Isn’t a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?
We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn’t be better for others to avoid using the “atheist” label to avoid the association with these people, otherwise they deserve all the religious backlash.
There are two strategies to become widely popular: say exactly the mainstream thing, or say the most shocking thing. The former strategy cannot be used if you want to argue against the mainstream opinion. Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones. Not because the idea is necessarily shocking, but because of a selection effect—if you have a non-mainstream idea and you are not shocking, you will not become popular worldwide.
I may sometimes disagree with how Richard Dawkins chooses his words, but avoiding the succesful “atheist” label would be a losing strategy. I disagree with a lot of what Roissy says, but “red pill” is a successful meme, and he is not the only one using it.
There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people. To insist that the negative connotation is the true one often simply means that the person dislikes the idea (otherwise they would be more likely to insist that the positive connotation is the true one).
Isn’t a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?
This looks like begging the question to me. Whether an idea offensively contradicts mainstream beliefs has a lot to do with the connotations that happen to be associated with it. Lots of reasonably popular ideas contradict mainstream beliefs, but are not especially offensive. Obviously, once an idea becomes popular enough to be part of the mainstream, this whole distinction no longer makes sense.
We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn’t be better for others to avoid using the “atheist” label to avoid the association with these people …
Indeed, this explains why many non-theistic people steadfastly refuse to self-identify as atheists (some of them may call themselves agnostics or non-believers). It also partially explains why the movements “Atheism Plus” and “Atheism 2.0″ have started gaining currency.
Similarly, any useful and non-offensive content of “red pill” beliefs may be easily found and developed under other labels, such as “seduction community”, “game”/”PUA”, “ev psych” and the like.
Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones.
It’s not clear why we should care whether a writer of non-mainstream opinions is famous especially when such fame correlates poorly with truth-seeking and/or the opinions are gratuitously made socially unpopular for the sake of “controversy”.
There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people.
Serious question, name a positive connotation of “The Red Pill”—which is not shared by “Game”/”PUA”/”seduction community” or “ev psych”.
I agree with your explanation about some people’s preference for the label “agnostic”. The “atheism plus” on the other hand feels to me like “atheism plus political correctness”—it is certainly not focused on not offending religious people. (So an equivalent would be a Game blog who cares about not offending… for example Muslims. That’s not the same as a Game blog trying not to offend feminists.)
Serious question, name a positive connotation of “The Red Pill”—which is not shared by “Game”/”PUA”/”seduction community” or “ev psych”.
Anyone who liked the movie Matrix? (Unless all of them are already in the seduction community.) I could imagine to use the same word as a metaphor for… for example early retirement, or any similar activity that requires you to go against the stereotypical beliefs of most people. I admit I never saw the word used in this context; I just feel like it would fit there perfectly. (Also it would fit perfectly to most conspiracy theories.)
The “atheism plus” on the other hand feels to me like “atheism plus political correctness”—it is certainly not focused on not offending religious people.
I don’t have that much knowledge of the Atheism Plus movement, but I have read some stuff that suggests they are concerned about how prominent atheists talk about Islam, at least. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had expressed opposition to Dawkins’ description of religious upbringing as child abuse. I do know some feminists who were/are pissed about that.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing that the red pill writers are pursuing an effective strategy in disseminating their beliefs. To be honest, I can see it either way. On the one hand, offending people gets them to notice you, and emotionally charged arguments are more interesting. On the other hand, some of the rhetoric might needlessly alienate people, and to a certain extent it can discredit the ideas (e.g. someone recommends Athol Kay, someone says “isn’t he one of those red pill guys? I saw Roissy’s blog and it was appalling, no way I can listen to one of them”). I definitely don’t think that being deliberately offensive is literally the only way to spread a contrarian belief.
But I don’t think the red pill movement should be able to have their cake and eat it too. You can’t deliberately make your writing as offensive and obnoxious as possible in order to try to get it to spread, and then turn around and say “People are offended? This just shows that anyone who doesn’t think like the mainstream becomes a public enemy!”
Some movements are able to have their cake and eat it too. If a hundred years ago someone told the early feminists to be extra careful about not offending people, would they listen? Would it be a winning strategy?
I agree that it feels like people should choose between having their cake and eating it. But is this a description of how the world really works, or merely a just world fallacy? As a competing hypothesis, maybe it is all about power—if you can crush your enemies (for example make them unemployed) and give positions of power (and grant money) to your allies, then people will celebrate you as the force of good, because everyone wants to join the winner. And if you fail, the only difference between being polite and impolite is whether you will be forgotten or despised.
Let’s imagine that Athol Key would stop using the forbidden words like “Red pill” et cetera. What about the rest of his message? Would it stop feeling offensive for the “Blue pill” people, or not? If the blog would be successful, they would notice, and they would attack him anyway. (The linked article reacted to Athol’s description of a “red pill woman”, but would it be different if he just called her e.g. a “perfect woman”?) And if the blog would be unknown enough to avoid being noticed, then… it wouldn’t really matter what’s written there.
Compared with most blogs discussing the topic on either side, Athol Kay is extra polite. We can criticize him for not being perfect, while conveniently forgetting that neither is anyone else.
Let’s imagine that Athol Key would stop using the forbidden words like “Red pill” et cetera. What about the rest of his message? Would it stop feeling offensive for the “Blue pill” people, or not?
Um, the issue is not that he’s using “the red pill” or any other forbidden words, but that he’s expressly associating with and supporting a subculture of misanthropes, losers and misanthropic losers who happen to be using “The Red Pill” as their badge of honor. And yes, some people might still be offended by his other messages, even if he stopped providing this kind of enablement. But he would be taking their strongest argument against him off the table.
he’s expressly associating with and supporting a subculture of misanthropes, losers and misanthropic losers
Just thinking… is loser a gendered word or not? Would you feel comfortable to describe a group of women as losers, on a public forum?
If not, then what would be the proper way to describe a subculture of women who are not satisfied with how society works now, who feel their options are limited by the society, who discuss endlessly on their blogs about how the society should be changed, and use some keywords as their badge of honor?
Would you feel comfortable to describe a group of women as losers, on a public forum?
That’s an interesting question—I actually can’t think of any group where that would be an accurate description, so I don’t really have a good answer here. Sorry about that.
If not, then what would be the proper way to describe a subculture of women who are not satisfied with how society works now, who feel their options are limited by the society, who discuss endlessly on their blogs about how the society should be changed, and use some keywords as their badge of honor?
People who may or may not be on to something? Sure, lots of folks blame the failings of society for their comparative lack of success, and that’s sometimes unhelpful. But even that is a lot better than just complaining about how all other people—most specifically including women as well as ‘alpha male’ other guys—are somehow evil and stupid. That’s called sour grapes, and IMHO it is a highly blameworthy attitude, not least since it perpetuates and deepens the originally poor outcomes.
I actually can’t think of any group where that would be an accurate description
No real group, or even an imaginary group? I mean, take the “misanthropic losers” you described (and for the sake of debate, let’s assume your description of them is completely accurate), and imagine exactly the same group with genders reversed. Would it be okay to call those women publicly “losers”?
Or perhaps “loser” is a gendered slur. (Something like the word “slut” that you can use to offend women, but if you try it to describe a sexually adventurous man, it somehow does not have the same shaming power.) In which case, saying that the “Red Pill” readers are losers contains almost as much information as saying that they are men.
Sure, lots of folks blame the failings of society for their comparative lack of success, and that’s sometimes unhelpful. But even that is a lot better than just complaining about how all other people—most specifically including women as well as ‘alpha male’ other guys—are somehow evil and stupid.
Complaining achieves nothing, and people who complain without achieving anything are, yeah, losers.
How about a group that achieves real results? For example, there is a controversial movement, in an obscure part of the “manosphere”, behind a blogger Valentine Solarius, often criticized by feminists for writing things like “to be female is to be deficient, cognitively limited”; “the female is completely egocentric, trapped inside herself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship”; “her intelligence is a mere tool in the services of her drives and needs”; “the female has one glaring area of superiority over the male—public relations; she has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of men that women are men and men are women”; “every woman, deep down, knows she’s a worthless piece of shit”. -- He writes a lot about his desire to kill women. Actually, he attacked and almost killed one woman for not responding to his e-mail, but she survived so he only spent three years in prison. He seems to be a popular person among some men politically influential in the Republican party… so, let’s assume that his friends really succeed to create a political movement, change the way society perceives women, change the laws as they want to have them, etc. Then, they would no longer be losers, would they? Now, would that be better than merely blogging about the “Red Pill”? (See his blog for some more crazy ideas.)
No real group, or even an imaginary group? I mean, take the “misanthropic losers” you described (and for the sake of debate, let’s assume your description of them is completely accurate), and imagine exactly the same group with genders reversed. Would it be okay to call those women publicly “losers”?
Well, we can imagine anything we want to. It’s not hard to think of a possible world where some loose subculture or organized group of women could be fairly characterized as “losers” on a par with redpillers. You could basically get there if, say, radical feminism was a lot more dysfunctional than it actually is. No such luck, though.
How about a group that achieves real results?
Perhaps you’re missing the point here? By “achieving real results”, I obviously don’t mean committing assault. Even successfully influencing politics would be a dubious achievement, as long as their basic ideology remains what it is. However, it is indeed a stylized fact in politics and social science that such nasty subcultures and movements generally appeal to people who are quite low either in self-perceived status/achivement, or in their level on Maslow’s scale of human needs.
Your quotes from the Manosphere blogger were quite sobering indeed, but I’ll be fair here—you can find such crazies in any extreme movement, so perhaps that’s not what’s most relevant after all. If most redpillers stuck to what they might perhaps be said to do best, e.g. social critiques about the pervasive influence of feminized thinking, the male’s unrecognized role as an economic provider and the like, as well as formulating reform proposals (however extreme they might be), I don’t think they would be so controversial. Who knows, they might even become popular in some underground circles who are quite fascinated by out-of-the-box thinking.
Perhaps so, to some extent: you may like it or not, but guilt by association is a successful political tactic. But the problem is made even worse by the fact that his writings occasionally support the Greens’ nasty attitudes.
To take the analogy even further, imagine a respected scientist writing approvingly about “deep ecologists” and “Soylent Greens”, who believe in the primacy of natural wilderness, and argue that human societies are inherently evil and inimical to true happiness, excepting “naturally co-evolved” bands and tribes of low-impact hunter-gatherers. Such a belief might even be said to supported by evolutionary psychology, in some sense. But many people would nonetheless oppose it and describe it as nasty—notably including more moderate Greens, who might perhaps turn to other sciences such as economics, and think more favorably of “sustainable development” or even “natural capitalism”.
Isn’t a similar dynamic involved anywhere where people are developing an idea that offensively contradicts the belief of a majority?
We could similarly ask why are some atheists so agressive, and whether it wouldn’t be better for others to avoid using the “atheist” label to avoid the association with these people, otherwise they deserve all the religious backlash.
There are two strategies to become widely popular: say exactly the mainstream thing, or say the most shocking thing. The former strategy cannot be used if you want to argue against the mainstream opinion. Therefore the most famous writers of non-mainstream opinions will be the shocking ones. Not because the idea is necessarily shocking, but because of a selection effect—if you have a non-mainstream idea and you are not shocking, you will not become popular worldwide.
I may sometimes disagree with how Richard Dawkins chooses his words, but avoiding the succesful “atheist” label would be a losing strategy. I disagree with a lot of what Roissy says, but “red pill” is a successful meme, and he is not the only one using it.
There are words which have both positive and negative connotations to different people. To insist that the negative connotation is the true one often simply means that the person dislikes the idea (otherwise they would be more likely to insist that the positive connotation is the true one).
This looks like begging the question to me. Whether an idea offensively contradicts mainstream beliefs has a lot to do with the connotations that happen to be associated with it. Lots of reasonably popular ideas contradict mainstream beliefs, but are not especially offensive. Obviously, once an idea becomes popular enough to be part of the mainstream, this whole distinction no longer makes sense.
Indeed, this explains why many non-theistic people steadfastly refuse to self-identify as atheists (some of them may call themselves agnostics or non-believers). It also partially explains why the movements “Atheism Plus” and “Atheism 2.0″ have started gaining currency.
Similarly, any useful and non-offensive content of “red pill” beliefs may be easily found and developed under other labels, such as “seduction community”, “game”/”PUA”, “ev psych” and the like.
It’s not clear why we should care whether a writer of non-mainstream opinions is famous especially when such fame correlates poorly with truth-seeking and/or the opinions are gratuitously made socially unpopular for the sake of “controversy”.
Serious question, name a positive connotation of “The Red Pill”—which is not shared by “Game”/”PUA”/”seduction community” or “ev psych”.
I agree with your explanation about some people’s preference for the label “agnostic”. The “atheism plus” on the other hand feels to me like “atheism plus political correctness”—it is certainly not focused on not offending religious people. (So an equivalent would be a Game blog who cares about not offending… for example Muslims. That’s not the same as a Game blog trying not to offend feminists.)
Anyone who liked the movie Matrix? (Unless all of them are already in the seduction community.) I could imagine to use the same word as a metaphor for… for example early retirement, or any similar activity that requires you to go against the stereotypical beliefs of most people. I admit I never saw the word used in this context; I just feel like it would fit there perfectly. (Also it would fit perfectly to most conspiracy theories.)
I don’t have that much knowledge of the Atheism Plus movement, but I have read some stuff that suggests they are concerned about how prominent atheists talk about Islam, at least. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if they had expressed opposition to Dawkins’ description of religious upbringing as child abuse. I do know some feminists who were/are pissed about that.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing that the red pill writers are pursuing an effective strategy in disseminating their beliefs. To be honest, I can see it either way. On the one hand, offending people gets them to notice you, and emotionally charged arguments are more interesting. On the other hand, some of the rhetoric might needlessly alienate people, and to a certain extent it can discredit the ideas (e.g. someone recommends Athol Kay, someone says “isn’t he one of those red pill guys? I saw Roissy’s blog and it was appalling, no way I can listen to one of them”). I definitely don’t think that being deliberately offensive is literally the only way to spread a contrarian belief.
But I don’t think the red pill movement should be able to have their cake and eat it too. You can’t deliberately make your writing as offensive and obnoxious as possible in order to try to get it to spread, and then turn around and say “People are offended? This just shows that anyone who doesn’t think like the mainstream becomes a public enemy!”
Some movements are able to have their cake and eat it too. If a hundred years ago someone told the early feminists to be extra careful about not offending people, would they listen? Would it be a winning strategy?
I agree that it feels like people should choose between having their cake and eating it. But is this a description of how the world really works, or merely a just world fallacy? As a competing hypothesis, maybe it is all about power—if you can crush your enemies (for example make them unemployed) and give positions of power (and grant money) to your allies, then people will celebrate you as the force of good, because everyone wants to join the winner. And if you fail, the only difference between being polite and impolite is whether you will be forgotten or despised.
Let’s imagine that Athol Key would stop using the forbidden words like “Red pill” et cetera. What about the rest of his message? Would it stop feeling offensive for the “Blue pill” people, or not? If the blog would be successful, they would notice, and they would attack him anyway. (The linked article reacted to Athol’s description of a “red pill woman”, but would it be different if he just called her e.g. a “perfect woman”?) And if the blog would be unknown enough to avoid being noticed, then… it wouldn’t really matter what’s written there.
Compared with most blogs discussing the topic on either side, Athol Kay is extra polite. We can criticize him for not being perfect, while conveniently forgetting that neither is anyone else.
Um, the issue is not that he’s using “the red pill” or any other forbidden words, but that he’s expressly associating with and supporting a subculture of misanthropes, losers and misanthropic losers who happen to be using “The Red Pill” as their badge of honor. And yes, some people might still be offended by his other messages, even if he stopped providing this kind of enablement. But he would be taking their strongest argument against him off the table.
Just thinking… is loser a gendered word or not? Would you feel comfortable to describe a group of women as losers, on a public forum?
If not, then what would be the proper way to describe a subculture of women who are not satisfied with how society works now, who feel their options are limited by the society, who discuss endlessly on their blogs about how the society should be changed, and use some keywords as their badge of honor?
That’s an interesting question—I actually can’t think of any group where that would be an accurate description, so I don’t really have a good answer here. Sorry about that.
People who may or may not be on to something? Sure, lots of folks blame the failings of society for their comparative lack of success, and that’s sometimes unhelpful. But even that is a lot better than just complaining about how all other people—most specifically including women as well as ‘alpha male’ other guys—are somehow evil and stupid. That’s called sour grapes, and IMHO it is a highly blameworthy attitude, not least since it perpetuates and deepens the originally poor outcomes.
No real group, or even an imaginary group? I mean, take the “misanthropic losers” you described (and for the sake of debate, let’s assume your description of them is completely accurate), and imagine exactly the same group with genders reversed. Would it be okay to call those women publicly “losers”?
Or perhaps “loser” is a gendered slur. (Something like the word “slut” that you can use to offend women, but if you try it to describe a sexually adventurous man, it somehow does not have the same shaming power.) In which case, saying that the “Red Pill” readers are losers contains almost as much information as saying that they are men.
Complaining achieves nothing, and people who complain without achieving anything are, yeah, losers.
How about a group that achieves real results? For example, there is a controversial movement, in an obscure part of the “manosphere”, behind a blogger Valentine Solarius, often criticized by feminists for writing things like “to be female is to be deficient, cognitively limited”; “the female is completely egocentric, trapped inside herself, incapable of empathizing or identifying with others, or love, friendship”; “her intelligence is a mere tool in the services of her drives and needs”; “the female has one glaring area of superiority over the male—public relations; she has done a brilliant job of convincing millions of men that women are men and men are women”; “every woman, deep down, knows she’s a worthless piece of shit”. -- He writes a lot about his desire to kill women. Actually, he attacked and almost killed one woman for not responding to his e-mail, but she survived so he only spent three years in prison. He seems to be a popular person among some men politically influential in the Republican party… so, let’s assume that his friends really succeed to create a political movement, change the way society perceives women, change the laws as they want to have them, etc. Then, they would no longer be losers, would they? Now, would that be better than merely blogging about the “Red Pill”? (See his blog for some more crazy ideas.)
Well, we can imagine anything we want to. It’s not hard to think of a possible world where some loose subculture or organized group of women could be fairly characterized as “losers” on a par with redpillers. You could basically get there if, say, radical feminism was a lot more dysfunctional than it actually is. No such luck, though.
Perhaps you’re missing the point here? By “achieving real results”, I obviously don’t mean committing assault. Even successfully influencing politics would be a dubious achievement, as long as their basic ideology remains what it is. However, it is indeed a stylized fact in politics and social science that such nasty subcultures and movements generally appeal to people who are quite low either in self-perceived status/achivement, or in their level on Maslow’s scale of human needs.
Your quotes from the Manosphere blogger were quite sobering indeed, but I’ll be fair here—you can find such crazies in any extreme movement, so perhaps that’s not what’s most relevant after all. If most redpillers stuck to what they might perhaps be said to do best, e.g. social critiques about the pervasive influence of feminized thinking, the male’s unrecognized role as an economic provider and the like, as well as formulating reform proposals (however extreme they might be), I don’t think they would be so controversial. Who knows, they might even become popular in some underground circles who are quite fascinated by out-of-the-box thinking.
So, is it more about that he has loser friends than about what he writes? And by losers, I mean Greens.
Perhaps so, to some extent: you may like it or not, but guilt by association is a successful political tactic. But the problem is made even worse by the fact that his writings occasionally support the Greens’ nasty attitudes.
To take the analogy even further, imagine a respected scientist writing approvingly about “deep ecologists” and “Soylent Greens”, who believe in the primacy of natural wilderness, and argue that human societies are inherently evil and inimical to true happiness, excepting “naturally co-evolved” bands and tribes of low-impact hunter-gatherers. Such a belief might even be said to supported by evolutionary psychology, in some sense. But many people would nonetheless oppose it and describe it as nasty—notably including more moderate Greens, who might perhaps turn to other sciences such as economics, and think more favorably of “sustainable development” or even “natural capitalism”.