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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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Accepting these as the choices is still accepting the incel-yellers frame. There is a possibility that the complaints the men have do in fact have validity and are not merely some sort of injured pride.

All three can be true. This is what you absolute conflict theorists ignore: the people you hate may be making bad faith accusations, but their accusations may also have more than a little truth to them. Of course you won't acknowledge the latter because admitting your enemies have a point would be conceding ground to them, which conflict theorists (who do not care about the truth, only about winning) can never acknowledge. But your enemies still might have a point.

There are actual incels, and incel-adjacent misogynists, and some of them have been legitimately injured by feminists and have reason to be resentful, and some of them are just shitty people who can't get laid for good reason, and some are just plain old misogynists resentful that they can't get laid as much and as easily as they would like.

Your enemies are never going to concede that calling Elon Musk (with 10 kids by 3 attractive women) an incel is at all wrong. By conceding that any of their accusations have truth to them, you validate such bogus accusations as well. It is not a matter of conflict theorists not caring about the truth; it is a matter of conceding true things assists in establishing lies.

Your enemies are never going to concede that calling Elon Musk (with 10 kids by 3 attractive women) an incel is at all wrong.

No, they aren't, because they are also bad-faith conflict theorists.

Calling Elon Musk an incel is obviously ridiculous, but it has nothing to do with whether incels and incel culture does in fact exist. And if you take your position, which is that you can never admit your opponents might even accidentally be right about something because that would be giving them a "win," then you are no longer able to actually distinguish between what's true and what's not, only between what helps your cause and what doesn't.

I know what's true and what's not; I know men with unjustified anger at women exist. But I see no reason to accept the "incel" framing of that phenomenon when it brings in all the stuff that isn't true also, and by accepting that framing I implicitly validate that too. That brings no one closer to truth.