The social justice wars

Discussion of science, technology, politics, and other topics that aren't strictly philosophical.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Hi David, thank you for substantiating your views with a source. And I'll try to use that same source to show you how you might have misunderstood not only my post but also your own source in places.
As far as I can see, the historical consensus is that Galileo was indeed persecuted by the Church.
But the following was the actual discussion, read carefully:

You: Galileo was persecuted/ex-communicated for "promoting rationality"
Me: Galileo was actually free to publish any hypothesis while the Church promoted science.
You: Galileo was indeed persecuted

But your own source or any other will show you Galileo was free to publish his ideas and was even encouraged for most of it by that Church. The dispute was not about Galileo being reasonable but about his blunt attacks on Aristotelian science, the one which official theology approved of and also about his attacks on interpretations of biblical passages. Mind you, he was not dismissing the absolute truth value of the Book itself, which would have been a most reasonable thing, but he was voicing how certain sacred texts had to mean something else than the Church said it did. And he promoted that as truth beyond the speculative, in effect stating, in the eyes of many, that he had God-like authority on theological matters.

An admirer and patron of Galileo became even The Pope (Urban VIII) -- the head of the Church! The only warning this pope gave (and it's a recurring request made to him) is to treat the Copernican theory only hypothetically and there was great support.

And lets not paint the picture too dark when "imprisonment" was mentioned. He even kept writing and researching afterwards! Lke this passage:
  • It should be noted that Galileo was never in a dungeon or tortured; during the Inquisition process he stayed mostly at the house of the Tuscan ambassador to the Vatican and for a short time in a comfortable apartment in the Inquisition building. After the process he spent six months at the palace of Ascanio Piccolomini (c. 1590–1671), the archbishop of Siena and a friend and patron, and then moved into a villa near Arcetri, in the hills above Florence
The main thing was that the Church was not allowing a scientific theory to be "held and defended" -- as absolute, that is. The Church was the authority on anything absolute. And science at the time did not have that authority. Simply because if it had, in the political sense, the power balance would shift. Power has held by those deciding over this process. It's purely a game of power.

In effect, Galileo's sin was mainly political and in no way he was discouraged or prevented to work on "reason" or scientific hypothesis. This can all be found in the Encyclopædia Britannica article or in the Wikipedia entry.

--
As for Bruno:
the tragic death he suffered at the stake because of the tenacity with which he maintained his unorthodox ideas at a time when both the Roman Catholic and Reformed churches were reaffirming rigid Aristotelian and Scholastic principles in their struggle for the evangelization of Europe.......
Lets see what is meant with "tenacity" and "unorthodox ideas" here.

Apparently he has trouble "reaffirming the philosophical character of his speculation". Again this is a case of stating a view as authoritative and these also included some views on biblical matters: the concept of God, the nature of Jesus, if Jesus was magical son of a magical god or just a magician who possessed magical abilities. That level. Pure theology!

What's missing from the Britannica article is more clarity on the exact reasons the Church had frictions with him.
Was it his emphasis on the magical and the occult? Speculation on other worlds? Original documents are still lost. Some reference are there to blasphemy, immoral conduct, and heresy in matters of dogmatic theology. Nothing about scientific work though, plurality of worlds and their eternity believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes; dealing in magics and divination. (From wikipedia: Luigi Firpo, Il processo di Giordano Bruno, 1993

General cosmology was at least not it Stanford Encyclopedia:
  • Thus, in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system, and it was certainly not a heresy. When Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was burned at the stake as a heretic, it had nothing to do with his writings in support of Copernican cosmology,
---
David Quinn wrote: But if my opposition to the left-wing cancer is supposed to require me to become involved with the madness which is the right-wing cancer - then forget it. I will never do that. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
Nobody is suggesting this false dilemma though. Somehow the extremes are creating higher contrasts, one can see them both more clear for what they are. Which is for me the value of the dispute around the Trump presidency. Some contrasts are increased.
If the Islamic jihadists wanted to install their own puppet government in the White House with the express intent of undermining American and Western society from within, then they couldn’t have picked a better dupe to lead it than Donald Trump.
But the actual "undermining American and Western society" has little to do with the elected President. That process is far bigger, older and more involved. At best Trump's election shows you the rotting process and the emotional energies moving around. But also Hillary Clinton as candidate, in contrast, shows the same issue. But as usual, people have a harder time seeing the issue in that direction. Appearances prove to be remarkably deceptive!
But after David promoting the guiding and reassuring of women so that they can become, in a smooth, painless way, more masculine (and by GOD lets not even spook them) ...
Woman’s proneness to being spooked is a reality that has to be dealt with. We can’t just ignore it, not if we actually want to resolve the issue. If we continue to pretend that this feature of feminine psychology doesn’t exist and continue to confront these left-wing women in a hostile manner, then they will simply dig their heels in and refuse to budge. No amount of reasoning will change their minds.
Confronting and reasoning might not help but I hate to bring it to you: guiding and reassuring would simply mean perpetuating the whole Woman modus operandi: how social evolution created the dynamic in the first place! There's no reason for hostility and no reasonable person has been suggesting it. But for some reason you "feel" it to be operating here somewhere, amongst philosophers?
This is people venting uselessly at each other and creating karmic conditions for even more violence to take place.
It can be stopped at any time, David! And usually with realizing how it's not the other who has the most pressing problems.
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Re: The social justice wars

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David Quinn wrote:Woman’s proneness to being spooked is a reality that has to be dealt with. We can’t just ignore it, not if we actually want to resolve the issue. If we continue to pretend that this feature of feminine psychology doesn’t exist and continue to confront these left-wing women in a hostile manner, then they will simply dig their heels in and refuse to budge. No amount of reasoning will change their minds.
You are presuming that left-wing women are being treated in a "hostile" manner, and not in the same way as everyone else.

If you speak the truth to some people they will experience it as a hostile attack. Do you think that nobody should speak the truth to left-wing women, just in case they get spooked? I don't think that's a healthy base for a political system that includes women.

What measures do you think should be taken to ensure that women are protected from hearing the truth?
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Kevin Solway »

David Quinn wrote: . . . this idea of having to go over to the side of the fundamentalist Christians, white supremacists and conspiracy nut-jobs that comprise most of the modern Republican party.
What does it mean to "go over to their side"? If you are in the southern hemisphere, does it mean moving to the northern hemisphere? Does it mean that you have to sign up as a fundamentalist Christian or a nazi?

And by the same token, if I were to support the democrats, would it mean going over to the side of the communists, the radical feminists, and the fundamentalist Islamists?
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Re: The social justice wars

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In recent times it has been revealed that the English police force allowed the mass sexual abuse of young girls - in Rotherham, for example - because of their fear of being called racist.

It's my impression that a significant number of people on the left are aware of what is going on in society, but they are afraid so say anything because of what will happen to them if they speak out. Like James Damore, they will be sacked from their jobs, their funding will be removed, their accounts cancelled, they will be removed or hidden from search engines, they will be called racist, sexist, misogynist, nazis, etc, universally blacklisted and doxed, and then they will be physically set upon by the likes of antifa.

It's the same for people living under communist regimes. If you speak the truth you will be cut off from society, sent to "political retraining camps", tortured, and starved to death if necessary.

This repression can only lead to disaster. There's no good side to it that I can see.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by JohnJAu »

Kevin Solway wrote: If you speak the truth you will be cut off from society, sent to "political retraining camps",
Or sexual misconduct and harassment awareness programs which have become standard in many companies.

David is gone already, don't even worry about him! Once the 'white knight' pill has gotten to your head you're lost for good. How he manages to all at once agree by his own word that women are more privileged than men and then also say that men are *relatively* hostile toward women is insane. Hostile how? Men these days are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on women just to get their attention. Where exactly is the connection between frivolous spending and pandering almost universally in the west to an entire sex and being 'hostile'?

He simply seems to be ignoring the facts: (If they are facts, feel free to correct me on any I've gotten wrong or if they are all wrong, I do not presume to know, I am only stating the statistics as they are broadly shared by various sources on the internet! These are mainstream statistics as far as I've seen, and even if they are not, many men certainly believe them! They seem to be largely part of what fuels this so called 'hostility' toward women)

Women receive 60% less jail time on average for the same crimes.
Men commit suicide 4-5x as often as women.
70-90% of divorces are initiated by women.
90%+ of all alimony is received by women.
80%+ of child custody is received by women.
Men get raped more in prison than the entire population of women get raped.
Women have a greater chance of receiving a job on average if equally qualified.
Women are largely favored in court vs men. Two examples being reproductive rights or domestic violence.
90%+ fatal workplace injures are men.
Men in the west on average live years less in life expectancy.
Men make up the huge majority of the homeless.

And, something which seems majorly relevant to me as one of the causes for the anti-feminist 'hostility' is the incredible degree (perhaps by thousands of times) that women have what's deemed more 'sexual market value' on average.

Why do you think men got behind Trump's apparent 'sexism' toward women?
Pam Seeback
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Pam Seeback »

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:It's really a recurring topic here and everywhere, the SJW, political correctness, equivalence enforcing for gender and sexual orientations, racial perceptions and so on. For now I'll just post one recent case which has currently some traction, the case of Google engineer James Damore who put out a memo on evolutionary psychology and gender in the Google workplace (as people are there encouraged to put out their ideas internally) only to get fired for suggesting a rational basis for what could be seen as a structural, non-curable inequality at Google.

Detailed summary of the case by Luboš Motl Pilsen, a theoretical physicist.
Since the writings of James Damore are psychologically based rather than philosophically based I question their value to 'cut the ties that bind.' I realize psychology is part and parcel of the attachment-transcendence process, however, philosophy trumps psychology in this regard, ergo should it not be the main focus of those professing to be philosophers? Philosophy cuts, psychology saws with a dull blade, no contest from where I'm sitting. Perhaps I am missing something deeper going on here vis a vis keeping the right-left debate burning in absence (for the most part) of reasoning its ultimate reason, and if I am, I am open to being enlightened.

Could not this thread have been posted on the Genius Forum framed philosophically rather than socially/culturally/psychologically...Diebert? Anyone?
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Santiago Odo
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Santiago Odo »

Some background to these newer manifestations of 'culture war.

From “Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right”.

Gramscians of the alt-light

There were two major figures of the online culture wars Trumpian right who wrote glowingly about the hard core of the alt-right in a heavily quoted piece in Breitbart called ‘An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right’. These were Milo Yiannopoulos and Allum Bokhari, who traced the intellectual roots of the amorphous alt-right back, in quite a flattering portrayal of the movement, to a number of key intellectuals and schools of thought.

They singled out Oswald Spengler, the German philosopher who wrote The Decline of the West in 1918, who influenced the whole discourse of civilizational decline and advocated a nationalist non-Marxist socialism and authoritarianism, H. L. Mencken, the deeply elitist but undeniably brilliant anti-New Deal US satirist and cultural critic, who also made Nietzschean criticisms of religion and representative democracy, Julius Evola, the Italian philosopher loved by the Italian fascist movement, who advanced traditionalist and masculinist values and believed modern man lived in a Dark Age, Samuel Francis, the paleoconservative US columnist and critic of pro-capitalist neoconservatism and lastly, the French New Right, who importantly were sometimes called ‘Gramscians of the right’.

The French New Right or Nouvelle Droite adapted the theories of Antonio Gramsci that political change follows cultural and social change. Andrew Breitbart’s phrase was that politics is always ‘downstream from culture’, and was often quoted by Milo. Belgian far-right anti-immigration party Vlaams Blok leader Filip Dewinter put it like this: ‘the ideological majority is more important than the parliamentary majority.’ Prior to 1968, the right had taken the view that ‘ordinary people’ were still inherently conservative which you can see echoed today in the ‘silent majority’ rhetoric of modern establishment conservatives.

The French New Right’s Gramscian aim, which the alt-right today also shares, was to break with the view that defeat of radical elites or vanguards would enable the restoration of a popular traditional order and instead took stock of how profoundly the 60s had changed the general population and become hegemonic. As Andrew Hartman outlined in his book on the 90s culture wars, The War for the Soul of America, the radical upheavals of Paris 1968 and the rise of the New Left was proof to the demoralized right that the whole culture would now have to be retaken before formal political change could come.

This led to the pursuit of a ‘metapolitics’, and a rejection of the political party and traditional activism within a section of the right. Instead, they set about rethinking their philosophical foundations and creating new ways to counter the ‘68 ideology of Social Progress. The resulting French New Right shared many of the alt-right’s preoccupations like multiculturalism and imminent Western decline, also drawing on and adapting ideas from across the political spectrum. For example, they had a strong critique of capitalism, promoting instead local ‘organic democracy’. Today, the movement that has been most remarkably successful at changing the culture rather than the formal politics is the alt-light. They were the youthful bridge between the alt-right and mainstream Trumpism. Although the tactics of the online right are updated to a digital age, it is hard to think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they have strategically achieved, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture, not just formal politics. They succeeded largely by bypassing the dying mainstream media and creating an Internet-culture and alternative media of their own from the ground up. Here, I want to look more closely at those being called the alt-light, who became major independent social media figures with huge audiences well before Trump’s win.

They influenced Internet-culture and eventually more mainstream culture. How did they do this and why did it work? First, think for a moment about the amount of scholarly and polemical writing that has come from a broadly left perspective in recent generations, attempting to explain why it is that the project of the revolutionary socialist left continues to fail and remains unpopular. Entire schools of thought about the culture industry, media hegemony, discourse, narrative, normativity and power have this problem either overtly or implicitly at their core. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘manufacturing consent’ thesis has remained quite dominant in left rhetoric ever since it was written.

The Frankfurt School and the Situationists remain canonical in university theory courses. Of all the Marxian and Marxoid schools of thought, Gramsci’s is perhaps the most influential today, placing media and culture at the center of political analysis and praxis in a mediated age after the decline of the old labour movement. And yet at the end of 2016 it was the candidate of the right, Donald Trump, who was elected President of the United States despite all mainstream news agencies, including conservative media from Fox News to National Review, working openly against him.

Figures like Milo, who were being dismissed as an irrelevant Internet fringe despite their growing mass online audiences right up until the election results came in, rose to mainstream success along with him. Let’s also remember that during the Obama years millennial cultural liberals had their own new media platforms to fill the vacuum left by the decline in the centrality of mainstream newspapers and TV as the general arena for public discourse. In this brave new world of clicks and content, their alternative came in the form of the often-sentimental feel-good clickbait sites like Upworthy and listicle sites like Buzzfeed. Other liberal sites like Everyday Feminism, Jezebel and Salon delivered a strange mixture of ultra-sensitivity, sentimentality and what was once considered radical social constructionist identity politics.

[et cetera]
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Santiago Odo
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Re: The social justice wars

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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Pam Seeback wrote:Since the writings of James Damore are psychologically based rather than philosophically based I question their value to 'cut the ties that bind.' I realize psychology is part and parcel of the attachment-transcendence process, however, philosophy trumps psychology in this regard, ergo should it not be the main focus of those professing to be philosophers?
If you don't see the value in discussing it here, then at least do not try to insert the dull protest like "everything is unimportant compared to existence, heaven, saving your soul, etc". It's not different from, what's his name again, who tries to tie everything to some medieval underlying metaphysics losing its bearing. The effect is the same: the great smutching out! Discussing one simple worldly topic with some tie-ins to Genius history has a purpose, part of which is to see who smutches and who doesn''t. And what is your intention? As I hinted at: some processes function as contrast enhancer, in the finer details of things, as it were. For the subtler minds, it can clarify a few subtle things. But admittedly, there's also possibility for a lot of fizzling.
Philosophy cuts, psychology saws with a dull blade, no contest from where I'm sitting. Perhaps I am missing something deeper going on here vis a vis keeping the right-left debate burning in absence (for the most part) of reasoning its ultimate reason, and if I am, I am open to being enlightened.
Just start a thread on it, for example Is political discourse even desired?. Hey, I see someone already did! :-)
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Re: The social justice wars

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It's not different from, what's his name again, who tries to tie everything to some medieval underlying metaphysics losing its bearing.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

JohnJAu wrote:Men these days are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on women just to get their attention. Where exactly is the connection between frivolous spending and pandering almost universally in the west to an entire sex and being 'hostile'?
To play David's advocate, that hostility seems to be present especially in the "pandering" group. There are some social experiments where it was seen that after a while under more primitive, difficult circumstances, without a judging society around, a uniform group of (esp young) people will start to split by gender lines and yes, the men getting hostile to the women. Or if not: needlessly belittling and humiliating. Why this happens remains a matter of debate. Perhaps it's a power dynamic, an unstable group or identity needing to redistribute the power relations? One seeks then perhaps some "omega", a weaker gender, race or otherwise identifiable group or lightning rod to strengthen the cohesion of what's left.

If the above would be true then it's not really about gender but about identifying and grouping the receiving end of scorn, anger or ridicule. It would become a need. And I'm sure women have been experiencing this in certain settings, especially if they appear to be weak or needy. To be attacked for just for being women seems way less often the case. Sexual violence in many cases is also a power grab, where the sexual serves as temporary justification or pathway for deeper instincts to dominate.
70-90% of divorces are initiated by women.
90%+ of all alimony is received by women.
80%+ of child custody is received by women.
That might just as well say something about how men tend to be assholes and certainly not capable of dealing with the issues.
Men get raped more in prison than the entire population of women get raped.
That would be further evidence of sex and sexual violence being part of a power structure and not simply "desire" or "relief".
Women have a greater chance of receiving a job on average if equally qualified.
Many women claim the opposite though but it's tough to prove it. I've been involved in cases where (Muslim) immigrants claimed this but each time there were some very good and objective reasons for the rejection. Part of the SJW struggle seems based on the opposite statistic then which you have introduced. So it would be interesting to see your sources.
Men make up the huge majority of the homeless.
Maybe because it's not very safe on the street for what's still a desirable item to possess or play power games with?
And, something which seems majorly relevant to me as one of the causes for the anti-feminist 'hostility' is the incredible degree (perhaps by thousands of times) that women have what's deemed more 'sexual market value' on average.
It's important to understand sex in relation to market, exchange value, power relations and the connected desires running as blood through the power structures of society.
Why do you think men got behind Trump's apparent 'sexism' toward women?
The locker room talk? Or the stories on the groping? It's not that men got behind it but many will not judge another man as incapable to be president because he talks like that. In the end the whole "sexual market" is about objectifying, in language, in play, in advertisement, in jokes etc. It seems the majority of women are fine with it still as they participate in it, the objectifying, like no other. Why that is, I've tried to summarize here.
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Re: The social justice wars

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I actually read that sesquipedalian excerpt from some book with a *way* overlong title. Correct me if I'm wrong, Alexfried, but the point of the author was that the alt-right is founded on *real* populism, rather than the *fake* populism of the "broadly left perspective".

The only problem with that view is that both forms of populism are utter crap. Populism of any form, in fact, is utter crap, precisely because it is popular. It is always a precious heap of truths, values and morals which is one's own by virtue of something apart from oneself. It matters little whether these truths and values are a melting pot or a homogeneous manifesto, or what the "something apart" happens to be.

That is indeed an exclusively masculine phenomenon: the desire to affirm the "intelligible ego" in the strongest possible way. Weininger's "Judaism" is nothing other than this phenomenon within the limits of feminine psychology, as is the case with most men. At bottom it is the inability to *lose* oneself in a certain line of thought, or even in an emotion or a melody, because one cannot be sure of finding oneself again. It is the fear of becoming nothing, which only arises when one is already quite close to being nothing. The alt rightists sometimes talk about great works of art or classical music etc. to feel proud about being white, or as filler for diatribes against the rap/hip-hop loving lefties. What would they be if they actually read Hamlet or listened to BWV 1? Probably bored, but one can lose oneself to boredom as well!

The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or multiple. There are always before him two or many possibilities, where the Aryan, although he sees as widely, feels himself limited in his choice. I think that the idea of Judaism consists in this want of reality, this absence of any fundamental relation to the thing-in-and-for-itself. He stands, so to speak, outside reality, without ever entering it. He can never make himself one with anything—never enter into real relationships. He is a zealot without zeal; he has no share in the unlimited, the unconditioned. He is without simplicity of faith, and so is always turning to each new interpretation, so seeming more alert than the Aryan. Internal multiplicity is the essence of Judaism, internal simplicity that of the Aryan.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Santiago Odo »

My dearest LBH,

The book is quite interesting, though it does not in any sense support the Alt-Right. Most of what I have read of it so far points to the fact that the 'culture wars', at least in the 4chan-type manifestations (and what corresponds to that on the progressive left) is made up of people who have, in different ways, become unhinged. Anonymity is perhaps a factor, youthfulness another, nihilism yet another. What results from dumbing-down processes in terms of classical knowledge necessary to a functional democracy (et cetera). Another element is the astounding prevalence of sheer anger, anger and violence (in word) that has no bounds. The author spends a good deal of time explaining the background of what she describes as, and what seems really to be, absurdist politics.

The quoted portion is relevant to the topic 'The Social Justice Wars' insofar as it provides some background to the 'intellectual right' (the newer right) in a juxtaposition to an 'intellectual left'. I do not think any part of that is difficult to understand and yet you seem not to have understood much of it. What is most relevant is the employment of Gramscian strategy. Which really turns it into cultural battles. If that is so I am inclined to reconsider Chomsky's recent statetemnts that while Absurdist Politics has become a national distraction the hardworking arch-conservatives are unravelling much of the legislative legacy of the previous administration. And that supports what Dan has said about overturning environmental protections and reducing social programs, et cetera.

If one wishes to understand what is going on within this strange and also absurd present, carnivalesque on one hand and darkly menacing on another, one has to consider all the angles, no?

What is coming out more and more on various blogs and fora where I read is the idea that the 'progressive left' has its mirror in the 'regressive right'. And so those who feel no relationship to either extreme are forced back into a center-position. For example here. These are interesting right-leaning (classic American) conservatives whose conversation and theme seem to me to support this centrist position. (Better said they are a recent generation of post-conservatives, the up-and-coming ones. Their politics is really right of progressivism in my view).

Essentially, and more or less in response to the rest of your incomprehenisible phrasings, the Vanguardist position that I find interesting and provocative is really just that: vanguardist provocation. As I take it, the inspiration can only really function at a personal level. It is simply not possible to imagine any political form arising out of it, certainly not in America.

Since there is really no 'Alt-Right', or the term is so general as to be meanignless, you would have to locate a person who embodies whatever you (or one) means with the term. Greg Johnson might be such a one. He has a philosophy background and is quite articulate and idea-driven. Out of his range of interests he brought out the Counter-Currents website. I think you will find that all of the authors represented there have uncommon, vanguardist positions. Were you to read some of those who comment to the various articles you would find a tremendous range of opinion and also intellectual preparation. So, Hamlet certainly and great works of music as well.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Santiago Odo »

Jupi do you have a tweed coat, snuff and a bowler cap? Photos would be helpful!
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by JohnJAu »

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:
70-90% of divorces are initiated by women.
90%+ of all alimony is received by women.
80%+ of child custody is received by women.
That might just as well say something about how men tend to be assholes and certainly not capable of dealing with the issues.
Men get raped more in prison than the entire population of women get raped.
That would be further evidence of sex and sexual violence being part of a power structure and not simply "desire" or "relief".
Men make up the huge majority of the homeless.
Maybe because it's not very safe on the street for what's still a desirable item to possess or play power games with?
Wow, the level of cognitive dissonance apparent in your three replies here is honestly shocking. Is it really David's advocate or Diebert's? You can't deny the facts (and it seems most of the ones I listed are indeed facts) so you brush off the first by saying maybe men are assholes? The second you say results just from power dynamic and that's somehow an excuse for the incongruent mass hysteria about women being raped and 'rape culture' when logically one can see how in prison alone men would suffer from it a lot more but that isn't mentioned, and men making up 80%+ of the homeless going completely ignored again in the mainstream media tho that's justified because it's not safe on the streets for women?

You really seem incredibly deluded at the moment and it's shocking that you can't see how weak the responses above are even just in terms of basic ability to reason or argue. It would also require one to wear blinders to miss seeing the relevance of the fact that these truths are so largely looked over or ignored in the mainstream media in favor of a focus on women's issues, and that this is also reflected in law. You'll even have a focus on women's suicide rates being at an all time high while the fact that men are doing it 5x more isn't even mentioned and you can't see the bias here? Or how this all spells a story which says that it is men who are more likely suffering from inequality, if any of the sexes are, yet people like David are seemingly conditioned to twist that around as you have above.

You even managed to argue that pandering, being overly generous, and spending frivolously on women almost universally in the west is hostility. That's clearly illogical. Your supporting reasoning being how dynamics play out on islands? lol

These are all partly reasons why I think people have essentially been brainwashed on certain subjects. The facts speak for themselves so clearly yet the SJW PC disease causes people to live in some weird world where reality is completely denied in favor of unsubstantiated ideas.

Soon enough we'll have you advocating transition surgery as a good treatment for the depression of the mentally ill trans people! It wouldn't surprise me at this point. I'm honestly afraid to ask to be honest but I feel I have to now as you're painting a dim picture and that ought to be explored to see how deep the rabbit hole of irrationality goes. Do you advocate transition surgery as justifiable, helpful, as a human right, as good, as worthy of defending, etc?

At some point Diebert, overturning every idea, or always playing advocate, goes a bit too far into the realms of madness.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by David Quinn »

JohnJAu wrote:David is gone already, don't even worry about him! Once the 'white knight' pill has gotten to your head you're lost for good. How he manages to all at once agree by his own word that women are more privileged than men and then also say that men are *relatively* hostile toward women is insane. Hostile how?
Surely, it is obvious. Women’s privileged status in modern society is an offshoot of the “women and children” attitude which has long formed the bedrock of traditional male psychology. The underlying assumption here is that women are lesser beings who need to be protected and pampered. The corollary of this is that many men feel is their right to do whatever they please with women, including abuse, harassment and sexual assault. Women are not being treated as human beings, but as pleasure-bots to be either pampered or abused.

JohnJAu wrote:Men these days are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of money on women just to get their attention. Where exactly is the connection between frivolous spending and pandering almost universally in the west to an entire sex and being 'hostile'?
In my book, bribing and flattering another person so that they can be tricked into doing what you want them to do is definitely a hostile act.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by David Quinn »

Kevin Solway wrote:
David Quinn wrote:Woman’s proneness to being spooked is a reality that has to be dealt with. We can’t just ignore it, not if we actually want to resolve the issue. If we continue to pretend that this feature of feminine psychology doesn’t exist and continue to confront these left-wing women in a hostile manner, then they will simply dig their heels in and refuse to budge. No amount of reasoning will change their minds.
You are presuming that left-wing women are being treated in a "hostile" manner, and not in the same way as everyone else.

If you speak the truth to some people they will experience it as a hostile attack. Do you think that nobody should speak the truth to left-wing women, just in case they get spooked? I don't think that's a healthy base for a political system that includes women.

What measures do you think should be taken to ensure that women are protected from hearing the truth?
I am not advocating that women need to be protected from hearing the truth. Not at all. It is important that everyone squarely faces the truth. What women need, however, is protection from the unnecessary hostility that often accompanies these truths, a hostility that springs from thousands of years of contempt for women. It is the hostility they object to, not the truth. Truth is meaningless to a woman. She doesn’t care about truth. What she cares about is not being persecuted simply because she is a woman.

Women are like children. You can’t just dump on them the full expression of truth and expect them to cope. They will just start crying. However, sit them down, give them some candy, relax them with some banter, and they will become far more open to what you have to say. It is then that you can begin to educate them about these deeper, harder truths. And they will accept these truths, provided that the underlying sexist hostility is absent.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Kevin Solway »

David Quinn wrote:
Kevin Solway wrote:What measures do you think should be taken to ensure that women are protected from hearing the truth?
I am not advocating that women need to be protected from hearing the truth.
But women regard it to be hostile, and you want to stop women from experiencing this hostility, don't you?

the unnecessary hostility that often accompanies these truths, a hostility that springs from thousands of years of contempt for women.
I think this is only in your imagination. In cases where there is hostility I don't believe it has anything to do with the fact that women are involved, but only that hostility is being met with hostility. Sex doesn't have anything to do with it.

It is the hostility they object to, not the truth.
Not in my experience. They very often object to the truth, which they regard as hostile, and they regard the speaking of this truth to be hostility. As you say, many of them have no recognition or concept of truth, but only feel how they are impacted by their environment.

Women are like children. You can’t just dump on them the full expression of truth.
A lot of them can't tolerate even the tiniest bit of truth. This is especially the case with the feminists.

Sit them down, give them some candy, relax them with some banter, and they will become far more open to what you have to say.
People have tried this many times, and it doesn't work. They regard your concessions, and the special treatment you give them, as their due, and then they demand more.

You might find rare individual women or feminists who can be spoken to, but in the general case this isn't a realistic option.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by David Quinn »

To get a better handle on my approach to the SJW issue, let's look at a specific example - that of women being sexually harassed on public transport. It is a common problem that affects many women in all parts of the world. Here is an article that I read today, which prompted me to write this post: The worst people on public transport. It's a nothing article, but it does reflect a widespread problem.

We all know that many men behave in a very unseemly manner towards women - whether it be invading their physical space and pressing up too closely to them, or talking at them in a sexualized manner, or engaging in groping and other forms of sexual assault. Understandably, the women on the receiving end perceive all this as hostile behaviour.

In the past, whenever women have complained about this behaviour, they received yet more hostility in the form of being called sluts and having their concerns instantly dismissed. In response, women have banded together to form a political bloc and they are now forcing men to deal with their own deviant behaviour. They are forcing the judiciary to enact harsher punishments. They are advocating the need for education/awareness programs. Some of the more extreme solutions include having separate carriages for men and women.

These are essentially the same dynamics that drive the SJW movement.

What is really happening here? A large proportion of men, through their own arrogance and ill-discipline, have created a febrile atmosphere in which women have become deeply suspicious and distrustful of most men. And so when someone like James Damore comes along and talks about the superiority of men in certain areas of life, such as engineering and physics, the only thing that women see is more hostility being directed towards them.

Here lies the foolishness of the anti-SJW movement, which is rooted in a lack of understanding of female psychology and a lack of interest in addressing women's concerns. They do not see that their ham-fisted attempts to “speak the truth” are only serving to feed the hostility that women are feeling.

What is the solution here? The very first step, before anything meaningful can be done, is that men have to become more disciplined and stop harassing women. And that means they need to become more independent of women and more conscious in the way they behave. They have to own up to the role that they play in all of this. If this doesn’t happen, then forget it. Nothing is going to change. Women will continue to perceive men as hostile and they will reject anything that even smells like it is supporting traditional male sexism (such as what we saw with Damore and his memo).
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by David Quinn »

Kevin Solway wrote:
David Quinn wrote:the unnecessary hostility that often accompanies these truths, a hostility that springs from thousands of years of contempt for women.
I think this is only in your imagination. In cases where there is hostility I don't believe it has anything to do with the fact that women are involved, but only that hostility is being met with hostility. Sex doesn't have anything to do with it.
It is precisely this close-minded attitude towards women's stated concerns that is exacerbating the problem.

Kevin Solway wrote:
David Quinn wrote:Sit them down, give them some candy, relax them with some banter, and they will become far more open to what you have to say.
People have tried this many times, and it doesn't work. They regard your concessions, and the special treatment you give them, as their due, and then they demand more.
I think it will be a long, long process, one that is only just beginning. It will take decades. Generations, even.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by JohnJAu »

David Quinn wrote: What is the solution here? The very first step, before anything meaningful can be done, is that men have to become more disciplined and stop harassing women. And that means they need to become more independent of women and more conscious in the way they behave.
You are contradicting yourself. Women will continue to seek a higher status by exploiting the 'women are oppressed' angle no matter what changes because they have been convinced by the MSM that it is true. No matter what they are given, they could all have mansions and private trains, they will still say they were oppressed for centuries and so deserve more. No matter how men behave the feminists will find something further to complain about. They are of course feminine, overly sensitive and emotional, and this femininity is spreading to encompass more and more males. Women today are so deluded they literally publicly call themselves goddesses, are praised for doing so and are treated as such while openly referring to men as trash. Even a 200kg women is sucked up to and treated as some kind of Egyptian God by countless starved men. Your solution is telling men that they need to be more 'beta' so to speak. No, it's the opposite. Irrational children (women) should not be pandered to at all and we should not mold ourselves to attempt to satisfy their insanity, which is impossible. It is like trying to get a child to behave by spoiling it further and giving it everything it demands, that clearly will not work.

The problem with men, especially recently, and the source of their actual hostility toward women where it exists, has been their femininity.
Kevin:
They regard your concessions, and the special treatment you give them, as their due, and then they demand more.
Exactly.
Jupiviv:
I agree that men should become independent of women, but not at all in your sense of "independence". You are suggesting that men spend all their time pandering to women's emotions, while also treating them like rational beings.
Exactly.
Last edited by JohnJAu on Fri Aug 25, 2017 2:55 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by jupiviv »

David Quinn wrote:We all know that many men behave in a very unseemly manner towards women - whether it be invading their physical space and pressing up too closely to them, or talking at them in a sexualized manner, or engaging in groping and other forms of sexual assault. Understandably, the women on the receiving end perceive all this as hostile behaviour.
This is clearly nonsense, especially in the context of crowded trains or buses. Again, you're attempting to justify your previous ad hominem attacks with tripe.
What is the solution here? The very first step, before anything meaningful can be done, is that men have to become more disciplined and stop harassing women. And that means they need to become more independent of women and more conscious in the way they behave.
I agree that men should become independent of women, but not at all in your sense of "independence". You are suggesting that men spend all their time pandering to women's emotions, while also treating them like rational beings. It's a fantasy about the relationship between men and women as a whole, which palliates the frustration and boredom created in men who cannot transcend their actual and/or psychological dependence upon women. The desire to make other men believe in that fantasy is a form of revenge.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by jupiviv »

David Quinn wrote:
Kevin Solway wrote:
David Quinn wrote:Sit them down, give them some candy, relax them with some banter, and they will become far more open to what you have to say.
People have tried this many times, and it doesn't work. They regard your concessions, and the special treatment you give them, as their due, and then they demand more.
I think it will be a long, long process, one that is only just beginning. It will take decades. Generations, even.
This doesn't make sense. What exactly is the process, and why is giving women special treatment the beginning of that process?
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by Kevin Solway »

David Quinn wrote:women being sexual harassed on public transport. It is a common problem
But how much of it is real, and how much is imagined and fabricated for political purposes?

I can go outside right now and then claim that I am being harassed by women on the street.

In addition, how much of this attention women are receiving is perfectly normal courtship behavior?

We all know that many men behave in a very unseemly manner towards women
And many women behave in a very unseemly manner towards men. This is because human beings are animals.

whether it be invading their physical space and pressing up too closely to them, or talking at them in a sexualized manner, or engaging in groping and other forms of sexual assault.
Women also do these things to men. These are largely normal animal behaviors. The term "sexual assault" is now being applied to just about all behaviors, such as looking at a woman, or complimenting a woman on how well she is looking.

Understandably, the women on the receiving end perceive all this as hostile behaviour.
It's understandable as delusion. Some women perceive these behaviors as hostile, while others are not so quick to judge, or perceive it for what it is.

forcing men to deal with their own deviant behaviour.
Merely being a man is a deviant behavior according to a lot of women nowadays. Thinking is a deviant behavior. Playing computer games is a deviant behavior. Being interested in things and ideas as opposed to people is a deviant behavior.

atmosphere in which women have become deeply suspicious and distrustful of most men.
It is a deluded atmosphere.

And so when someone like James Damore comes along and talks about the superiority of men in certain areas of life, such as engineering and physics, the only thing that women see is more hostility being directed towards them.
It's not just women who think that, but all SJWs. Their thoughts arise from delusion.

They do not see that their ham-fisted attempts to “speak the truth” are only serving to feed the hostility that women are feeling.
I don't think James Damore made a "ham-fisted" attempt to speak the truth. He did so very politely and thoughtfully. He was a lot more polite and made a lot more concessions that I would have.

The only alternative to speaking the truth is to not speak the truth, and a lot of men won't do that any longer. The line needs to be drawn somewhere, otherwise no truth will ever be spoken under any circumstances.

Men have to become more disciplined and stop harassing women.
Men aren't harassing women. This is a delusion.
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Re: The social justice wars

Post by jupiviv »

The main fault in David's reasoning is that he is asserting an urgent need for radical shift towards rationality *only* for men, and *only* in their relationship towards women. He is completely ignoring the fact that such a need, by definition, must apply to all people in all contexts in order to be valid.

He contradictorily excludes himself from said need with his characterisation of men. Also, he says nothing about men behaving rationally in other respects, like giving the things they don't need to those who need them. If all men started doing this, the concessions given by men to women in a handful of western countries would decrease or even stop altogether, which - according to David's reasoning - would make women less willing to think rationally.
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