterns, so perhaps our best compromise is that we are talking about general patterns of individuals. If you want to talk about an individual case, we could certainly do that. But that would be a change of topic.
It's not about a specific individual case, it's about the concept of applying generalizations to individuals. "There is more variation within a race than between races."
> It isn't a double standard. Neither side should be engaged in any such thing and anyone who does is wrong regardless of which side they're on.
My point isn't about the standard. It's about selective enforcement. That is, the people I see telling people interested in social justice that they're just too darned strident don't obviously demonstrate an equal desire to police the people causing the injustice.
> It's not about a specific individual case, it's about the concept of applying generalizations to individuals.
I think that can be done poorly, but I think it's a generally useful first-pass heuristic. Especially so the way I'm applying it here, which is to say that my fellow white dudes should spend more time listening to voices they would not otherwise hear before holding for on topics which they are much more likely to be ignorant. Those who have already done the listening are not harmed by that.
> My point isn't about the standard. It's about selective enforcement.
Then you're trying to fix the end that isn't broken. The problem is not that people are objecting to bad behavior in the one case, it's that they're not objecting in the other.
> I think that can be done poorly, but I think it's a generally useful first-pass heuristic.
So is not interviewing black job applicants because they are more likely to have received a poor education. But we ought not to do that because the heuristic is often wrong and the individuals have no ability to control what box you put them in when it is.
Thanks for your advice on how I should spend my time, but I think otherwise. If you would like to fix the hypocrites, you are welcome to do so. I think the way to fix that is reducing the power imbalances so that the shitty opinions of formerly dominant groups are irrelevant to the currently downtrodden. As I mentioned elsewhere, I value civil dialogue, but I value civil rights more. When the two conflict, I am ok with some incivility in the service of fixing bigger problems.
>So is not interviewing black job applicants because they are more likely to have received a poor education. But we ought not to do that because the heuristic is often wrong and the individuals have no ability to control what box you put them in when it is.
No, we ought not to do that because it reinforces a major societal oppression of black people. If you've ever run a hiring process, you'll know you use all sorts of possibly-unfair heuristics. The point of hiring isn't to be maximally fair to every individual; it's to get good people while not contributing to negative externalities like, say, America's centuries-long history of being shitty to various minority groups.
Would it be fair to summarize your position as "facts about the lives of people who are substantially different from us are difficult to obtain; therefore, we should defer to their personal experiences"? If not, could you correct this summary?
I guess if I had to summarize my point it would be that those of us who are for historical reasons unfairly advantaged should work especially hard at listening to people who aren't. Especially so when we want to discuss topics relating to that historical advantage.
E.g., all people have opinions on race. But as a white person I try to recognize that my opinions have been shaped by a system that unfairly favors me, and part of the way it does that by limiting the amount I hear about the experience of non-white people with respect to race. (By the way, I don't think this involves much conscious malice; it's just one of the bugs you get when primates have to build a civilization from scratch.) So to the extent that I want to have informed opinions on race, I have a lot of work to do.
I'd add that even accounting for the learning value of listening, I think there's another value to it. Black people are already generally aware of what white people think about racial issues; they have to be. So I try to separate when I want to be heard from when I think I have something to say that is actually helpful to the people I'm talking with. In the former case, I try to favor silence. There are other ways I can feel heard, and helping other people feel fully heard is a great way to create some willingness for them to listen when I actually do have something possibly helpful to say.
>those of us
who are for historical reasons
unfairly advantaged should work
especially hard at listening to people
who aren't
I see. Thanks for the explanation.
If you don't mind I have a follow-up question -- actually two related ones. The approach you are suggesting is essentially about ethics and epistemology at an individual level. What I wonder is, how, if at all, should it extrapolate to government action? I.e., to what degree should government decisions about aiding people who are at a disadvantage be informed by listening to them versus dispassionate observation and statistics?
I ask because "listening" is inherently hard to "scale" to a national level in a large nation. In a Western liberal democracy the usual answer on how to do this seems to be "voting."
In practice besides voting the supposed public voice of any disadvantaged group is also shaped by self-appointed spokesmen for the disadvantaged, typically journalists and academics. Personally, I have little faith in either doing more good than harm.
My second question is, how should it be determined who is considered advantaged and who is considered disadvantaged?
I think that both people and governments should work from both stories and statistics. Statistics help us understand one way. As narrative creatures, stories help us differently. In particular, I think empathy is much easier to find with stories than raw data, and empathy is vital for functioning societies.
As to noticing privilege, I think we have good ways to measure some sorts of privilege. E.g.:
But I think it's incumbent on all of us to understand what power we have and use it wisely. For me, both stats and stories have been useful. The stats are widely available, but here are some collections of stories:
And I also really benefited from Project Implicit, which helped me understand how my own subconscious biases were contributing to various societal problems:
I definitely agree with your point that spokespeople and media gatekeepers are often part of the problem. That's what makes me hopeful about things like Twitter. There I can make a decision to seek out individual voices and add them to the mix of what I see every day.
Quite so. Although I was already familiar with some of the material you link to I think I understand your position better now.
One thing that is still unclear to me is how the government should work from stories. If you mean a write-your-congressperson kind of approach I am very sympathetic to that. However, nearly all other means of aggregating stories I think are prone to distortion by the middleman is involved (not necessarily deliberate).
I'm not sure I understand your question about government. To my mind, a government isn't really a coherent actor. The individuals within it should have a good understanding of the problems they're working on, and for me that should include a personal, empathetic understanding of the individuals affected. Which I think is mostly what happens. I think a lot of our problems happen where government actors (officials and staff alike) are not representative with respect to the problem. E.g., Ferguson was such a mess because there was a strong race/class differential between the government and the governed. That not only created problems, but kept them from getting solved and prevented an effective response when things boiled over.
So if I understand the question correctly, I think that everybody should collect stories and that the aggregation should mainly be internal and via trust relationships. E.g., a congressperson can't meet everybody, and they'll have a particular set of biases depending on how they grew up. But their can cultivate a diverse selection of staff and advisors, and they can encourage those people to seek out broad contact with society.
That said, I think statistics-driven checks on things can help point out holes in that aggregation of stories. I recently heard about a city that was working on their long-term housing plan. Their main means for citizen contact was through public meetings about the plan. But a little looking at stats showed that the people at the public meetings were all homeowners, while the city was half renters. I'm sure city officials were disproportionately homeowners as well, and also more likely to know homeowners.
I'm also excited to see to what extent the Internet lets us avoid the various filtering biases. Even today a St. Louis politician could have manually used Twitter to get a semi-random sampling of stories as a check on what they were learning officially. I have a lot of hope for how technology shifts can help us transform citizen engagement in government.
This does answer my question in a very satisfactory way.
Since you mention Ferguson, the theory I currently hold is that tensions between the police and the policed are, in practice, inevitable if the two differ in race, ethnicity, language or religion. Through their sheer visibility these differences have more weight than any difference that otherwise exists between the government and those it governs. The only plausible way to resolve this tension that I see is by ensuring the police force of a community is recruited from that community and represents its ethnic and cultural makeup.
I definitely agree. I think the great apes, us included, are naturally tribal. As the various sportsball empires show, we just like picking sides. If we want society to work well, we have to consciously work against that tendency. And I share your view that self-policing works way better than other-policing.
You disagree with the tenets that make "being open to criticism" possible. Arguments do not where the skin of their speakers. They're sexless, skinless things. Your ideology destroys the fungibility of arguments, requiring that we pay strict attention to the provenance of any idea that pertains to your sacred issues, gender and race. Obviously, this poisons the information economy around these issues and much nonsense is taken as fact.
Arguments don't do anything. People use arguments. Those people have histories, and their histories are material when considering what they do with those arguments.
I agree that the truth isn't influenced by race or gender. But one's perception of truth is influenced by one's experiences, and those experiences currently have heavy race and gender components. So if getting at the truth is the true goal, then one must be enormously careful to discover and work against one's own biases.
I used to think that I wasn't biased. But instead I just didn't want to be biased. There's a big difference, and seeing that helped me see how wrong I was to think that my experiences didn't influence my opinions.
Is that a graph of people being convinced by rational argument? No, it's mainly people with old ideas dying off. It would be great if the world worked like you say, but it doesn't. Even science doesn't. Max Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
> Just by virtue of being a comfortable white dude
I've got news for you: People don't listen because you're a white male, they listen because you're privileged.
I've never met a "SJW" that actually knows what it's like to be poor, it's all well-off, college educated, mostly white people.
I think most poor people who make their way to the top don't actually get any help, so they end up forming conservative view points, whereas the rich white people just can't understand why poor people don't just stop being poor. It must be because they're black! Congratulations you're a racist.
You should meet more people interested in social justice. Plenty of them grew up poor. I did. It's only thanks to a childhood hobby of computers that I'm now doing well.
Whiteness is one kind of privilege in US society. So is male-ness. So yes, I'm privileged. And yes, people listen to me better because of that.
..using the completely contrived (and incorrect) definition of "feminism" that asserts anyone who believes in equality is a feminist.
That is not how groups work.
I believe that black people should have the same rights as everyone else too, but that does not make me a member of the "black power" movement. I believe in meditation and stilling of the mind, but that does not make me a Buddhist.
Why is feminism the only group that tries to claim dominion over otherwise unaffiliated people? As far as I know, it is unique in that respect. I can't think of any other ideology, good or bad, that operates in this way.
Given the behavior of prominent/famous feminists (say, campaigning for the abolition of due process, which is the single most fucked up thing I think I've read this year), that is not a label I want to be anywhere near. It is anti-intellectual, it is toxic, and I want nothing to do with it.
..and Feminism is far from the only ideology that believes in equality for all, yet is literally the only one that tries to claim I'm a member because I believe in equality.
Seriously, you did it, to me, in your original post.
Why is that? What is the authoritative definition you use that allows you to presume other people's ideologies in such a way?
I asked a couple of very simple questions. I've got a donut in front of me, some code open in another window, and enjoying a snowy Friday. Believe me, I'm calm :)
Unfortunately, once again, you kind of didn't directly answer what I asked you. I'm starting to sense a pattern here.
Let's try this again:
What is the authoritative definition you use that allows you to presume other people's ideologies in such a way?
As previously mentioned, I do not wish to be associated with feminism in any sense, broad or otherwise, because of its ever increasing association with (ir|a)rationality and toxicity. I prefer to be called a humanist, or an egalitarian, because I believe in equality for all, not just for a particular sex.
With that in mind, I'm asking you to define, preferably from a dispassionate and neutral source, how you can claim that label applies to someone. From what I can see, the "if you believe in women's rights, you are a feminist" definition is circular and held primarily by self-described feminists. If you have any evidence to the contrary, I would love to see it.
>You can chill out. I'm not trying to recruit you.
Regardless of whether you did this intentionally or whether you just naively spouted this, it's a really shitty tactic to employ when conversing with people.
the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.
synonyms: the women's movement, the feminist movement, women's liberation, female emancipation, women's rights; informalwomen's lib
"a longtime advocate of feminism"
> Why is feminism the only group that tries to claim dominion over otherwise unaffiliated people?
Its not. Lots of groups movement groups claim that most everyone believes whatever their key belief is, its a standard rhetorical strategy to leverage the common desire to fit in.
(apologies for posting on a new account for this; I don't feel safe discussing social-justice-related topics on accounts that can connect with my real-world persona)
>If you said yes to any of these questions, you're a feminist.
There's danger in treating ideological positions in the same way we treat party affiliations. The idea of the "motte and bailey doctrine" [0] is relevant here, where ideas like "feminism is just the belief that women are people!" are the motte, and more controversial ideas are the bailey that not only do many adherents support, but then use the near-universal acceptance of the motte as reasoning why people should accept the package deal of including the bailey as well.
>I don't feel safe discussing social-justice-related topics on accounts that can connect with my real-world persona
Isn't it amazing that this is a thing, and you're certainly not alone in feeling this way, and yet people can still support the movement that has you feeling this way?
On my few social media accounts, which are linked to me as a person, I'm more than happy to criticize the government(s), I'm more than happy to criticize the NSA, GCHQ, etc, I'm more than happy to criticize politicians and many other things but I'm sure as hell never going to voice my opinion on modern feminism/the social justice movement on these accounts.
This is a sad state of affairs. I feel for you, but i cannot condone hiding. obviously, this is my opinion and i am not telling you what to do. i just hate that A) you feel the need to hide and B) you are probably right to do so.
>I bet you think women should vote, and be treated equally under the law. I bet you think women should earn equal pay for equal work (even if you think the wage gap is caused by parenthood / not asking for raises or some other explanation). I bet you think rape is wrong. If you said yes to any of these questions, you're a feminist.
This is a logical fallacy (Association). If you believe in X, then you are Y. You can believe in all of those listed criteria and not consider yourself a feminist, because it is a broad topic and some viewpoints are more extreme then others.
um, yes it is. self determination is the root of equality. others can apply labels willy nilly. how one views themselves is the most important factor in embodying an identity.
I can call myself a lion but that doesn't make it so.
Reality is objective. Get over it.
As for my actual point: "Doing X makes you Y" is about public perception, not self-perception. If you conflate the two, you do more damage to yourself than anything I could ever say.
Apples to oranges. Feminism is not a species. If a weak lion says,"I am a strong lion." then one might be able to say that Mr. lion is deluding itself, but it may also be beginning the path towards becoming the strong lion it wishes to be.
The problem is that the internet won't "get off" reality. It is no longer true that what happens on the internet mostly stays on the internet. If a bunch of tumblr people start denouncing you, you could get fired.
We saw that happen to a hackernews poster a few years ago.
College campuses are capitulating to these people's demands.
I think this movement will let off some steam and people will stop taking it seriously, but I don't think it is unfair to worry that they will take real positions of power in the future.
>I think this movement will let off some steam and people will stop taking it seriously, but I don't think it is unfair to worry that they will take real positions of power in the future.
They're very highly active, and in control of, many student unions throughout say the US and UK. Student union reps often go on to become politicians, so it is indeed something worth worrying about.
Especially since their movement is based on dividing people and making one group the oppressor and the other the victim, even if such perceived oppression has no basis in reality.
Their movement has entirely turned against gay men now and blasts them as being "oppressive". They're almost as bad about FTM transsexuals. There's really no telling where it goes next. Most bizarrely though is the vast majority of the division is being carried out by largely straight, white, middle class or higher women at the helm.
I think the bigger fear is that they'll take small positions of power in not-so-transparent organizations, like in academia. They'll have their own little fiefdoms where they can have witch hunts without a lot of press.
I don't see how someone like that would actually win office. Too insane.
> Yeah, there's a handful of misguided activists who read
> malice into everything. But they're the minority
> (albeit a loud one).
And there's the problem. It's not that the represent them majority, it's that, by sheer volume, they've managed to set the terms of the the debate to suit their own viewpoint, biases, and beliefs. Even movement has its fruitcakes and its lunatics, but when they're the ones setting the agenda, it becomes a real problem and actively undermines the otherwise noble, sensible aims.
> Y'all gotta get off tumblr. Yeah, there's a handful of misguided activists who read malice into everything. But they're the minority
But isn't the problem the fact that if nobody speaks out against them that they'll eventually continue to grow? I mean, a minority opinion graduating into the opinion of a majority isn't exactly improbable or unprecedented.
And if that doesn't happen, you'll possibly have something even worse; you'll end up with what's been going on with Muslims where people think all muslims are extremist terrorists who hold radical views (because of a minority). Obviously that's not the case but many people really do think like that. Not helping matters is their most prominent leaders remain silent on those extremist views. Sure, you'll have a few leaders here and there putting in PR time while speaking out against extremism, but there's no conviction and it's not backed up by actual actions. The moderates and their leaders should be the fiercest fighters of that extremism and that's just simply not the case.
>But isn't the problem the fact that if nobody speaks out against them that they'll eventually continue to grow?
No. Tumblr-style "social justice activists" (scare-quotes because Tumblr activists have comparatively little to do with serious professional activism) are insane, unpersuasive, and prone to triggering strong backlashes against their own views.
I think the issue is not so much that they'll continue to grow -- I don't anticipate a majority of the United States, for example, becoming ideologically identical to the "SJW"-type people on Tumblr.
The issue is that a very small but loud group of online activists are becoming able to have disproportionate influence. It's easy for online mobs to form on sites like Twitter or Tumblr, which have messaging systems that promote reblogging/retweeting/"signal boosting" and are neither good for nuanced discussion nor corrections. Companies and organizations depend so heavily on Internet social media for their PR that they quickly bow to mob pressure in terms of self-censorship or firing "problematic" employees.
So it's not so much that the "social justice activists" will spread in terms of population, it's that they can have a chilling effect where the other side doesn't speak out, out of fear of the nuclear option of online shaming being used against them. This can lead to one side dominating the conversation despite being unpersuasive.
>This can lead to one side dominating the conversation despite being unpersuasive.
There is no conversation. They don't converse with those holding conflicting opinions. In fact, with Twitter, they've built out the BlockBot to automatically censor all and any deemed to have dissented against the narrative.
When you've a movement that is based on very flawed statistics and that places emphasis on hypersensitive feelings over reality, dissent containing reality or fact is a threat. It's far easier to censor the dissent than to engage it.
BlockBot doesn't censor anyone, does it? All it does is prevent the person who uses it from seeing output from the people they are opting to filter - they can continue to talk, rant, abuse, write poems, whatever they do with impunity.
"Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" is a good analogy, I think.
The reason it seems this way is that the handful of misguided activists work to silence the large proportion of moderates.
Tumblr, as an example, is not a place where you can admit moderate views about feminism or identity politics without getting shouted down. This results in moderates self-censoring and refusing to talk about their views publicly online, resulting in a hateful echo chamber completely lacking in subtlety.
I don't know this is exclusive to Millenials, so I'll be generic:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of decrying someone's argument due to race or gender approaches 1.
Really, this is just a precursor for Godwin's Law, because this will be inevitably followed by the argument that Hitler or the Nazis also utilized zealous discrimination.
If I had to guess I would attribute it to the fact that the internet allows radical viewpoints to not only be heard more easily, but it also enables congregation point to exist. I'm not implying that this type of radicalism is new millennial-exclusive thinking, just that it's more noticeable now.
The moderate majority doesn’t make for a good article, it’s true, however it is worthwhile to call out the bullies nonetheless.
I have experienced this from those older than millenials, too. But as someone in their mid-20s, I’m kind of in the thick of the part of the internet where the bullies reside, and it’s certainly not just on Tumblr.
Nope, egalitarian here. I actively choose not to use the term "feminism" because the only encounters I've had with "feminists" have shown that they aren't accepting of anyone who disagrees with them in the slightest. (yes now tell me I need to "get out more", I have.)
Not only that, but in my experience with feminism, to not be a feminist is to be a racist (according to them), and that's kind of how you sound.
There are good people who believe in equality that don't want to wear the moniker of feminism, believe it or don't.
I take a cup of lemonade and put a handful of dirt in it. I offer it to you. You refuse it, because you don't like the taste of dirt.
Is it fair for me to challenge your original claim of liking lemonade? Likewise, if you maintain that you do in fact enjoy lemonade, are we just quibbling over semantics? Or is there a substantive reason why you refused to drink it?
That's what the GP is claiming. When dealing with "feminists", he senses toxic and anti-intellectual attitudes. That's a substantive claim, not a semantic one.
Right, but the toxic and anti-intellectual attitudes are the dirt in the cup. The word "feminism" simply does, by common usage and political self-definition, refer to the equality of women.
maybe this is just me, but semantics are what define the issue as a whole. We all know to stay away from generalities when attempting to make a cogent argument, but it would appear that the moment one wants to get into the deep details, there are people ready to say that "semantics" are somehow misleading. Strange.
I'm not sure how other tech individuals feel about these issues, but with the accounts of mass public shaming by everyone against perceived injustices and their supporters I feel like the best thing for myself is to say and do nothing at all. Until the tone of the discussion changes I think many people will continue to feel this way as well
I nearly always just keep my mouth shut because I know that I can be shot down and 'discredited' purely because I'm white, male, and straight. Part of it is perhaps age (I'm 31 now, and less angry/opinionated than I once was), but it's mostly just that I have, in the past, been repeatedly disregarded or outright abused because of who I am rather than what I'm saying. That kind of response is fundamentally censorious, and it has worked; I'm effectively self-censoring now to comply with the wishes/intentions of this lunatic fringe. From your comment, I get the impression you're doing the same.
The scary outcome of that is a continued chokehold on the narrative and conversation by these extreme fringes, and no change for the better because nobody is willing or able to engage in a reasonable discussion or take reasonable action.
Agreed. I don't know why, but your post reminds me of the part of Cryptonomicon where the intellectuals sit around the table and nod incessantly as their Academic Prince derides the Internet because of who created it. The privileged academics who benefit from a very expensive education speaking ill of the privileged and expensive Internet infrastructure.
That's exactly what they want you to do. Don't try to form any sort of counter argument against them or you'll immediately be painted as a racist, bigoted, misogynist. And if you use your real name they'll attempt ruin your career and destroy your life.
I think that's a good response, but I'd suggest adding some listening and learning to it. The Internet is accelerating some important cultural changes.
For example, look at the speed with which gay rights have happened, and how quickly society changed. In my view, that's because the Internet has drastically increased the ability of people with minority viewpoints to be heard.
What does that feel like for somebody with the old opinions? It has to be hard. For their whole lives, something they didn't like was actively hidden from them out of fear. They just never had to accept that gay people were real humans. So now they have a whole reservoir of views and habits and comments that are no longer appropriate. Many surely feel uncomfortable enough that they just shut up in public.
And I think that's fine. Their views and habits and comments were part of the social structure that oppressed gay people. Nobody wants to hear them anymore. I think it's best for everybody if they say nothing in public. They should instead take some time listening to the gay people whose voices they previously ignored. To the extent that they need help working through their opinions, they should do that privately, with people already sympathetic to them, rather than demanding that the world help them process things.
I don't agree with the sentiment that those who are afraid of speaking up are supporting bigotry or inequality. I hope my comment doesn't imply that I would support those things, or belong to those with 'the old opinions'.
I'm sure you don't want to support those things. I don't either. But I expect we both accidentally do. Let's look at the previous example to gay marriage, interracial marriage:
For a long time, it was the near-universal opinion that it was wrong. Now it's the near-universal opinion that it is fine.
When opposition was the dominant opinion, nobody thought that was supporting bigotry and inequality. Then there was a long period where one side believed it was bigotry and one side didn't. Now everybody sees it as bigotry.
For a long time, opponents of interracial marriage were comfortable sharing their views. Supporters were afraid of speaking up. Eventually supporters started speaking up energetically. Opponents did the same:
Eventually, the tide turned. Opponents generally didn't lose their opinions, but they became afraid to speak up because of possible social consequences. And eventually a generation grew up that doesn't even question the topic.
Why does this matter? Well, either A) all racism, sexism, etc, have now been eliminated from society in this manner, or B) most of us harbor some bigoted, erroneous views that we haven't collectively recognized as wrong.
I believe it's the latter. That's certainly been my personal experience as I've come to learn about these topics.
> So now they have a whole reservoir of views and habits
> and comments that are no longer appropriate.
It's worth noting that pg considers[0] "inappropriate" to be one of the central nodes of a graph of lazy labels. The main problem with a lazy label is that it is used by the listener to suppress ideas rather than deal with them directly[1].
I think this attitude is evident in your following statement:
> Many surely feel uncomfortable enough that they just shut up in public.
> ...
> And I think that's fine. Their views and habits
> and comments were part of the social structure
> that oppressed gay people.
You can't be oppressed by an idea, viewpoint, or comment. That's not oppression, that's disagreement in a free society.
The article makes the point that the solution to hate is not hate in the opposite direction. Yet that's exactly what it seems like you advocate when you say that the Internet has drastically increased the ability of people with minority viewpoints to be heard, and then turn around and say you're glad that people who hold "old opinions" are not comfortable enough to share their viewpoints in public. Which is it, a more open or more closed marketplace of ideas?
> they should [work through their opinions] privately
The privatization of belief and the search for truth does nothing to help a secular, pluralistic society come together and live in harmony. Rather the opposite, when the only truth we agree on societally is the hivemind in search of the "arc of history", we'll end up with no basis on which to reject the totalitarian, authoritarian ideas which inevitably come in to fill the void.
At the risk of offending Godwin, I'd just like to point out that Hitler did not take over Germany with "old opinions" held by the establishment[2], but by some of the most highly educated moral philosophers of his day. Smart, progressive, socially-minded people who are asking good questions can still come to drastically wrong answers.
> inappropriate" to be one of the central nodes of a graph of lazy labels
Here I mean "wrong and recognized as so by a broad segment of society". For example, the inappropriateness of overtly racist statements has become greater over time, while their wrongness hasn't.
> You can't be oppressed by an idea, viewpoint, or comment. That's not oppression, that's disagreement in a free society.
This piece belongs on HN as much as any of the pieces that spring up and are flag killed about feminism i.e. it doesn't.
However, the fact that it is on HN and has received quite a bit of support let's me know I'm certainly not alone in my frustration with the modern social justice movement, their antics, and its creep into the "tech media".
It is an incredibly divisive, hate-fueled movement based on flawed, debunked statistics and what amounts to a game of oppression olympics. Where once the type of person to spout their hateful rhetoric would be simply ignored, through social media they have been enabled, given a voice to, and been able to form an echo-chamber with other similarly deluded, hate-fueled people.
Through their network they have wielded an undue amount of power and we have unfortunately witnessed the result of it in real life, as a man who landed a probe on a comet millions of miles away had his team's achievement pushed to the back in favour of the furor over the shirt he wore while doing so, and who then wept on TV as a result of the sheer level of hate he received.
We have seen GitHub shamed for its rug championing unity in meritocracy, who then quickly moved to throw the "problematic" rug into the trash amidst the furor from these online "feminists".
We saw two people lose their jobs and have their names ran into the ground online by these "feminists" over a bad joke at a tech convention.
And the list goes on.
They have become simply too large to ignore. Their presence, and their narrative, drives so many clicks that we now see the "tech media" latch onto it, give their toxic views air and promote their narrative in the name of gaining clicks.
Facts no longer matter when it comes to these people, only the narrative. It doesn't matter that Ellen Pao was proven to have no case against Kleiner Perkins and was exposed as an incredibly shady person while doing so, you wouldn't tell she lost as the media driving this narrative cherry picked that which was convenient to the narrative and brushed over everything which was not.
I could go on about this, but all I will say is that I'm glad to see backlash against this movement increasing. I'm glad to see more speaking out against it. I'm glad to see their hashtags on Twitter being used against them, and I'm extremely glad to see some of their champions like Sarah Noble being held accountable in real life for the hate they spew online.
I think this is a bit disingenuous. I have definitely seen many articles on the web playing "oppression olympics" pitting supposedly privileged and oppressed groups against one another in literally every possible category, but these are usually met with scorn from rational individuals who identify as feminists or social justice warriors who believe that it harms the relevancy of actually oppressed minorities. There are fringe groups on every topic -- just as the Tea Party isn't representative of the visions of Libertarians and Islamic extremism isn't representative of the views of most Muslims, most radical exclusionary feminism isn't representative of the views of the vast majority of feminists.
And as for Pycon 2013, most feminists I know argued that Adria had done enough by complaining to staff and had no right to post the employees' names and pictures on Instagram/Twitter/whatever, and that the individuals involved did not deserve to lose their jobs. But being a jerk isn't a prerequisite for being a voice for a traditionally oppressed group. It's just a result of being impassioned and hopelessly misguided, both traits that are indicative of naïveté rather than malice.
> In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. —George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Well, doesn't that sum up the modern West in a nutshell. War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.
This is quite unsurprising, since the political system in the United States is very authoritarian.
The entire political discourse lies between the authoritarian center (Democrats) or the authoritarian far right (Republican). There are no real libertarians. There were a few fringe candidates in the past (e.g. Ralph Nader, Ron Paul) who were basically unelectable, and there are a few fringe candidates now (e.g. Rand Paul) who have begun singing the tune of authoritarian government to get elected.
The prerequisite for civilized discourse is that arguments should stand or fall on their own merits. To evaluate opinions on the basis of the sociopolitical identity of the author, and to shout down those who do not pass this test, is pure prejudice indicative of intellectual debility.
I enjoyed reading the contrarian comments attached to the article, because they were revealingly thin on argumentation. My favourite one was "this is not a good article", closely followed by the inscrutable "you need to come to terms with the idea that you're more libertarian than left-wing."
I would agree in general that the left has appropriated and advocates the kind of extreme, life-changing response to perceived enemies that it has accused the right of using. I do think that ultimately there will be backlash against this. The left mentions routinely that it has demographics on its side, but I could just as easily envision them being perceived as having gone too far and being the 'establishment' that people will eventually work to rebel against - though at that point, it may be too late.
This article appears to have fallen off the front page rather precipitously. It was at position 5 last I looked, and now that I refresh the page, it's not even there anymore - older posts with fewer votes are now far above it.
Would any staff care to chime in? It seems as if this posting was penalized.
There is (used to be?) a flamewar detection algorithm built into the larger ranking algorithm that would penalize stories which sparked rapid discussion accompanied by frequent downvoting.
Kind of sad. A case where the algorithm is wrong. This is not a flame war, rather it is a passionate discussion between opposed ideologies. The nefarious tentacles of PC culture infecting the maths. Maybe they should add a word search for certain terms (No, idiot, fucking moron, you are dumb) as well as rapid responses and downvotes to determine if it has gone all Reign of Fire up in here...
The mindset may not be a millennial thing but its prominence in modern society most certainly is. Where once the hate-fueled rhetoric these kinds spew all day and night would have been written off as the delusions of a bitter lunatic, social media has given them a platform to find those similar to them, to network, to organise, etc. and those people tend to be within the millennial age group.
This is like some kind of Clickhole parody that mashes up MRA literature with How Millennials are Destroying the World(TM). There's no discussion to be had because the author's engaged in a dialog in his head about what the counter argument is and decided to format his thoughts in regards to that. Pepper a little Orwell here and some allegory there and you've got an article that shows exactly what's wrong with this argument - a refusal to listen to reason and instead substitute your own perception of how the world works.
You're not really refuting any of his points, you only compared it to "MRA literature" to deflect from having to actually form a counter argument. It's the same as when the "MRAs" compare feminism to nazism.
>There's no discussion to be had
That's the problem. SJWs don't want to discuss anything, just point fingers while sitting atop their high-horse.
>a refusal to listen to reason and instead substitute your own perception of how the world works.
It sounds to me like you're using the same exact rhetoric that the "MRAs" use against the SJWs.
Personally I think the article is very well thought out and I've seen first hand how self described "social justice warriors" can be completely authoritarian, racist, and bigoted.
The WaPo author explicitly says, "This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system."
The Medium piece conflates social justice and legal justice. Slavery was legal, so forcibly returning slaves to their owners was legally just. However, we came to recognize it as a moral wrong, something socially unjust. Eventually, we changed the laws, but the cultural change had to happen first.
What is the end game in a world where an accusation of a crime is accepted as factual, and any questioning of that accusation makes one an apologist for the crime at best?
The legal system is supposed to be a reflection of society's morals. If you challenge the moral framework, by asserting that an accusation should never be questioned, you challenge the legal framework by extension.
Nobody is saying that accusations should never be questioned in court. But we live in a society that, outside of court, treats rape victims very differently than victims of other crimes. The dynamic is lampooned here:
It is that aspect of the moral framework that people are attempting to change. Like it or not, society has collectively acted to excuse rapists for millennia. That has been gradually declining; at least now it's a crime that is taken somewhat seriously.
>The Medium piece conflates social justice and legal justice
>we changed the laws, but the cultural change had to happen first
>This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system
So basically you are describing the very means that will be used to change the laws to remove due process. "Morality" will be used change the legal environment.
So, your slavery example corroborates what the others in the discussion are accusing the WaPo author of. Slavery was legally just, but socially unjust. Thus "we changed the laws, but the cultural change had to happen first." The WaPo author's position is "doubting the accounts of rape victims is legally just, but socially unjust". Do you see where this is going?
Nobody ever said due process shouldn't exist except the author. Again, another scarecrow the author sets up to dehumanize the opposition. The point raised was about listening to rape victims, taking their accusations seriously, and not blaming the victim, but somehow this is against due process? This isn't about the accused but the accuser.
Due process is a legal situation, and it matters after an arrest and during the investigation of a crime. Listening to rape victims at face value is not a violation of due process.
In the Washington Post, Zerlina Maxwell argued that “we should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser [of rape] says,” for “the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”
(Which is another quote in of itself)
Is there another way to read these words that I am aware of?
>Due process is a legal situation, and it matters after an arrest and during the investigation of a crime. Listening to rape victims at face value is not a violation of due process. Listening, yes. Blanket accusation based on a single account is de facto limitation of due process. Shaming a rapist who gets off on a technicality is one thing. Shaming a person who has been accused of rape is quite another.
I stopped hating my generation (born 1983, so I'm just barely a Millennial rather than an Xer) when I stepped back and looked at the picture in its totality and realized that we looked bad because (except in athletics, where objective genetic talent rules the day and rich parents or producers alone can't make a career) most of the prominent Millennials were produced by the worst of the Baby Boom generation.
First of all, authoritarian leftism isn't new. The ex-leftist neoconservatives of 2003 who got us into the Iraq War? They weren't the civil rights activists or the hippies. They weren't the ones fighting for desegreation or womens' or gay rights activists. Rather, those people were the communists, Stalin-defenders in the 60s, the left-wing authoritarians who swung right when they were older and richer. It's not really a loss that they went from left to right in the Reagan Era, as they were assholes the whole time.
Anyway, someone being a jerk on Twitter is not the same thing as what the Weather Underground was up to. For good and bad, we're pretty moderate in comparison to the Baby Boomers.
I stopped hating Millennials when I realized that the worst of us are products created by the worst of the exiting generations. You can find anything in any generation, so one bad apple (or few) says little about the generation and much more about those who endeavored to find it. And a young generation will be defined, when it is young, based on the uses that older generations find for it. Evan Spiegel? Lucas Duplan? Miley Cyrus? Justin Bieber? Lena Dunham? They're detestable, but they reflect on their producers, the ones who made their careers, and not on "our generation" in any meaningful way. If you look at the currently small-- and it's small not because we suck but because we're still young and most of us haven't had a chance to get started yet-- percentage (in the arts and business) of prominent Millennials who are actually self-made, the picture is a lot more flattering.
> Evan Spiegel? Lucas Duplan? Miley Cyrus? Justin Bieber? Lena Dunham? They're detestable, but they reflect on their producers, the ones who made their careers, and not on "our generation" in any meaningful way.
I'm with you otherwise but this line of reasoning is pretty dubious, a sort of counting the hits and not the misses approach.
It doesn't reduce well. If we blame the boomers for "producing" millennials why can't we just turn around and blame the prehistoric Madison Avenue types that produced the boomers[0], and so on and so forth.
My point is that a large percentage of the people who are prominent right now are the ones who had lift from the worst of older generations. They're not reflective of the generation as a whole, or what we will be when some of us actually get into real power.
Right now, the oldest Millennials are 33. In 15 years, it will be different.
Perhaps, I suppose we'll have to see. One could also make the argument that these guys who are becoming billionaires will only spawn whole cottage industries of metastasized douchebaggery in 15 years (ala Peter Thiel) but I'll concede it's possible that there's a pending cultural shift that will dwarf all this just over the horizon.
> Rather, those people were the communists, Stalin-defenders in the 60s
I think you'll find a lot of them were rather Trotsyists rather than Stalinists[1] which made the leap to the right during Reagan's early anti-USSR years somewhat easier as they had a long term hatred of the (post-Stalin) Soviet Union.
Cheap synopsis: MRA tries to make make a cogent case without the overt whining, misogyny, bigotry. Still a privileged rant. Author may be feeling strident in the wake of Rolling Stone's retractions and recriminations.
You just proved how you either didn't read the article, or read it and completely missed the point as the author directly addresses what you're complaining about.
It's very telling (and actually directly proves the author's point) that the best criticism you can come up with is the author's identity (i.e. a personal attack, i.e. an adhom) rather than a concrete problem with his ideas.
I've been through divorce in Texas. I know how sexist the system can be towards men. But I have looked into the issues and the politics, and it's clear that feminist policies would have served me much better than sexist ones.
Author's premise that feminism is a propagandistic response to actual sexism faced by men is offensive to all my experience with the facts and the people involved. Thus my conclusion is, this tries to be a high-minded sounding article but it is a hit piece.
You know what else is offensive? The disgusting perversion of the justice system called out in the article. It's not a "hit piece" if it's completely true.
Know what else is offensive? The disgusting perversion of the justice system supported by people who don't know the difference between bullies and victims. Feminism didn't break the system.
Every bully was at some point a victim. Many who suffer from sexual assault early on are in very real danger of being warped from victims into aggressors. It is important to remember that everyone becomes something through a process. Not a defense for bullies; i just think we should attack the root cause and not the symptom.
My god, why can't white cis males handle any criticism? It's as if people live in paralyzing fear of being called a name. And then can't wait for an opportunity to say "Aha! You're now exactly like your oppressors!" WTF? If you can think these things are the same, you automatically prove you do not actually understand anything. And yet you preach, and preach...
The problem here is that there is also an equal opposite force.
Pretty much all of those who use the derogatory term "SJW" turn out to be misogynistic right-wing bullies for whom feminism equals evil, and who think rape threats are free speech. The whole gamergate movement is utterly disgusting and spreading. (For instance, the right-wing bullies are now terrorizing the Hugo awards.)
It's a movement towards intolerant extremism from both sides.
Really?? So by using a term, whether quoting, asking, or actually applying, you can infer deep motivation? That is a pretty awesome skill... or maybe you are being the change you refuse to see...
While the author has a couple good points [there is alot of 1984 kind of Doublespeak in Western culture and it is getting worse] and there are those overzealous individuals who will use false information to push an agenda...
> The fact of the matter is, this particular brand of millennial social justice advocacy is destructive to academia, intellectual honesty, and true critical thinking and open mindedness. We see it already having a profound impact on the way universities act and how they approach curriculum.
The mere fact political propaganda from a known biased source would be used as "evidence", honestly, shows the OP has the same biases as the SJW but from a different direction.
Intellectually honesty isn't repeating stories from a well known political organization that solely exists to train future conservatives to spread their message as fact [without disclosing that is what they are].
---
Since I'm rate limited I'll reply to the accusation below here:
> Your argument is simply ad hominem. Either the ideas themselves are wrong, or they're not. It doesn't matter where the information came from. If Hitler told me about gravity that doesn't mean there is no gravity just because I learned about it from him.
Hitler in a clown mask coming to tell you about how the Jews are ruining society. The author knows its Hitler, but he doesn't tell you. All the while claiming he is a paragon of intellectual honesty and the opposition is not.
That is the actual comparison and why him doing this is a problem.
Your argument is simply ad hominem. Either the ideas themselves are wrong, or they're not. It doesn't matter where the information came from. If Hitler told me about gravity that doesn't mean there is no gravity just because I learned about it from him.
