stoatherd
3d ago
Yeah but people do this about everything!
True, but also: no!
@FtttG's description resonated with me a lot (thanks for putting it to words).
I think you (rae) are right that the median person does feel a compulsion to push back on things they think are wrong. But... does the typical pushback on social media look anything like the Motte (in its best, idealised form)? Most popular pushback takes the form "your political bloc is dumb and stupid and evil, here's why".
Everyone (including people like me, and presumably FtttG) probably feels an urge to drop zingers on people who say dumb/evil things, and to push back against our tribal enemies. Call this "Pushback Type 1". PT1 lets us feel smart and good, and signal to our tribe that we are smart and good, and to enjoy the schadenfreude of our enemy getting squished. This is probably a universal thing that people are predisposed to like.
I think the thing FtttG is referring to is distinct. Call it "Pushback Type 2". PT2 is about criticising what we think is false even if (a) it can't be done in a crisp, devastating zinger, (b) it doesn't help some tribe we're aligned with, and (c) we don't get to enjoy having put someone down a peg. It's the obsessiveness of going: "This person is wrong, I don't care if the whole world is behind them; I need to explain why!"
The Motte is fuelled by a proprietary blend of PT2 spiked by PT1 (the exact formula is a closely-guarded secret).
There's still the question of why trans stuff specifically has captured FtttG. Obviously that's not for me to say, but a general explanation would be: people with PT2 inclinations can get sniped by any particular instance of falsehoods; it's a crapshoot.
... but I'd also then say: to me, trans stuff is the quintessential example of people "proudly, confidently asserting things I know to be false". I can't think of a stronger example. It's as ontologically broken as transubstantiation.
(I'm very sympathetic to your position of trans people basically wanting to be left alone, btw.)
stoatherd
3d ago
If trans people are (random number) 2x more likely than cis people to get murdered walking a random street at night, but 5x less likely than cis people to take that kind of stroll where they’d be exposed to that risk, does that count?
Yeah, that's the flipside of what I was gesturing towards with "[making statistical corrections for] dangerous occupations like being a sex worker". I'd say that, in your hypothetical, that would indeed count! It would be a real problem.
... but it's not true. I know you said it was a "random number", but the "random numbers" we choose are typically representative of what we think are reasonable values. Trans people being 2x times for likely to be murdered for walking down the street isn't a reasonable random number. Again: cis men are more likely to be murdered than trans women! Assuming that you're a trans woman, then you are literally safer as a trans woman than your other option (i.e. being a cis man). We can discuss the hypothetical world where you receive a 2x multiplier to being randomly murdered, as long as it's on the record that this is utterly non-representative of the world we live in.
I do know that I feel more uncomfortable in many situations now than before (...) Maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s hard to tell.
Yeah, sorry about that; that sucks.
For most trans people I know, I'd try and (incredibly carefully) gesture towards something like: "You live in a catastrophically damaged epistemic environment. The people around you take anything less than complete submission to their religion as being literally genocide. Even if you personally don't express stuff like that, the people who say these things are contributing (negatively) to the general epistemic structure around you, and it's fucking with your ability to calibrate. Even high-decoupling, disagreeable humans aren't really built to completely ignore this kind of endemic social messaging -- it's going to seep in and cause you stress, anxiety, and a constant sense of being at war."
I think that's not quite the right message for you (but I'm still going to sneak it into evidence via quotation). I have no idea what kind of environment you're in; and obviously you're, y'know, actually thinking about this stuff already. I guess I'd suggest that your impression of things like trans-related discomfort, rudeness, or social difficulties are probably picking up on a real signal -- but when you hit the threshold of violence/murder etc, there's a good chance you're massively overestimating that stuff for whatever reason. (I stress again that I don't know you or your environment; if you're in a place with atypically high violence against trans people compared to the rest of the West, probably disregard my comment.)
stoatherd
3d ago
The great thing about AI is that you get impartiality on demand if you make a completely unconnected instance and ask an impartial question
It's possible I'm failing a sarcasm check here or something, but: do you actually believe this?
Like, this is an extremely untrue thing to say. I don't want to put a low-effort comment here saying "this is wrong", but I also don't want to waste time on a long comment explaining it, if it turns out that this was a joke or some kind of unserious comment. So I'm going to flag up that, if you sincerely believe "AI gives you impartial answers", that this is an extremely broken part of your epistemic model, which I can substantiate if it needs to be substantiated.
stoatherd
3d ago
Not the OP, but a couple of points here. I could very easily say:
in the West, being [male] can lead to discrimination (...) and make you more at risk of low level violence and hate crimes
(I've omitted the ostracisation part, as I don't think that's supported in my parallel; but I don't think omitting it fundamentally changes the idea.)
The above is just true. But if men then had a culture of saying there was a "male genocide", and that their society was "androphobic" because of this, I'd get very annoyed, because -- as @WandererintheWilderness says -- it's an attempt to parlay a weaker, true claim ("men are more likely to be victims of violence") into a hysterical false one ("society is systemically murdering men!!")
Part of why I'm raising the parallel: one way trans activists misrepresent this stuff is by comparing trans women to women rather than to men. IIRC, men have a higher rate of being victims of violence than trans women? (It might require some statistical stuff like "once you correct for dangerous occupations like being a sex worker", or it might just be outright; I don't remember.)
There's something kind of ridiculous about this world model:
- If you're born male, your options are basically cis man or trans woman -- you don't get "cis woman" as an option
- If a male person chooses to be a trans woman, they are now instantly statistically categorised as "some type of women"...
- ... and therefore, any male-propensity-to-get-stabbed is supposed to instantly vanish; and if its doesn't, there's a trans genocide.
Like... no? This isn't even epicycles; this is no model at all. The dangerous portion of being (1) trans and (2) biologically male... is not the trans part. If a soldier chooses to call themselves a "trans accountant", they don't get to go "My workplace death rate is higher than cis accountants -- this is discrimination".
I agree that white Western trans women probably aren’t at an extremely elevated risk of murder
I appreciate you saying so, but this does seem like a weaker formulation than what you should probably agree to. "extremely elevated risk"? Is your position that white Western trans women are at an elevated risk of murder -- possibly even a very high one -- but it just doesn't rise to the level of "extremely"? Because I'm reasonably sure the accurate version of this would just be "they aren't at an elevated risk of murder". Similarly, I wouldn't say "the trans genocide is overblown", I'd say "the trans genocide is fictitious". We can certainly discuss different patterns of violence and how they interact with being trans, but framing that as "genocide" needs to be immediately met with "you are lying for political expediency". (The generalised "you", I mean; you're not lying.)
It's also a bit of a motte and bailey: the bulk of trans activism focuses on white Western culture as performing some kind of trans genocide. Then when criticised, it becomes "Well, in this non-white, non-Western part of the world, these non-white-non-Western cultures are dangerous for trans people!" Again, you're not personally responsible for what other people are arguing; but you get how this is frustrating, right?
stoatherd
10d ago
It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)
Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?
... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.
Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:
- Significantly increased terror among the population
- Dehumanisation of prisoners and any social group they're drawn from
- Slippery slope to even less humane treatment of people
- Slippery slope to expanding the number of valid targets
- General breaking of bright lines around things like bodily autonomy, torture, etc
... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)
It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!
stoatherd
30d ago
Google gives me this for the definition of "genocide":
the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
This comports with a couple of dictionary definitions I checked.
The key part, and the part you're trying to emotionally invoke, is the killing of people. That's the central concept of genocide, and it's what people who say "genocide" are trying to lean on. When people hear "genocide", they're supposed to think "murdering an ethnic or national group"; they're supposed to think "sending people to the gas chambers".
Is that what you think Trump is threatening? If so, where does he say anything remotely like that?
If, instead, you think Trump is threatening something that's still bad -- such as regime change that will inherently come with collateral damage, or the destruction of civilian infrastructure -- then say that. It will still be bad! But calling those things "genocide" is co-opting a stronger word purely because it's a stronger word. I don't believe you actually believe Trump intends to murder "a significant portion of the members of the civilisation" (please tell me if I'm wrong), so I don't take that as a sincere defence of using the word "genocide".
stoatherd
1mo ago
Do you think this is actually calling for genocide, or is it just strategically useful for you to call it genocidal?
When Trump refers to the "civilization" dying, do you sincerely think he's referring to mass-murdering the civilians in the region, rather than the obvious reading that he's referring to the society and regime?
If so, why didn't he just say that?
stoatherd
1mo ago
Iranians have, in fact, never had the genocide of Americans ... to be their policy
Where has America had the genocide of Iranians to be its policy?
stoatherd
1mo ago
Here's a few related concepts:
- Sturdy belief that you can accomplish what you're currently doing
- General belief in yourself as a competent, valid, effective person
- Being unconcerned with the idea that you might fail your current task
- Generally being chill and non-anxious
- Ability to project "this is the thing we're doing"
- (5), but automatically and unselfconsciously
All of these could reasonably be called "confidence". I'm not staking any kind of linguistic claim, where the thing I'm pointing at is definitionally some distinct thing from confidence.
The distinction I'm making is this. Informal uses of "confidence" (particularly in the context of male dating advice) are a blend of 1-4, maybe with a sprinkle of 5 and 6. It's usually an internal thing. A lot of "just be confident!" advice is about being comfortable with yourself and accepting outcomes -- it's not about controlling the Narrative.
For example: a manservant might be very confident in their role (i.e. they feel non-anxious, they're competent and know it, they're unflappable in the face of failure) -- but they wouldn't generally be someone who projects "this is the thing we're doing".
stoatherd
1mo ago
What are your equivalent percentages for women?
Also: the idea that 50% of men would be crazy manipulators in the absence of social consequences invites one of two replies, depending on your gender:
- If you're female: the sample of men you interact with is not randomly chosen, and is not representative of the statistically average man.
- If you're male: would you be a crazy manipulator if it were consequence free?
stoatherd
1mo ago
That's a bit of a sleight of hand.
What do you mean by "the men"? 99% of men have already been reformed (usually preemptively), because 99% of men are not crazy, evil manipulators. (Same goes for women)
There will always be a tiny minority of men (and women) who are evil manipulators. I guess you can always point at the male portion of that cohort and go, "why aren't we reforming these people? Is it because men are low agency? (troll face)" -- if you choose to ignore that you're sampling the worst of one gender, because the better people have already been reformed.
... meanwhile, what's the percentage of women who experience some version of the OP, where they make self-damaging choices? 50%, maybe? I don't know, but it's definitely an order of magnitude greater than the percentage of men or women who are crazy, evil manipulators.
It's perfectly reasonable for us to go "hey, why are large numbers of women having this bad experience?" without having to go "men are the problem". But yeah, raising the slightest spectre of women possibly not being perfect is never going to go down well.
stoatherd
1mo ago
I can't imagine any evo-psych explanation for this
Will you accept an even less rigorous, non-falsifiable, ad-hoc explanation in its place? If so, here's my framework for understanding this stuff.
An instrumental goal for any evolved brain is: "Figure out what the heck is going on, figure out your place in it, figure out what you need to do."
For social animals, this gets refined into: "Figure out the Narrative, figure out your place in the story, comport to that role."
The Narrative started (probably) as a way of coordinating individual hunter-gatherers into a single super-organism. To do that, there needed to be a shared "thing that we are doing", with roles assigned within that story. Leaders who could enforce that Narrative (e.g. with violence) ended up being more successful than ones who couldn't; non-leaders who could quickly and adeptly take their role in the Narrative ended up being more successful than ones who couldn't. So I imagine humans have a really deeply ingrained goal of "figure out your role in this story and follow it".
Chuck in some standard sex-based differences around appetite for risk. If you're a middle-of-the-pack male, it might be genetically worth it to try out the high-risk Narrative "I should be king"; less so for his female equivalent, who will be genetically "safer" in following the dominant Narrative around her.
If all of this is true: then people will generally be susceptible to things that hijack the Narrative-identifying mechanism. Women will tend to be more susceptible to attacks that strongly and bluntly overpower the dominant Narrative; men will tend to be more susceptible to Lady-Macbeth-type "you should be king" attacks that provide a risky status-enhancing alternative Narrative.
Some loosely associated stuff that might support this:
- Hypnosis
- Tarot, astrology, anything that abdicates responsibility to a supernatural power
- Friendship groups generally responding better to "let's do X" than "what do people want to do?"
- BDSM things that establish rigid social rules around exactly what everyone is supposed to do
- A fifth, better example
Connecting this back to, y'know, your actual point: there are people, usually men, who instinctively broadcast an aura of "this is what we're doing". It's typically unselfconscious and unaware of even the possibility that this isn't actually the thing we're doing. It's just happening. When they do this, it seems to activate that ancestral Narrative-seeking DNA. People fall into their roles. It's like picking up a kitten by its nape.
(This kind of attitude is easily mistaken for confidence, and I reckon is a big part of why men are told "just be confident!" when dating.)
If I can add another layer of evopsych to my tower of unsubstantiated claims: if women are generally looking to find the dominant Narrative and comport to their role in that story, then there's a huge selection pressure for men who can trigger those dominant-Narrative identifiers. But if these identifiers are too legible, then lots of men are going to consciously cultivate them; so there's a pressure for the identifiers to become illegible (or hard to fake). So you can end up with men who aren't good, or even good-looking, or even any other legible markers of sexual success -- but they have this illegible way of making people go "yes, we're doing what this guy wants".
... so, yeah, when encountering people like this, some women are going to make superficially inexplicable decisions that probably felt completely right from the inside. A million years of evolutionary optimisation is a hell of an opponent.
I said up front that this was non-rigorous and non-falsifiable, so naturally I will not be accepting criticism at this time.
No.
I'm not saying "you must publicly disavow anyone in your movement who says X, otherwise you're complicit, and deserve to be hurt". That's the idea of "Silence is Violence".
I'm saying:
There are feminists like Goodguy who (roughly) describe themselves as being solely pro-gender-equality, with none of the nastier parts of feminism in them. (That's good!)
However, whenever I observe these people in a context where a nastier feminist is doing/saying evil things, I don't observe these milder feminists pushing back or disagreeing. This is both in a personal context -- e.g. at a social gathering, a work event, whatever -- and in the public or social media context as well. In fact, it's not even that they'll be fully silent: they'll nod along, support the conversation, and do everything short of saying "yes I fully agree that men are pigs".
Also, the nastier parts of feminism have a pretty well-observed pattern of bullying the hell out of anyone who dares to push back against them.
The combined effect of this: feminism, despite being apparently "many different things", ends up being a coalition that reliably pushes in a single direction. If a subgroup of feminism doesn't push back on X, and instead just is silent on X (but passively/socially supporting the parts of the movement that push for X), then these groups aren't meaningfully different, and do function as a single block that can be meaningfully criticised.
To put it another way: I'm not telling Goodguy "You must push back on X, or you're complicit!" -- I'm saying "Because feminists don't push back on X, you don't get to make the argument that actually feminism is made of lots of different things".
I think that's a pretty obvious difference between what I said and "Silence is Violence".
EDIT: Here's a right-wing equivalent.
ALICE: Republicans are homophobic.
BOB: Republicans are many different things, so it's meaningless to criticise "Republicans".
ALICE: But among all the Republicans I know, even the "mild" ones who say they're pro-gay-rights -- whenever a more homophobic Republican says "God hates fags", the supposedly milder Republican never pushes back. They just smile and laugh along, nodding their head.
BOB: Wow, sounds like "Silence is Violence", huh?
ALICE: No, I'm saying the supposed variation in your group doesn't prevent that group from having an emergent, collective goal, and I'm allowed to criticise it for that!
stoatherd
1mo ago
Consider that perhaps I've actually noticed reality, where approximately zero feminists ever push back against anything that moves in the direction of "more feminism".
Even the best that you can personally offer is "Well, I don't blindly cheer". Great -- do you actually push back against feminism doing evil things? Because yes, of course I've noticed feminists who'll be passively silent when other feminists do horrible things. If that's the best they can do, then no, there is no meaningful variation in feminism, because 99%+ of feminists have no interest in reining in the worst parts of the movement.
I've made no comment on you being politically biased; nor have I said anything about the right. My issue is this constant motte and bailey where any criticism of feminism is deflected with "feminism doesn't exist!", and any praise of feminism is encouraged with "yay feminism!"
stoatherd
1mo ago
... are you saying the rule is "if any member of X group hurts you, you have a reason to hate X group"? Does that apply to all groups, or just men?
EDIT: lack of reading comprehension on my part, sorry -- thought "claims" referred to your comment, but I see now you were referring to omw_68, making my comment dumb
stoatherd
1mo ago
I can't answer for zeke5123a, but I personally loathe any ideology that dodges any criticism by going "actually we're 1,000 completely different things", despite those things all consistently pushing in a single direction and generally cooperating to hurt their mutual enemies.
Somehow, when people go "feminism is great and we should have more of it!", feminists don't rush to go "um actually, feminism means lots of different things" -- they just cheer. It's only when people want to criticise it that suddenly it becomes this nebulous, unassailable hydra.
stoatherd
1mo ago
Appreciate you handling the criticism so gracefully -- hope I wasn't too harsh.
I really have seen primarily two groups talk on gender (...) I understand why [feminists] try to hold their beliefs, and I think they're frequently 'good' people(...) there is no way [they will come to my side] if I keep harping on about bad feminists who are bad.
There's a spectrum here, right? I'm certainly not advocating for "harping on about bad feminists who are bad". Just note that, even in this paragraph, you volunteer that feminists are basically good -- your criticisms are that their ideas can be harmful, or that their reputation is bad -- without the same charity being given to the other "side."
If it's a dial from 1-10 (with 1 being "maximally whitewash group", and 10 being "harp on about bad group who are bad"), you come across as like a 3-4 for feminists and a 6-7 for people who advocate for not-hurting-men (it's telling that there isn't really a good label for this group). So you're not doing anything egregious! I'm advocating for equalising these dials around a 5, not turning the first to 10.
Because the issue is, basically:
- Feminists, thanks to their institutional power, have to be courted and treated with kid gloves -- you have to be nice to them, because otherwise they won't read what you say. They've got a billion other places to go that will pretend to be critical or analytical or useful whilst also flattering them and telling them that feminism is stunning and brave. In the worst case, some of these people will meaningfully hurt you for not being sufficiently flattering.
- The other group, having no institutional power whatsoever, do not have to be treated kindly or fairly. And dunking on them is a good way to demonstrate fealty to feminism.
This is a group of people who have come to their beliefs through trying to maximize how 'empathetic' they are, and they are thus unlikely to listen to any sort of criticism that marks them as bad.
I think you're slightly off. They're not maximising their empathy, their maximising their personal perception of their own empathy (+how others around them perceive their empathy). A person who says "all men are pigs", "kill all men", "fuck straight white men" (not a strawman; I have dated these women) is not actually empathetic. They are lazily optimising for being able to feel like a good person, not for actually being one.
But yes -- they won't listen to criticism that marks them as bad. This is a pretty universal trait. This is why I point out that you're doing something practical at the expense of truth. Again, you don't have to court any non-feminists, so you feel free to mark them as bad, because they don't have any power that's relevant to you.
But it's nothing to do with empathy.
the truth does not lie in non-feminism, nor in anti-feminism; the truth lies in post-feminism, where we apply feminist ideas to men and women alike
Extremely strong disagree.
This is giving infinitely flexible charity to a memeplex -- "feminism is too big to fail". The central bank of ideas should not be giving a bailout to an idea with this kind of performance. If you can transmute "feminism" into meaning any kind of idea, to the extent that "post-feminism" means "even more feminism", then what the heck are we doing with that word?
"Applying feminist ideas to men and women alike" isn't feminism. It's a different thing. It is opposed to feminism.
I notice that my own brand of gender egalitarianism -- which is either non-feminism or anti-feminism -- consistently gives kinder, more truthful, more humane answers than feminism generates. So I'm going to object to any process that decides that none of that matters, and we have to go with feminism anyway, regardless of what it actually does.
I wouldn't call them misogynists, and I don't; but I would say they frequently seem to have not integrated feminist ideas, by which I mean they frequently do not have even pre-emptive defenses against feminism and are stuck repeating traditional ideas
Do you have examples of "feminist ideas" that you could test me on?
Because I would generally view it as an extreme positive that someone hadn't "integrated" feminist ideas. In the same way I'd view it positively if they hadn't integrated Young Earth Creationism or phrenology. Some philosophies are just bad. It is good and correct to reject their framing and assumptions. These are fields of anti-knowledge; absorbing them makes you know less about the world.
You're certainly right that a lot of traditional frameworks lack the defences against, basically, virulent memeplexes. But these memeplexes don't win by overwhelming you in a one-on-one discussion! If they did, many of them could be easily defeated by spells like this: "Stop redefining words. Explain what you mean by X. Show me your sources for Y. No, don't change the subject onto Z. Predict exactly what W would mean..." These memeplexes don't win because people are unprepared to argue against them; they win by popularity contests like "Ewwww, you don't accept X? Don't you know that person Y, a misogynist, disagrees with X?"
I think you are overestimating the effectiveness of rationalist-type debate of ideas, vs how those ideas actually spread via social dynamics. (I don't like that this is the world we live in, but yeah.)
You say "There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men." I sincerely have come across very few such people throughout my years on the internet
I mean... you go on to perfectly answer your own point! I don't really have anything to add to it. Your analysis is correct. Feminism bullies any other kind of position out of the public square, so you don't see those arguments. Worse than that: if you can't discuss your own actually correct and kind positions in public, and can only discuss them with other heretics, you stand a good chance of being corrupted by nastier versions of the true position. Which then get used to justify further crackdown on the true and kind and good position.
Still, you know all these; and you know about Scott's post, and you know about yourself, and you know about me (to the extent that you believe I'm not a woman-hating chud). So you know these people exist, and you know the social dynamics that prevent them from being visible to you.
This book is my attempt to create such a framework, by, regardless of anything else, seeing what all truths might dawn if we tried to treat men with the kindness feminism seeks to universalize for women. (...) If, having read this, you feel you'd know a better pitch, I'd be eager to hear it.
Afraid I don't have a better one. I think the underlying goal, while noble and good and correct, is ultimately doomed. Because empirically:
- If you want to get feminists to treat a man nicely, by far the easiest option is to convince them that the man is actually a woman.
Literally, it is far easier to convince the median feminist to break the very concept of words, than to get them to apply the "kindness" of feminism to men.
Still, I hope your book proves me wrong about this.
stoatherd
1mo ago
Is your goal to practically persuade, or to say true things? Truth-wise, the pitch is frustrating to read. (I say this as someone who agrees with the spirit of what you're trying to do, and I don't want to discourage you from doing it.)
The most irritating thing is how you divide the discourse into two groups:
- "feminists: a largely virtuous group"
- men rooted in "harmful ideas" with bad attitudes towards women.
Is this a practical attempt to persuade feminists to read your book, where they otherwise would have no reason to; or is this something you genuinely believe? (Or some third option.) Because your presentation isn't true. Presenting one side as basically good, one side as basically bad, is incredibly frustrating because it doesn't correspond to reality. (I need a word that conveys the strength of "gaslighting" without implying it's deliberate or malicious. "Reckless mishandling of truth" or something.)
Idk if you have something like this on your list:
- One way it hurts to be a man: society will happily launder any level of explicit, spiteful nastiness against you into "virtuous feminism". Meanwhile, the most compassionate, carefully-constructed call to make the world be a fraction less pointlessly nasty to men -- this will be laughed at, mocked, distorted, and labelled "misogyny".
Men do not feel "seen" when you tell them up front something like: "hey, the person saying 'kill all men' is fundamentally virtuous; but the people saying we should address your problems -- they're bad."
There are plenty of men (and women) making sober, rational, kind, decent, truthful arguments that society should be a bit less crap towards men. These people already get called misogynists by the "largely virtuous" group. I wish you'd represent these people fairly, seeing as you're basically trying to be one of them.
Assuming you're a man, you're also completely setting yourself up. To the extent your book fails to tightly comport with whatever popular feminism demands, you won't be cast as some kind of reasonable compromise "new voice on gender" -- you'll be lumped in with the people you label misogynists! Later, when someone like you writes their own book on this stuff, they'll characterise you as a man with "harmful ideas", whose attitudes towards women leave something to be desired. And that'll be really unfair, because it's not true of you. And it's not true of other people, either.
With that said: I basically agree with your underlying premise, and think it is good you've written this.
stoatherd
3mo ago
it was 2 guys approaching her from the left, not one
That's fair -- I was focusing on the guy who opened the car door, but yeah, you're right. I still object to "a bunch".
it's not clear how "suddenly" was a lie
They had enough time to say "get out of the (fucking) car" 3 times. When people are insisting that 1 second is an eternity for perfect deliberation when an SUV is accelerating towards you, then that 3+ second gap cannot be considered "suddenly". I wouldn't call it a lie, but it's not an accurate characterisation of events.
we got like half a second of grainy vid to interpret that she smirked and smiled
You're overselling the graininess and underselling how much time we can see her. I'm not "interpreting" anything. You can see her being cheery, smiling, smirky, and -- like her wife -- clearly enjoying being able to LARP as the plucky rebels against the fascist stormtroopers.
Like, come on. The idea that she panicked is based on the idea that she was just innocently turning around in the street, and ICE -- who she wasn't expecting -- spooked her. We know that's not true! She and her wife were deliberately antagonising ICE; they knew exactly who they were dealing with.
It is, in fact, completely unreasonable to watch that interaction and go "oh poor lamb, she was terrified and panicking!"
stoatherd
3mo ago
I'll note that @oats_son asked you:
Take a look at @stoatherd's post: what behavior are you trying to change, specifically?
Your answer:
the behavior I'd like to see changed is less cheering on for one side and less 'revenge makes rules irrelevant'.
... you know that's not what my posts contain, right?
Or were you ignoring his question so you could answer a more convenient one? (with the bonus of being able to implicitly micharacterise my posts, so you could later go "sigh, I never explicitly said I was talking about your posts")
stoatherd
3mo ago
I think you'd do yourself some favors re-reading my comments and waiting a few minutes before replying because you're mischaracterizing me.
Knock it off, again.
You're filling this thread with contradictory claims (e.g. it was obviously a murder + you're shocked anyone could think it wasn't a murder + you don't think it was a murder), and then complaining about being "mischaracterised"?
I think you do yourself some favours by concisely, honestly saying exactly what you believe, rather than switching back and forth depending on what's convenient.
I was going to say that you avoided answering my question
Well, I didn't. As you'd say, please re-read my comment.
To be clear, this is a follow-up question ... So I'll ask again
... Sorry, is it a "follow-up question", or are you asking it "again"?
do you truly believe that the portrayal I described ("if he were to die, that'd be great, and totally justified") is what a large chunk of lefties think?
I reject your grounds for asking that question. It smuggles in a frame and implications that completely unjustified. Suppose I asked you this question:
do you truly believe it's ok to murder puppies? I just want to understand what anti-puppy biases you may or may not have. How confident are you that it's ok to murder puppies?
If I asked that, you'd be within your rights to go "uh, dude, what the fuck? I never brought up puppies or puppy-murder; stop implying that I hold positions that you have no evidence for me holding".
I specifically described my best (obviously imperfect) guess of what Good might've been thinking. You tried to conflate that with what I think "a large chunk of lefties" think. Who cares what my opinion on "a large chunk of lefties" is? Was the car being driven by "a large chunk of lefties"? You are trying to turn my specific guesses about Good into evidence for a general bias/hatred/whatever of a political bloc.
I invite you to re-read my comments, take a few minutes to think, apply critical thinking, and whatever other passive-aggressive instructions you think are appropriate.
stoatherd
3mo ago
I'm also not, and nowhere did, claim that we have indisputable proof that she was murdered
This is a lie. You said:
This is so obviously a murder
I don't care that your defence is going to be "sigh, apply some critical thinking skills -- that's from the transcript; I didn't literally say it!"
No. You dropped a massive transcript in your OP as if it were your own words. You said it expressed things better than you could yourself. You said you "vibe" with it. You presented it as a something you fully endorsed.
You did not go "actually I disavow the part where he says it was obviously a murder". The rules say to speak plainly. If you're going to drop a transcript with maximally inflammatory claims that you don't actually agree with, and then later go "b-but I never literally said those words!", then people are going to assume you're fucking with them.
This is some god-of-the-gaps bullshit. Any part of the transcript that becomes indefensible or inconvenient -- "oh, I never actually said it". All the other parts -- well, they get to stand as part of your argument, until the exact part where you need to discard them and pretend you never held them at all.
This is deceitful.
stoatherd
3mo ago
I'm begging you to re-read before replying and apply some critical thinking skills.
Knock it off.
You're being consistently dishonest across all of your comments, and then start acting huffy when people point out that you're contradicting yourself to manipulate people who were trying to treat you charitably. Jesus Christ, indeed. You're not optimising for light or honesty. You're not doing anything because it's more "transparent or honest".
But ok! Let's apply your cherished critical thinking skills. Using your definition of "on some level", we get these quotes from you:
I myself probably would shy away from calling it outright "murder"
[to some degree], I'm shocked people don't all see it as murder
Um... are you ok? Because you say that you don't call it a murder; and you're also kinda shocked that anyone wouldn't see it as a murder. I can't imagine why you think that smugly defining the phrase "on some level" lets you wriggle out of how insane that is.
Apply some critical thinking skills.
stoatherd
3mo ago
You:
I myself probably would shy away from calling it outright "murder"
Also you:
on some level I'm shocked people don't all see it as murder.
Stop wasting everyone's time. Someone died. Do them the courtesy of saying what you fucking mean, instead of this transparent manipulative bullshit.
I don't think there's actually a coherent thing that "act utilitarianism" is pointing to. Its conceit seems to be that you can do some kind of causal surgery and ask: "Assuming that there are no downstream effects of this action (beyond some arbitrary cutoff?), and there are no implications of me being the kind of the person to have chosen this action... is it the best action?"
So there's two problems with this:
On point 2, the rule/act distinction is confused in a similar way that two-boxers in Newcomb are confused. If, in the organ scenario, you make the choice to kill an innocent person to take their organs... then you are the kind of person to do that. Which means you live in a society that generates people who choose to kill innocent people for their organs. You can't carve out the naive 1st-order utility calculation from the implications of people taking that choice, any more than in Newcomb you can go "I'm going be a one-boxer so I get the million dollars... and I'm going to take both boxes".
Act Utilitarianism seems to mostly exist as a strawman for people to say "utilitarians would kill you for your organs", which is silly, because they empirically don't.
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