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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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
1yr ago
Hm, let me make a list of measures that I would either directly recommend or seriously consider. Not all of these will inconvenience or disadvantage women particularly, but a few of them should satisfy that also.
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Repealing the "Dear Colleague" letter requiring "preponderance of evidence" standards for campus rape cases. I think there is sufficient evidence to show that this has led to unjust outcomes, and that in general allowing campuses to set their own standards based on the way they see things playing out in their local community makes more sense.
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Opening up some/most domestic violence shelters to men. I know many radical feminists would prefer them to be all-female spaces, and of course J. K. Rowling famously made one that excludes trans women, just to make it feel extra safe to women who fear men particularly. Keeping a few single-sex spaces does make sense, in areas where the population density can support more than one. But men sometimes need a place to go when they have been abused, too, and when they're dealt with separately this can make it harder to build infrastructure.
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Local community measures to give men places to meet and socialise with other men, such as the "Men's Shed" initiatives in Australia.
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More physical activity in schools, to make the learning environment easier for high-energy children (who are often disproportionately boys).
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Anti-suicide measures aimed at men.
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Housing measures that pay particular care to the needs of homeless men.
There are probably more, but hopefully this provides a decent spectrum.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thanks for the shout-out! The phenomenon you note is easily explained, of course. Most of the leftists on here who aren't deeply committed to charity have flamed out and left, already! Those of us who remain form a very specific subset.
I often feel an odd sense of fellow-sympathy with the honour-driven conservatives and religious traditionalists around here. It could be the shared virtue ethics, although Christian virtue ethics differs from the pseudo-Aristotelian kind in some pretty dramatic ways. But I think it's probably just that I, too, get tired of the edgy rightists and aloof centrists, and feel a certain solidarity with my ideologically-outnumbered fellows. You, too, are part of the ideological diversity of this place; every time you force the main flow of this place to deal with your more outsider-type views you're helping to establish that it's normal to encounter views on here that aren't perfectly aligned with local popular sentiment. And that means that when people encounter me they might be a little less likely to see me as an interloper to be resisted.
gemmaem
1yr ago
When I want to talk about racism, I'm not held to the standard you're asking me to hold naraburns to. I don't get to call people "racist" just because they meet my definition of racism. I have to be very, very careful about using the word at all, and avoid the more disputed definitions thereof. If I can't say it in a nicer way than that, then I just don't get to say it.
With that said, you have yourself provided a less inflammatory way to say it:
"Providing sexual material to children is preparing them for abuse, you're providing sexual material to children, therefore you are preparing children for abuse."
This refrains from using a disputed definition and is therefore much clearer in what it is saying. This makes it easier to respond to, because the assumptions are laid out and can be openly discussed. It's a much better comment, with much higher standards of expression.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. I've never actually looked at /r/egg_irl, but everything I hear about it makes it sound pretty terrible. I agree that many people right now are too quick to act as though being trans is an immutable and easily recognisable category. There are edge cases who are sort of in between being trans and not; there are odd cases (meaning no judgment) of people whose sense of gender simply fluctuates. Treating gender nonconforming people well requires acknowledging this complexity.
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
Kudos on the self-awareness. What you're saying sounds pretty closely related to some discussions we've had on /r/theschism about visceral threat responses. I feel like responses of this type are a pretty crucial part of how a lot of Culture War fights get so hot.
Children and child-rearing can be pretty hot subjects even before you get trans issues involved. I've seen so many horrifying comment sections on parenting forums on what you would think would be minor topics that people could agree to disagree on: breastfeeding, sleep training, etc. Obviously the parents of babies are all pretty sleep deprived, so that doesn't help, but even so it's pretty incredible how worked up people get.
Most of my own hot button issues are feminism-related, whether it's about social acceptance for female ambition or social norms around turning down sexual advances. Being able to take a step backwards and say "I am having a threat response right now" can make a big difference in enduring tricky conversations, but I shouldn't get too overconfident about that. You never know when you'll let your guard down just as it's about to hit you right in the face.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Mind you, I had help -- most of the wording that you're praising here is either directly borrowed from, or somewhat downstream of, this post from /u/Obsidian and this post from reddit user Bakkot. Which is to say that much of what I was articulating was developed by the original moderators of /r/slatestarcodex, back when the Motte was the Culture War Thread. Their achievement is indeed impressive.
For my part, I've got a long standing interest in discussion norms that includes a couple of blog posts that are relevant to your comments above. My post on pluralist civility grew out of me trying to justify to myself as to why this community is worth engaging with. And my much more recent post on ideological diversity and nonreciprocated virtue is quite relevant to your discussion of the value of having principles -- I approach it from a virtue ethical perspective rather than from the perspective of articulated principles, but it's covering the same sort of ground.
On the whole, I find the virtue ethical perspective on tolerance and civility to be a particularly useful one. I think pretty much all people have speech that they would respond to punitively in one way or another, whether by vociferous denunciation or shaming, or ceasing contact with that person, or stronger varieties of cancellation. You can't actually ask everyone to outlaw all of this on principle without infringing on rights of speech or of freedom to choose who to associate with.
Productive discussion with people whose views are different to yours will always be something of an art. Rules can help, but rules will never be the heart of it. Ultimately, tolerance is not adherence to a simple rule. It's a learned virtue.
gemmaem
1yr ago
Brokeback Mountain is a tragic drama rather than a romantic comedy, so it's probably not the right movie to use as a comparison. Love, Simon is a romantic comedy, and seems to have done reasonably well. (I saw it myself, albeit not in theatres, and it was cute! I liked it). Maybe the fact that this was a gay romance wasn't actually particularly relevant to its success one way or the other.
gemmaem
1yr ago
The Texas law saying that gender-affirming care can be investigated as child abuse would seem to be an even more direct mirror. Same issue, same threat to remove children from their parents.
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
1yr ago
We do not! For example, Christian religious education still occurs in public schools, with an opt-out process. Officially, we have a constitutional monarchy that is still integrated with the Anglican church.
With that said, it's worth noting that the karakia that are being said before meetings are not always Christian and, in fact, need not refer to any specific God or denomination. For example, this document (Warning: PDF) on Māori Culture and Tikanga for the Workplace suggests a karakia that it translates as follows:
I summon from above, below, within, from the outside environment, to calm and settle the vital inner essence, the well-being of everyone. Be joined, together, united!
Bit of a clumsy translation, it's probably more elegant in the original language. As you can see, this is sort of vaguely spiritual without committing to any specific religion.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I think it makes sense to read this as a statement about the locus of control, here. That is, Adams' views are to be determined by Adams himself. His opinions are not controlled by the newspaper, nor does the newspaper consider itself responsible for controlling them. It's actually quite an important principle, in its own way.
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
I would think that this sort of story appropriation would be more likely to happen in a conversational format than in a formal survey, but I don't know. Are there surveys of urban legends where people tick "yes this happened to me" in appreciable numbers?
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 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
Tactics or no, I hope people don't harass this bereaved person. I'm sure opponents of gender ideology would find plenty of ammunition anyway, from somewhere or other.
Many transgender people don't believe in the doctrine of self-identification. Quite a lot of them have strong feelings about precisely what it is that defines their own gender, and would like the rest of society to adopt their specific theory even if that means excluding people who don't fit in with that definition. Self-ID wins that internal battle because, amongst the available options, it's the one that can unite the most people within the community. Every other definition is forced to turn away potential allies by its very nature.
And yes, ultimately, self-ID is a matter of charity. I think most of the people who subscribe to it as a notion would privately concede that a person can, in theory, falsely claim to be transgender. For example, if an evil genie told me I'd have to go and tell people I was a man or they'd kill a hundred babies, and I went out and told people I was a man, that would not, in itself, make me a man. But, if people didn't know about the evil genie and thought I really meant it, then "self-ID," as a norm, says that trusting me on that would still be the right thing to do in most situations.
We might ask, what is it that distinguishes a false claim to be trans from a true one? Many activists wouldn't ask this, of course, because they'd rather not start a massive internal fight. But I suspect that the closest thing the "self-ID" camp would have to an answer to this question -- provided they felt safe enough to consider it in the first place -- would be something along the lines of, you're really transgender if (a) you want a different gender identity and (b) that want is intrinsic rather than instrumental. I'm reaching, on that second one, because I have never actually seen it articulated that way, but I think it fits. Wanting to be female because then you can get scholarships reserved for women would not make you trans; wanting to be female because there is no same-sex marriage and you want to marry a man would not make you trans; wanting to be female (or male/neither/a mixture) because you just want it is the thing that counts.
Unfortunately, "because I just want it" can be very hard to describe, let alone prove. Thus: charity.
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
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.
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
I can agree with some of the things you ask for, here and there. For example, I agree that the top-down command to use a "preponderance of evidence" standard when evaluating campus rape cases has been shown to be a mistake, leading to unjust outcomes in some cases, perhaps particularly for men with social disadvantages of race and/or class.
There are also some places where I don't agree with your proposed remedy, but might agree with alternate ways to help men. For example, I don't agree with abolishing all female-only scholarships, but nor do I object to male-only scholarships, particularly in fields where men are underrepresented such as nursing or teaching.
Most importantly, though, I think there are some important consequences to the idea that everyone, including men, is deserving of a baseline level of sympathy. One of these is that we need to retire the idea that women don't have to work hard to understand what men are going through, because "society forces less powerful people (like women) to consider the point of view of more powerful people (like men)." That sort of statement is far too confident. Sympathy with someone who is different to you is actually quite hard. Moreover, not all men have power.
So, while I might not always agree with you on all of the issues you raise, I do agree that it's important for me to listen to your perspective as sympathetically as I can.
gemmaem
1yr ago
I don't think the reaction of decreased respect for liberal norms is unique to feminism, actually. Certainly, many centrists seem to complain about illiberalism on the left and right. But feminism is the context that I, personally, can speak to with the greatest amount of personal experience, so that is where I have put my focus in responding.
I do not, as a rule, look at Twitter unless I have to. But of course I take your point that there are also trolls on the left.
If you were genuinely finding this conversation emotionally difficult and wanted to discontinue it, I would let you. I would also not hold it against you, nor consider that to be forfeiting your position. This is because I do think that everybody's emotions are worthy of respect. Yes, that includes when right-wingers get emotional about the possibility that their children might be harmed by the influence of liberal norms.
Have you ever bothered to engage with the possibility that emotionalism is, in fact, a bad thing?
Of course. I'm very interested in this topic. I don't believe in the existence of a single set of discussion norms that will work for every group of people on every subject, and I think that disallowing "emotion" really does disallow certain sets of facts about how people feel. Emotions matter. Sweeping them aside can be counterproductive, sometimes.
However, I do appreciate that sometimes a ban on "emotion" is a genuine attempt to lower the temperature of a discussion so that people with very different views can actually hear each other, instead of just shouting past each other. Whilst I prefer a co-operative appreciation for the emotions of both sides to a terse ban on all emotional acknowledgment, I realise that different norms can be a benefit in themselves, and thus that in some contexts a ban on "emotion" may still be a useful tool.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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