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Gonna have to agree to disagree for sure. To me, by your logic Jesus should have submitted to the judgement of the Pharisees because a majority of people agreed with them, and yet we can all universally agree he was right to call them un-Christian and he was right to flip tables in the temple. God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves. A bunch of sexists being sexists and calling themselves feminists is no different than a bunch of people thinking beating their children into submission is God-approved and Christian. That sexist people go into governmental work and try to enact sexist policies while calling it feminism still doesn’t make them feminists. And if people want to talk about sexism on this site and call it feminism that still doesn’t change the definition of it. “A person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist’” would be, to me, a sexist.
He actually did submit to the judgement of the Pharisees. Also, he didn't call them un-Christian, he called them un-jewish, and "we" certainly dont all universally agree with that assessment; I'd imagine the Jews here beg to differ, and the argument that Christianity is innately left-wing is a common one among our right-leaning atheists. There are a number of posters here whose ideology disagrees strongly with a plain reading of Jesus' teaching.
If people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. The Rationalists had a whole thing about this: tabooing words. Just pick a different word, even a random word, to denote that the concept's proper label is disputed, and move on to talking about the contents instead. Or if you insist on your label, just understand that you're pretty much the only one using it that way here, because you're one of a vanishing few using the word that way anywhere. So when people don't instinctively use the word the way you prefer, have a little charity.
...My parents tried to raise me in a God-approved fashion, and they definitely used spankings with a belt or a wooden spoon, particularly when I refused to submit. Would you say they "beat me into submission", and was their purported Christianity false?
The way you are using language is doomed. Assumptions, axioms, are necessary to think, let alone communicate. But you need to be conscious of the fact that the map is not the territory; axioms can be wrong, and if you're going to adopt them, you need to have a clear view as to why, and what they are costing you specifically. If you treat them as a brute fact of reality, then it becomes difficult to impossible to communicate with others who don't share them. Like above: I am now doubtful that you and I share a common understanding of "beating children" or of "Christianity".
I respond to you for the same reason I respond to most other people: I want to understand how you, an individual human, thinks. This is valuable to me because I want to understand and be understood by others. What else would the point of any of this be?
I absolutely agree with you that if people don't agree on how to use labels, communication grinds to a halt. I believe one of the greatest disconnects in the USA is that a vocal group of people have started to try to change the definitions of words which is destroying the national conversation, but then again, I don't think the national conversation is happening between online reactionaries. I think real feminists are quite boring; hence you don't heard about them on reactionary websites. I also think the way to stop the misappropriation of words is by ignoring it. I frame it something like: If a group of adults are talking about horses and a kid comes over, points to a mule, and calls it a horse, you don't suddenly debate the definition of a horse. You tell the kid that's not a horse, and if he insists, you ignore him. If he wants to go find others who want to call a mule a horse and make a group, then you have a weird bunch of people who don't know what the hell a horse is.
In my opinion, yes, they did beat you into submission, and therefore weren't very good Christians. My parents did the same. I remember the paddle. And I also remember the Golden Rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. I highly doubt my parents would want to be hit with an object over and over again to the point of causing them tears when someone disagrees with them, therefore, they're violating the first rule of the whole religion. And I'd disagree we don't have a common understanding of beating children and Christianity; I don't assume you are malicious, and if we broke things down into a "yes" or "no", I think we'd find a lot of shared yeses. But, as you said, when words lose their meanings, communication becomes hard, much less breaking things down into a yes or no.
Presuming that this group of people is more or less Red Tribe, this seems like a statement that should be testable by objective evidence. Woman, Rape, Racism, Sexism, Feminism, Child Abuse all seem like words whose definitions have been radically altered, where it is a matter of objective fact who is doing the altering.
This seems wrong in two ways: first, because the conversations here have had a direct relation to the conversations happening nationally, and second, because a number of the views we've been discussing here have just been championed by the victorious candidate in a national election as well as a number of lesser cultural arenas. The online reactionaries are engaging with the national conversation, and what's more they're currently conducting a wildly successful offensive.
The Motte might be described as a "reactionary website". I don't think that's a fair description of either Vox or the state of California, or the Biden administration. Vox and the State of California and the Biden administration are the ones claiming what you (and I!) call sexism is actually "Feminism". And you still seem to side with them, so apparently this isn't a deal-breaker for you.
Alternatively, if this weird bunch of people declare that a mule is a horse, and organize and swing elections for the "mules are horses" party, and write and pass laws that mules shall be considered horses, and then enforce those laws with the power of the state, you don't get to pretend that everyone knows mules aren't horses and it's silly to even discuss the subject. Clearly, they don't know that mules aren't horses, and enough of them don't know it that they'll send the police to arrest you if you disagree too strenuously. Nor is it silly in such a situation to point out the difference between your claimed principles and observable social and political reality, most especially if you are voting for the "mules are horses" party and urging others to do likewise and sharply disapproving of the "mules are not horses" party.
I disagree. "Pain" and "Harm" are not synonyms. Pain can in fact be harmless. It can even be beneficial, when necessary to achieve a greater good. A spanking hurts, but so does exercise. So does play; I loved playing paintball as a kid, and getting hit by a paintball was way, way more painful than a swat with a belt. Sword fighting with boffers also involved inflicting pain for idle amusement, and it was totally worth it. Blocking a soccer ball with my calf once left me with a huge purple bruise six inches wide, and right when it was fading blocking another soccer ball left a new six-inch bruise inside it, like a bullseye; it made walking notably painful all week, and the week involved a ton of walking. By contrast, no spanking I received ever left bruises, or even lasting pain at all.
Having been a child, I observe that children are foolish and selfish by default, and their reasoning is remarkably deficient; this is often true even of adults. Pain cuts through all of that; children fear pain unreasoningly, instinctively, even when the pain is actually not all that bad. Eventually they learn that the anticipation and fear are actually worse than the sensation itself, and this level of mental maturation is the point at which corporal punishment stops being effective; in my case, it was the point at which I toughed out a spanking with only minimal distress, at which point my parents transitioned to other methods of discipline.
And discipline is, in fact, the point. Spankings weren't done out of anger, and they weren't done arbitrarily. Sure, they secured my submission. My submission needed to be secured, because I was a foolish child who did not understand the value of discipline, and so had to have it imposed on me until I could learn to value it through experience. Learning discipline is obviously good for any child, and the fact that the child does not recognize this in the moment is easily explained by the fact that they are a child, hence of extremely limited understanding and perspective. In hindsight, I recognize that spankings were very good for me, and wish that my parents had used more discipline, not less. I do not think this is any form of false consciousness, but is a rational assessment of my own experience. Maybe it was different for you and your parents; all I can judge is my own experience and the experience of those I observe around me. And as you say, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". When I was a kid, I wanted unlimited chocolate and Nintendo and no school. Now I recognize that these desires were immature, and I had to be taught that by parents who loved me, wanted the best for me, and prioritized my long-term welfare and flourishing over my desires for immediate gratification. How could it be otherwise?
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In that case, it seems that TheMotte - and, honestly, most of America - is a place where they speak a different version of English from you, where "feminist" refers to a certain strand of "sexist." As such, when you see "feminist" being analyzed, it should be clear that it's not referring to the same thing you are when you use "feminist." As long as everyone involved can communicate to each other using words that each other recognize and agree on the meaning of, I don't see any problem.
I don't want to argue this, but I'm curious who is "we" here, though? In my own descriptive model of word definitions, the "we" would be referring to just the sum total of how people, throughout their everyday lives, make noises (and write scribbles on paper or screen, etc.) at each other by flapping their mouths in order to convey things to each other, through which the noises become associated with meanings. You seem to believe in some sort of authority that gets to override this sort of emergence of meaning through behavior, and I'm not sure who specifically that authority is.
The "we" is, uh, I guess Charles Fourier and/or the Oxford English Dictionary in 1852. The word was invented, given a definition, and then people took that definition as a label. I disagree "most of America" speak a different version of English from you; the part of America that's wrong about feminism does, and good thing I don't speak to them outside this site. That people take a word and try to convince others that the word means something else is the neverending creep of stupidity that, as you pointed out, interrupts the flow of communication between people.
Fair enough, so it seems to me that, to you, the original person who wrote the first entry of a word into some particular dictionary (OED in this case) is the ultimate authority of the word's definition, and no matter how people "in the wild," so to speak, use the word to communicate to each other doesn't affect it. It's essentially the equivalent of a tablet handed down from God at that point and forevermore.
There's nothing wrong with this perspective, even if I disagree. But much like how there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the 10 Commandments when it comes to how they live their lives, I hope you understand that there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the OED or any similar authority when it comes to how they communicate with others.
Given how general polling about people identifying as "feminists" in America goes - IIRC, every poll indicates that a majority of American women don't identify with the term, and the proportion of people who agree with some statement about men and women deserving equality or being equal is always far greater than the proportion of people who identify as feminists - I think you're likely living in a bubble.
I mean, that's precisely what you're doing in this thread though, right? You're the one trying to convince others that the word that they use to communicate to basically everyone else clearly is actually being used wrong.
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