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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31958 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I am personally very sympathetic to most of these critiques.

I am not. I am quite familiar with most of these debates. To me, the position you describe seems to stem from a desire to declare one's arguments unassailable via fiat rather than testing their merit through open discourse. The first few items listed by that article you linked are rather telling here:

It’s with very real regret that we must inform you that your petition to play devil’s advocate has been denied. (...) We would like to commend you for the excellent work you have done in the past year arguing for positions you have no real interest or stake in promoting, including:

  • Affirmative Action: Who’s the Real Minority Here?
  • Maybe Men Score Better In Math For A Reason
  • Well, They Don’t Have To Live Here
  • I Think You’re Taking This Too Personally
  • Would It Be So Bad If They Did Die?
  • If You Could Just Try To See It Objectively, Like Me

The same is further evidenced by the fact that even the mildest and most factual critiques are banned on sight in feminist spaces, or how "sea-lioning" became a buzzword. We also see this when we look at why feminists flame out of discussion spaces like this one, where the biggest complaint almost invariably is that the powers that be do not sufficiently intervene to tilt the playing field in their favour.

It might very well be that women in general and feminists in particular have a harder time presenting their arguments in a calm and collected fashion. But that is not because the onus on them is particularly strict. It's because the most useful weapons in their rhetorical arsenal are emotional blackmail and performative pearl-clutching (i.e. un-personing the interlocutor as morally repugnant for the crime of disagreeing).

Intersectional feminists take it further, and suggest that upper-class white male emotions are likely to be the noncontroversial, accepted ones that have weight without needing to actually be expressed strongly -- and which are therefore likely to carry the day under liberal "rules of debate.

This is simply wrong if you look at the complete and total monopolisation of victimhood on behalf of women. Compare, e.g. how much societal ressources we spent on topics such as "How do we get more women into C-suites" vs. "Why are there so many male suicides?"

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