gemmaem
1yr ago
There are many Bible verses that say that there is such a requirement for practical, monetary help. Matthew 19:21, for example:
Jesus said to him, “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”
gemmaem
1yr ago
This is the Motte. You may have noticed that there are quite a few people around here with ideas that are deeply immoral, incompatible with liberal morality, and dangerous. Nevertheless, we have norms against being deliberately unpleasant to people on that basis.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Noah Millman notably avoids this trap, writing,
There is surely still scope for both policy and cultural arguments, but the starting point for any discussion of fertility decline has to be that it is a global, cross-cultural phenomenon. The factors that correlate most-strongly with fertility decline are female literacy and urbanization. As a country urbanizes, and as it modernizes to the point where most women learn to read, fertility declines dramatically. As I’ve said before, if the alternatives to a low-fertility world are ISIS or the Khmer Rouge, I’m sticking with a low-fertility world.
We are all, to some extent, entitled to draw upon the cultural richness of the entire world.
There are caveats, here. If you're drawing on something sacred, or something that has a specific meaning, then part of respecting the culture you're working with can be not diluting that sacredness or meaning by repurposing it for other, more frivolous ends. And in general, especially if you're drawing on people less well known than you, I think there is a moral duty to give credit to the people you are drawing from. Both of these caveats are based on my view of the morality of the situation and you are entitled to reject them if you choose.
There is also the caveat that if the thing you are using is more recent, then it may be subject to copyright or trademark law.
Beyond that, though, I think it's good to use each other's stories. In the specific case of Ariel, I think (a) pretty much everyone is entitled to Hans Christian Andersen's work at this point, and, (b) Disney get to do what they want with their own IP, although I'm unimpressed by the cash-grabbing aspects of their recent spate of live-action remakes.
Disney is, at the very least, legally entitled to the work that they pay people to produce. They may not be morally entitled to do whatever they want with it, however. I, for one, would certainly hope that they would feel some duty to respect their employees' creative work, and would be open to arguments that cash-grabbing remakes fail in this duty.
I do not think that changing a white character to a black one in the course of those remakes is in any way outrageous, however, and it is certainly not more outrageous than the existence of the remake in the first place.
This is fundamentally a question about "What do left-wing people believe and why do they believe it?" To answer such a question, you need a qualitative appreciation of people's belief structure, rather than pure quantitative analysis of the type you seem to be suggesting.
As someone who watched the intersectional feminist critique of "liberal debate" developing in real time, I can give you some examples of the types of direct criticism of liberal debate norms that led to decreased appreciation for such procedural rules.
-
Blog comment moderation. Early on, in the blogosphere there was a substantial (or at least noisy) "free speech" contingent that contended that all blog comment sections ought to be unmoderated for "free speech" reasons. Feminists frequently had bad-faith people showing up in their comment sections to deliberately troll; they were also frequently discussing delicate topics such as rape. Comment moderation of some kind or other was thus a fairly universal practice, and the conflation of "free speech" with being against comment moderation contributed to a decline in appreciation for the (broad, non-first-amendment version of the) concept.
-
The devil's advocate. When someone says they are "playing devil's advocate," they're often asking people to debate them as an exercise without holding them responsible for any moral repugnance inherent in what they are suggesting. Feminists got tired of being asked to calmly refute ideas that they considered personally painful and morally unsupportable. They noted/claimed that there was often an inherent imbalance in who was being asked to "remain calm" while hearing something deeply threatening to them on a personal level.
-
Tone policing. When speaking about an emotionally resonant subject, being asked to speak calmly can mean censoring yourself. Thus, while the previous two claims are about how liberal norms are too permissive, this one is about how they are too restrictive. Sometimes being visibly angry is the only way to truthfully express yourself. Intersectional feminists also claim that variation in the social norms applied to different groups of people will lead to greater tone restrictions on women (in whom anger is less accepted) and on black people (in whom anger is seen as more threatening).
-
The ban on "emotion." If I may quote myself: "Disallowing "emotion" favours noncontroversial emotions over controversial ones, since noncontroversial emotions do not need to be vividly expressed in order to be understood and taken as meaningful." Feminists tend to believe that typically male emotions are accepted, where female ones are not, and thus that they will be disadvantaged as women under such a rule. Intersectional feminists take it further, and suggest that upper-class white male emotions are likely to be the noncontroversial, accepted ones that have weight without needing to actually be expressed strongly -- and which are therefore likely to carry the day under liberal "rules of debate."
I am personally very sympathetic to most of these critiques. Unfortunately, I don't think the most common solutions on offer actually lead to better outcomes overall. Nevertheless, my explanation of the trend that you identify would be that these liberal norms fell out of fashion because they genuinely were flawed, and that bringing them back will require re-working them to take some of these critiques into account while also preserving what was important about them.
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
10mo ago
Many Christians, including some of the more conservative ones, do not believe that every single word of the Bible is the literal word of God. On the contrary, the letters of Paul (for example) are the word of Paul — some of which Paul himself believes to have come from God, and some of which is explicitly given as “I didn’t get this from God but it seems like common sense.”
gemmaem
1yr ago
Male power fantasies in fiction are still very common, I think you'll find. There's an entire section of literary criticism in which the ur-narrative is The Hero's Journey. Being the Son of Heaven or some other kind of Chosen One comes standard.
Reality is, ultimately, its own check on these things, I think. Most women know they aren't actually queen of very much. Time comes for us all, and most of us grow. Some of us still like to imagine being Batman now and then while we're at it, and that's okay.
I think it might actually be harder to mock women for not being powerful just because, unlike men, we're not failing in our gender role by lacking power. Which isn't fair to men, that they should be mocked for not aligning with a gender role, but I think some of the difference that you are seeing actually comes from there.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Now, just for starters, I realize this is a semantic battle that's lost, but I will nonetheless keep pointing it out: "TERF" at least originally meant Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Radical feminism is a specific school of feminist ideology, it doesn't just mean "feminists who are really zealous and strident." It's actually quite fringe in modern feminism. Rowling is a feminist, and could probably be described as a Second Wave feminist, but she is certainly not a radical feminist.
I would also dispute the "Trans-Exclusionary" label, but that's somewhat more subjective, depending on what you mean by "exclude."
I've shifted to "trans-critical feminist" for the same group. I feel like "gender critical" is confusing terminology, in that it really is transgender critical, but "critical" is more accurate these days than "exclusionary", and, as you note, a lot of these people are not radical feminists.
(I think the "TERF" terminology was originally more accurate -- the split started with radical feminists who distrusted men and therefore wanted to exclude trans women from certain kinds of feminist events. But the usage has broadened to the point where the wording needs to be improved.)
gemmaem
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I have a couple of posts on my tumblr that collects nuanced social justice leftist positions making precisely the point you're making, here -- namely, that excessive hatred of men and hostility towards trans people are related, and should be rejected in tandem.
(explanations from me in square brackets)
I know misandry is fun and all but “men are born evil and women are pure and incapable of doing harm 😌🥰” gender essentialism still leads to transmisogyny ultimately even though you include trans men and women in it
It’s the kind of thinking that leads to the idea that afab [assigned female at birth] = safe and amab [assigned male at birth] = dangerous and one of the reasons why amab non binary people and trans women are still shunned within queer spaces because of perceived “maleness” being treated like a poison you can’t fully “cleanse” yourself of like essentialism is still bad when repackaged as inclusive of trans people and something that can be exploited to turn people who aren’t transfem against us lol
(The last time I posted this, someone thought the "I know misandry is fun and all" part was serious, so I'm just going to take a moment to point out the sarcasm for anyone not accustomed to the idiom, btw.)
saying this as a trans dude: I honestly think you really can’t be a good trans ally if you’re gonna treat cis dyadic men [dyadic = not intersex iirc] as inherently evil/worse than everyone else
like yes toxic masculinity and certain socialization and being unaware of privilege can lead to a higher incidence of shitty behavior, it’s not stupid to be wary of cis dyadic men, but that’s different than believing they are inherently worse than anyone else simply by the fact that they are cisgendered men
you can’t say you don’t discriminate based off of gender identity while also saying that people of a certain agab and gender identity are inherently bad full stop.
also it Will bleed over to trans people even if you don’t realize it. if you think being amab and male makes someone shitty you’re gonna apply that to amab trans people and transmascs regardless of agab [assigned gender at birth]. any amab person who doesn’t completely dissociate from masculinity and any person who embraces it is gonna be considered shittier than everyone else bc they’re closer to cis men, unless people just ignore the parts of peoples identity and presentation they don’t like which is still garbage
and also like. even if it didn’t affect trans people it’s still incredibly shitty to think that any gender identity/agab combo is inherently worse than others
They're not wrong! Nor are they unique. I can definitely recall similar arguments from other people that I can't immediately locate right now.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Transgender people are not, as a rule, exempt from being "canceled" for saying the wrong thing about other trans people. (See Contrapoints' video on her own experiences of being canceled.) I would hope for some mercy in this specific instance, not because the identity questioning is justified but because she's talking about someone who quite literally just killed her dear friend; expecting her to be perfectly charitable isn't really fair. I would not, however, generalize from this case in determining leftist norms in general.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Being violently attacked should not be "the consequences" of making unpopular policy, or of being the family of someone who has made policies that some people do not like. If you're worried about being smeared as supporting this kind of violent attack, then don't talk as if the attack was justified.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, note below that I'm not trying to outlaw reasoned explanations of why a given act is abusive or likely to prepare someone to be abused. We can still discuss why porn is inappropriate for 5 year olds.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I'm not defending those responses. I agree that they were out of line, for the exact same reason that naraburns is out of line. And naraburns started it.
gemmaem
1yr ago
To respond to your edits (which I think you ought to have marked as such, out of courtesy, given that I had already replied):
Does "unfortunately it's illegal because teachers and kids sharing porn would be a Powerful tool for social justice" count? Or "porn is good for kids, but only if it's Queer and Addresses Gender Inequities"?
Like, I just want you to acknowledge here that these "social justice in porn studies" academics only have a problem with kids being given porn if they think it's the wrong kind of cisnormative porn.
First of all, I would appreciate knowing what this quote is from. You've said nothing about where you found it, or who said it.
Second of all, it is still not clear to me that it is saying what you say it is saying. "Porn can be helpful in these ways and harmful in these other ways" is very far from an unqualified endorsement. The fact that the person who wrote this (whoever they are) reaches first for a social justice critique of porn is not actually evidence that they think porn is always good for children when it doesn't have those issues, or that children should be given it when they are not choosing to access it on their own.
In particular, I think there may be something important being said here:
This interrogation would not rule out explicit critiques of misogynistic, homophobic or racist tropes within pornography, but might also offer the capacity to open up critically productive conversations about the boundaries between adult sexual knowledge and young people’s sexual learning; and the ways popular and institutional discourses define particular forms of sexuality, sexual identity, and sex/gender expression as ‘legitimate’ (or ‘illegitimate’) know-ledge for young people.
It's not clear from your quote what "productive conversations" would consist of, but I can see two potentially sympathetic things being alluded to here. One of these -- from my second bolded section -- is the lack of access children might have to non-pornographic information about LGBTQ topics. Children sometimes turn to porn because they don't have alternate sources of information, and this can be particularly true when topics like homosexuality and trans identities are deemed off limits for them. Rather than castigating them for turning to porn for information in that situation, it might indeed be helpful to leave room for a productive conversation about what information they are looking for.
The second sympathetic thing that I might be detecting here -- although I would need more context to be sure -- is this reference to "the boundaries between adult sexual knowledge and young people’s sexual learning." I do wonder if this is trying to say that adult pornographic content is not necessarily a good source of sexual learning, and that it's useful to have a boundary here.
gemmaem
8mo 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
8mo 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
9mo 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
10mo 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
1yr ago
Hospitals compete to get the most births, and as a result the maternity ward in most hospitals is really nice.
Huh. Interesting. This made me wonder if Israel might have unusually high quality of maternity care as regards how birthing mothers are treated on a personal level. Looking it up, the country apparently has the lowest rate of C-sections per 1,000 live births. Impressive. This is a potentially under-rated way of increasing birth rates, in that people with less birth trauma are more likely to give birth again.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I probably am sea lioning a bit, it's true. But, on the other hand, it's not actually good for the Motte when it becomes a place for men to lash out in frustration at women with exaggerated claims. You joke that there are about 2 women here, but really, if you want viewpoint diversity, this can't become a space where people are perceived as having the right to complain about a particular subgroup without getting pushback.
For what it's worth, you have my agreement of some of your complaints. "Women are the greatest victims of war" is pretty indefensible. There have been instances in which the social movement against rape and sexual assault has led to deeply unfair outcomes for some of those accused. And, in this context, it is silly to blame men for not being in relationships. If women are "rational" for dating each other or choosing their careers instead, then men are just as "rational" for looking at the hell that is dating apps and deciding to watch porn instead.
The liberal position is that people can "demand" whatever they want out of a partner, provided that they are willing to accept not having a partner if they cannot actually convince such a person to date them. And I think that's a pretty important principle, actually -- that individuals can always opt out of the dating market, if they've decided that it sucks. That women fear coercion in this space is not actually a sign that we are manipulative; our fear is based on a not-too-distant history in which social norms used to make it harder for women to say no to relationships even when they wanted to. If you want to throw away liberalism in this context, because you think it simply isn't sustainable, then it's not illegitimate for people to respond by pointing out that this will create harms of its own.
If we're keeping liberalism, then I think the finger-pointing in both directions has to stop. I think sometimes people point the finger at men because they want to forestall any sort of conversation that might lead to social coercion of women, but I don't think this is actually helpful. Men are also within their rights to opt out if they want to.
Honestly, if you ask me, one reason this problem is hard is that child-rearing just doesn't fit easily into an atomised, market-based society. The strongest incentives are not economic nor directly related to happiness; they happen on the wishy-washy level of fulfillment and even sometimes self-sacrifice. The best ways to support it naturally take place not on the individual level nor the national level but rather on the intermediate, community level.
It's possible that some of the solutions to the problem of finding relationships need to happen on that local level, too. Dating apps suck particularly badly for men, but women don't really seem to love them all that much, either. Rather than berating people for not engaging with the system as it exists, it surely makes more sense to try to reform the system so that better ways of finding partners and starting families start to seem possible for people. That's easier said than done, but better than sitting around arguing about who is to blame.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, I would certainly be in favour of also having homeless programs that target men. I agree that there is a fair bit of momentum behind addressing inequities faced by women, and less momentum behind addressing inequities faced by men, and I am definitely open to arguments about which such inequities are particularly important (successful suicide attempts would be another obvious urgent one).
So I agree that there are issues that need addressing, here, but I don't think denying women the vote is likely to be an important step towards that. And although some feminists are threatened by the notion that men might also face inequities, I think the broader public, including women, is generally not inclined to view such things with outrage or bad faith argumentation, so much as an unwarranted level of neglect which we can work to overcome.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I loved Ancillary Justice. It did not deserve to get dragged through the mud just because some people were mean to Larry Correia on the internet. It certainly starts out quite opaque, but it rewards attentive reading.
Given the publicity surrounding its use of feminine pronouns for every character, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a book about gender. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this is really a book that is not about gender. The Imperial Radch is a deeply flawed society with a great deal of systemic injustice -- and it doesn't have gender (as we understand it) and it doesn't have race (as we understand it). So it's a book about systemic injustice that has very carefully excised the main two identity markers that we usually associate with that sort of thing. It takes away the compass that the average social justice advocate would use, and asks readers to learn to navigate anew.
I thought the body horror aspects were excellently handled, creeping up on the reader precisely because they are so normal to the narrator. I also found Anaander Mianaai's troubles with herself to be predictable in the manner of a successful Chekhov's gun -- the sort of thing where you ask "but what if..." partway through the book and then learn later (to great readerly satisfaction) that, indeed, if. On the whole, there is a general theme of throwing the reader into the deep end of some massive cultural and technological differences. If you enjoy subtle clues and tricky empathy leaps, it's a really good book.
gemmaem
1yr ago
The left does get a lot of unpleasant rhetoric aimed at it, you're not wrong about that. Frankly, if the norms applied to the woke left were applied across the board, this place would be a lot less pleasant for everyone (Including the woke leftists, whom I think would promptly become subject to a yet worse standard, because some inequities are unavoidable. I say this as a long-since-resigned woke leftist feminist with intersectional influences. Frankly, as someone near the bottom of the congeniality ladder I would prefer that the median not slip further down).
If this was a discussion about "Why do people not approach Catholicism respectfully?" then I think your post would be acceptable, because it would be on topic. Unpleasantness as a side effect of honest explanation is unavoidable, sometimes, around here. But this was, instead, a discussion about how to survive when your views are unpopular. Moreover, it was a discussion specifically instigated to try to help those people feel more at home and deal with it better. "Have different views" is not a good suggestion, in that context, particularly since breadth of viewpoints is something this forum is supposed to encourage.
Thank you so much!
This makes me pretty unimpressed with OP. For one thing, this isn't a post "explaining the rules of the subreddit," as OP claims. It's an opinion from an ordinary user. It's also preceded by several important caveats that make it less inflammatory than if it had started from the place where OP begins their quote. Also, it's from nine years ago -- how far did they have to dig in order to find something they could quote out of context in order to make it sound suitably threatening?
@KingKong, I don't think you posted this in good faith. You omitted important context. You didn't provide a link so people could check. And you lied about what the post actually was.
You should be ashamed. The culture war is hot enough without misrepresenting things deliberately in order to cause drama.
More options
Context Copy link