gemmaem
7mo ago
There's no need to escalate this to "requiring explicit consent for any type of physical social interaction." I'm sure a congratulatory pat on the back would have been fine. Even a hug.
gemmaem
7mo ago
It does indeed depend on the social meaning to some extent. But, looking at reactions within Spain to this event, it seems like a lot of Spanish women agree that, according to their own social meanings, this was out of line.
gemmaem
7mo ago
There is no level of status at which any man becomes attractive to every woman. The phenomenon in which high-status men sometimes get away with sexual harassment or assault was never win-win to begin with. Your comment doesn't even consider the possibility that sexual attention from a powerful man might at times be deeply unpleasant in itself, and that refusal is important for personal reasons rather than some kind of elaborate power play.
Boy band audiences, particularly those in the front row, can usually be assumed to be fans. That makes them a special case. Even then, it would be possible to go too far, I think.
gemmaem
8mo ago
Since it is in fact not an election year, I suspect that one answer to your question is that about 40-50% of America's time is now considered to be "election year" in some sense.
Honestly, your political season is exhausting.
gemmaem
8mo ago
Hey, you know I’ll always hear you out on this subject. I didn’t think I was defending “whiteness” terminology, though, to be honest. My main concern, in this conversation, is the comparison with Hanania. This thread contains a lot of minimisation of his rhetoric. Establishing that Hanania’s pseudonymous writing is worse is important to me because to say otherwise is to misinform about Hanania.
See you in other parts of the internet!
gemmaem
8mo ago
The former would be an example of explicitly defending a call to violence, while the latter would be an example of "bending over backwards" which is what I originally called it.
In the comment to which I was responding, your exact phrasing was "you can openly call for murdering people based on their race, and the "paper of record" will come to your defense." Like I said, precision matters.
You can, of course, say that the explicit denial of serious intent isn't relevant; that's a judgment you're allowed to make. Personally, while I still think that "wink wink" versions of such things are very bad, I would nevertheless make the distinction. I'm not a fan of dark humour on such subjects, for example, and I think it can give cover for more serious versions, but it's not the same as openly meaning it. I don't know enough about the South African context to judge actual intent, so the best I can do is to be as factual as I can.
gemmaem
8mo ago
It's always worth being accurate about the problem. "Person calls for genocide, and when questioned about it says 'yes, we really mean genocide' and the NYT defends them" is different to "People sing a song about killing another race of people, and when questioned say they are remembering the bad old days of their oppression and do not mean it literally, and the NYT frames the story in a way that deflects condemnation."
When discussing racism on this forum, I always have to be precise about exactly what happened and what did not. Sometimes this is bullshit (e.g. these quibbles about the exact definition of "ethnic cleansing.") However, the general principle of precision over outrage is a good one, and I am certainly not going to lower my standards just because white people are the target in this instance.
as long as stuff like this can be published in broad daylight, I see no reason why what he posted should result in any consequences.
Would this still be true, for you, if he didn't even disavow it? Would you use statements with overtly denied meanings or non-explicit rhetoric with uncertain but potentially disturbing implications as an excuse for allowing overtly harmful explicit policy proposals?
gemmaem
8mo ago
What exactly are you pushing me for, when it comes to using “whiteness” to describe the set of effects that being white in a racist society might have on people? I think it’s bad terminology and people should stop using it. Are you asking me to conclude that everyone who uses such terminology actually intends white people harm? Because, if so, I don’t think that’s true. Alternatively, you might be asking me to be outraged, in order to campaign more effectively for people to actually stop. I am not sure if my outrage would actually be helpful, though.
There are a lot of situations in which a more measured argument would be more persuasive. After all, most people who support such terminology believe that outraged people are mistaken about its meaning. By not being outraged and instead taking people at their word, I might well have a better chance of changing people’s minds. I’ve not tried to make this argument, but I am pondering whether I should engage more with people to my left, now that this place is becoming less interesting to me.
gemmaem
8mo ago
Like @raggedy_anthem, I do not believe you intended to sound Black. Because AAVE is an alternate dialect with different pronunciations and rules of grammar, and because it is primarily spoken by members of a socially disadvantaged class, the stereotypical “idiot” pronunciation has sometimes shifted towards that (actually fairly complicated and internal-rule-abiding) dialect. This isn’t on me or on you. It’s on the pre-existing history of seeing Black Americans as social inferiors.
Given the surrounding social environment here, I don’t expect to gain points for wokeness. I do think that it’s useful to avoid normalising racial caricature, even unintentionally.
gemmaem
8mo ago
I know I’m being an SJW, but I don’t think you should use African-American dialect pejoratively like this. I don’t think these are black people to begin with, and this wouldn’t be a good way to respond even if they were.
gemmaem
8mo ago
With all due respect, you cannot “openly call for murder.” What you can do is sing a song that calls for murder and then pinky promise you don’t mean it literally, and then the NYT will make sure to mention all that stuff about not taking it literally.
It’s not good! In a country where white people are a racial minority, it’s reasonable to see a serious potential threat. I sincerely hope we do not see violence as a result.
To be clear, I don’t support the pejorative usage of “whiteness” to describe cultural or personal qualities. However, I am not the one making a comparison, here. I’m responding to a comparison that I was given. It is indeed tricky to compare “aimed at white people, no claims of inherent racial superiority, disturbing in potential unspoken implication but not necessarily meaning what a person’s worst fears might make of it, continues to be openly held, not given strong social sanction” with “aimed at a racial minority, claims of inherent racial superiority, explicitly terrible policy suggestions, very recently repudiated, given some social sanction and we may see more.” That’s a lot of variables!
gemmaem
8mo ago
Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,” and the authors probably aren’t secretly thinking it; note that I come from a country where giving back land is government policy. Metaphors about “whiteness” are still putatively about mindset rather than genetics, and the paper you list was by a white person, which isn’t a complete defence but it does complicate things. We don’t have to trust these people completely but it does matter that they don’t actually mirror Hanania’s pseudonym.
You might reasonably ask whether someone who had called for extremist anti-white policies that truly did mirror Hanania’s would be more easily forgiven if they repudiated their earlier stance. Probably. But I have never seen such policies advocated in the first place, and I think that extreme white supremacy is feared because it actually has a constituency. It certainly has one here on this website. OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.” This person blithely refers to “implement[ing] a few eugenic policies” as a way of getting rid of a racial minority.This person thinks that Jim Crow and slavery were “sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass.” At least that last one is getting pushback?
It remains to be seen whether this even will scuttle Hanania’s book deal. You’re right that it could, but it might not. I am not certain that it should, but I may as well admit that it scares me a little that it might not. Without the possibility of strong pushback, would Hanania have changed his mind in the first place? Even if he would have, others would not. You can see plenty of them right here.
Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status. I don’t think he should lose the opportunity to regain some trust, and his explanation does matter, but it’s important that he takes a hit for this. Moreover, we don’t have to trust him.
gemmaem
8mo ago
I’m intrigued that you conflate “HBD believer” with “believer in coercive eugenics.” Seems like there are a lot of people in this thread defining that term in very telling ways.
gemmaem
8mo ago
Nonsense. Coerced sterilisation would be a human rights violation no matter who the target was. Removing a specific racial group from America is well outside the Overton Window. And even affirmative action is generally framed in terms of helping minorities, rather than justifying it with invective against white people.
gemmaem
8mo ago
But his posts and blog comments very much did encourage racism. This is not a close call, whether Hanania says it himself or not.
Hanania’s “talk about race and crime” was fine with them. The problem is with his talk about eugenic sterilisation and justified racial discrimination and the necessity of getting Hispanic people to leave the US because of the inevitable antagonism between whites and racial minority groups with inferior intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
gemmaem
8mo ago
Mm, fair enough. There’s still a part of me that balks at phrasing like “practising homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences,” in that it seems to consider “practising homosexuality” as a single thing that can be considered risky in itself instead of looking into the underlying causative relationships. But this may be influenced by the disgust with which the word “lifestyle” is sometimes deployed in this specific context, rather than any analogy with other contexts. “Having a full time job that requires you to sit down all day is a lifestyle with health consequences” would probably not stand out to me in the same way, even though this, too, is a causative chain that can be somewhat interrupted by, for example, taking breaks in which you are mobile.
gemmaem
8mo ago
Interesting! I was reasoning by analogy with "driving a pickup truck is correlated with being male and rural which is correlated with worse life expectancy." In that situation, all else being equal, the pickup truck itself is not a concern. Similarly, if it were just a matter of personal promiscuity and the community effects weren't salient, then homosexuality itself would not be a concern.
gemmaem
8mo ago
There's a lot more stuff in there besides the two things you mention. For example:
Hispanic people, he wrote in a 2010 article in Counter-Currents, “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.” He then made an argument for ethnic cleansing, writing that “the ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave.”
“If we want to defend our liberty and property, a low-IQ group of a different race sharing the same land is a permanent antagonist,” he wrote.
Of course, many proponents of "HBD" do indeed consider racial antagonism to be part and parcel of that worldview. I'm not the first to note that "HBD" is a motte and bailey with dry statistics in the motte and outright racism in the bailey. But if you're going to fold remarks like this into "HBD" then you really are saying the quiet part out loud.
gemmaem
8mo ago
Obviously I can't speak for @Doubletree1, but the answers to your questions seem fairly obvious. The correlative cause, when it comes to spreading disease, is (a) having a lot of sex with a lot of different people and/or (b) having sex with people who are part of a community that has a lot of sex with a lot of different people (even if your own behaviour doesn't fall within that category).
The former is a "pickup truck" level of causality: homosexuality is correlated with promiscuity which is correlated with disease transmission. The latter may not be, in that men who have sex with men form a somewhat more dangerous community to have sex with even if you are, yourself, quite careful.
Since I would not have had reason to think this distinction through without @Doubletree1's comment, I think it's fair to say that they have made a useful contribution to the discussion and should not be getting downvoted. Perhaps you were already thinking in terms of (b)? If so, I guess I can understand why you wouldn't see the point of their analogy. Still, I appreciated it.
gemmaem
9mo ago
I dunno, in some ways "you know this deep down but you've convinced yourself otherwise" is even more infuriating than a simple "you're lying for social approval." At least the latter can be easily dismissed. The former always feels like the person talking to me is trying to undermine my best judgment by making me doubt myself.
gemmaem
9mo ago
I think it would also be perfectly fair to criticise the book for implying something without deciding whether it is “at odds with Christianity.” In particular, a non-Christian might not care about what “true Christianity” has to say about nylons and lipstick. A criticism like “This description of Susan draws on a type of disdain for specifically female sexuality that is common amongst Christians” can be valid whether or not it is actually Christian, in some idealistic or doctrinal sense, to disapprove of lipstick. It doesn’t make sense to claim that Lewis can only be interpreted as a Christian in a doctrinal sense, and not in a broader cultural sense.
gemmaem
9mo ago
I definitely have some similar reactions to you. The idea that Susan is pretending not to believe in exchange for social approval may well have some basis in real temptations that Lewis as a believer sometimes experienced. Nevertheless, it’s quite common for believers to suggest that nonbelievers are falling prey to these sorts of failings and I can feel my hackles rising as a result.
I think Lewis often takes this kind of tactic of “Are you sure you don’t just feel [uncharitable suggestion]?” as part of his approach to apologetics. Often, as the OP notes, he believes that these accusations are true of his own former self. Lewis often seems to think that self-criticism is surely safe. But when you are using your former self as a guide to understanding others, charity toward your former self becomes as important as charity to others.
gemmaem
9mo ago
Thank you for your explanation of 1 Corinthians 7. I’d probably respect it more if it did make a distinction between inspiration and personal best judgment, but I can see how the text supports your interpretation. Agnostically speaking, I probably shouldn’t hold it against Paul in the event that he either truly always speaks with inspiration or honestly believes that he does.
I’m having trouble squaring some of the statistics in your link with broader statistics in the USA. In particular, their survey would have it that 71% of Americans, in 2021, believed that the Bible was the inspired word of God in some sense (even if it might contain errors). But in 2021, only 63% of Americans said they were Christian.
So is the discrepancy all made up of Jews and Muslims? Are there “unaffiliated” people who nevertheless believe the Bible to be inspired by God? It would be helpful to know how the responses in the American Bible Society survey split up by stated religious affiliation, honestly.
In any case, this certainly supports the idea that a large percentage of Christians think the Bible “has no errors” (even if many say some of it is “symbolic and not literal.”) Still, as an outsider, I think I’m still most inclined to define “Christian” to mean people who believe in the divinity of Christ. I don’t think that someone who believes that Paul believed in an imminent apocalypse and writes with reference to that view is somehow “not Christian” if they still think that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and will someday return to judge us all, for example.
I wasn't overly familiar with Lasseter's case, but Wikipedia's brief summary mentions "grabbing, kissing, [and] making comments about physical attributes." In both cases, it may be worth distinguishing between "physical social interaction" and sexual interaction.
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