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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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So the question here is this: Why is prejudice based on sex tolerable, but prejudice based on race & religion, not?

There's a joke I've seen before that is along the lines of "women be shopping = bigoted, white women be shopping = woke" so it doesn't seem to be strictly true that sexism is tolerable while racism and religionism isn't. It seems more to just be directional from minority and "oppressed" groups in the English speaking world to majority groups. That being said, it actually doesn't seem to matter too much regardless and mostly depends on the areas you traffic in. In some circles, saying women shouldn't vote is actually the correct social signal to send. In other circles, something like that would get you instantly excommunicated.

Is it not sexist to believe that someone is inherently more likely to kill and rape you due to a immutable and arbitrary characteristic, like gender, in the same way believing that black people are Muslims are more likely to kill and rape others because of their faith & skin color? Its not something inherent about men (or muslims, black people) that make them more likely to be violent, society is to blame!

I don't think it's sexist or racist to believe that men are more likely to be violent or that Muslims are more likely to be violent. I think prejudice occurs when you go from the real statistical understanding to collective blame and group punishment, treating every man or black person or Muslim or whatever else as if they aren't an individual who holds responsibility only to themselves and not to others who they have an attribute of theirs in common with. Just because men are more violent on average doesn't make it fair to some random office worker Joe if he's treated like a violent criminal, he is an individual and if he is peaceful he should be accepted that way. Especially when there's basically no group where violent people make up the majority. Even with the worst American group, black men, most of them you come across are still gonna be generally peaceful. And just like most male violent crime, even that is pretty much just towards other black men.

Essentially it's just useful to remember. Men are more violent on average, but the average man is not violent. The average man is peaceful, the baseline of men is nonviolence and non crime.

I don't think it's sexist or racist to believe that men are more likely to be violent

Replace "violent" with "at the highest end of STEM aptitude" and you just got fired from the presidency of Harvard. These are somewhat overloaded words but the revealed descriptivist definition seems to include any belief in inherent differences that have clear moral valence, at least if the direction of some of those perceived differences can be interpreted as "punching down" the progressive stack.

or that Muslims are more likely to be violent.

Well, this one's straightforwardly not racism because "Muslim" isn't a race, but it is classic "Islamophobia".

It's kind of weird that we don't have a general "-ism" word to refer to religious prejudice or religious intolerance, but I guess religion is the point at which the "everybody's the same regardless" theory breaks down so badly that nobody wants to say religious prejudice is always unwarranted? You may believe Islam in particular isn't inherently more violent (it tried to be more resistant to the "evolution" that @Rosencrantz2 points out is common to religions, yet in practice Muslims' attitudes toward violence do vary greatly from century to century and place to place) But, are you going to extend that charity to every religion ever? That's a good way to find yourself visiting the People's Temple for a free glass of Flavor Aid.

No, see, this is exactly what they were talking about, and my comment above as well. You jumped straight to a factual debate about the stereotypes but that’s not the point. The point is, you have these beliefs about Muslims, fine. You think your views are more accurate, fine. Are you following it up by treating individual Muslims as dangerous and potentially violent as a baseline belief?

There's a joke I've seen before that is along the lines of "women be shopping = bigoted, white women be shopping = woke" so it doesn't seem to be strictly true that sexism is tolerable while racism and religionism isn't. It seems more to just be directional from minority and "oppressed" groups in the English speaking world to majority groups.

I think this is more or less the correct explanation. It really is just who/whom in its fundamental essence, and trying to make it make sense logically is a fool's errand.

There's a joke I've seen before that is along the lines of "women be shopping = bigoted, white women be shopping = woke"

This isn't so much a joke as it is an accurate representation of how much modern feminists have "lost the plot" so to speak and gotten subsumed into the broader (pun half intended) realm of woke racial politics. You can see this clearly with the widespread proliferation of the term "Karen", which as far as I can tell, feminists never really pushed back on, and often embrace and use themselves, despite being blatantly misogynistic. Calling a woman a bitch = misogynist, calling a white woman a bitch = a ok.

It's sort of the inverse of the term "thug", which is woke from a gender politics angle (men are thugs), but un-woke from a racial politics angle, and therefore no bueno.

In a way, this observation does support OP's claim, no? "Directionally wrong" sexual prejudice is redeemed by a "directionally correct" racial component, but "bad" racial prejudice is not made acceptable by introducing a "good" sex component; ergo the racial dimension empirically matters more.

I don't think it's sexist or racist to believe that men are more likely to be violent or that Muslims are more likely to be violent. I think prejudice occurs when you go from the real statistical understanding to collective blame and group punishment, treating every man or black person or Muslim or whatever else as if they aren't an individual who holds responsibility only to themselves and not to others who they have an attribute of theirs in common with.

This is actually what I meant to critique. Ill modify the post accordingly! (Although many people do think that simply believing this is wrong) Im trying to talk more about treating people within a given group differently based on these general facts. (Treating an individual man as if he would rape you, and profiling him, for example, because the majority of rape is men.)

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