Grant: I would second everything in your post except the last paragraph.
Angel: I sincerely do apologize for making you feel bad, and I certainly won’t use your name in the future, as hurting people is bad, hurting people in ways that make them likely to behave worse is worse, and my not trusting the person I harm or not considering them to have good intentions doesn’t make it better.
That said, NO, it is NOT wrongwrongwrong to tell people that its a bad idea to adopt such and such a label because the people who typically use that label are in some respect immoral, crazy, or even simply widely believed to be so. If you call yourself a Communist I will point out that you are choosing a label identified most strongly with mass murderers, and if you call yourself a Christian, one identified with warmongering anti-rationalists. Doing this is beneficial. If you call yourself a ‘communist’, you really will probably end up with an inappropriately positive attitude towards the Soviet Union even as you denounce it as “not really communism”. If you call yourself a Muslim you really will probably end up with a level of sympathy for Islamic terrorists that you lack for terrorists of other types even as you insist that they are misguided and that “Islam is really a religion of peace”.
Labels are in general destructive of rationality. In so far as they are useful, it is because their signaling value exceeds their emotional cost. It is totally appropriate to emphasize the negative messages that a label will send to someone who is considering adopting it, and the main source of such negative messages comes from making claims of similarity to all others who are using that label. In the case of feminism it is totally clear to me that many of the more prominent feminists endorse positions diametrically opposed to equal rights and to rational thought and it sure seemed to me like you did as well based on your posts.
At this point, I still don’t believe with p>50% that you favor rational thought or equal rights, but I’m willing to make that assumption for argument’s sake if you wish to stick around. I don’t really prefer for you to stick around, but I do think that there is a very small chance of my learning something very important by your doing so, so I’ll do what I can not do discourage your continuing presence here. Not in exchange, but rather as a token of your commitment to sincere deliberation I would like to ask you to internally and externally taboo “privilege” and “dominant” while you are here. These concepts seem to me to be too loaded and amorphous to contribute to the dialog.
Grant: I would second everything in your post except the last paragraph.
Angel: I sincerely do apologize for making you feel bad, and I certainly won’t use your name in the future, as hurting people is bad, hurting people in ways that make them likely to behave worse is worse, and my not trusting the person I harm or not considering them to have good intentions doesn’t make it better.
That said, NO, it is NOT wrongwrongwrong to tell people that its a bad idea to adopt such and such a label because the people who typically use that label are in some respect immoral, crazy, or even simply widely believed to be so. If you call yourself a Communist I will point out that you are choosing a label identified most strongly with mass murderers, and if you call yourself a Christian, one identified with warmongering anti-rationalists. Doing this is beneficial. If you call yourself a ‘communist’, you really will probably end up with an inappropriately positive attitude towards the Soviet Union even as you denounce it as “not really communism”. If you call yourself a Muslim you really will probably end up with a level of sympathy for Islamic terrorists that you lack for terrorists of other types even as you insist that they are misguided and that “Islam is really a religion of peace”.
Labels are in general destructive of rationality. In so far as they are useful, it is because their signaling value exceeds their emotional cost. It is totally appropriate to emphasize the negative messages that a label will send to someone who is considering adopting it, and the main source of such negative messages comes from making claims of similarity to all others who are using that label. In the case of feminism it is totally clear to me that many of the more prominent feminists endorse positions diametrically opposed to equal rights and to rational thought and it sure seemed to me like you did as well based on your posts.
At this point, I still don’t believe with p>50% that you favor rational thought or equal rights, but I’m willing to make that assumption for argument’s sake if you wish to stick around. I don’t really prefer for you to stick around, but I do think that there is a very small chance of my learning something very important by your doing so, so I’ll do what I can not do discourage your continuing presence here. Not in exchange, but rather as a token of your commitment to sincere deliberation I would like to ask you to internally and externally taboo “privilege” and “dominant” while you are here. These concepts seem to me to be too loaded and amorphous to contribute to the dialog.