I AM bought in on the idea that the crushing of funding for various NGOs and similar government agencies
I just want to note how nonsensical this sentence is on its own. It is incredible how the very acronym for non-governmental organization is now tied to government funding and nobody bats an eye. And it is not just USA, it is the same in EU and everywhere, NGOs are now openly used as vehicle to support government policies at best and vehicles for corruption and nepotism at worst.
The word NGO itself is used for deliberate equivocation and propaganda, as if government is crushing private charities - by not giving funds. By the way, the same language was used by Harvard president Randall Kennedy in his latest debate against Crowder, where good professor likened Trumps funding cuts to "extortion". It is like the classic beggar vs rich man joke:
A rich man goes to work and notices a beggar on the street. Taking pity on him, he pulls out a $100 bill and hands it over. The beggar thanks him profoundly.
This goes on every single day for a week, and the beggar is absolutely thrilled. But the next day, the rich man doesn't show up. He doesn't come back the day after that, either.
Finally, after a week of being gone, the rich man walks by again with $100 in his hand.
The beggar stops him and asks, "Where have you been all week?!"
The rich man smiles cheerily and says, "Oh, I finally took my kids on a vacation!"
The beggar glares at him angrily and yells, "With my money?!"
I've talked before about how a lot of rape-culture controversies arise because under a consent-only view of rape, and a criminal legal standard of intent mens rea, you can run into the scenario in which there is a rape, but there is no rapist. A woman feels that she did not give consent, or that she was coerced into giving consent; but the man feels that she did give consent, had no intent whatsoever to have sex with her against her consent or to coerce her consent, and would have stopped within a reasonable interval after consent was withdrawn. This is a common disjuncture.
That is because the consent based criteria such as FRIES is absolutely stupid and make rapists out of people who would not be such under any rational standard. Whenever your wife wakes you up with her hand on your dick, she technically raped you. Whenever you have glass of wine during dinner with your GF and then hop on it, you are raping each other. Under this definition millions of people commit rape every single day.
I am not sure what people want. We have a society where Aella can write succesful blogpost about birthday gangbang with detailed flowchart of how many men did what to herself and fluffers she hired. And we pretend that not only is that a normal thing, but she and Scott Alexander and rest of their depraved butt magic sex cult then promptly rage against "conservatives" and prudes who are disgusted by such practices, which I think includes majority of the population.
We live in this crazy world where people have "rights" do do such depravities, which in practice means that you actually have duty to defend such a behavior. And yet somehow you are supposed to be selectively upset based on some technicality. Imagine that Aella was in some manic episode, she was given some drugs beforehand and in fact those dozens of men she invited actually raped her. Or even vice versa - that any of those men had some drink before and thus did not have full capacity to withdraw consent and were raped by Aella or whatever. In fact I am absolutely sure that something like that happened in practice, that is the way this depraved game is played. The same goes with porn which is at the same time protected by 1st amendment, widely consumed and yet from time to time we have some story about how this whole industry is one huge meatgrinder of souls where all participants numb their senses with copious amount of drugs, psychiatric medication and alcohol. So again, at the same time you should be on the side of Larry Flynt against People, and also at the same time you should be outraged on command whenever some sob story comes from a porn actress. It is just stupid and unworkable position.
In the end I don't care. If I was absolute monarch, I would line everybody involved in that Cornell shit including Jane Doe on local plaza and gave them punishment of 30 lashes as a form of justice. I would also fine each of them $50k for inflicting this stupid shit on unsuspecting public, who all collectively lost uncounted quintillions of brain cells by being forced to witness all that stupidity. Case closed.
This is exactly the opposite of my conclusion. Women being "equal" means men and women compete everywhere ranging from fights who stays at home with kids to competition with women for your job position to politics and societal arrangements. Equal rights eventually means erasure of duties and related social norms.
For instance if it is a new arrangement that women have "right to be sluts", this flattens all social expectations, no slutshaming etc. Moreover this also wildly rearranges societal expectations - women no longer have duty to be chaste, which means more fights at home if husband expects such a behavior as it is oppressive and goes against "rights". Just one more thing to argue and fight inside relationship.
Or take another change - equal pay for men and women. If men and women have equal pay, this then means that in increasing number of cases women will outearn men. This should then come with corresponding change in norm of women as primary breadwinners and their duty to take care of their husbands. But at the same time women also have right to be hypergamous and expect men to outearn them. These rights and expectations are going against each other, which means clash and strife.
If men and women can be whatever they want to be, then there is nothing wrong with somebody being incel jerking off at home. He has his first amendment right to watch porn, it is no longer expected that men should marry or take care of family as it is their right not to chose so - so there is nothing wrong with somebody living in small apartment and playing videogames. In fact if this is their right, it means it is your duty to defend this lifestyle from any infractions or shaming. Every right and norm has counterpart in duty. If everybody has right to free healthcare, it means it is somebody's duty to finance the whole system. To then turn and be horrified by incels choosing their lifestyle you defended or bitch about healthcare taxes you clamored for is illogical. You are adopting traditional norms and duties while at the same time saying that abolishing these norms and duties is fantastic progress toward equality. It is crazy position.
The first thing you might be wondering is "why is this not in the above section?". For most people, obviously men and women are different. There are biological differences based on hormones and genes. But I think what is different is a subtle and key distincter that makes this much less of a forceful offense, and more of a subtle one.
I will use this quote of yours as I think that "not all men/women" defense discounts it. To give an olive branch, men and women have the same ontological value as humans. I would even go as far as to say that from my view they should all have the same virtues: both men and women should be for instance patient, kind, diligent etc.
However I think this really discounts the huge differences on average between men and women, which really make the difference. I like how I think Andrew Wilson put it: while men and women should aspire to the same virtues, there are different consequences and these virtues have different hierarchies. If for instance if an alien changed all women who would stopped to be chaste tomorrow and fucked around, we would end up with bunchload of unwanted pregnancies with everything that follows. If the same goes with men (and they would not become violent), then we would probably end up with more tissues spend jerking off and some sluts having exceptional revenue that day. The same goes for instance if all men suddenly got lazy and nobody would show up at work: the society would stop working, stores would not get supplied, electricity would fail and so on. If all women stayed at home the situation would be bad, but not as much.
There are real differences in primary duties between men and women - and again not ALL men and ALL women, but on average there is meaningful difference and if it is ignored, it can have far reaching consequences and saying otherwise is standard Lewontin's Fallacy
There are studies showing that women are more interested in things and men are more interesting in people. Men are more effective in physical strenght and violence than women. Men are more suitable to adverse situation ranging from stress (being less anxious) to physical stuff (e.g. being able to be a roofer in Arizona summer, where women would literally die from heat stroke). Women are more interested in socialism and flattening the hierarchies, men are more comfortable with competition and following orders. The quintessential male organization is the army, the quintessential female organization is the sewing circle/quilting bee. And you see it in real life from voting patterns, different mating strategies and everything else.
I think it is not healthy to view the relationship between men and women as adversarial by necessity, but in modern world it was forced to be. Women compete with men on all levels from individual relationships via individualism to corporate sphere to politics. Men and women are not interchangeable, they have different duties and they steer institutions such as marriage or motherhood, organizations such as Army or corporations and even whole societies toward different goals. Helen Andrews has great speech about that here
georgioz
6d ago
I'd add that New Atheism is also failed metaphysics and epistemology. I also agree that it was a substitute for hamartiology and to some extent narrow axiology. However in a very funny ways it adopted the overall cultural flow of other philosophical traditions, ranging from hermeticism to humanism to naive empiricism, namely that you can get to "The Truth" by critique and negation. All you have to do is to identify the Big Bad (e.g. religion), remove it, and then everything will be "better".
Of course there is no grounding for what better means, what is "The Truth" or anything like that. What happened next is the search for the replacement. Sam Harris tried to tie it to Secular Humanism, utilitarianism and the rest of it. This is the same what Big Yud and Alexander tried to do in their own way reviving Quine with addition of quantum physics and a lot of parables and stories. I see a resurgence of some new grey tribe attempts at philosophy, mostly going for some sort of idealist monism be it Sean Carolls "universal wavefunction is all that exists" or Max Tegmark mathematical realism or computationalism of Joscha Bach. These are all some sort of RETVRN to previous philosophical traditions dated even to presocratics, but instead of "all is water" or "all is flux" we now have these new monadic entities. Only they are even stupider as they want to have legitimacy of empiricist tradition without addressing arguments from Hume or Quine. Of course there are other splinters, including roundabout return to religiosity and Christianity, the latter of which I consider a more robust paradigm.
However significant part of the crowd was captured by the thrill of the hunt and went over to Critical Theory tradition, it just provided other Big Bads after the original project failed. That is why I sometimes called these philosophizes as theological conspiracy theories - they evade all the hard questions just assume that things can get better if we tear down "bad" things around us.
So New Atheism failed, because in the end it was always broad tent "anti-something" coalition and there were internal fractures regarding where to move next.
Sure, that is one way to look at it, although I would not say it is just female mode of power. This is a classic techne of power: create byzantine rules and then apply them selectively whenever you want to arbitrarily punish somebody. There is the classic quote by Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Joseph Stalin's NKVD: "Show me the man, and I'll find you the crime."
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