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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25824 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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Is this..."Silence is Violence", but from the right?

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!

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