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It's a poor analysis, as you say, because elections are not "proxies for war." Democracy wasn't invented as an alternative to war, and obviously democracies have not resulted in the end of war. Minorities having disproportionate electoral power is a problem in a lot of electoral systems; we've debated this here quite a lot. But the 4chan argument is just another iteration of the very unsophisticated premise we see repeated here all the time: "Women are weaker than men, therefore men should control women."
The increasing hostility between the sexes is certainly a problem, but to believe that the solution is for women to accept a subordinate role without political autonomy requires believing either (a) that women could be persuaded to accept this or (b) persuading men to revert to treating women as property. If we had an apocalypse or something it would undoubtedly be a pretty rough time for women (which is why @KulakRevolt is so popular with certain types of people), but short of that, you aren't going to persuade most men, and certainly not most women, that giving women rights was a mistake.
I don't foresee the South Korean government deciding that the solution to plummeting birth rates is to take away women's voting rights or institute some sort of YA dystopian regime. It's certainly not going to happen here. I think all the trads and redpillers predicting some sort of End of Feminism are wishcasting, and they are just as ridiculous as the feminists gloomcasting in the other direction by calling every pushback against feminism an attempt to implement the Handmaid's Tale.
It's generally true though that whenever civil wars are terminated through compromise and mutual agreement, it always entails armed groups disarming themselves, renouncing political violence and transforming into political parties, under the strict understanding that the other side will not try dissolving these parties through other means. So I think the analysis does have some legs to stand on in that respect.
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Uh, the premise I usually see is pointing out the EVOLUTIONARY reasons women are weaker than men, and how that has massive implications about things like the ability to engage in abstract reasoning, to commit to true beliefs vs socially popular beliefs, and to make self-sacrificing decisions rather than those that provide short term personal benefits.
Which is more sophisticated than the idea that because Cave MEN could overpower Cave WOMEN that's why men should be in control.
Where are you seeing that argument promulgated around here?
My friend, Afghanistan is literally doing option (b) as we speak. All it took was the removal of the U.S. military to reassert the general status quo that women can't do much to unseat.
To think that it requires an apocalypse is a bit hyperbolic.
Afghani women were never liberated enough for it to matter, no matter what the US-backed government liked to pretend. They’re just taking the mask off.
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I don't actually see "Evolutionary psychology says women are irrational and neurotic and conformist and maybe not even actually sentient* so they shouldn't have rights" as being a lot more sophisticated than "Cave men stronger than cave women, therefore they shouldn't have rights."
Afghanistan has been Islamist for a long time, so the reversion under Taliban rule is not much of a change. Also, notably, this is not happening because men were feeling increasingly dissatisfied with the cultural domination of women or a more general hostility between the sexes.
Yes, I do think it would take something like an apocalypse (or perhaps an Islamist or Christian Dominionist revolution, which is maybe only a little less likely) for that to happen here.
* Yes, an argument that has been made here
Its certainly more valid when examined critically.
Especially when the best science and studies we can muster on the topic indicate that yeah, women are more neurotic, much more conformist, and have less overall awareness of or acceptance of opinions other than their own. This isn't a claim about any specific women, but its the sort of thing we'd look at when determining what sort of factors make the sexes different.
So if the reasons for that AREN'T evolutionary to some large degree, from whence do they come?
The argument also has to account for the fact that men have been the primary political and military leaders for literal millennia, and almost NO societies anywhere in history were governed by females.
And how that might impact our culture and social norms.
The U.S. didn't recognize the right of women to vote for the majority of its history. Most of the pro-female policy changes in this country were enacted post-WWII, and mostly since the '60's.
Surely it would only take like 1 generation at most to revert back, if there were an organized movement for it?
I've said before that I think evpsych is broadly, generally correct about a lot of things, but I also think it's frequently overfitted to a particular answer that someone wants (e.g., "Why women shouldn't be allowed to vote"). Even if we accept that women are farther on the bell curve towards the neurotic and conformist axes, that's not enough to convince me they are unfit to make political decisions or have personal autonomy.
Sure, but also not really a convincing argument. We didn't have democracy for literal millennia, therefore democracy is bad! (Insert all the yeschad.jpgs you like.) More seriously, political power today is not the same as political power in an era of tyrants and might makes right being the only governing philosophy.
This is not to say I believe in "government by females." But you have to do more than spin some evpsych arguments to convince me that Dread Jim or Islam is Right About Women.
Perhaps, but as we've seen, it's a lot harder to remove a right than to grant one. I don't see any movement that doesn't involve what would essentially be some sort of coup or radical (probably violent) transformation of our political system stripping away anyone's voting rights. So "Could we undergo a Cultural Revolution" or the equivalent? Yes, but that seems much worse to me than women being allowed to vote.
I’ll steelman this.
When you’re talking about large classes of people, you have to make generalizations to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. We already do this, uncontroversially, about voting- you can, if you want to, go out and find a sixteen year old with 18+ levels of maturity. It’ll take you maybe a couple of days.
The law doesn’t care because regulating the rights and duties of different classes of people is a task for which it is of necessity a blunt instrument.
So you have the propositions 1) women are much more neurotic and conformist than men(I’ll add risk aversion because no one disputes that) 2) very neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people should not be allowed to vote 3) women should not be allowed to vote.
The disconnect isn’t actually at 2->3. It’s at 1->2. And if we do agree that sufficiently neurotic, conformist, and risk averse people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, then the most obvious question becomes ‘where is the threshold and how far is the median woman from it’. If the median woman is on the other side such that only a minority would be able to vote in the presence of an objective test for neuroticism, conformity, and risk aversion, then it is no more unjust to categorically deny women the vote than it is to categorically deny teenagers the vote- our hypothetical objective test doesn’t exist, can’t exist, and would probably be cost prohibitive if it did exist.
Steelman over- to be clear, I think at that point you’re arguing for the average woman being mentally ill, at least if you consider this a strong enough argument to stand on its own. At that point you’re arguing for women’s independence to be rolled back in toto, with things like guardianship laws. To be clear, my opposition to women’s suffrage stems from old-school views on gender roles and family in society, similar to the original anti-suffragettes. But I would sign on to a much weaker form of the above as a minor supporting argument; making decisions about groups as a class is a normal way to govern society, and it’s not normally seen as unjust.
I like the thought you’ve started but I don’t think you’ve really thought it through - or else have a deeply skewed and inaccurate view of where women are on the scale and the underlying distribution.
What you describe has an entire math background. For example, it’s highly related to logistic regression and analysis of classification/cutoff rules. Basically any time you make a cutoff, you produce a square with false positives, false negatives, etc. Analysis of whether this array of outcomes, mathematically fixed based on the underlying distribution as well as the cutoff point itself (you can also slide the cutoff point around a little bit in numerical contexts but gender spectrum stuff aside we can’t here) relies on some sort of subjective judgement about if the trade off is acceptable or not (or, considering alternative trade offs). In this context, a false positive might be “we took away the vote when really it would have been fine”, you get the idea. When your only choice of cutoff is “you are a man or woman” the numbers don’t produce anything other than a horror story for accuracy. That’s just the math of the situation. When your cutoff is numeric like age, you can actually produce a set of outcomes that are morally acceptable and practically feasible.
All this to say that again, unless you have some deeply disturbed and unrealistic idea about the actual distribution of eg female neuroticism, or simply don’t care about unnecessarily disenfranchising half the population, this idea is completely untenable. Especially if we consider the right to some degree of say in governance to be a human right of thinking people, which I do.
Well yeah, that's what the second to last paragraph was about. I understand algebra and statistics on a basic level but I lack the ability to truly model this, so I didn't try. Is the difference between the average(adult) man and woman similar to the difference between the average 16 year old and the average adult? It probably isn't that big- women don't on the whole seem to be as bad at managing their own lives as teenagers are. As I got to, arguing that the average woman is incapable of voting isn't actually an argument for American gender roles in 1910; that wasn't the argument in use against women's suffrage at the time, and American law and gender roles at the time gave women more independence than that attitude would suggest(which would be norms more similar to Saudi Arabia before the recent liberalization). Factually Iran gives women's suffrage while maintaining guardianship laws(don't know much about how they work out in practice).
Instead a western argument against women's suffrage has, of necessity, to be rooted in arguments about how individuals should interface with society- either as members of a household or on their own. And enfranchising landless males seems like it set the anti-suffragette position up for defeat on the grounds of household voting being good, except possibly for heavy reliance on gender roles. Which is what we lost on.
Being genuinely reactionary, the issue with expansion of the franchise dates back to the introduction of universal male suffrage, which made truly universal suffrage inevitable.
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Yet not the argument made by your interlocutor. Isn’t charity something that is in the rules here?
Try harder.
I was not claiming either @faceh or @doglatine made that argument. I was referring to the "4chan greentext" @doglatine originally cited, and the arguments @faceh referred to, when @faceh asked me what arguments I have seen.
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Broadly agree with all of the above, but I think it's a bit simplistic to suggest that the only way for Group A types to utilise their advantage in violence is to take over the government and then push for the wholesale disenfranchisement of Group B. Consider the massive and disproportionate amount of power wielded by Islamists in the West over things like blasphemy because of the willingness of a small percentage of their number to commit acts of violence when they perceive their religion to be insulted (I'm sure other similar groups come to mind). Willingness and ability to commit violence can be a political superpower when wielded in the right ways, such as in contexts that allow governments to save face by symbolically punishing the most violent elements while cutting deals with non-violent 'moderates'.
I don't think the same dynamics would work wrt to men and women, though. IMO, a lot of the strategy of placating Muslim extremists originates not from fear of violence (if the authorities really wanted to crush violent Islamists, they could) but fear of offending modern liberal sensibilities and being called racist. The equivalent would be men launching violent attacks on feminists and the government deciding they have to cut deals with the less violent elements of the manosphere. How would that work? When an incel occasionally murders a bunch of women, they are universally reviled (and every other anti-feminist is implied to be an existential threat because of them). There is nothing the government's going to offer "men" as a group to try to keep a lid on anti-women violence. I think an actual violent redpill movement would be utterly crushed and the "moderate" faction would receive zero sympathy.
Also, no group of men is actually going to embark on an organized and widespread campaign of political violence because they think women have too much power.
I think the special status of Islam in the West is only partially explained by concerns of cultural sensitivity. No other religion or faith group has the same degree of coddling, and I find it hard to see any explanation other than the fact that Islamists are willing to commit violence if they feel their religion has been besmirched (see relevant Onion image.). Similarly, when it comes to racial issues, the groups that get the greatest degree of toleration and indulgence from the state are those that are most willing and able to take to the streets and engage in civil disorder.
This is not because Western governments are supportive or tolerant of civil disorder - quite the opposite. There is a keen (if sometimes sublimated) awareness in Western governments of their weakness when it comes to combating internal disorder. Simply put, we no longer have the state capacity to engage in large scale reprisal violence against citizens, even disobedient ones. The only reason this hasn't led to the collapse of governments is that this same decline in state capacity for violence has been mirrored by a reluctance among the wider population to engage in large-scale civil disobedience. In this regard, I disagree with your claim that Western states could really crush even the violent minority of Islamists if they wanted to; policies like collective punishment, reprisal violence, mass deportation, and so on are utterly anathema to the liberal sensibilities of both the modern state and its officers. Even if it were in the interests of the state and its officers to enact such measures, we are incapable of doing so. Consequently, minority groups that have the persistent ability to commit violence against the state must be bought off by any means necessary, while more widespread currents of disorder must be preemptively quashed, because their manifestation would be fatal to the collective game of make-believe that underwrites state power.
I should also clarify that I think the real risks of a persistent gender imbalance in politics don't take the form of violence directed specifically against women or aimed against women's influence in politics. The more plausible scenario of concern is one in which a large majority of men, especially young men, feel alienated by political outcomes and take matters into their own hands - a politics of gender, but not about gender. In such circumstances, the underlying gender gap in political outlook would be an implicit rather than explicit consideration, motivating young men to violently pursue political ends that on an object-level have nothing to do with masculinity or femininity.
At risk of going off topic, I think the treatment of Islam has more to do with projection than fear or enforced groupthink. While I’m not really a “right side of history” person and I think the idea is dumb, I do think that Islam is on a similar trajectory as Christianity in the sense that for a while similar images would produce violence - but that was a few hundred years ago perhaps. So eventually there will be more tolerance and less radical extremism, but a lot of people in the West think they are already there or have somehow hoped it into existence.
I’m not totally confident however because there are some quirks of Islam that make it unique. Not only the Sunni-Shia split but also the nature of religious thought and organization as well as things like a ban on artistic representation. It still shocks me that Islamic countries basically didn’t even have theatre which most every other culture does have in some form!
Christian religious violence in the modern and early modern era was mostly state sanctioned. There really is a big difference between Christianity and Islam in terms of proclivity towards non-state violence.
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Okay, good clarification. I largely agree with this. However, I think the unwillingness to deal with violent Islamists has gone hand in hand with an unwillingness to be "racist." Muslims quickly figured out that they could get away with things that normal citizens could not.
As for a movement of seething, dissatisfied young men becoming radicalized - possible, I guess. Discontented young men are always a recipe for instability, but for all the raging about feminism from the manosphere, I don't actually think Western men are that disadvantaged or that hard up.
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