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The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
So you begin by acknowledging and distancing yourself from people on your side of the debate that seem hateful, then immediately turn around and accuse your wife of sane-washing when she does the same? Holy Russell's conjugation, Batman!
I have pure motives, unrelated to those on my side who are motivated by hate.
You are sane-washing the haters on your side.
He is a hater lying about his motivations.
yes we can all play that game. There is plently to criticize about the fat-acceptance movement, but pinning them as the side more prone to being motivated by hate / disgust is just lulz. I am sympathetic to an argument that hate of the person has nothing to do with it / one side is objectively correct / detraction is the appropriate response to unhealthiness, even if it's expression should be tempered etc / that shame can be a powerful way of patrolling unhealthy social contagions, etc. But the frame that it's the other side who is hate-filled is more DOA than Dems are the real racist type of rhetoric
Those people aren't on my side. That's a separate party, the group of people who hate fat people. I'm not a part of that group of people, and I dislike and disavow that group of people. Whereas my wife would say that she does feel that the fat acceptance movement is a fundamentally good thing, that she does like, and she would not disavow them. There's the big difference.
You're just cleaving 'sides' conveniently. By your description, your wife described the positive aspects of fat acceptance. You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction. Neither is truly a 'side' in any ontological sense, but you're just throwing in a biased gerrymander to accuse your wife of sane-washing.
Calling the fat acceptance movement hate-filled, is just an ineffective "Democrats are the real racists". It might be objectively true under carefully drawn definitions of the central word, but you've just engaged in word-thinking.
This sounds like an isolated demand for rigor.
No I don't. I don't think there's much positive to fat-detraction, and I generally dislike fat-detraction entirely, pretty strongly. I know there are hate-filled people who hate fat people. I dislike them greatly. That doesn't mean that the hate-filled fat acceptance movement people are any better, or are suddenly noble. I despise those squeaky wheel social movements who try to shame everyone around them.
You can tell how hate-filled they are from how much you hate them!
These guys too. Why would you hate them so much unless they were filled with hate?
Wait a second...
Well, for whatever it's worth, I've always been someone who hates people who hate other people for hating people. That's just the way I am. I'm a 3rd order hater. I guess I feel like the proper response to dealing with bigots is to admonish them, but try to do better yourself, not to debase yourself like they do, and not to play the victim.
I take it you have the common decency of hating yourself, bigot that you are?
Maybe you should walk away from this meta nonsense and do what everyone does: love the righteous, hate the wicked and admit to yourself that you actually have first order principles instead of postmodern aloofness.
Which would be what, exactly?
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