haroldbkny
16d ago
I agree with you but I also want to play devil's advocate a little bit. Do you, and I, and others actually feel like it'd be better to have a society that values the strong over the weak? It's not hard to imagine how that sort of society could be dystopian, too.
And is it a binary choice, or is there a middle, too, where we can have the strong and weak valued equally, or strong is valued over weak, but not so much that we get the effects we're seeing in society today? If I had to choose a society one way vs the other, I'm not sure which I'd choose.
haroldbkny
22d ago
Well, if that's the case, then it really is an echo chamber, and there's no point in anyone playing Darwin2500's role and arguing the counter point. Also we should probably also change the banner on the side of the site.
Realistically, you're probably right to some degree. But I do believe it's possible for people to change their minds, even if just in small ways. Then small mind changes lead to bigger ones. But people don't change their mind by being nagged, mocked, and provoked by an enemy. They do it when people make great points and relate to each other.
haroldbkny
22d ago
Well, someone has to, if this forum is going to be anything other than a complete echo chamber
No, no one has to reflexively argue the opposite. A principled leftist would do more than just spitefully fight for the sake of fighting and as such turn mottezians further against leftism by providing examples of the ideology they despise. He would lead with empathy while providing legit counterpoints that open up people's hearts and minds and make them think.
I think you're correct. From everything I've ever seen of her, I don't think she's anti-trans, I think she's anti-men. That then cascades over into some anti-trans positions because she hates men, especially those who she deems as a threat to women, and she believes that trans women are actually just men who are infringing on female space.
But this is all a moot point, because in the court of public opinion, if you don't believe any person that they're trans, or if you say anything even remotely construable as questioning trans ideology, then you "hate trans people". And as you say, this simply becomes repeated until the point that no one questions it, and it becomes "truthy" (in the sense that Colbert used to talk about "truthiness").
haroldbkny
22d ago
That's horribly short sighted from a consequentialist perspective, and not particularly rational to indicate that short term gains are worth degrading the value of truth and language. Just because you can't see the immediate negative consequences, or they're obscured, doesn't mean that they're not there. All of this lowering the sanity waterline is to blame for all the horribly contentious political strife going on, and increasing divide. If there's a civil war that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that this sort of sophistry is not an insignificant factor.
Furthermore, I doubt most of the people who actually are promoting this sophistry would actually be okay with other people doing it as well. Saying "it's okay when we do it" isn't exactly a good look, or anything I think people should be aspiring to do.
haroldbkny
22d ago
Whether or not the 1913 definition means what you're implying it to mean probably depends on exactly how you define consent, and how you define the boundaries of consent. Suffice it to say, based on what I was exposed to growing up in the late 20th century, it was my impression that rape referred to a violent brutal crime, and I'm sure that most others of my generation and geographic location would agree with me. Ymmv, perhaps
It's like Jonathan Haidt says, people form their moral judgements first based on disgust, then rationalize it post hoc. People will jump through many hoops to preserve their feelings of moral superiority, especially when it comes to protecting women and how women are treated. This, in my opinion is evidence that women are not oppressed. Everyone wants to think everyone else is oppressing women but they are the one of the few good ones.
I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.
The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.
FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.
haroldbkny
23d ago
Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.
haroldbkny
23d ago
You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.
Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.
haroldbkny
23d ago
I don't think it's "blaming" to tell people they need to take responsibility to ensure negative things don't happen to them in their lives, to the extent that they can control those negative events. Some might say a better term than "victim blaming" would be "prevention". I shouldn't have to lock my house when I leave town for a week. But if I did that, would that really be wise? Why are we not teaching robbers not to rob, instead of teaching people to lock their doors?
I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination.
Yes, that's true. My framing of it is not a steelman, for sure. Though I do know some people who certainly act like they believe in the coordination, believe that there's a cabal of white men who are actively trying to keep others down, and they take our their anger on white men as such. I think that some groundling progressives may intellectually know some things, but have a lot of anger about their perceived injustices, and they end up having a hard time separating their angry feelings from their logical thoughts on the subject.
At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.
A sort of nitpick: they don't think that all people are subject to circumstances out of their control. I think they only think the people who are oppressed are subject to this.
For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems to attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich off of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.
I find this sort of model very infuriating, because there's a lack of acknowledgement that we're all people, and we're all just trying to live our lives. And there really is no logical rubric for who is oppressed or not, other than inclusion in specific categories (most of which almost everyone has at least one of), and therefore, there really is no logic to who is in control of theirs and others lives and who isn't.
I had a fairly traumatic life event happen recently. It's made me think about whether I'm really leading the life I want to. I fill my life with lots of fun and educational media, and I value learning new skills a lot. I play several instruments and have several other hobbies, and I love getting better at these things. I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company, building very niche systems, striving for operational efficiency and delivery of small new features.
But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love.
I wonder if I should be doing something greater with my life, to try to make the world actively better, instead of just existing in it. There must be something I can do. I feel like I worked so hard to become an engineer in big tech, and my skill set includes management skills, design and coding skills, and business skills. I'd like to leverage those skills in some way. How did one leverage skills such as these to try to do something that is more impactful? The sheer magnitude of the question paralyzes me, and I never end up making progress on it
These sort of traumatic life examination-prompting events happen every few years, and I usually just eventually go back to existing and doing what I'm doing. I don't know if that is if either me getting over the trauma which allows me to go back to normal, or if it is me chickening out from a greater calling, choosing a selfish comfortable and non impactful life over trying to actually make the world better. I have had also many traumatic (in a different way) events in the past that have ended up making me scared about my ability to maintain my life as is, so striking out on something new (especially if I don't even know what it is) is extra terrifying to me.
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