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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   25734 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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Your argument-free emotional crashout isn't really helping them beat the rap.

Me and Whitney, baby. Me and Whitney 😁

I unironically really love how all you guys think the absolute worst thing you can call me is "emotional". Oh, noes! I haz feelings? Say it ain't so!

  • -11

The word "argument-free" is critical here. Scott:

For a mistake theorist, passion is inadequate or even suspect. Wrong people can be just as loud as right people, sometimes louder. If two doctors are debating the right diagnosis in a difficult case, and the patient’s crazy aunt hires someone to shout “IT’S LUPUS!” really loud in front of their office all day, that’s not exactly helping matters. If a group of pro-lupus protesters block the entry to the hospital and refuse to let any of the staff in until the doctors agree to diagnose lupus, that’s a disaster. All that passion does is use pressure or even threats to introduce bias into the important work of debate and analysis.

In a democracy, at least in theory and usually at least partially in practice, those with the franchise are rulers; they decide what policy is best for the country. However, policy of a modern nation is fairly complex, and needs to be carefully tailored in order to function well; we can outsource some of this to politicians and the civil service, but not all. Ruling based on bellyfeel - System 1 - would quickly doom us all, because System 1 is very old (it's mostly hardwired, and evolution is slow) and thus its conclusions are in many places out of step with correct actions of a modern state.

Attacking claims about policy based on bellyfeel rather than reasoned argument is moderately-strong evidence that one adopts views based on bellyfeel rather than reason, which thus implies that one's a poor ruler. This is the "rap" that Skeletor mentions as being put forward by the most extreme of anti-feminists: if women are all emotional rather than rational, they are systematically poor rulers, and they shouldn't be rulers i.e. women's suffrage was a mistake.

I am not convinced of the premise there. At the very least, as even Dave Sim notes in his infamous essay*, the bell curves overlap; there are certainly some women who are more rational than some men. But this is why the accusation's being treated with such gravity; the "women are irrational bellyfeelers" => "women's suffrage was a mistake" implication is well-known and commonly accepted in the Ratsphere (especially the right-leaning half of it), which makes the truth or falsity of the premise direly important.

*I don't really recommend said essay; it's an example of what I call the Capitalised Important Concept Rant, which is how psychotic people tend to write essays (and indeed, it's known he was mentally ill at the time). If you enjoy CICRs, or want to see a good example of what they look like, there's a copy archived here (skip down to "Writings from "Reads""). Note that I still don't agree with all of it even after disregarding the obvious layer of crazy paint.

We get it, you're offended, no one cares, cope.

Clarify for me, as Southkraut has requested me to do: is this comment shitflinging or discussion forum things?

This is not a helpful contribution. Just because she's embarrassing herself and everyone is piling on does not mean it's open season to just throw rocks.

Noted.

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