In the same vein The Red Pill / Manosphere is an OVERreaction to a problem, yes it is wrong, both it tone and content, misogynistic and so on, misrepresenting history etc. wrong in both quantity and direction, yet it DOES point out a problem, and some ideas when saner and kinder people work them over and remove the jaded or hateful elements of them, are actually useful.
What do you mean by “misogynistic”? The word is commonly used to mean believing that there are significant differences between men and women. If you mean something else by this word feel free to explain it.
Maybe things get easier, if feminism, if ever, fully wins 100%.
What do you mean by feminism 100% wins? Do you mean human nature will change? And if so to what?
What do you mean by feminism 100% wins? Do you mean human nature will change? And if so to what?
This is highly debated how much human nature is hardcoded in this regard. The No 1. feature of human nature is the ability to adapt to wildly different circumstances. For example there is absolutely no such thing as an ancestral or paleolithical diet. Human nature is tribal, we still manage to have nations and supranational organizations somehow. Once could just as easily argue every political organization above kinship based tribes is against human nature. Yet we manage to do it… just with some unintended consequences (like tribalism rearing its head in politics, kicked out the door, it comes back the window).
My “gut instinct” is on the middle way: we can change genders, but with many unintended consequences. (For example, once consequence that is more or less visible already: when people become more unisex, sexual tension drops as it is generated by difference. One of my ugliest (thankfully unproven, conditional) beliefs is that every passionate sex is essentially BDSM, and easing up dominance/submission kills truly burning desire. Dropping birthrates may be another one.)
What do you mean by “misogynistic”? The word is commonly used to mean believing that there are significant differences between men and women. If you mean something else by this word feel free to explain it.
I think it is meant not simply about differences, but when 1) differences are used to justify social customs that reduce the autonomy / choices of people, primarily women 2) differences of the kind that tend to assign lower status to women. So when differences are value-laden in this way, and not purely factual. I think this is the most accepted usage.
However in the case of RP it is not even the usual meaning but something far worse. Really, really ugly lingo, not even “politically offensive” but insulting in that basic human pre-feminism sense, violating every rule of keeping a civil tongue in one’s head. For example blog.jim.com says most modern women are “psychotic whores”. This is not simply un-PC, it was a huge insult far before PC or feminism was invented, 1950 or whatever date you pick. It is not simply un-feminist or anti-feminist lingo, it is the lingo of louts who grew up in the gutter. It is simply incredibly un-classy.
What’s your evidence that RP is in fact wrong?
First of all, statements can be right or wrong. Subcultures never. I think I should write an article about it, but subcultures are largely about like-minded people banding together, often held together by values and moods and personality types but not facts. They are simply beyond right or wrong: you can say that the most important statements a subculture believes are right or wrong, but the subculture as such cannot be reduced to its most important statements, because it is people. Prove them all wrong, and the very same people will band together in a different subculture that has different statements, but the same mood affiliation, the same mindset. Prove them all right, and you can still say the personality, mindset or values are still all horrible or simply bad, harmful. For example, I am an atheist and generally disagree with the major things Catholics believe in, yet I tend to generally like them as a people, it seems our mindset and mood is at some level similar (“Chestertonesque”). I like their subculture and disagree with their statements. It can also happen the other way around. So, context is everything.
The second issue is that good luck about trying to separating facts from values in the fields that are not natural science but more like human, social concerns. For example, Marxists claim to have an entirely factual analysis of how the engine of capitalism works, but it is full with so much value-laden, mood-laden terms, that you cannot really separate the factual proposition from a general value/mood of them disliking hierarchical modes of production.
I think the strategic aspect of RP is not bad, they are the kind of things a man stumbles upon by experience anyway, such as, there are interactions where mock agreement and humorous amplification are appropriate answers. If a girl in a bar would ask me to hold her purse I would probably parade around with it in a super gay way and good laughs would be had. The issue is the context, the values, the mood. For example, the interactions where this kind of answer is appropriate are called “shit tests” and they get referred to as “mercilessly swat down the shit tests”. So you see a general mood of hostility, aggressivity, negativity. And it is really difficult to separate the context from the statements.
So the issue is not that some statements are wrong. They are embedded in a very negative mood/value context.
One useful way to look at it is to say the issue is that RP guys were in some significant sense screwed up BEFORE swallowing the pill. So it is not the pill that is wrong as such, it is the kind of people it attracts. Because the same pill could be embedded in a very different mood and context, one of positivity, cooperation, friendliness and mutual respect.
Also the context I am talking about is actually just one example of a more general category of negative contexts. Similar negative contexts are: The Gervais Principle, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Social Darwinism, Objectivism. Generally ideas that cash out to saying life is all about brutal competition where winners take all and losers get screwed and generally downplaying the role positive social connections, alliances, support networks play in life outcomes, which generally come from “nice” behavior.
These negative contexts are what I called “dark romance” in a former conversation. It is the assumption that we live in a dog eat dog world, where the law of the jungle rules because the assumptions feels so… badass. Well, such things happen indeed. But on the other hand, it is incredibly handy and useful to be “nice” and be the kind of person others like to cooperate with or support. A truly smart sociopathic, evil Machiavelli would not try to project this jaded tough guy image but would be a super mellow nice person, the most agreeable person around, liked by everybody… and in the rare, really rare occasions when it worths it, he would backstab them. But if he is evil only for the sake of actual gain and not for the sake of evil being awesome and badass and darkly romantic… then such occasions are exceedingly rare.
For example there is absolutely no such thing as an ancestral or paleolithical diet.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Clearly you’re not saying that our antcectors did not eat. Are you saying that humans have genetically adapted to different diets since the paleolithic? That still leaves the concept of ancestral diet as important. Are you saying any given human will be just as healthy on any diet? That’s clearly false.
Human nature is tribal, we still manage to have nations and supranational organizations somehow.
By adapting the larger organizations to human nature, yes.
Can we? It’s possible for say men, to cut of their peneses and declare themselves women. (And in the west expect society to declare that they have always been women). However, in my experience the behvior of m-to-f trannies makes more sense if I model them as men who decided to “become women” as part of the especially male tendency to do crazy things.
I think it is meant not simply about differences, but when 1) differences are used to justify social customs that reduce the autonomy / choices of people, primarily women 2) differences of the kind that tend to assign lower status to women.
Does it matter of said customs are rational (say in the sense of leading to better outcomes)?
For example blog.jim.com says most modern women are “psychotic whores”. This is not simply un-PC, it was a huge insult far before PC or feminism was invented, 1950 or whatever date you pick. It is not simply un-feminist or anti-feminist lingo, it is the lingo of louts who grew up in the gutter. It is simply incredibly un-classy.
Yes and in the 1950s a woman who behaved the way a typical women does today (at least in the west, I hear it’s not quite as bad in eastern Europe) would be considered much worse then simply un-classy and loutish. And yes “psychotic whore” sounds about right for what they would of thought of that type of woman.
The second issue is that good luck about trying to separating facts from values in the fields that are not natural science but more like human, social concerns. For example, Marxists claim to have an entirely factual analysis of how the engine of capitalism works, but it is full with so much value-laden, mood-laden terms, that you cannot really separate the factual proposition from a general value/mood of them disliking hierarchical modes of production.
Yes it is. At least it is possible to isolate the factual analysis enough to see that it is false.
Also the context I am talking about is actually just one example of a more general category of negative contexts. Similar negative contexts are: The Gervais Principle, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Social Darwinism, Objectivism. Generally ideas that cash out to saying life is all about brutal competition where winners take all and losers get screwed
Um, are you actually familiar with the philosophies you listed or are you going by the popular caricatures? Of the ones I’m familiar with, this is a rather bad characterization of Machiavelli and an absolute horrible characterization of Objectivism.
And I think this is a good example. The most typically human trait is flexibility because that is what intelligence generates.
This suggests your suffering from the arugment to mederation fallacy.
In the specific case when something is argued to be impossible, taking a middle way seems sensible: almost everything is possible, just often you have to throw the equivalent of a nuke on it, and then you will get all kinds of unwanted consequences.
we can change genders
Can we? It’s possible for say men, to cut of their peneses and declare themselves women.
Really I bet this is not new to you, you just pretend you have never heard the difference…
At least it is possible to isolate the factual analysis enough to see that it is false.
I find it far too optimistic but I figure neither of us has evidence here.
Um, are you actually familiar with the philosophies you listed or are you going by the popular caricatures?
Popular versions, yes, but they are not caricatures simply—more like what people actually believe in. Popularity matters. To give you a reverse example, some people argue the Soviets were never properly, really Communists or Marxist. This means, they did not really believe what some books said. Books matter. But actual history, what people actually do, often matters more. Soviet Communism was the kind of Communism that mattered, because this had nukes and the obscure kind of Communism that had only some books and debating groups mattered far less. The same thing with the ones I mentioned—they were far smarter than this, but based on them there is a popular view of a simplified “dog eat dog” world where everything is competition and winners take all and losers suck and cooperation does not worth for anything.
This jaded view was already disproved by Plato. Justice and efficiency go hand in hand and there is rarely lasting success without a lot of cooperation and fairness.
I often think the jaded views on the right horseshoe into the oppression-oriented views on the left quite nicely, the difference is largely about how to evaluate the same facts and how changable it is, but both extremes would say the world as we know it so far is usually pretty ugly. I think it is not, we are just under the spell of a huge yellow journalism bias. When someone murders their spouse, that is on TV evening news. When people cook their spouse their favorite food or take them to their favorite restaurant, that is not. Reporting is biased towards the negative, largely because it is biased towards the unusual, and it is far, far harder to do something unusually good than unusually bad. Unusually bad deeds are comparatively easy, destroying is easier than building, because things are on the whole pretty fragile. So most unusual i.e. reporting worthy things are bad. However, most usual things are good. Correct for this bias and you find that most human efforts were usually into cooperating and building and were generally constructive. For every one case where someone burned someone for witchcraft (unusual and bad move) there are a hundreds of cases where he just paid a decent price to the witch for an anti-coughing tea (usual and good, mutually beneficial exchange) and so on. Just this did not get reported on. Too usual.
So you’re arguing that the Albanian sworn virgins were (socially) men? The very fact that they were called “virgins”, thus appealing to the ideal of female virginity, should give you a clue. I thought you were smarter than that.
Popular versions, yes, but they are not caricatures simply—more like what people actually believe in. Popularity matters.
Depends on which people. What the followers of the philosophies believe matters, what most people believe about the followers, not so much.
This jaded view was already disproved by Plato. Justice and efficiency go hand in hand and there is rarely lasting success without a lot of cooperation and fairness.
I’m not sure who you think your arguing against here. It certainly isn’t (most of) the philosophies you listed.
So you’re claiming that any human will be just as healthy on any diet?
No, and building straw mans like that is not useful at all. I am just claiming most human groups learned to be healthy on almost any nutrients their environment managed to offer. I.e. flexibility, adaptation ability, due to intelligence.
So you’re arguing that the Albanian sworn virgins were (socially) men?
Yes, the article is very clear about that. What is your point really? There is nothing particularly magic or essential about social roles, although it is clear that hormones play a role in being more suitable or less suitable for them.
What’s your evidence that RP is in fact wrong?
What do you mean by “misogynistic”? The word is commonly used to mean believing that there are significant differences between men and women. If you mean something else by this word feel free to explain it.
What do you mean by feminism 100% wins? Do you mean human nature will change? And if so to what?
This is highly debated how much human nature is hardcoded in this regard. The No 1. feature of human nature is the ability to adapt to wildly different circumstances. For example there is absolutely no such thing as an ancestral or paleolithical diet. Human nature is tribal, we still manage to have nations and supranational organizations somehow. Once could just as easily argue every political organization above kinship based tribes is against human nature. Yet we manage to do it… just with some unintended consequences (like tribalism rearing its head in politics, kicked out the door, it comes back the window).
My “gut instinct” is on the middle way: we can change genders, but with many unintended consequences. (For example, once consequence that is more or less visible already: when people become more unisex, sexual tension drops as it is generated by difference. One of my ugliest (thankfully unproven, conditional) beliefs is that every passionate sex is essentially BDSM, and easing up dominance/submission kills truly burning desire. Dropping birthrates may be another one.)
I think it is meant not simply about differences, but when 1) differences are used to justify social customs that reduce the autonomy / choices of people, primarily women 2) differences of the kind that tend to assign lower status to women. So when differences are value-laden in this way, and not purely factual. I think this is the most accepted usage.
However in the case of RP it is not even the usual meaning but something far worse. Really, really ugly lingo, not even “politically offensive” but insulting in that basic human pre-feminism sense, violating every rule of keeping a civil tongue in one’s head. For example blog.jim.com says most modern women are “psychotic whores”. This is not simply un-PC, it was a huge insult far before PC or feminism was invented, 1950 or whatever date you pick. It is not simply un-feminist or anti-feminist lingo, it is the lingo of louts who grew up in the gutter. It is simply incredibly un-classy.
First of all, statements can be right or wrong. Subcultures never. I think I should write an article about it, but subcultures are largely about like-minded people banding together, often held together by values and moods and personality types but not facts. They are simply beyond right or wrong: you can say that the most important statements a subculture believes are right or wrong, but the subculture as such cannot be reduced to its most important statements, because it is people. Prove them all wrong, and the very same people will band together in a different subculture that has different statements, but the same mood affiliation, the same mindset. Prove them all right, and you can still say the personality, mindset or values are still all horrible or simply bad, harmful. For example, I am an atheist and generally disagree with the major things Catholics believe in, yet I tend to generally like them as a people, it seems our mindset and mood is at some level similar (“Chestertonesque”). I like their subculture and disagree with their statements. It can also happen the other way around. So, context is everything.
The second issue is that good luck about trying to separating facts from values in the fields that are not natural science but more like human, social concerns. For example, Marxists claim to have an entirely factual analysis of how the engine of capitalism works, but it is full with so much value-laden, mood-laden terms, that you cannot really separate the factual proposition from a general value/mood of them disliking hierarchical modes of production.
I think the strategic aspect of RP is not bad, they are the kind of things a man stumbles upon by experience anyway, such as, there are interactions where mock agreement and humorous amplification are appropriate answers. If a girl in a bar would ask me to hold her purse I would probably parade around with it in a super gay way and good laughs would be had. The issue is the context, the values, the mood. For example, the interactions where this kind of answer is appropriate are called “shit tests” and they get referred to as “mercilessly swat down the shit tests”. So you see a general mood of hostility, aggressivity, negativity. And it is really difficult to separate the context from the statements.
So the issue is not that some statements are wrong. They are embedded in a very negative mood/value context.
One useful way to look at it is to say the issue is that RP guys were in some significant sense screwed up BEFORE swallowing the pill. So it is not the pill that is wrong as such, it is the kind of people it attracts. Because the same pill could be embedded in a very different mood and context, one of positivity, cooperation, friendliness and mutual respect.
Also the context I am talking about is actually just one example of a more general category of negative contexts. Similar negative contexts are: The Gervais Principle, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Social Darwinism, Objectivism. Generally ideas that cash out to saying life is all about brutal competition where winners take all and losers get screwed and generally downplaying the role positive social connections, alliances, support networks play in life outcomes, which generally come from “nice” behavior.
These negative contexts are what I called “dark romance” in a former conversation. It is the assumption that we live in a dog eat dog world, where the law of the jungle rules because the assumptions feels so… badass. Well, such things happen indeed. But on the other hand, it is incredibly handy and useful to be “nice” and be the kind of person others like to cooperate with or support. A truly smart sociopathic, evil Machiavelli would not try to project this jaded tough guy image but would be a super mellow nice person, the most agreeable person around, liked by everybody… and in the rare, really rare occasions when it worths it, he would backstab them. But if he is evil only for the sake of actual gain and not for the sake of evil being awesome and badass and darkly romantic… then such occasions are exceedingly rare.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Clearly you’re not saying that our antcectors did not eat. Are you saying that humans have genetically adapted to different diets since the paleolithic? That still leaves the concept of ancestral diet as important. Are you saying any given human will be just as healthy on any diet? That’s clearly false.
By adapting the larger organizations to human nature, yes.
This suggests your suffering from the arugment to mederation fallacy.
Can we? It’s possible for say men, to cut of their peneses and declare themselves women. (And in the west expect society to declare that they have always been women). However, in my experience the behvior of m-to-f trannies makes more sense if I model them as men who decided to “become women” as part of the especially male tendency to do crazy things.
Does it matter of said customs are rational (say in the sense of leading to better outcomes)?
Yes and in the 1950s a woman who behaved the way a typical women does today (at least in the west, I hear it’s not quite as bad in eastern Europe) would be considered much worse then simply un-classy and loutish. And yes “psychotic whore” sounds about right for what they would of thought of that type of woman.
Yes it is. At least it is possible to isolate the factual analysis enough to see that it is false.
Um, are you actually familiar with the philosophies you listed or are you going by the popular caricatures? Of the ones I’m familiar with, this is a rather bad characterization of Machiavelli and an absolute horrible characterization of Objectivism.
No, saying that even in the paleolithic they were adapted to wildly different diets, because they were intelligent and they could make the most of whatever grew near them. http://hells-ditch.com/2012/08/archaeologists-officially-declare-collective-sigh-over-paleo-diet/ If they found wild rice, that was okay. If they found whale blubber, that was also OK.
And I think this is a good example. The most typically human trait is flexibility because that is what intelligence generates.
In the specific case when something is argued to be impossible, taking a middle way seems sensible: almost everything is possible, just often you have to throw the equivalent of a nuke on it, and then you will get all kinds of unwanted consequences.
Come on, you are smarter than that, you know the difference between biological sex and social gender. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_sworn_virgins
Really I bet this is not new to you, you just pretend you have never heard the difference…
I find it far too optimistic but I figure neither of us has evidence here.
Popular versions, yes, but they are not caricatures simply—more like what people actually believe in. Popularity matters. To give you a reverse example, some people argue the Soviets were never properly, really Communists or Marxist. This means, they did not really believe what some books said. Books matter. But actual history, what people actually do, often matters more. Soviet Communism was the kind of Communism that mattered, because this had nukes and the obscure kind of Communism that had only some books and debating groups mattered far less. The same thing with the ones I mentioned—they were far smarter than this, but based on them there is a popular view of a simplified “dog eat dog” world where everything is competition and winners take all and losers suck and cooperation does not worth for anything.
This jaded view was already disproved by Plato. Justice and efficiency go hand in hand and there is rarely lasting success without a lot of cooperation and fairness.
I often think the jaded views on the right horseshoe into the oppression-oriented views on the left quite nicely, the difference is largely about how to evaluate the same facts and how changable it is, but both extremes would say the world as we know it so far is usually pretty ugly. I think it is not, we are just under the spell of a huge yellow journalism bias. When someone murders their spouse, that is on TV evening news. When people cook their spouse their favorite food or take them to their favorite restaurant, that is not. Reporting is biased towards the negative, largely because it is biased towards the unusual, and it is far, far harder to do something unusually good than unusually bad. Unusually bad deeds are comparatively easy, destroying is easier than building, because things are on the whole pretty fragile. So most unusual i.e. reporting worthy things are bad. However, most usual things are good. Correct for this bias and you find that most human efforts were usually into cooperating and building and were generally constructive. For every one case where someone burned someone for witchcraft (unusual and bad move) there are a hundreds of cases where he just paid a decent price to the witch for an anti-coughing tea (usual and good, mutually beneficial exchange) and so on. Just this did not get reported on. Too usual.
So you’re claiming that any human will be just as healthy on any diet?
So you’re arguing that the Albanian sworn virgins were (socially) men? The very fact that they were called “virgins”, thus appealing to the ideal of female virginity, should give you a clue. I thought you were smarter than that.
Depends on which people. What the followers of the philosophies believe matters, what most people believe about the followers, not so much.
I’m not sure who you think your arguing against here. It certainly isn’t (most of) the philosophies you listed.
No, and building straw mans like that is not useful at all. I am just claiming most human groups learned to be healthy on almost any nutrients their environment managed to offer. I.e. flexibility, adaptation ability, due to intelligence.
Yes, the article is very clear about that. What is your point really? There is nothing particularly magic or essential about social roles, although it is clear that hormones play a role in being more suitable or less suitable for them.
That was rude to jump right to without further justification.