This is a spiritual successor to the Identity Politics thread I started early this year. This is a neutral place where we can hopefully debate effectively, and bring up recent news about, the various social issues underlying social movements such as Feminism, Men's Rights Activism, Egalitarianism, Anti-Racism, Fat Acceptance, Black Lives Matter, Social Justice, Humanism, Intersectionality, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), Masculinism, Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminism, Pro-life and pro-choice, LGBT issues and any other social/political movements that I forgot to mention (I'm sorry).
FeMRA stands for Feminism, Egalitarianism and Men's Rights Activism.
[b]OKAY, READY, 3, 2, 1...[/b]
[b]FIGHT!!![/b]
[b]...BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE![/b]
Here in the Facepunch FeMRA thread, we work under a constantly updated list of agreed definitions for various terms and labels. If you'd like to debate in this thread, please use the definitions of terms we have listed here or else tell us why you would like to change a definition and, if we come to a consensus, we'll change the definition:
[b]Classical Radical Feminist[/b]
[thumb]https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/79/c6/50/79c6505cee9efb36fc958629d33e7fda.jpg[/thumb]
The sect of sex-positive Radical Feminism from the Second Wave. They liked to burn bras and were extremely sex-positive, sometimes even violently so. They despise sex-negativity, but not many of them exist today.
[b]Equity Feminist/Freedom Feminist/Second-Wave[/b]
[thumb]http://56773344.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/8/9/25894814/4601287_orig.jpg[/thumb]
The Main front of Feminism during the 60s-80s. They believed in getting men and women the same opportunities in employment and positive representation in the media as well as fighting for birth-control and abortion rights. This was also a time where a major divide grew between sex-positve and sex-negative feminists. The sex-positive feminists believed in promoting the freedom of women's sexuality and saw restrictions of such to be indicative of Christian-style anti-sex puritanism. Sex-negative feminists lead by Andrea Dworkin, on the other hand, believed that institutions such as pornography and prostitution and in many cases sex-in-general were mechanisms used by men to exploit women. This resulted in a massive conflict between the two sides, leading to more than one person being sent to jail or shot (including Andy Warhol). The sex-negative feminists are seen to have won the sex wars because although they did not get to pass legislation restricting pornography, they successfully managed to end the wave of sex-positivity that had been so revolutionary in the past couple of decades. More recently many still active sex-positive Feminists from this era have come out against sex-negativity within Neo/Third-Wave Feminism, such as the eponymous Christina Hoff Sommers, Camile Paglia and Cathy Young.
[b]Egalitarian/Humanist[/b]
[url=http://imgur.com/Ce3r4jY][img]http://i.imgur.com/Ce3r4jY.jpg[/img][/url]
People who represent a desire for a gender neutral identity activism campaign. Egalitarian's argue that parity between men and women has been achieved but there are still identity issues that face both sexes as well as other people of various sexualities, genders, ethnicities, races, identities and behaviours. Critics of Egalitarianism argue that it is essentially partaking in the 'Golden Mean' fallacy of attempting to find a middle ground between two opposing parties that doesn't exist. The critics argue that Egalitarianism is either a non-belief on the issue, analogous to being agnostic in a debate regarding religion (you either believe in god or you don't), or that it is a creation by MRAs made in order to scurt criticism without changing any of the underlying values or really ever being 'gender neutral'.
[b]Reddit FeMRADebates[/b]
The official Feminist/MRA/Egalitarian debating subreddit on reddit. It is designed as a neutral place to discuss and debate the various issues of, you guessed it, Feminist/MRA/Egalitarian discourse. It's not very big due to the lack of necessary controversy, but the subreddit is highly moderated and doesn't ban people for holding particular opinions like most other related subreddits. If you're interesting in hearing reasonable views from the, GASP, opposing side, you can check it out here: [url]https://www.reddit.com/r/FeMRADebates/[/url]
[b]Intersectional Feminist[/b]
[img]http://everydayfeminism.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/black-feminism-comic-211x300.jpg[/img]
For a long time, the problem of applying a single standard of the 'privileged' and the 'oppressed' to the entirety of a single race, gender or ethnicity has been insurmountable. The method of calling all men privileged and all women oppressed, even within a framework that denotes the existence of a male-dominated culture such as in the model of patriarchy, falls apart when you consider the existence of a poor homeless black man and rich white woman. The solution to this, social media-based third-wave feminist's argue, is to enforce a strict tabled system accounting for a person's Age, Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality, Height, Weight and Financial Income in order to develop for them a suitable Privilege Quotient. It uses the system of Kyriarchy, where individuals are the oppressors in some criteria and the oppressed in others. It's proponents argue that it eloquently solves the problem of inclusivity within Feminist circles, so that no group of people feels left out of any discussion of gender roles, social construction or privilege. It also serves the purpose of discouraging people from viewing a single individual as being representative of an entire group or demographic, where previously one woman or one black man was representative of all women and all black men. However, the extent to which each oppression criteria counts as what level of oppression is highly debated. Is being a black man better or worse than being a white woman? Is being prosecuted for your race or ethnicity better or worse than being prosecuted for your sexuality? Critics of the theory argue that, in practice, the application of Intersectional Feminism goes beyond comparing apples and oranges and straight into the territory of comparing cantaloupes and golf balls. They argue that is impossible to practically compare different types of oppression because they affect separate people differently and we should instead consider other people's problems both as individuals as well as distinct, separate demographics, instead of mashing the two together.
[b]The Kyriarchy[/b]
The Basis of Intersectional Feminism is The Kyriarchy. The Kyriarchy is the Patriarchy updated to the new millennium. Wikipedia generally agrees Kyriarchy to mean: "a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission... in which a single individual might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others...It is an intersectional extension of the idea of patriarchy beyond gender."
[b]Men's Lib[/b]
Men's Lib is a small burgeoning subreddit dedicated to discussing Men's issues without attacking any form of Feminism. It is mostly frequented by male feminists though, since it was built as a counter-board to other men's right subreddits. They have been criticized by some for having very strict rules in place that limit the possibility of discourse between disagreeing parties. You will be banned for holding the wrong opinions there so watch out, although the subreddit mods argue that the strict rules are necessary in order to "keep this place from turning into a clone of /r/MensRights"; a fate that has apparently been wrought upon the subreddit /r/OneY. You can find it here: [url]https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/[/url]
[b]MGTOW- Men Going Their Own Way[/b]
[url=http://imgur.com/8krY7RP][img]http://i.imgur.com/8krY7RP.jpg[/img][/url]
A group of men who have decided to divorce themselves from the circumspect she-beasties that are the other 50% of the human population. MGTOWs have decided to not date or marry women due to the risks of the high divorce rate, alimony and child support, emotional abuse or just general possibility of heartbreak, financial litigation and embarrassment in what they view to be an non-vital and unnecessary part of the human social experience. It's up in the air whether one-night stands or prostitutes are okay. Critics of MGTOW argue that it is unfairly vindictive towards large parts of the population who have neither contributed nor are responsible for the issues that MGTOWs face and that it is unreasonably restrictive, promoting swearing off the opposite sex entirely on the precedence of what 'might' happen.
[b]MHRA- Men's Human Rights Activist[/b]
The slightly more moderate brother of the MRM. The Men's Human Rights Movement (MHRM) is more organized and better presented than the Reddit-based movement, but presents most of the same talking points. Their homepage is A Voice For Men ([url]http://www.avoiceformen.com/[/url]) and their probably most well known advocates are a group of women known as the Honey Badger Brigade, who run a YouTube show called Honey Badger Radio. Critics of the MHRA argue against their twisted version of Evolutionary Psychology that uses social environments from the Stone Age in order to describe modern social interactions and that precludes the possibility of social and cultural evolution as well as their penchant for what can be described as Historical Revisionism, although they argue that their version of history is the correct one.
[b]Moderate[/b]
The uninitiated and/or uninformed. Naturally, they are hated by everybody.
[b]MRA/Meninist- Men's Rights Activist[/b]
[img]http://media.insidepulse.com/zones/wrestling/uploads/2013/11/fLDlGJx-225x300.jpg[/img]
Originating from Reddit, the Men's Rights Movement (MRM), fights for men's issues such as Alimony, False Rape Accusations, Men's Reproductive Rights, Double Standards, Boy's Education, Father's Rights, Homeless Shelters for Men and Men's Mental Health. Critics compare MRAs to being just like straw-manned Feminism- but you know...for men. This is expressed in how, much like Feminists are stereotypically thought to just be Women bitching about Men because they're too ugly to get a boyfriend, MRAs are stereotypically thought to just be Men bitching about Women because they're too ugly to get a girlfriend. The epitome of this bitching behavior can be found on the RedPill subreddit ([url]https://www.reddit.com/r/TheRedPill/[/url]), for non-bitching related purposes, head over to the actual Men's Rights subreddit ([url]https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/[/url]).
[b]NeoFeminist/Third-Wave[/b]
[img]http://36.media.tumblr.com/f86f8ed620d89f198ed0215f1114753f/tumblr_nlcv1y5fLq1tg8nuto1_500.jpg[/img]
Third-Wave feminism is generally considered to have been started in the early to mid-90s, just as universities across the world were struggling with an influx of Post-modern theorists attempting to invade STEM fields and change the Scientific Process itself to be more considerate and progressive, an event colloquially known as The Science Wars ([url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars[/url])
[QUOTE]The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of scientific theory and intellectual inquiry. They took place principally in the United States in the 1990s in the academic and mainstream press. Scientific realists (such as Norman Levitt, Paul R. Gross, Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal) argued that scientific knowledge is real, and accused the postmodernists of having effectively rejected scientific objectivity, the scientific method, and scientific knowledge. Postmodernists interpreted Thomas Kuhn's ideas about scientific paradigms to mean that scientific theories are social constructs, and philosophers like Paul Feyerabend argued that other, non-realist forms of knowledge production were better suited to serve personal and spiritual needs.[/QUOTE]
Around this time, elements of Second-Wave Feminism started to criticize the idea of Feminism as not being considerate enough of "many colors, ethnicities, nationalities, religions and cultural backgrounds" and attempted to include race, sexuality and gender issues into the melting pot of Feminist issues, mostly in order to better integrate the beliefs and values of minorities within feminist discussion. Rebecca Walker is considered to be the main mother of Third-Wave feminism as she declared in her 1992 essay "I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the third-wave." As usage of the internet exploded, the various strands of Third-Wave became more tangled and harder to define. Critics argue that this is what ultimately ended up with the currently infamous "Tumblr culture" while proponents praise the variety of ideas now being discussed within feminist circles and in the greater public as a result. Third-wavers fight to expose gender as a social construct (their concept of gender is more complicated than TERFS with a distinction between biological gender which is what you identify as from birth and gender expression in the form of, for example, what toys you play with, so you're allowed to be trans), promoting gender fluidity ( in the form of gender expression), LGBT rights and fighting against social behaviors that might normalize and make rape more acceptable within society (fraternities are a prime target). Critics argue that Third-wavers do not have a clear goal in mind when it comes to their activism. They stipulate that The First-Wave was about getting women the vote, the Second-Wave was based around getting women equal opportunity in the work force, but that Third-Wave doesn't have a clear singular focus with-which to define itself, leading to some of it's members becoming embroiled in what they call a 'Call-Out Culture' when it comes to activism. Third-Wavers, they argue, are seen to be seeking to 'punish' individuals and are consequently ineffectual in solving the institutional issues that cause problems to exist in the first place.
[b]Neo-Masculinists[/b]
[thumb]http://i1.wp.com/conservative-headlines.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/masculinity.jpg[/thumb]
Neo-Masculinists believe that men should go back to being men, and re-adopt more traditionally masculine behavior. They believe that the cause of modern mens' unhappiness, and high suicide rate, is that they have been denied the experience of truly acting like a man apparently should. Manly men, they argue, are supposedly more likely to attract women, have better and longer lasting relationships and contribute more to their community than those damn effeminate wimp-biscuits that men are today. Men that follow this model of masculine behavior of high independence, risk-takingness, dominance, stoicism and casual dress are said to be Alpha males, or Alphas, while the other subservient men who do what they're told and don't beat their fists on their chests like Tarzan are said to be Beta males, or Betas. Masculinists argue that Betas are more likely to suffer abuse by both women and other men, including being cheated on or 'cuckolded', because they don't demand enough respect. Essentially, they say act tough or people will take advantage of you. Critics of Neo-Masculinism disagree with the idea that, historically, men were ever as unabashedly domineering of women as Neo-Masculinists claim (or they might've been, but they didn't tend to live very long without being clubbed in the head) and that most of the world (barring some third-world countries, parts of the middle-east and the southern states of the USA) evolved past the whole confrontational nature of 'talk softly and carry a big stick' for a reason and that homicide rates in places where that mentality is common begs to differ the whole 'men live longer lives' thing.
[b]Neo/Third-Wave Radical Feminist[/b]
[img]http://theralphretort.com/wp-content/uploads/nARIvVQ.png[/img]
Unlike the Radical Feminists of the Second-Wave, Radical Feminists of the Third-Wave are much less likely to be burning bras and much more likely to be following the latest fashion trends. With smart phone in hand and fancy coloured hair, Neo-Radical Feminists have been known to pull fire alarms and pour a few dozen bottles of pepper spray into the ventilation system of function buildings that contain people they don't like. They are also known to be highly abusive online, being the main instigators of the Call-Out Culture that third-wave is criticized for creating by dog piling people on twitter and creating scandalous online reports about how so-and-so is a "Rapist Paedophile Misogynist Cis-Het-White-Male who probably can't get a girlfriend because he's so fat and smelly and ugly and should go kill himself, ew!".
[b]The Oppressed[/b]
Depending on who you ask: Women, Non-Europeans, Non-Whites, Lesbians, Gays, Trans, Bi, Pan, Gender Fluid, Intersex, Asexual, Queer, Fat people, Thin people, Tall people, Short people, People with uni-brows, People who are smarter than everybody else, etc.
[b]The Patriarchy[/b]
This guy:
[img]http://www.nerdist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Halloween-5.jpg[/img]
The traditional bad guys, the big men in suits who run the world and get to boss around everybody in it. Now that Women can get into positions like CEOs or Politicians or Prime Ministers or Presidents, it's basically just the idea that we live in a male-dominated society and not that we're in the thrall of just those few men who are rich and powerful.
[b]Privileged People[/b]
People who are said to be advantaged in society because they were born a certain skin color, gender or sex. Alternatively it could be used to refer to people who are in positions of power within society, such as the rich Bourgeois, but just like with The Patriarchy, The Oppressed can be rich and powerful which means Privileged has come to mean just people of a certain color, gender or sex rather than rich people or people of a certain social class.
Specifically, the shift in definition most likely came as a result of the deconstruction of the class system in the west over the last 150 years and the resulting formation of a middle class culture where most people sit at relatively equal economic stature. This caused the focus to be pulled away from rich and poor, upper class and working class, and more towards systematic factors that would disadvantage specific personal identities. As systematic prejudice gradually became emblematic of the problems of the day rather than class struggle, radical anti-radicals started to develop their own prejudices resulting in the line between the prejudice against an individual and systematic prejudice becoming blurred. On the other hand, believers of the Broken Window Theory suggest that we can combat systematic prejudice by fighting the small battles, which will eventually remove the environment that systematic prejudice needs to exist. Critics of the idea argue that it leads to a call out culture that hunts down individuals at the expense of larger systemic issues. They also argue that it puts too much weight on arbitrary physical characteristics and that we should instead lead by example by giving all people the same amount of respect regardless of their appearance, judging them by the strength of their character rather than the color of their skin, their gender, sex, race, ethnicity, orientation, etc.
[b]Sex-negativity[/b]
The belief that sex, or sexiness, is a negative thing for men and women and society as whole and creates a system of abuse. Proponents of sex-negativity are usually against pornography and depictions of either women or men in the media or in public as 'sexy', often as well as being against things such as prostitution, polygamy and sexual fetishists. Radical sex-negativists believe that consensual sex in general is universally a bad thing due to the power relationships that need to be involved. People usually pick and choose what issues they are sex-negative about but the general concept of sex-negativity applies to just about anything involving peoples' sexuality.
[b]Sex-positivity[/b]
The belief that sex, or sexiness, is a positive thing for men and women and society as a whole. Proponents of sex-positivity are usually in support of pornography and depictions of men and women in the media or in public as 'sexy', often as well as things such as prostitution, polygamy and sexual fetishists. People usually pick and choose what issues they are sex-positive about but the general concept of sex-positivity applies to just about anything involving peoples' sexuality.
[b]SJA- Social Justice Advocate[/b]
The more moderate supporters of Social Justice who don't abuse other people. This branch of Social Justice is based around acknowledging people's differences in order to create Safe Places for people who suffer abuse both online and in the physical world. SJAs are non-combative in nature. sdoctmdplays (Reimu on Facepunch) is a SJA who wrote "Understanding the Zoepost" which sought to show how Eron, the man who wrote the zoepost, had been mentally abused by his partner Zoe Quinn by highlighting the various abusive techniques she had employed such as Gaslighting, Not allowing him to see other people and repeatedly telling him she loved him while sleeping with five other men behind his back. Kazerad, the creator of the webcomic Prequel, is another SJA, you can find his tumblr here ([url]http://kazerad.tumblr.com/[/url]) where he talks about abuse, social accountability, privilege, web anonymity and a lot of other issues in a very clear and approachable way.
[b]SJW- Social Justice Warrior[/b]
[thumb]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B2QbGweIgAA3Y2N.jpg:large[/thumb]
The abusive radical wing of Social Justice. They overlap with Radical Third-Wavers a lot except seem to be far more interested in using the rhetoric to push their own personal tastes onto everybody else rather than defend anybody's rights. A good indication of these kind of behavior is when somebody attempts to use their own self-perceived oppression to win entirely unrelated arguments or fabricates their own 'abuse' in order to more effectively get somebody to change something. Essentially a buzzword for someone who is not a Feminist or SJA, but is trying to use the rhetoric in order to force people to change their work or opinions with the new millennial version of "think of the children!". Also known as 15 year-old soccer moms with issues.
There is a lot of discussion going on over the use of the term 'SJW' as a pejorative term used by people to describe Identity Politicians who do not explicitly identify as Social Justice Warriors. Some argue that there needs to be a clear and accepted definition for the term, as people often use it to describe anyone with a politically left point-of-view that they disagree with, while others promote the idea of defining the term whenever it is used in the context of the person who is speaking. A case of where the second proposal applies is if you say the United States of America is being taken over by fascists, and you identify fascists as being anyone who supports economic regulation, then that carries a much different weight than if you just said the United States was being taken over by fascists without providing a definition for the term. The practice of using the accepted definition of a term to gain public approval and then changing the definition to suit your own purposes is called the [url=http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/]motte and bailey method[/url]. For the purpose of this thread, the definition of 'Social Justice Warrior' is in the paragraph above this one. Ironically the motte and bailey method is likely used by both Social Justice Warriors and those who criticize them.
[QUOTE=catbarf;47917323]It doesn't need an exact definition, but people here shout the label 'SJW' the way diehard Republicans shout the label 'Marxist' or 'socialist' or 'fascist'.
If you want to argue that fascists are destroying American freedoms, it behooves you to explain what definition of fascist you're using, because if you seem to be labeling to anyone who wants economic reform a 'fascist' you shouldn't be surprised if you catch shit for your overly broad and clearly pejorative definition that is essentially relying on guilt by association.
And besides, as I said on the last page 'SJW' seems to almost always be used in the form of a motte and bailey argument:
Do you see what just happened there? S0beit just defined 'SJW' as 'an insane, extremist element attempting to steer society toward padded corners'. He's framing it in a way such that [i]of course[/i] no reasonable person would deny that there are some crazy people with crazy ideas out there. But the core theme of this thread's circlejerk isn't that there are some crazy people out there, it's that there is this pervasive, organized effort by large numbers of people, mostly college students, to shape American discourse. The unspoken definition of SJW that's been used for most of the thread seems to be little more than 'socially-minded activist college students', but when challenged on the idea that those people are destroying free speech, Facepunchers give a more reasonable, unassailable, specific definition- and one which also happens to not support the argument that these SJWs are legion and they're ruining everything, because now the definition no longer applies to the people it was being levied against.
These words do not necessarily need concrete definitions. Everything about language is essentially colloquial and contextual. But if you're going to make an argument around a word that has no 'official' definition, you should make it clear what definition you're using for the sake of both clarity and intellectual honesty.[/QUOTE]
[b]TERF- Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist[/b]
[img]http://www.transadvocate.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/transphobia_mistake.jpg[/img]
[thumb]http://i.imgur.com/chnHv1C.jpg[/thumb]
TERFs started in the Second-Wave and continue to exist online today. They believe that all trans-men are gender traitors and that all trans-women are despicable worms trying to take advantage of women by playing for the other team. Bis are shifty while Gays are useful "minions" but never allies. If you find this hard to believe, then remember the cornerstone of many radical feminist beliefs is Shulamith Firestone, who wrote that sexuality and gender identities are social constructs rather than biological truths (she attempted to prove this by finding a boy who had a botched circumcision and telling his parents they could just raise him as a girl, being non-trans the boy was miserable growing up and eventually took his own life). TERFs believe that without the constraints of society, Women would all be cis-lesbians living in a utopia and Men would all be mongrel apes who would all die out as soon as they finished beating each other over the heads with rocks. Critics argue that TERFs prescribe to a conversion of modernist eugenics and postmodernist deconstructive principles called Freudian social theory and that they've managed to combine all of the worst parts of the 20th century under the same roof with none of the good.
[b]LOGICAL FALLACIES[/b]
As it so often comes up in these kind of debates, here is a list of our accepted logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are debating points that, while often used in arguments that seek to encourage an emotional response, fall outside of the accepted definition of logical sense. They are often self-defeating, infallible or lead into endless tangents without any kind of evidence or conclusion. Here's the list:
[b]Straw-man[/b]
[img]https://img.4plebs.org/boards/pol/image/1398/13/1398130965784.jpg[/img]
[img]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Jo_Ce4gdvkg/VCNi3xBIQ9I/AAAAAAAAABE/g-jyqIq2mG8/s1600/stawman.png[/img]
The arguer creates a stereotype of their opponents and presents them in the worst light possible, usually by either simplifying their arguments and removing any of the nuance or context to their statements. In doing so, they can avoid having to rebut any of the opponents arguments by simply presenting the straw-man as is in order to demonstrate that their opinion is worthless and all of their opponents are crazy.
[b]Weak-man[/b]
[img]http://i634.photobucket.com/albums/uu67/jamesboxerboxer/james%20boxing%20moments%20and%20stuff/boxing_giant.jpg[/img]
Similar to the Straw-man, except this time they take the most crazy proponent of their opponent's personal identity and hold them up as representative of the greater identity. It has the same effect of allowing them to avoid rebutting any of their opponent's arguments and instead make it seem as if the opponent's opinion is worthless and all of their opponents are crazy.
[b]Guilt By Association[/b]
[img]https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/law-order-court-courtroom-verdict-jury-juror-mba0764_low.jpg[/img]
The arguer asserts their opponents are guilty of a proposed wrongdoing because they can be superficially related to either a real wrongdoer or a straw-man or weak-man.
[b]Unfalsifiable Statements[/b]
[i][b]"You can't prove it didn't happen"[/b][/i]
Statements that can neither be proven to be true or false, but the arguer takes as being a fact. One of the basic tenants of a scientific fact is that it can always be disproved in the right circumstances assuming some bar of proof or evidence is met. An unfalsifiable statement is one that cannot be disproved no matter what happens and is therefore not permissible in court or any kind of logical discourse. For example, I have tiny unicorns in my anus that produce magic fairy dust, but only I can see the unicorns and the fairy dust and they cannot be detected using any form of scientific equipment. You cannot disprove that the tiny unicorns in my anus exist because only I can see them. Typically, an arguer will attempt to justify an untenable assertion by using an unfalsifiable statement and will act very smug as they come up with increasingly wild and outlandish justifications for why something only they can understand is somehow the one true answer. Look out for them using statements like "Well there's an absence of evidence to support this, but there's also no evidence of absence, meaning it could've happened and probably did!" or "you can't disprove that this happened, so you can't say it didn't happen!". Human brains are not quantum computers, we cannot possibly consider every possible fact in the universe at the same time, because of this something is only considered true if it is supported by evidence otherwise it defaults to being false (this is why people are presumed to be innocent until it has been proven that they have committed a crime). If you say something is a fact but in actuality it is not supported by any evidence, that means that what you said is wrong, no exceptions. If new evidence comes up that shows that an unfalsifiable statement is true (scientists invent a machine that can detect the magical unicorns in my butt) then the statement is no longer unfalsifiable, but that doesn't mean we should consider every unfalsifiable statement as being potentially true, because that would mean that anything anyone says ever should be considered potentially true. Essentially it's the assertion that something exists or has happened that needs to be proven, not the assertion that the thing that doesn't exist actually doesn't exist (this is why in court cases, the burden of proof is always on the accuser). You don't need to disprove that there are magical unicorns in my butt that only I can see, I need to prove that THERE ARE magical unicorns in my butt that only I can see.
Unfalsifiable Statements are not permissible as expert evidence for either the prosecution or defense in court cases, as they violate the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daubert_standard]Daubert standard[/url]. To count as evidence in a court case, an expert eyewitness statement must be based on scientific knowledge, be flexible, relatable to the case, and falsifiable.
[b]Motte and Bailey[/b]
[img]https://ashnavabi.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/motte-and-bailey.jpg?w=300[/img]
The Motte and Bailey method is essentially a bait-and-switch, where you say a statements means something in order to gain public approval, and then switch it to mean something else in order to push a particular agenda.
[url]http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/[/url]
[QUOTE]One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do a very good job of it. The original discussion is in the middle of a post so controversial that it probably can’t be linked in polite company – somewhat dampening its ability to popularize anything.
In order to rectify the error, here is a nice clean post on the concept that adds a couple of further thoughts to the original formulation.
The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.
Then post-modernists go on to say that if someone in a different culture thinks that the sun is light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, that’s just as real as our own culture’s theory that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas a great big nuclear furnace. If you challenge them, they’ll say that you’re denying reality is socially constructed, which means you’re clearly very naive and think you have perfect objectivity and the senses perceive reality directly.
The writers of the paper compare this to a form of medieval castle, where there would be a field of desirable and economically productive land called a bailey, and a big ugly tower in the middle called the motte. If you were a medieval lord, you would do most of your economic activity in the bailey and get rich. If an enemy approached, you would retreat to the motte and rain down arrows on the enemy until they gave up and went away. Then you would go back to the bailey, which is the place you wanted to be all along.
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you claim you were just making an obvious, uncontroversial statement, so you are clearly right and they are silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.[/QUOTE]
[b]Kafkatrapping[/b]
Essentially, this:
[video=youtube;FCMHmDnfD6I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCMHmDnfD6I[/video]
Kafkatrapping is a complex logical conundrum that always results in the opponent being guilty of wrongdoing no matter what they say or do. It's based on a book by Franz Kafka called "The Trial" where a man is tortured by a convoluted and manipulative court system until he actually believes he is guilty of an unspecified crime he didn't commit. The implicit purpose of the Kafkatrap is to warp the definition of guilt so much as to make it seem that you are guilty of a crime you cannot actually be guilty of because you made no conscious decision to do perform it (which is the basis of [i]'mens rea'[/i], the guilty mind, or the mental state a person must be in to commit a crime). It usually employs some sort of guilt by association but it also comes in many other deceitful and manipulative forms.
[url]http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122[/url]
[QUOTE]Good causes sometimes have bad consequences. Blacks, women, and other historical out-groups were right to demand equality before the law and the full respect and liberties due to any member of our civilization; but the tactics they used to “raise consciousness” have sometimes veered into the creepy and pathological, borrowing the least sane features of religious evangelism.
One very notable pathology is a form of argument that, reduced to essence, runs like this: “Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…} confirms that you are guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}.” I’ve been presented with enough instances of this recently that I’ve decided that it needs a name. I call this general style of argument “kafkatrapping”, and the above the Model A kafkatrap. In this essay, I will show that the kafkatrap is a form of argument that is so fallacious and manipulative that those subjected to it are entitled to reject it based entirely on the form of the argument, without reference to whatever particular sin or thoughtcrime is being alleged. I will also attempt to show that kafkatrapping is so self-destructive to the causes that employ it that change activists should root it out of their own speech and thoughts.
My reference, of course, is to Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, in which the protagonist Josef K. is accused of crimes the nature of which are never actually specified, and enmeshed in a process designed to degrade, humiliate, and destroy him whether or not he has in fact committed any crime at all. The only way out of the trap is for him to acquiesce in his own destruction; indeed, forcing him to that point of acquiescence and the collapse of his will to live as a free human being seems to be the only point of the process, if it has one at all.
This is almost exactly the way the kafkatrap operates in religious and political argument. Real crimes – actual transgressions against flesh-and-blood individuals – are generally not specified. The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator’s personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others.
Sometimes the kafkatrap is presented in less direct forms. A common variant, which I’ll call the Model C, is to assert something like this: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} behavior of others in the system.” The aim of the Model C is to induce the subject to self-condemnation not on the basis of anything the individual subject has actually done, but on the basis of choices by others which the subject typically had no power to affect. The subject must at all costs be prevented from noticing that it is not ultimately possible to be responsible for the behavior of other free human beings.
A close variant of the model C is the model P: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} system.” For the model P to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap.
It is essential to the operation of all three of the variants of the kafkatrap so far described that the subject’s attention be deflected away from the fact that no wrongdoing by the subject, about which the subject need feel personally guilty, has actually been specified. The kafkatrapper’s objective is to hook into chronic self-doubt in the subject and inflate it, in much the same way an emotional abuser convinces a victim that the abuse is deserved – in fact, the mechanism is identical. Thus kafkatrapping tends to work best on weak and emotionally vulnerable personalities, and poorly on personalities with a strong internalized ethos.
In addition, the success of a model P kafkatrap depends on the subject not realizing that the group ascription pinned on by the operator can be rejected. The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?
There are, of course, other variants. Consider the model S: “Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression,…}, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt.” Again, the common theme here is that questioning the discourse that condemns you, condemns you. This variant differs from the model A and model P in that a specific crime against an actual person usually is in fact alleged. The operator of the kafkatrap relies on the subject’s emotional revulsion against the crime to sweep away all questions of representativeness and the basic fact that the subject didn’t do it.
I’ll finish my catalog of variants with the verson of the kafkatrap that I think is most likely to be deployed against this essay, the Model L: “Your insistence on applying rational skepticism in evaluating assertions of pervasive {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia, oppression…} itself demonstrates that you are {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…}.” This sounds much like the Model S, except that we are back in the territory of unspecified crime here. This version is not intended to induce guilt so much as it is to serve as a flank guard for other forms of kafkatrapping. By insisting that skepticism is evidence of an intention to cover up or excuse thoughtcrime, kafkatrappers protect themselves from having their methods or motives questioned and can get on with the serious business of eradicating thoughtcrime.
Having shown how manipulative and psychologically abusive the kafkatrap is, it may seem almost superfluous to observe that it is logically fallacious as well. The particular species of fallacy is sometimes called “panchreston”, an argument from which anything can be deduced because it is not falsifiable. Notably, if the model A kafkatrap is true, the world is divided into two kinds of people: (a) those who admit they are guilty of thoughtcrime, and (b) those who are guilty of thoughtcrime because they will not admit to being guilty of thoughtcrime. No one can ever be innocent. The subject must be prevented from noticing that this logic convicts and impeaches the operator of the kafkatrap!
I hope it is clear by now that the particular flavor of thoughtcrime alleged is irrelevant to understanding the operation of kafkatraps and how to avoid being abused and manipulated by kafkatrappers. In times past the kafkatrapper was usually a religious zealot; today, he or she is just as likely to be advancing an ideology of racial, gender, sexual-minority, or economic grievance. Whatever your opinion of any of these causes in their ‘pure’ forms may be, there are reasons that the employment of kafkatrapping is a sure sign of corruption.
The practice of kafkatrapping corrupts causes in many ways, some obvious and some more subtle. The most obvious way is that abusive and manipulative ways of controlling people tend to hollow out the causes for which they are employed, smothering whatever worthy goals they may have begun with and reducing them to vehicles for the attainment of power and privilege over others.
A subtler form of corruption is that those who use kafkatraps in order to manipulate others are prone to fall into them themselves. Becoming unable to see out of the traps, their ability to communicate with and engage anyone who has not fallen in becomes progressively more damaged. At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders.
These are both good reasons for change activists to consider kafkatraps a dangerous pathology that they should root out of their own causes. But the best reason remains that kafkatrapping is wrong. Especially, damningly wrong for anyone who claims to be operating in the cause of freedom.
UPDATE: A commenter pointed out the Model D: “The act of demanding a definition of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} that can be consequentially checked and falsified proves you are {sinful,racist,sexist, homophobic, oppressive}.”
UPDATE2: The Model M: “The act of arguing against the theory of anti-{sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} demonstrates that you are either {sinful,racist,sexist, homophobic, oppressive} or do not understand the theory of anti-{sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression}, and your argument can therefore be dismissed as either corrupt or incompetent.”
Model T: Designated victims of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} who question any part of the theory of {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression} demonstrate by doing so that they are not authentic members of the victim class, so their experience can be discounted and their thoughts dismissed as internalized {sin,racism,sexism,homophobia,oppression}.[/QUOTE]
[b]Emotional Appeals/Ethos[/b]
While not a logical fallacy in-of-itself, you should be wary of arguments that attempt to use appeals to emotion in order to combat logical arguments. They often play off prejudices and make the arguer (and potentially the reader) implicitly involved in the situation where they should remain impartial and objective in order to provide a fair and evidence-based third-party opinion. Do not let your emotions cloud your judgment and be wary of those people who attempt to get you to do so.
[b]Anecdotal Bias[/b]
[img]https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a8/61/76/a86176fc2f2d9b9ed34288dc4f604ed8.jpg[/img]
An arguer uses their own personal account of something as a basis for an argument, despite there being multiple possible perspectives involved in the situation. Ironically, many arguers use the 'walk a mile in their shoes' argument and ask the reader to consider the viewpoints of others instead of basing your views simply on your own experiences, they will then talk about their own experiences as if they are representative of some sort of universal human experience. If someone is talking about themselves and their own experiences and then conveying their own problems as some great injustice towards a specific personal identity, consider whether that experience is actually fairly universal to that identity or not. If not, then they may be trying to be emotionally manipulative in order to confer some sort of advantage to themselves.
[b]Fallacy Fallacy[/b]
[thumb]http://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/fallacyMan2.jpg[/thumb]
The logical fallacy that simply having any logical fallacy in your argument proves the whole point, and any basis it might have in reality, to be null and void. Although there are many 'hard' fallacies that, if employed, result in the whole argument needing to be dismissed because they directly contradict the whole statement; i.e. saying that someone must be guilty because you cannot prove them to be innocent, which is an unfalsifiable statement; there are also 'soft' fallacies that only contradict part of what someone is saying. Also, just because something someone is saying is fallacious and self-contradictory doesn't mean that there is no basis to it beyond that individual arguers recollection of it. This doesn't mean that what they argue IS true or MIGHT be true even if their argument is completely false and self-contradictory, it just means you can't then go on to say definitively that everything else they've said in the past or might ever say in the future is wrong also. It's okay to call something someone said wrong, but you can't make it so that anything or anyone else is wrong other than that statement.
[b]Poisoning the Well[/b]
[img]http://www.critthink2.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/BillOreillyKatrina.jpg[/img]
Proposing or suggesting that the truth is false, relative or circumstantial or changing the definition of words so that they only mean what the arguer wants them to mean. If you can control the language people can use, then you can also control what they say and if it sounds good or bad. You can also change definitions in order to hold two conflicting and opposite viewpoints simultaneously. It's important to carefully consider not just what the arguer is saying, but the specific words they use and how they choose to either define or not define them. Be wary of those who use wishy-washy language that can mean any number of things, they may simply be rather whimsical or they may be attempting to make you think that they are in order to emotionally manipulate you. Shifty social manipulators will use words together in order to create an implicit meaning that wouldn't normally exist, such as using the words violence and aggression in close proximity to each other until they start to mean the same thing. Our perception of semantics is often subconscious and we often don't realize that the person we're arguing against has shifted the meaning of the word to mean something else until it's too late. Make sure to clearly define the definitions of keywords in an argument and call out your opponents if the meaning shifts even slightly. If the person you're arguing with ignores you and continues to use the shifted meaning or defends the new definition they've created by, for example, citing a dictionary definition, they may be trying to manipulate you, otherwise they may have done it unintentionally.
[b]Circular Reasoning[/b]
[thumb]http://40.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me1pfhfMQS1r7qpeho6_r1_1280.jpg[/thumb]
In an effort to substantiate unfalsifiable claims or claims without evidence, an arguer may employ circular reasoning wherein the conclusion of an argument is supported by its own preposition, i.e. Point A is true because B is true, Point B is true because C is true, Point C is true because Point A is true. As you can see, in the midst of those Points have not presented any actual evidence to prove that Point A, B and C are true and instead just went in a big circle without justifying anything. By using extremely long chains of arguments, it may be possible for someone to fool you or lead you into a trap of unraveling an extremely long list of prepositions with no proof while they pepper you with tidbits until you either give up or give in to their argument. If you read out at arguer's points and it doesn't seem to make logical sense to you, put them on the spot and ask them to substantiate their claims instead of trying to reason with their arguments. If you keep asking them to provide evidence for what they say, eventually they'll trip over their own word salad. After they trip up and it becomes clear that they've been using circular reasoning, they may be trying to manipulate you if they keep using the fallacious arguments despite you disproving them, on the other hand if they realize their error and correct themselves they may have just made a mistake.
Here's a an example of Circular Reasoning:
[quote]"Whatever is less dense than water will float, because whatever is less dense than water will float" sounds stupid, but "Whatever is less dense than water will float, because such objects won't sink in water" might pass.[/quote]
[b]Double Standard[/b]
Putting more skepticism on one side of an issue than the other in order to justify treating them differently. Some people may do this unintentionally because of the way they were taught something and/or their limited knowledge on the subject, but if you clearly point this out to them and they still employ the Double Standard then they may be trying to manipulate you.
[b]Wet Streets Cause Rain[/b]
[img]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Jymihe3wDY0/UyGd0ur5EXI/AAAAAAAAD-k/8R_MbxpYgH4/s1600/Wet+Streets+Cause+Rain.png[/img]
[img]https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/45/d7/aa/45d7aa471c9e6f58510eb1b111245e93.jpg[/img]
The arguer reaches a conclusion based on a preposition involving their own conclusions. For example, that the phenomenon of rain is caused by having streets that are wet, as rain and wet streets always appear at the same time. Those who employ this fallacy attribute situations to what they personally observe and use the observation as the evidence rather than using evidence to support the observation. This is allowed to happen because people's prejudices cause them to see things as being "as is", plainly true without any evidence, because they can observe it. They draw their conclusions in order to justify what they see, not to understand why what they see is the way it is. A common example of where we see this in Identity Politics is in cases where an arguer will apply attributes to a personal identity through their prejudices and will 'justify' that by saying that there is something intrinsic about that identity that makes them behave that way. They don't look at the historical circumstances that have lead them to be that way, or the societal circumstances that force or at least highly encourage them to act in that way. They take one look at a person and judge that they must be the way they are, at that specific time and in that specific place, simply because they are. They effectively argue that Wet Streets Cause Rain. As per usual, an arguer who uses this fallacy may not realize they're doing it, but if you make it clear where the contradiction lies and they continue to use the fallacy then they may be trying to manipulate you.
[b]The Dunning-Kruger Effect[/b]
It is quite often the case that stupid people, or people who lack knowledge on a particular subject, will believe they know everything about said subject because they don't know that they don't have the information. Consequently, individuals who employ the Dunning-Kruger Effect will often attempt to state things that they are assume are facts which are in actuality are highly debatable. Alternatively, they'll accuse someone of moral illegitimacy or stupidity for not knowing something that they assume is a fact but is, once again, in debate or even unknowable. This can lead to a Wet Streets Cause Rain scenario, a Double Standard, or even an Unfalsifiable Statement, but obviously the individual can employ any of the logical fallacies listed here due to their lack of knowledge on the subject. Ironically, this can lead to situations where individuals who know less about a subject accuse others who know more about it of having no understanding or being mentally disabled for not understanding something so simple.
[b]Confirmation Bias and the Statisticians Fallacy[/b]
[img]https://godlessindixie.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/dilbert_diss.jpg[/img]
People hear what they want to hear. That's an undeniable part of human nature. This is a huge problem when it comes to creating dialogue with people of opposing viewpoints because they can easily see you reaching out as an attack towards them, concern trolling or any number of other argumentative stratega. They might assume that everything you say is manipulative or a lie and on that basis never truly listen to the arguments of their opposing side. Compounding this problem is that you can find 'evidence' and studies that attempt to prove just about anything on the internet. Because of a bias towards things that agree with their worldview, individuals might apply Double Standards on evidence that disagrees with them, including applying logical fallacies such as Unfalsifiable Statements and the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in order to disprove it while not employing the same rigor to subjects that they do agree with.
On top of this Confirmation Bias that arguers have towards certain topics and statistics, there's the issue of the statistics and studies themselves, which often have a particular bias one way or the other and can't often conceivably come up with a form of testing things that is completely concrete and neutral. The bias comes about often when the actual data is analyzed as opposed to when it is gathered (although issues with the gathering of data itself are often abundant, such as small sample size). It is important to consider what can be taken from the data itself rather than what the results of the study are, numbers generally don't lie unless they've been fiddled around with. This also means that just because the results of the study are biased or inaccurate, that doesn't mean that the data itself should be thrown away if it was taken correctly and following correct criteria such as a large enough sample size, neutral rather than loaded survey questions and a fair control group.
Of course, even actual scientists, who are supposed to be skeptical of everything, are prone to this kind of fallacy. Here's an example:
[url]http://lesswrong.com/lw/j8h/the_statisticians_fallacy/[/url]
[QUOTE]In grad school, I took a philosophy of science class that was based around looking for examples of bad reasoning in the scientific literature. The kinds of objections to published scientific studies we talked about were not stupid ones. The professor had a background in statistics, and as far as I could tell knew her stuff in that area (though she dismissed Bayesianism in favor of frequentism). And no, unlike some of the professors in the department, she wasn't an anti-evolutionist or anything like that.
Instead she was convinced that cellphones cause cancer. In spite of the fact that there's scant evidence for that claim, and there's no plausible physial mechanism for how that could happen. This along with a number of other borderline-fringe beliefs that I won't get into here, but that was the big screaming red flag.*
Over the course of the semester, I got a pretty good idea of what was going on. She had an agenda—it happened to be an environmentalist, populist, pro-"natural"-things agenda, but that's incidental. The problem was that when she saw a scientific study that seemed at odds with her agenda, she went looking for flaws. And often she could find them! Real flaws, not ones she was imagining! But people who've read the rationalization sequence will see a problem here...
In my last post, I quoted Robin Hanson on the tendency of some physicists to be unduly dismissive of other fields. But based the above case and a couple others like it, I've come to suspect statistics may be even worse than physics in that way. That fluency in statistics sometimes causes a supercharged sophistication effect.
For example, some anthropogenic global warming skeptics make a big deal of alleged statistical errors in global warming research, but as I wrote in my post Trusting Expert Consensus:
Michael Mann et al's so-called "hockey stick" graph has come under a lot of fire from skeptics, but (a) many other reconstructions have reached the same conclusion and (b) a panel formed by the National Research Council concluded that, while there were some problems with Mann et al's statistical analysis, these problems did not affect the conclusion. Furthermore, even if we didn't have the pre-1800 reconstructions, I understand that given what we know about CO2's heat-trapping properties, and given the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels due to burning fossil fuels, it would be surprising if humans hadn't caused significant warming.
Most recently, I got into a Twitter argument with someone who claimed that "IQ is demonstrably statistically meaningless" and that this was widely accepted among statisticians. Not only did this set off my "academic clique!" alarm bells, but I'd just come off doing a spurt of reading about intelligence, including the excellent Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction. The claim that IQ is meaningless was wildly contrary to what I understood was the consensus among people who study intelligence for a living.
In response to my surprise, I got an article that contained lengthy and impressive-looking statistical arguments... but completely ignored a couple key points from the intelligence literature I'd read: first, that there's a strong correlation between IQ and real-world performance, and second that correlations between the components of intelligence we know how to test for turn out to be really strong. If IQ is actually made up of several independent factors, we haven't been able to find them. Maybe some people in intelligence research really did make the mistakes alleged, but there was more to intelligence research than the statistician who wrote the article let on.[/QUOTE]
[b]WHAT ELSE?[/b]
So there's my list of labels and definitions, you can now get right to the hammering and hollering. If you were wondering why I decided to start a new thread for this, rather then attempting to resurrect the old one, here's two posts from the end of the last thread about it:
[QUOTE=Tamschi;48481766]I really don't think there's enough of a motivated crowd around here to talk about these kinds of issues when there are no current events going on to keep motivated.
I'm also not entirely sure if a forum is necessarily the best place to do this, since the nature of the matter usually means one needs to spend most time on discussing semantics to find out what everyone [I]actually means[/I]. Once that's done and the positions are formulated (hopefully precisely enough), you'd need to find out how people think about these matters, but you can't poll or ask on the Internet and have any hope of finding a sample that's actually useful to the issue at large. (In part because even large Internet communities are normally not as heterogeneous as a random city street with about fifty people, and in part because the hurdle for participation is actually a lot higher on average for [U]random[/U] individuals than it would be with an in-person interview, which amplifies extreme viewpoints and reduces the participation of moderates.)
Somewhat complex and ill-defined topics are, in my opinion, far more suited to be discussed by sending longer opinion pieces to platforms where they'll have a broader and hopefully mixed audience.
You can of course use discussion platforms to survey sentiment and so on, but to arrive at a true (or at least true-ish) consensus is virtually impossible without individual leadership that can stand on its own, formulated as concisely as possible.
Especially with gender issues it's difficult to get past "I don't care" because the topic is [B]extremely[/B] homogeneous in western societies.
If you really want to get to the core of the issues that persist, I think those specific contentious opinions have to be the topic from the start to capture enough people's attention.
(Those who would discuss the general topic constructively and critically don't count, I think, because they are those who already inform themselves and as such already have very well-founded positions compared to the majority of potential participants.)
"Women and men should have equal rights." is so much a consensus normally that many people just ignore it when presented as such.
"Feminist" and "MRA" are so fuzzily defined compared to anything contentious that the terms become useless to the issues at hand and [I]will[/I] introduce noise that makes it hard to see individual positions if they are framed in this context.
"Egalitarian" is perhaps too underused to be a practical shorthand towards the public.
That said: Tagging the discussion as "gender rights", "feminism", "men's rights activism" and "egalitarian" would be a good idea to attract those interested in those topics and looking for related opinions. It probably should be done somewhat subtly since these are all "noisy" terms that elicit emotional responses due to certain types of reporting and mixing of international issues of different qualities.
In my opinion, some good questions (somewhat) related to the topic would be:
- What do you think would be a good way to lastingly increase diverse participation in [the tech industry/core gaming/porn/a sector that has a large difference in gender representation]?
- What matters to you in the morality of an action between people? The nature of the action itself, the one acting or the one being acted on. If more than one applies, in which ratio? Why?
- Do you think collective effort should be focused on solving the most pressing current issue, or distributed more evenly among current issues of varying importance.
- What is important to you when you make decisions? If you're uncertain, what do you focus on to form a stronger opinion?
- Can justice, theoretically, be achieve
Heh, you took those questions verbatim :v:
They were meant as templates to be used individually since they're fairly complex to answer thoroughly, but I suppose it [I]could[/I] work out.
I'm somewhat concerned that it's going to be messy or people will instantly tune out because of the topic these are put under, which I should have made more clear, but we'll see how it works.
If this was a street survey I'd place any context or motivations for asking very far away (or additionally do A/B testing), but here it's possibly fine since you give a lot of context and it's not difficult to read up on issues on the fly if you're already at a computer.
[QUOTE]- What do you think would be a good way to lastingly increase diverse participation in [the tech industry/core gaming/porn/a sector that has a large difference in gender representation]?[/QUOTE]
I don't see the point in trying to diversify for the sake of diversifying. What matters is that people get to do what they want to do without being hindered by social pressure. To say stuff like "We need more women in engineering." is to miss the point, so do programs that aim to get them interested in fields that are not typically female. The point is not to make women who wouldn't be interested in it otherwise join those fields, but to rid them of social stigma so that those who are already interested in the first place don't hesitate because of their gender.
[QUOTE=_Axel;48484163]I don't see the point in trying to diversify for the sake of diversifying. What matters is that people get to do what they want to do without being hindered by social pressure. To say stuff like "We need more women in engineering." is to miss the point, so do programs that aim to get them interested in fields that are not typically female. The point is not to make women who wouldn't be interested in it otherwise join those fields, but to rid them of social stigma so that those who are already interested in the first place don't hesitate because of their gender.[/QUOTE]
But isn't it more difficult to get into something in the first place if nobody else you can identify with has done it? More to the point, people face all sorts of discouragement whether it's intentional or unintentional due to things like a severity of the task involved, a specific work ethic and cultural differences.
We can't expect everybody to be able to perform any task imaginable without examining why there aren't as many people of a particular demographic within a particular field. Think of it like a form of tracking data points and optimizing things for efficiency so that we can get as many people past the mark as possible, examining where the pitfalls are and improving things accordingly. These accommodations we make could be things like allowing trans individuals to access the bathrooms of their gender. It doesn't have to be as intrusive as some people say it is and we can work from both ends of it, optimizing the system as well as removing the social stigma around it. It would actually work much better as an approach because we could show progress was being made to people who are skeptical in order to remove the stigma also.
[Quote]But isn't it more difficult to get into something in the first place if nobody else you can identify with has done it? More to the point, people face all sorts of discouragement whether it's intentional or unintentional due to things like a severity of the task involved, a specific work ethic and cultural differences.[/QUOTE]
Who you identify with is subjective. No matter how similar to you your role models are, there's always a small difference to nitpick on. It's a problem with people's mindset when they care so much about representation that it influences their career choices, but it's not a good justification to care about representation in the first place, that's a self-feeding loop. We must try to get rid of this tendency instead of catering to it.
There's this larger problem which I think is the cause of many other issues, which is that propensity to believe that the average is representative of the individual. In our case it expresses itself when people consider lack of representation as a sign of those not represented enough lacking the proper skills/being discriminated against, when it could just as well be explained by a lack of interest.
You may try to get around this supposed influence of representation by emphasising the role of women in sciences (a common example being Marie Curie), that ought to reassure those who are hesitant, but the moment you start doing preferential treatment and caring about diversity as your end goal it defeats the original purpose. People seem to believe that social gender norms are inherently bad and should be dealt with because they supersede people's inherent preferences, but if you force diversity by trying to get more women into STEMs, aren't you doing exactly the same thing? You're having a social influence on the choices these women make in spite of their natural inclination towards those fields. If that's not something you think you should avoid that means you should reconsider your stance (or at least the stance I assume you have) on gender norms' inherent value.
[QUOTE=_Axel;48484411]Who you identify with is subjective. No matter how similar to you your role models are, there's always a small difference to nitpick on. It's a problem with people's mindset when they care so much about representation that it influences their career choices, but it's not a good justification to care about representation in the first place, that's a self-feeding loop. We must try to get rid of this tendency instead of catering to it.[/QUOTE]
I was thinking about things such as cultural differences and stuff that I talked about such as issues relating to transgendered people and bathrooms. Not so much the perceived slights and injustices but more the practical issues that could conceivably (and physically) stop someone from being able to work within a specific environment. Surely there's a middle ground between small adjustments that can be made to make the system more efficient for different people and creating quotas and what some people call positive-discrimination?
[QUOTE=Zyler;48482941][img]http://i.imgur.com/chnHv1C.jpg[/img][/QUOTE]
I must admit, I don't really get this one. The point of transgender people is that they're not born as the wrong gender but with the wrong [I]sex[/I], and therefore are raised to the standards of the gender associated with that sex. The current line of thought is that conforming to the gender roles of the sex they do not wish to be (eg a trans woman being raised as a boy with toy cars and action figures) can make the individual uncomfortable due to those things' strong association with the opposite sex.
[QUOTE=Zyler;48484500]I was thinking about things such as cultural differences and stuff that I talked about such as issues relating to transgendered people and bathrooms. Not so much the perceived slights and injustices but more the practical issues that could conceivably (and physically) stop someone from being able to work within a specific environment. Surely there's a middle ground between small adjustments that can be made to make the system more efficient for different people and creating quotas and what some people call positive-discrimination?[/QUOTE]
I don't see how these small adjustments are related to diversity and the need thereof. Could you elaborate?
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;48484512]I must admit, I don't really get this one. The point of transgender people is that they're not born as the wrong gender but with the wrong [I]sex[/I], and therefore are raised to the standards of the gender associated with that sex. The current line of thought is that conforming to the gender roles of the sex they do not wish to be (eg a trans woman being raised as a boy with toy cars and action figures) can make the individual uncomfortable due to those things' strong association with the opposite sex.[/QUOTE]
The point is that if gender were entirely a social construct as many radical feminists believe. Then it's a complete mystery as to why certain people feel that they were born as the wrong physical sex when they were allegedly socialized from birth to act as the sex that they don't identify as.
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;48484512]I must admit, I don't really get this one. The point of transgender people is that they're not born as the wrong gender but with the wrong [I]sex[/I], and therefore are raised to the standards of the gender associated with that sex. The current line of thought is that conforming to the gender roles of the sex they do not wish to be (eg a trans woman being raised as a boy with toy cars and action figures) can make the individual uncomfortable due to those things' strong association with the opposite sex.[/QUOTE]
I think it's addressing the argument that gender is a social construct and there is no notable mental difference between men and women, in which case transgender people wouldn't exist in the first place.
[QUOTE=Melkor;48484537]The point is that if gender were entirely a social construct as many radical feminists believe. Then it's a complete mystery as to why certain people feel that they were born as the wrong physical sex when they were socialized to act as the sex that they don't identify as.[/QUOTE]
I personally think there are some generalised behaviours which are caused by the sex hormones; that's proven by personality changes when trans people receive those hormones, trans men will become more assertive and trans women become more emotional. However, most of the details such as liking dolls or action figures, pink and blue, even the 'leader and follower' to an extent are mainly social. Other cultures where gender is perceived completely differently, as well as history where for instance boys wore dresses at a young age, is proof enough of that. It seems sensible just not to assume that anyone can or can't do something based on their gender/ sex, and instead just do it based on the individual. Women can run companies and men can be caring and sympathetic, so there's no point assuming that they can't.
[editline]18th August 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=_Axel;48484547]I think it's addressing the argument that gender is a social construct and there is no notable mental difference between men and women, in which case transgender people wouldn't exist in the first place.[/QUOTE]
Many people now take the stance that, since one can be a cis woman and still act very 'boyish' (tomboys), or be an effeminate man, there is no reason why trans people can't do the same and still receive the correct pronouns from people. Nobody would call a tomboy a man just because she acted manly (and if they did so in error, they would quickly correct themselves), so there's no particular reason why it should be any different for trans people.
Regardless, I don't want to turn this thread into trans discussion thread, so I'll leave it here.
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;48484512]I must admit, I don't really get this one. The point of transgender people is that they're not born as the wrong gender but with the wrong [I]sex[/I], and therefore are raised to the standards of the gender associated with that sex. The current line of thought is that conforming to the gender roles of the sex they do not wish to be (eg a trans woman being raised as a boy with toy cars and action figures) can make the individual uncomfortable due to those things' strong association with the opposite sex.[/QUOTE]
The way it was posed to me when I was debating a TERF in the YouTube comment section was that sex only has a biological component and no psychological one (as in, the only difference between a man and a woman is one has a penis and the other has a vagina, which is an incorrect assumption in of itself) and that a person's gender, which only has a psychological component and no biological one, is decided by how they are treated by society. All aspects of gender are socially constructed, which means that people are born as blank slates and then they are taught to wear dresses and play with bolls or wear pants and play with action figures by their parents, society, television, etc. Under this model, it is impossible to be trans because trans individuals are men or women who were raised and socialized as men or women, but for some reason think they are women or men. it would imply that there is a biological component to gender, which is impossible. Instead, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists believe that trans people have a mental disorder that makes them think they are the wrong gender when it actuality they are whatever gender society has prescribed for them, the explanation of this is the same sort of explanation that Christian professors in Universities of the late 40s used to explain the existence of Homosexuality, that the individuals in question had been predisposed to something like their parents having sex at an early age and it confused their perception of sex and gender so utterly that they came confused and disoriented and therefore received the wrong signals from the stimulus they were given by society.
Here's a really good documentary video that tackles some of these concepts:
[video=vimeo;19889788]https://vimeo.com/19889788[/video]
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;48484552]I personally think there are some generalised behaviours which are caused by the sex hormones; that's proven by personality changes when trans people receive those hormones, trans men will become more assertive and trans women become more emotional. However, most of the details such as liking dolls or action figures, pink and blue, even the 'leader and follower' to an extent are mainly social. Other cultures where gender is perceived completely differently, as well as history where for instance boys wore dresses at a young age, is proof enough of that. It seems sensible just not to assume that anyone can or can't do something based on their gender/ sex, and instead just do it based on the individual. Women can run companies and men can be caring and sympathetic, so there's no point assuming that they can't.[/QUOTE]
That's more or less my mindset, except I don't assume there are no inherent difference between men and women, which wouldn't make sense. It's something that works in other cases than gender-based problems too. As long as you consider that averages are not representative of individuals it doesn't matter what your beliefs about those averages are.
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;48484552]I personally think there are some generalised behaviours which are caused by the sex hormones; that's proven by personality changes when trans people receive those hormones, trans men will become more assertive and trans women become more emotional. However, most of the details such as liking dolls or action figures, pink and blue, even the 'leader and follower' to an extent are mainly social. Other cultures where gender is perceived completely differently, as well as history where for instance boys wore dresses at a young age, is proof enough of that. It seems sensible just not to assume that anyone can or can't do something based on their gender/ sex, and instead just do it based on the individual. Women can run companies and men can be caring and sympathetic, so there's no point assuming that they can't.[/QUOTE]
Yes, obviously behaviors among genders are caused by a mix of both socialization and physiological differences. But that comic was exclusively aimed at certain groups of radical feminists who argue that differences in gender behaviors are purely the result of socialization to the exclusion of everything else. (I've literally seen radical feminists argue that the reason that women are physically weaker than men on average is that they've been conditioned from birth to be weaker.)
[QUOTE=Jamsponge;48484552]
Regardless, I don't want to turn this thread into trans discussion thread, so I'll leave it here.[/QUOTE]
No that's fine, this is the kind of thing that the thread is for!
[Quote]We can't expect everybody to be able to perform any task imaginable without examining why there aren't as many people of a particular demographic within a particular field. Think of it like a form of tracking data points and optimizing things for efficiency so that we can get as many people past the mark as possible, examining where the pitfalls are and improving things accordingly. These accommodations we make could be things like allowing trans individuals to access the bathrooms of their gender. It doesn't have to be as intrusive as some people say it is and we can work from both ends of it, optimizing the system as well as removing the social stigma around it. It would actually work much better as an approach because we could show progress was being made to people who are skeptical in order to remove the stigma also.[/QUOTE]
Identifying the reasons why certain demographics are less likely to be in those fields doesn't mean we should get rid of those reasons. That line of thinking assumes that diversity is the goal here, and so does interpreting increase in diversity as progress.
[QUOTE=_Axel;48484589]Identifying the reasons why certain demographics are less likely to be in those fields doesn't mean we should get rid of those reasons. That line of thinking assumes that diversity is the goal here, and so does interpreting increase in diversity as progress.[/QUOTE]
Well if there's a small thing that discouraging certain demographics from participating that's easily avoidable, why not avoid it? I want to be clear here that I'm not encouraging creating quotas or 'positive discrimination', I'm just thinking about all the little things you do (maybe without even realizing it) to make other people more comfortable.
[QUOTE=Zyler;48484600]Well if there's a small thing that discouraging certain demographics from participating that's easily avoidable, why not avoid it? I want to be clear here that I'm not encouraging creating quotas or 'positive discrimination', I'm just thinking about all the little things you do (maybe without even realizing it) to make other people comfortable.[/QUOTE]
I'm fine with that kind of thinking in most cases, but what if it turns out that one of those reasons is that women simply aren't as interested in those fields to begin with? Would you try suppressing that reason too?
To be honest what I was most concerned with to begin with was the idea that representation is an inherent goal and that it justifies trying to get more females into the fields through propaganda or sponsored programs. To look for the reasons for these discrepancies instead of ignoring them and bruteforce diversity in through those methods is a much better approach indeed.
[QUOTE=_Axel;48484627]I'm fine with that kind of thinking in most cases, but what if it turns out that one of those reasons is that women simply aren't as interested in those fields to begin with? Would you try suppressing that reason too?[/QUOTE]
I never said I wanted to suppress anything
[quote]To be honest what I was most concerned with to begin with was the idea that representation is an inherent goal and that it justifies trying to get more females into the fields through propaganda or sponsored programs. To look for the reasons for these discrepancies instead of ignoring them and bruteforce diversity in through those methods is a much better approach indeed.[/QUOTE]
Yes, it's always good to look for the reasons behind things rather than blindly believing in a particular cause, but one of those possibilities is always going to have to include the likelihood of there being something within the environment itself that is stopping people in a specific demographic from participating, even if it is just one of many possibilities. The reality is that the reason people do things is very complicated and is likely neither totally physical or totally psychological/social.
[QUOTE=Zyler;48484661]I never said I wanted to suppress anything[/QUOTE]
Sorry if I worded that poorly, I meant get rid of the reason as you would do in other instances.
you've butchered basically every single "type" of feminism
second-wave feminism was not about bra-burning and being "sex-positive," it was anti-pornography and anti-prostitution and very much anti-sex in a lot of ways because sex was viewed as a way for men to have power over women. this was where "political lesbianism" became in-vogue and the concept of the "patriarchy" was built.
third-wave feminism (aka "modern tumblr feminism") that started in the 1990s is the "sex positive" feminism you're thinking of. they're the people going on the SlutWalk and hashtagging #FreeTheNipple and talking about how prostitution needs to be legalized and regulated.
seriously it's like you've intentionally made "older feminists" seem positive when in reality the third-wave feminists you're bitching about are the ones that most MRAs and such tend to agree with, second-wave feminism is still [i]very much[/i] alive today alongside third-wave feminism. Christina Hoff-Sommers is the furthest thing from a second-wave feminist - she's largely anti-feminist even though I appreciate her efforts to bring attention to male equality issues.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_sex_wars[/url]
it literally says that sex objects and porn aren't regularly viewed by third-wave feminists as objects of oppression. hell, trans-exclusionary radical feminists were largely second-wave feminists.
you've said that TERFs started in the second-wave, yet continue to exist online today, and then say that Christina Hoff Sommers is a second-wave feminist, without realizing that modern third-wave feminism was a backlash against trans-exclusionary feminism and sex-negative feminism that led to a queer-focused and minority-focused feminist movement that almost entirely exists on the internet.
i'd participate in a debate about this sort of stuff but the thread OP is monumentally biased and severely misinformed, not to mention 90% newspaper comics and inherently uninformed sketches.
try again without using the term "SJW" as if it's an actual subset of feminism. it's a term used to discount overly-aggressive people or people with certain viewpoints - nobody on the internet "identifies as an SJW," it's a made-up term used to mock trans issues and disparage online feminism. try again without painting neo-masculinity as a positive thing - it's a movement to reinstate gender roles so that women are inferior and men are all manly and controlling again. try again without painting MGTOW as a positive movement when a stickied post on their subreddit is about how all women go insane.
this thread is utter shit
[QUOTE=.Isak.;48486750]this thread is utter shit[/QUOTE]
this is self-explanatory, I get the feeling it was made to stir up some shit rather than for debate
So what you're saying is that the OP is just a stereotypical tumblr feminist who is misinformed?
[IMG]http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/007/009/373.png[/IMG]
[QUOTE=.Isak.;48486750]
this thread is utter shit[/QUOTE]
I'm surprised it doesn't fall under most threads that have crazy political agendas to them
[editline]18th August 2015[/editline]
[quote]Neo-Masculinists believe that men should go back to being men, and re-adopt more traditionally masculine behavior. They believe that the cause of modern mens' unhappiness, and high suicide rate, is that they have been denied the experience of truly acting like a man should. Manly men, they argue, are more likely to attract women, have better and longer lasting relationships and contribute more to their community than effeminate wimp-biscuits. Men that follow this model of masculine behavior of high independence, risk-takingness, dominance, stoicism and casual dress are said to be Alpha males, or Alphas, while the other subservient men who do what they're told are said to be Beta males, or Betas. It is argued that Betas are more likely to suffer abuse by both women and other men, including being cheated on or 'cuckolded', because they don't demand enough respect. Essentially, act tough or people will take advantage of you. [/quote]
This is a horrible concept actually
[QUOTE=.Isak.;48486750]you've butchered basically every single "type" of feminism
second-wave feminism was not about bra-burning and being "sex-positive," it was anti-pornography and anti-prostitution and very much anti-sex in a lot of ways because sex was viewed as a way for men to have power over women. this was where "political lesbianism" became in-vogue and the concept of the "patriarchy" was built.
third-wave feminism (aka "modern tumblr feminism") that started in the 1990s is the "sex positive" feminism you're thinking of. they're the people going on the SlutWalk and hashtagging #FreeTheNipple and talking about how prostitution needs to be legalized and regulated.
seriously it's like you've intentionally made "older feminists" seem positive when in reality the third-wave feminists you're bitching about are the ones that most MRAs and such tend to agree with, second-wave feminism is still [i]very much[/i] alive today alongside third-wave feminism. Christina Hoff-Sommers is the furthest thing from a second-wave feminist - she's largely anti-feminist even though I appreciate her efforts to bring attention to male equality issues.
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_sex_wars[/url]
it literally says that sex objects and porn aren't regularly viewed by third-wave feminists as objects of oppression. hell, trans-exclusionary radical feminists were largely second-wave feminists.
you've said that TERFs started in the second-wave, yet continue to exist online today, and then say that Christina Hoff Sommers is a second-wave feminist, without realizing that modern third-wave feminism was a backlash against trans-exclusionary feminism and sex-negative feminism that led to a queer-focused and minority-focused feminist movement that almost entirely exists on the internet.
i'd participate in a debate about this sort of stuff but the thread OP is monumentally biased and severely misinformed, not to mention 90% newspaper comics and inherently uninformed sketches.
try again without using the term "SJW" as if it's an actual subset of feminism. it's a term used to discount overly-aggressive people or people with certain viewpoints - nobody on the internet "identifies as an SJW," it's a made-up term used to mock trans issues and disparage online feminism. try again without painting neo-masculinity as a positive thing - it's a movement to reinstate gender roles so that women are inferior and men are all manly and controlling again. try again without painting MGTOW as a positive movement when a stickied post on their subreddit is about how all women go insane.
this thread is utter shit[/QUOTE]
Thanks for your, uh, 'constructive' criticism. Feminism is a very complex and multi-layered concept. Many different people call themselves Feminists who often hold very mutually exclusive views on the matter, it requires a certain amount of tact to dissemble and deconstruct these various branches of what is in actuality a fairly undefined and widely interpreted theory.
[QUOTE]
second-wave feminism was not about bra-burning and being "sex-positive," it was anti-pornography and anti-prostitution and very much anti-sex in a lot of ways because sex was viewed as a way for men to have power over women. this was where "political lesbianism" became in-vogue and the concept of the "patriarchy" was built.[/QUOTE]
There was both a sex-positive and sex-negative wing of the Feminist movement in the second-wave, sex-positive feminists were more mainstream while sex-negative Feminists were considered to be radicals. It was in the 80s that the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_sex_wars]Sex Wars[/url] happened, a series of confrontations between sex-positive and sex-negative Feminists that ended up with Valerie Solaras shooting Andy Warhol and the sex-negative feminists basically winning. The sex-negative view became the pervading theory and was folded into the subsequent evolution into third-wave feminism while sex-positivity became a thing that old nutters would ramble on about, which is why we attribute it to Second-wavers. Sex-positivity is starting to come back now in the form of Choice Feminism, but the majority of radical feminists today are still opposed to pornography, prostitution and public sex. As for your implication that "political lesbianism" was sex-negative, the huge number of sex-positive feminists were lesbians who were upset at what they saw was a puritanical view seeking to discourage the sexual freedom they had worked so hard to achieve. The Lesbian Sex Mafia, founded by Dorothy Allison and Jo Arnone in New York in 1981, was one such example of this.
Here's a video about it from Camile Paglia, a sex-positive second-wave feminist:
[video=youtube;88_3AhU0-B0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88_3AhU0-B0[/video]
[QUOTE]third-wave feminism (aka "modern tumblr feminism") that started in the 1990s is the "sex positive" feminism you're thinking of. they're the people going on the SlutWalk and hashtagging #FreeTheNipple and talking about how prostitution needs to be legalized and regulated.
seriously it's like you've intentionally made "older feminists" seem positive when in reality the third-wave feminists you're bitching about are the ones that most MRAs and such tend to agree with, second-wave feminism is still [i]very much[/i] alive today alongside third-wave feminism. Christina Hoff-Sommers is the furthest thing from a second-wave feminist - she's largely anti-feminist even though I appreciate her efforts to bring attention to male equality issues.
[/QUOTE]
The largest Feminist organisation in the world right now is the National Organization for Women (N.O.W) and they are decidedly sex-negative .
[QUOTE]In October 1980 the National Organization for Women identified what became known as the "Big Four" through declaring that "Pederasty, pornography, sadomasochism and public sex" were about "exploitation, violence or invasion of privacy" and not "sexual preference or orientation".[/QUOTE]
Things like slut walks aren't about the same kind of sex-positivity as the older sex-positive feminists support, they're about shaming men for wanting to look at attractive women and trying to in some way dictate what women should be allowed to wear based on their interests, it's an extension of Andrea Dworkins' theories of male manipulation. Third-wave feminists routinely attack sex workers and claim they are stupid or being exploited. And you cannot possibly deny the current trend of Feminists attacking depictions of women who are over-sexualised in media, such as bikini armor in video games or tight suits with cleavage in movies. Those are fundamentally sex-negative traits.
[QUOTE]it literally says that sex objects and porn aren't regularly viewed by third-wave feminists as objects of oppression. hell, trans-exclusionary radical feminists were largely second-wave feminists.
you've said that TERFs started in the second-wave, yet continue to exist online today, and then say that Christina Hoff Sommers is a second-wave feminist, without realizing that modern third-wave feminism was a backlash against trans-exclusionary feminism and sex-negative feminism that led to a queer-focused and minority-focused feminist movement that almost entirely exists on the internet.
i'd participate in a debate about this sort of stuff but the thread OP is monumentally biased and severely misinformed, not to mention 90% newspaper comics and inherently uninformed sketches.
try again without using the term "SJW" as if it's an actual subset of feminism. it's a term used to discount overly-aggressive people or people with certain viewpoints - nobody on the internet "identifies as an SJW," it's a made-up term used to mock trans issues and disparage online feminism. try again without painting neo-masculinity as a positive thing - it's a movement to reinstate gender roles so that women are inferior and men are all manly and controlling again. try again without painting MGTOW as a positive movement when a stickied post on their subreddit is about how all women go insane.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]it literally says that sex objects and porn aren't regularly viewed by third-wave feminists as objects of oppression. hell, trans-exclusionary radical feminists were largely second-wave feminists.[/QUOTE]
That part of the wikipedia article doesn't have citations. I was simply linking to the wikipedia article to show people what the sex-wars was. You're really are just nitpicking at this point.
[QUOTE]you've said that TERFs started in the second-wave, yet continue to exist online today, and then say that Christina Hoff Sommers is a second-wave feminist[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure what you mean by this, TERF isn't the same as second-wave.
[QUOTE]without realizing that modern third-wave feminism was a backlash against trans-exclusionary feminism and sex-negative feminism that led to a queer-focused and minority-focused feminist movement that almost entirely exists on the internet.[/QUOTE]
Third-wave feminism is a convulted mess of theories that was first proposed by a woman named by Rebbeca Walker. It is an attempt to integrate racial issues and other social factors into the already tangled mess of theories that had been left by the arguments between sex-positive and sex-negative feminists, but it definitely was not sex-positive. Can you honestly tell me you don't see, for example, the constant bashing of sexualised women in the media?
It would be nice if you actually had some citations of some kind as opposed to just believing you have the definitive answer to a fundamentally mixed and highly debated definition of a long running social movement.
[QUOTE]"STOP PAINTING THINGS I DISAGREE WITH IN A NEUTRAL LIGHT"[/QUOTE]
So the mere thought of approaching this discussion neutrally and, you know, having a debate is enough to make you leave the thread? I'm sorry, I guess everyone should just peddle to your interests instead of discussing things openly.
[editline]19th August 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;48487098]I'm surprised it doesn't fall under most threads that have crazy political agendas to them
[editline]18th August 2015[/editline]
This is a horrible concept actually[/QUOTE]
Yes it is.
[editline]19th August 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Limed00d;48487007]this is self-explanatory, I get the feeling it was made to stir up some shit rather than for debate[/QUOTE]
Remaining neutral as possible in an attempt to get everybody involved is stirring up shit? Alrighty then.
Would you guys like me to split up Second-Wave into sex-positive and sex-negative in the OP? If anyone else wants me to change things in the OP, can you present a rational argument as to why I should do so (with evidence if possible, not because you 'know' it's wrong).
[QUOTE=Zyler;48489050]Thanks for your, uh, 'constructive' criticism. Feminism is a very complex and multi-layered concept. Many different people call themselves Feminists who often hold very mutually exclusive views on the matter, it requires a certain amount of tact to dissemble and deconstruct these various branches of what is in actuality a fairly undefined and widely interpreted theory.
There was both a sex-positive and sex-negative wing of the Feminist movement, sex-positive feminists were more mainstream while sex-negative Feminists were considered to be radicals. It was in the 80s that the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_sex_wars]Sex Wars[/url] happened, a series of confrontations between sex-positive and sex-negative Feminists that ended up with Valerie Solaras shooting Andy Warhol and the sex-negative feminists basically winning. The sex-negative view became the pervading theory and was folded into the subsequent evolution into third-wave feminism while sex-positivity became a thing that old nutters would ramble on about, which is why we attribute it to Second-wavers. Sex-positivity is starting to come back now in the form of Choice Feminism, but the majority of radical feminists today are still opposed to pornography, prostitution and public sex. As for your implication that "political lesbianism" was sex-negative, the huge number of sex-positive feminists were lesbians who were upset at what they saw was a puritanical view seeking to discourage the sexual freedom they had worked so hard to achieve. The Lesbian Sex Mafia, founded by Dorothy Allison and Jo Arnone in New York in 1981, was one such example of this.[/QUOTE]
it's not criticism
i'm calling you a complete idiot
the fact that you spent that much time writing such a massive post and you [i]still[/i] can't tell second-wave and third-wave feminism apart is very telling that you've already decided your opinion and historical facts won't change it. sex-positive feminism was a backlash to common second-wave feminism from the 1960s and forwards that were hugely against pornography and prostitution and such.
i'm not going to waste time and energy arguing with someone who puts "neo-masculinity" with a positive tilt and puts feminists in a negative light.
[i]Neo-Masculinity was invented and pushed by [B]Roosh fucking V[/B], who is a self-admitted serial rapist and who advocates for legalized rape[/i].
if you make a thread actually explaining the differences between waves of feminism and accurately and succinctly (without fucking rage comic tier bullshit) detail retaliatory movements by men, i'd love to debate. until that point, which will never happen because you're painting "Patriarchy" as some mystical guy in a dark room pointing fingers when it's a well-documented and easy-to-understand concept of a male-focused paternal environment where our last names come from our father and our mothers are supposed to be housekeepers.
i'm not even pretending to understand the nuances of feminist opinion, but you're blatantly ignoring them and putting up movements supported by literal rapists as "counter" to feminism. fuck off lol.
[editline]18th August 2015[/editline]
here's my rational argument for why you should wipe the OP and delete this thread: because it's fucking terrible and you're a joke for thinking that a bunch of inherently biased and insultingly pandering newspaper comics are good representations of each position.
i'm not even going to mention how you absolutely butchered the meaning of intersectionality by saying that it means people get "oppression points" or some shit - nobody says "you're a 5.3 on the Oppression Scale!" and if you honestly think that's a reasonable and realistic perspective on the concept of intersectionality you're a complete fucking loon lol
[highlight](User was banned for this post ("flaming" - postal))[/highlight]
[QUOTE=.Isak.;48489330]it's not criticism
i'm calling you a complete idiot[/QUOTE]
This is not a constructive argument, you're just trolling the thread at this point.
[QUOTE]
i'm not going to waste time and energy arguing with someone who puts "neo-masculinity" with a positive tilt and puts feminists in a negative light.
Neo-Masculinity was invented and pushed by Roosh fucking V, who is a self-admitted serial rapist and who advocates for legalized rape.[/QUOTE]
Do you understand the concept of neutrality? I'm not condoning or throwing away any of these theories, I'm simply stating what the theories are, not agreeing or disagreeing with them. This is meant to be a neutral debate thread (at least as neutral as it can be) and you're acting like a little kid whose marbles have been taken away. Instead of calling me stupid for holding a different belief than you, how about you actually come up with some arguments for how/why something should you changed instead of being overly confrontational about it?
[QUOTE]here's my rational argument for why you should wipe the OP and delete this thread: because it's fucking terrible and you're a joke for thinking that a bunch of inherently biased and insultingly pandering newspaper comics are good representations of each position.
i'm not even going to mention how you absolutely butchered the meaning of intersectionality by saying that it means people get "oppression points" or some shit - nobody says "you're a 5.3 on the Oppression Scale!" and if you honestly think that's a reasonable and realistic perspective on the concept of intersectionality you're a complete fucking loon lol [/QUOTE]
Again, this is not a constructive argument, you're just insulting me for not pandering to your interests. I've been very reasonable and explained things very openly and plainly to you and you've responded by screaming like a petulant child. If you'd like to explain exactly what should be changed and [i]how[/i] it should be changed and present a case for it, that would be good. Otherwise, your whole red-faced litany of insults does nothing but make you look like a shitposting troll. There's no need to be so confrontational, I'm willing to listen to anyone and everyone, but you need to discuss this with me calmly and provide evidence and sources or an actual argument that essentially amounts to more than "your wrong, I'm right, if you disagree with me you're a poopyhead."
[QUOTE]i'm not even pretending to understand the nuances of feminist opinion, but you're blatantly ignoring them and putting up movements supported by literal rapists as "counter" to feminism. fuck off lol.[/QUOTE]
So you don't know what you're talking about but you're calling [i]me[/i] stupid for not knowing something you already don't know anything about? What's your point then? Are you just insulting me for the fun of it?
[QUOTE=Zyler;48489425]This is not a constructive argument, you're just trolling the thread at this point.
Do you understand the concept of neutrality? I'm not condoning or throwing away any of these theories, I'm simply stating what the theories are, not agreeing or disagreeing with them. This is meant to be a neutral debate thread (at least as neutral as it can be) and you're acting like a little kid whose marbles have been taken away. Instead of calling me stupid for holding a different belief than you, how about you actually come up with some arguments for how/why something should you changed instead of being overly confrontational about it?
Again, this is not a constructive argument, you're just insulting me for not pandering to your interests. I've been very reasonable and explained things very openly and plainly to you and you've responded by screaming like a petulant child. If you'd like to explain exactly what should be changed and [i]how[/i] it should be changed and present a case for it, that would be good. Otherwise, your whole red-faced litany of insults does nothing but make you look like a shitposting troll. There's no need to be so confrontational, I'm willing to listen to anyone and everyone, but you need to discuss this with me calmly and provide evidence and sources or an actual argument that essentially amounts to more than "your wrong, I'm right, if you disagree with me you're a poopyhead."[/QUOTE]
the issue is you're not stating what those theories and ideas are [i]with even a tenth of a degree of neutrality[/i]. Almost every single description you've written is seriously biased and/or severely misinformed.
my advice to you is the same: get rid of this sad excuse for an informative post, and decide to spend a few months reading up on all of these topics, and then maybe make another thread with [i]actually[/i] neutral descriptions. because none of these are neutral by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't give a shit that you disagree with me or that you support neo-masculine legalized rape or whatever else you want to say - I take issue that you start a debate thread and then repeatedly say "it's neutral! it's neutral!" even though to any passing user it's clearly biased beyond all belief.
i already said you're seriously misinformed about intersectionality and prescribing it a "point scale" is literally a meme from 4chan. if that's where you're getting your ideas on social movements from i don't even know what to say, because it's blatantly obvious that you're biased and misinformed and incredibly ignorant to think you're the one with the neutral position.
i'm not having a constructive argument with you. you've already set the goalposts firmly in your territory, and then you have the audacity to spend half the OP talking about logical fallacies. if you start a debate saying "feminism sucks dick everything is awful about it, neo-masculinity is about men being men and being strong men," you're not going to get the time of day from anyone who is willing to start a discussion from a neutral stance.
also, you're a poopyhead and i have no qualms with trolling someone who's [I]blatantly[/I] flamebaiting.
[QUOTE=.Isak.;48489484]
I don't give a shit that you disagree with me or that you support neo-masculine legalized rape or whatever else you want to say - I take issue that you start a debate thread and then repeatedly say "it's neutral! it's neutral!" even though to any passing user it's clearly biased beyond all belief.[/QUOTE]
I don't support it, I literally just said I'm posting the theories as-is and neither agreeing nor disagreeing with them.
[QUOTE]i'm not having a constructive argument with you. you've already set the goalposts firmly in your territory, and then you have the audacity to spend half the OP talking about logical fallacies. if you start a debate saying "feminism sucks dick everything is awful about it, neo-masculinity is about men being men and being strong men," you're not going to get the time of day from anyone who is willing to start a discussion from a neutral stance.[/QUOTE]
If that's what you got from my post, then I guess that's your interpretation. I've told you three times now that I don't support neo-masculinity. I would've thought I'd know what I think about social issues more than you do, but I guess you know more about me than I do about myself so who knows.
[QUOTE]also, [b]you're a poopyhead and i have no qualms with trolling someone who's [I]blatantly[/I] flamebaiting.[/b][/QUOTE]
Well thanks for admitting you're just shitposting, I guess.
I wasn't trying to stir up shit, and I'm completely willing to adapt the OP to be a neutral as possible (although your idea of neutrality would probably be to call all MRAs rapists, all Egalitarians stupid redditors, etc). Here's the thing though, you need to present a rational argument that doesn't rely on ad hominem and shit posting. Have I not been totally reasonable and willing to listen this entire time? I've noticed you have a knack for finding interpretations of other people's posts that weren't intended, maybe if you took a step back and we started this discussion all over again we can work something out. I have a feeling you and I agree on more things than you've abashedly assumed about me from a single forum post.
Im done with this thread. This is some bullshit Feminism, now dont get me wrong I love feminism but some people get way to into it like anime, its okay but weeaboos need to calm the fuck down.
Regular Feminists: Women deserve equality and men should support us.
Bullshit Feminists: What is a vagina? Is the name vagina sexist? After extensively reading tumblr I know everything. Is hair genitalia? Let me make this more complicated than it needs to be. What about a penis could it be socially a vagina as a woman?
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