gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, since you can't even explain what power it is that women have that you're complaining about, I suppose there is no substance here for me to argue with. You've made one vague gesture towards @2rafa's list of admirably gender-neutral constraints while simultaneously declaring it, understandably, "too hardcore."
You can't even really articulate the premise on which your misogyny rests, let alone substantiate it.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Power of women specifically is the power to tank any political project they don't like (say, one increasing men's rights) and shut down a discussion they don't favor (say, one casting women in unflattering light) with a gratuitous refusal to compromise or engage in good faith;
Still a bit light on the details. Are you too afraid of my mean-girl power to explain which men's rights women are taking away, or would you be willing to elaborate?
As for "casting women in an unflattering light," well, your premise that women are too mean and irrational to be allowed to participate in politics certainly does that! And I suppose you will claim that any counterargument that I make is merely an appeal to "women are wonderful." But I think my conduct speaks for itself, to any reasonable observer. Your accusation of habitual bad-faith argumentation on my part is unfounded.
gemmaem
1yr ago
You're not wrong that a clear double standard seems to be opening up around accusing posters on here of being "groomers." I feel like naraburns crossed a line when he wrote:
Do you honestly advocate for distributing such things to children? If so, you're a groomer, too...
This is a shaming tactic: "If you disagree with me on this issue then you are a knowing accessory to child abuse." It's unworthy of this forum, and it's an example of a style of rhetoric that would not be acceptable here if it was coming from someone on the left. It's completely reasonable for you to be angry about this, particularly since it is coming from a moderator. When you're in charge of maintaining the rules, you'd best try not to break them.
With that said, I think the way you're going about trying to call it out is unproductive. I know it's frustrating to have to pay attention to fine distinctions when your interlocutor is going out of their way to blur them in order to smear you. The thing is, though, if you're going to try to make a post in favour of better enforcement of the rules then you, too, are going to be subject to greater scrutiny in your own behaviour, just as moderators are. So you need to not accuse naraburns of saying things he didn't say. The things he did say are the things you need to be complaining about. He didn't directly accuse people who disagree with him of being pedophiles, he accused them of being groomers. That's bad enough.
Of course, you may not actually be trying to call for better rule enforcement, here. You seem to simply be blowing off steam. That's a shame, because I would like to call for naraburns to commit to not calling people names for disagreeing with him, and, unfortunately, your post risks overshadowing my point.
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.
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
1yr ago
You're twisting my words. Will you commit to not (pre-emptively or otherwise) calling posters "groomers" because they disagree with you about which materials are appropriate for which age groups?
gemmaem
1yr ago
I do, in fact, generally respect exhaustion in my argumentative partners, you're not wrong about that. Unfortunately, in this case, you've made any number of statements that require answers. You accuse me of sneering, but you've been sneering at me this whole time, and suggesting taking away rights far more fundamental than a right to single-sex spaces. As for catty sniping, you're full of catty sniping! "I love the indignation here," you write. "And thanks for another illustration," you continue. It's true that I'm not spelling out my own object level ideas; I'm asking you to spell yours out because you keep leveling accusations at women that honestly seem far more true of you. Perhaps if you were better at engaging with women in good faith, you'd get more good faith in return.
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
1yr ago
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am so grateful for your straightforward explanation.
In arguing against the idea that women’s ability to garner sympathy is dangerous in itself, I find that I am in a similar situation to the one that Yair Rosenberg outlines here:
Anti-Jewish bigotry is a self-sustaining circle. It’s a common misconception that anti-Semitism is simply a personal prejudice toward Jewish people. It’s not. It’s also a conspiracy theory about how the entire world works, blaming shadowy Jewish figures for countless societal problems. Kanye’s tweets aptly illustrate why this form of anti-Semitism is so difficult to uproot: It’s a self-affirming conspiracy theory. The anti-Semite claims that Jews control everything. Then, if they are penalized for their bigotry, they point to that as proof. Heads, they win; tails, Jews lose.
Similarly, if I point out the cruelty that might result from denying women a voice in the political process, someone who subscribes to the HBD-MRA viewpoint that you outline can simply respond that any traction I can get from such an argument is proof that people sympathise with women. Accordingly, women constitute a danger and need to be treated with less sympathy in order to neutralise this threat.
We need to prevent the possibility of a downward spiral in which any sign of sympathy for your opponents is proof of the danger that they pose. Basic human sympathy ought to apply to everyone. When the state has as much power as modern states almost always do, this means that the state needs to be able to have sympathy for everyone in it. This means that everyone needs to have some voice in the political process.
When women protest that they ought to have a voice in our debates over how society should be run, this is not in itself evidence that women are unreasonable and power-seeking. Nor does the fact that people sympathise with this argument constitute evidence of some kind of overwhelming persuasive power that women have. To claim either of these things is to participate, clearly, in a spiral of nonsympathy.
Thank you so much for your explanation. If your understanding of what I am trying to argue against illuminates any flaws in my response, then I welcome your insight. You can’t argue against what you don’t understand. I appreciate the opportunity you’ve given me.
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
1yr ago
Be honest, you know you being a woman has nothing to do with how he is engaging in this conversation
Dase has made his opinion of women very clear, on multiple occasions. He thinks we are liars. He thinks we are mean. He thinks we habitually act in bad faith.
The style of sneering at female commenters personally that he is employing in this thread is very obviously coloured by his broader opinions.
Do you seriously think "has women franchisement gone too far" is too spicy relative to the other things the motte discusses?
I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be allowed. I decided not to let it -- and the sneering alongside it -- go unchallenged.
So why add in that little snide at all if not for shaming purposes?
I meant it, sincerely. Good faith works best as a two way street. That's just a fact of human interaction.
I've been on the Motte since it was the Culture War Thread. I'm one of the left-most people here. I've never flamed out. I've garnered two mod notes over six years; never a ban. I stay for the charity, when I can get it; I stay to be challenged and to see views I wouldn't otherwise see. Sometimes, I admit, I stay for the fight. But I always argue in good faith, even when it leaves me vulnerable. If you can't access that side of me, you're not trying very hard.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Well, I certainly support sympathy for men and policy measures designed to help men in areas where they are disproportionately struggling, and I am open to the idea of trimming back the power of the state over some facets of our lives. So although I don't believe we actually live in a "gynocentric society," we might well be able to come to an agreement on some individual changes!
gemmaem
1yr ago
Dina Martina seems to do a sort of housewife drag that isn't trying to be sexy. There's also a long tradition of impersonating female celebrities, some of whom dress sexily and some of whom do not. Judy Garland impersonation tends not to be overtly sexual, for example. Admittedly, this Garland impersonator says that "My wig designer and friends of mine have said I’m not a drag queen because drag tends to go over the top." There's some truth, there -- drag doesn't always have to be sexy but it's often comically exaggerated in one way or another, with sex and sexiness as frequent aspects of such comedy.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I would like to see the original context. Can you provide a link, or at least give the actual name of the subreddit in question? There's more than one lesbian subreddit.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I take public transit a lot, often in New Zealand, but also a little bit back when I lived in Los Angeles. I have not been harassed as far as I can remember, although if the incident was minor then I might easily have forgotten it. There was quite a lot of street harassment in LA, and incidents from that context are thus more likely to have stuck in my memory than any small additional experiences during my less frequent public transit trips.
There are a number of possible explanations for the phenomenon that you outline. Without knowing more detail it's hard for me to guess which ones are more likely, but here are a few of them:
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Some harassment is comparatively invisible. Groping can occur out of line of sight. Someone with astute social skills can box someone into a conversation out of politeness and then start quietly bringing up sexual topics after the rest of the car has got the impression that the conversation is polite chit-chat. And so on.
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Harassment does not occur at random. If you are, in fact, an alert traveller, and this is visible to the people around you, and you look like someone who would intervene if you saw something, then you may be carrying a little anti-harassment field around with you. Thanks, if so! But this would mean that your experience would drastically undercount the level of harassment that occurs under other conditions.
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Some of the women you are talking to may be conflating "I have heard stories of harassment on public transit" with "I have been harassed in public, although not on public transit, and do not wish to repeat the experience" and may therefore give replies like "I have experienced too much harassment to want to use public transit." This could be true, strictly speaking, even as it implies that they have been harassed on public transit when in fact they have not had that precise experience.
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People often have a tendency to retell stories with themselves in the main role, even when they heard it from someone else. Think, like, urban legends, where people will retell it and swear it happened to them because that makes for a better story. This just seems to be a thing people do. Some people may therefore be telling you stories that are not, strictly speaking, their own.
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
1yr ago
As I understand it, the claim is that women are so powerful that they have turned into little dictators who go around making unreasonable demands. This requires substantiation. What kind of unreasonable demands? So far I've been given "shut down any political project they don't like." That's a strong claim. There are, in fact, many existing political projects that women are more against than in favour of that have not been shut down.
You've given me a second claim, that "criticizing women as a group is so verboten that any and all of it is taken with utmost offense." It is true that claims about women are policed more strongly than claims about men. However, women are not unique in this regard. Claims about black people are policed more strongly than claims about white people, for example. So it does not make sense to attribute this to women's overwhelming manipulative dictatorial power. It has more to do with the fact that there is a historical pattern of unfair mischaracterisation of women that was bad enough that it gave rise to a movement dedicated to correcting it.
None of what I have been given substantiates the claim that I was initially criticizing -- namely, that women are "queens by political fiat" in any real sense of social or political power. We are not. It is obvious that we are not.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Gosh, people are writing pop songs that are power fantasies! Sometimes they even write them about women. What is the world coming to?
Come on, there's no substance here.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Sex education has been controversial for years. Calling it "grooming" is new, and this form of demonization didn't get used before it was specifically the LGBT content that people were angry about. I think it's reasonable to suspect that this tenuous claim of sex/sexuality/gender-related education leading to pedophilia did not just happen to occur when the controversy was about LGBT topics instead of about sex education more generally.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I think there are many, many people in the world who think they deserve more than they have, certainly. It's fair to say that those people's self-evaluation is frequently questionable. I don't think this tendency is confined to women, though, nor do I think it is more out of control in women than in men. There are some areas where it is more tolerated in men (especially if those men are already high status), and others where it is more tolerated in women (especially if those women are already high status).
gemmaem
1yr ago
Right-wing media sources characterize it as an invasion of the capitol building to keep the state legislature from voting on legislation which would outlaw medical gender transition for minors.
This isn't quite accurate, since people who are between the ages of 18 and 26 are not minors, the bill that is the main object of protest would outlaw any kind of gender transition procedures or referrals for individuals under 26.
gemmaem
1yr ago
"Demisexual" meaning someone who doesn't form attraction from mere physical observation but from getting to know someone deeply? My friend that used to just be called 'not being shallow.'
Really? I mean, maybe I'm just shallow, but I've always assumed that most people have the capacity to be attracted to someone within a short time of meeting them. I completely understand why some people would either want or need a longer acquaintance before actually having sex, but needing to know someone for years before you even understand that they could be attractive seems to me to be fairly unusual. Am I wrong? Perhaps I'm just falling prey to the fallacy of the typical mind.
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.
Queens of what? Ourselves? The question of whether we are going to gestate an entire baby with all the physical and mental changes that implies?
Well, if you think that you should have control over that, then I think it's pretty clear which of us is the one with unreasonable dictatorial aspirations.
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