Men and feminism

First off it needs to be said that Arthur Chu has publicly endorsed one of the most anti-semitic hate filled screeds I have ever read in my life, as well as publicly encouraged and even participated in doxing attacks against women and non-whites he disagrees with. He's publicly said he has absolutely no problem with lying or worse to further his own ends.

Second, I'll let Scott Alexander's extremely thorough and very well-cited essay take over the rebuttal.

The reason people are learning to hate feminism is because when someone shares how they were so harmed by constant abusive messages that they literally BEGGED TO BE CASTRATED OR KILLED the universal feminist response from the most prominent, influential, and popular feminist writers out there has been so deplorable that an article which merely says his suicidal depression was "not nothing" is effusively praised just for the sake of not being an utterly abhorrent attack on him in some of the most despicable terms possible.

As Scott Alexander writes the mere fact one article happened to treat him like a human being was "rare and wonderful".

Maybe, just maybe, the fact that the people behind this utterly deplorable behavior are some of the most widely supported and influential feminists out there today who own the largest feminist websites on the internet and regularly write for audiences in the multi-millions to thunderous applause has something to do with why feminism has earned itself a bad name. These people aren't the Westboro of feminism, they're Queen at Live Aid.

 

I don't know anything about Arthur Chu; never heard of him before today. The essay you linked to didn't mention him. The paragraph I quoted resonates very much with my own experience with major depression, which is why I brought it here.

Incidentally, I found out about Scott Aaronson, Laurie Penny, and Arthur Chu this afternoon in a posting by a writer and critic I greatly respect (I omit his name only to avoid outing myself). He characterized Amanda Marcotte's piece (not in these words) as a toxic piece of bullying.

In any case, thanks for the pointer to Scott Alexander, who I didn't expect to like from your excerpt, but who is entirely reasonable, persuasive, and readable. I've spent the last hour or more reading his very interesting blog, and I expect to keep up with it from now on.

 

Slate Star Codex is up there with Less Wrong and Kazerad on the list of excellent illuminatory writers. I'd include Jackdaws as an honorary mention on that list for his Eight Meditations but he seems to have retired from the public discourse. The only problem I have with any of them is that despite the wealth of evidence it's unwarranted some such as Slate Star still insist on being obsequiously apologetic in their criticism of feminism, dancing around a true call-out with caveats and the like.

That's a fair if mild description of basically everything she and her peers write. As for Chu's excerpt... it's a painted clock situation. Chu is one of the most toxic voices online right now, but unlike many others he freely admits that he lies and uses doublethink on a near constant basis and derides others who won't do the same. He believes that only "winning" matters so strongly that he truly doesn't see the problem with admitting that he just uses morality as a disposable weapon against people he doesn't like. Doxing is bad... unless it's doxing people he hates. Bigotry is bad... except against his enemies. Violence is wrong... unless it's used against people disagreeing with him.

 

A what?

 

"Even a painted clock is right at least once a day", you've never heard that metaphor?

 

Never with "painted" instead of "stopped", no. (And a Google search on "painted clock" yielded ... links to sites about actual clocks.)

Also, a friend has a blog titled The Stopped Clock ("Political discussion and ranting, premised upon the fact that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.")

But thank you.

 

Just gonna chime in and say that I've not found Chu to be toxic at all. But then again, I'm not at all pro-Gamer Gate. I could see how he would rub proGG folk the wrong way.


With respect to maleness or masculinity, I think of those are marketing terms. There's a lot of money to be made trading on sex-based insecurity. I don't spend a lot of time comparing myself to arbitrary benchmarks of manliness. I know people who do. They seem unhappy, insecure and shallow.

 

I bet they're perfectly fine with embodying masculinity, unless a man tries to do something like hug them.

 

If you're not also pro-doxing, pro-anti-semitism, pro-genocide, pro-racism, pro-sexism, and pro-transphobia you should find Chu to be so toxic you question whether it's Poe's law at times. Unless of course the reason you don't find him toxic is the same reason you refuse to find anything wrong with any other feminist's actions, which both Slate Star and I have written about in different wordings:

This can be said of literally anything. Maleness and masculinity, femaleness and femininity, stoicism, bravery, congeniality, Finnish sisu, anything can be dismissed on the grounds of it being an marketing term and arbitrary benchmark.

 

That strikes me as probably over-the-top. But though I have seen no evidence, I'm not dismissing this characterization completely out of hand.

That's because what Shadowex3 says about Chu really reminds me of my own views about A. M. Rosenthal, who I regard as the worst person to write a regular column for the New York Times. I cheered loudly when he was fired. I would call him "pro-genocide."

Of course he and his admirers would deny that, and no single column he ever wrote could possibly prove it.

But in 1988-92, I was a very close student of everything happening in Yugoslavia, getting news from a wide variety of perspectives, including partisans of all sides. For an American who had never been there, I think I had a deep and nuanced understanding of the situation. After a while, it became obvious that Rosenthal was the American media's leading apologist for Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbian nationalists.

It's one thing to be a contrarian, it's entirely another to constantly, column after column after column, misrepresent events and circumstances that I was very familiar with at the time.

And once I saw how he approached this one little corner of the world, I realized he did exactly the same thing everywhere else. A whole lot of his observations, whether I agreed with him or not, just lined right up along the same axis: to him, anything that killed a Muslim was a positive good. Whichever side of a question involved killing more Muslims, no matter how monstrous or unjust it was, that was the side he took.

The New York Times never quite disclosed why they got rid of him, but I believe that was it.

 

I thought he was anti-GG. Why would he adopt so many of their tactics?

This is true; words and ideas can be grouped together in a lot of different ways.

Street Pattern, Chu is someone who is very publicly anti-Gamer Gate. People who are publicly anti Gamer Gate are typically subjected to all types of absurd accusations based on faulty logic, confirmation bias and casual malice. I don't know enough about Chu to know whether any of Shadowex's accusations are true, and I don't really care. I follow Chu on Twitter and I've never seen him tweet anything egregious. I do know that Gamer Gate deserves absolutely zero credibility when it comes to accurately assessing a person's character.

 

See now you're just trolling and I'm tempted to report your post, but anyone else reading this deserves to know the magnitude of criminal and deplorable behavior you're lying to defend.

The entire smear campaign against gamergate is an absurdist conspiracy theory on the level of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Chemtrails. It is beyond absurd to claim that tens to hundreds of thousands of people from all around the world, including a disproportionate number of women and non-white/LGBT gamers, gathered together for pushing five months now for the sole reason that they all hate women so much that they would raise nearly $200,000 for about a half dozen charities and even track down the very people ACTUALLY committing harassment so fast that the other side's polemecists literally can't even retweet them for publicity before they're gone.

On the other hand to baseless and empirically disproven conspiracy theories there IS objective proof that racist troll groups such as the GNAA and anti-gamergate people have repeatedly engaged in false-flagging or even paid others up to $20 a tweet for false-flagging (with guess who's help). There IS objective proof that anti-gamergate have engaged in a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse overwhelmingly targeted at women and non-whites who dare speak out against a group of 80-90% white male journalists, a campaign of abuse so severe that I lost count around thirty people getting doxed and losing their jobs, having their bank accounts hacked, their income cut off and utilities shut off by fraud, getting death threats from people on terrorist watch-lists for downloading IED instructions, getting mailed knives, syringes, and dead animals along with death threats and abuse, and multiple people have nearly been killed in SWATtings.[/URL]

The sheer quantity and severity of harm caused by anti-gamergate's targeted campaigns of harassment and abuse is simply incomparable. You just can't compare the GNAA making mean tweets with people losing jobs, nearly getting murdered repeatedly, and getting knives and dead animals sent to them in the mail.

By "absurd accusations based on faulty logic, confirmation bias and casual malice" what Bodkin means is archives of hard evidence showing them doing such wonderful things as shitting on women and minorities, threatening to dox people, victim blaming victims of terrorism, talking about how necessary it is to "mindkill" yourself and other orwellian insanity, and openly arguing against civility or even rationality ("andrew cord" = "arthur chu").

Of course Chu, despite being one of the most toxic people online right now, still doesn't come close to some of the other disgusting racists, neo-nazis, domestic abusers and so much more.

Or to sum all this up Bodkin as always is following a very simple formula: "A feminist did it, therefore it's not wrong and the target must be a horrible misogynist that deserved it anyway". Chu is on the side of a group of people claiming the mantle of "Feminism" as their shield and banner, therefore Chu can do no wrong. Anyone who disagrees with Chu must be wrong about everything. Any evidence contradicting this, no matter how incontrovertible, must be simply ignored because as step one states Chu claims the mantle of "Feminism" and therefore can do no wrong.

 

Rogue, read some of the citations. That's what Bodkin's not only defending but trying to lie and smear the victims of. I think there stopped being an "overboard" responding to that around the time minorities started being targeted for attacks costing them their jobs, let alone when people started getting knives and dead animals in the mail, let alone when multiple people were almost killed in one night because of a SWATting.

Killed, rogue. People were almost murdered by the people Bodkin is lying to protect right now, by neonazis and domestic abusers, by criminals colluding to blacklist women and non-whites from the industry.

If that doesn't justify anger I don't know what does.

 

Here's my problem.
It must be like how my Muslim friends feel when some crazed asshole shoots up a kosher market and every pundit climbs up on their soapbox to demand that Muslims must apologize.
No matter how often my friends point out that they as well as a million other Muslims loath, condemn, and hate what was done in their religions name it doesn't matter.
The idiots are going to insist that the killers are the true example.

The same goes for feminism.
No matter how many times I say that, for example these random tweets, do not in any way speak for me or any feminist I've ever met they will be thrown in our face.
Yes, there are idiots and truly nasty people out there who use the standard of feminism to justify their bullshit but you know what they don't speak for me or the hundreds of thousand of feminist out there.

But being reasonable and understanding of the differences takes away from the turning things into an us vs them scenario.
Too many people prefer that.
They aren't happy unless they can have a huge enemy to fight, so they can be the oppressed.
The valiant underdog, battling against the evil persecutor.
When in fact the world is far more complex and made up of people who much more in common than most are willing to admit.

 

There are over 30 countries, some of them major world powers, that openly preach and encourage exactly this kind of violence. To deny this is a direct product of Islamic ideology is as absurd as denying the inquisition was a product of Christianity.

I literally JUST posted a very well cited article pointing out why this argument is completely disproven by the fact people like this, and worse, are some of the most universally lauded and supported people in feminism today. You don't get to say "they don't speak for the hundreds of thousands of feminists out there" while they're literally the most prominent and publicly supported feminists out there. If these people "don't speak for the hundreds of thousands of feminist out there" then prove it. Where's the opposing voice that IS supported by "hundreds of thousand of feminist out there"? Why are these people supported by hundreds of thousands, writing for audiences of millions, controlling multi-million dollar organizations, all without ANY major feminist opposition?

If what you were saying had a SHRED of truth to it then these people wouldn't be where they are in the first place, let alone sitting comfortably there with no opposition. How can you not see that? This is BASIC logic.[/quote]

 

Man, I don't give two shits about gamergate. Gamergate is about two things: 1) attempting to salvage the unsalvageable GamerGate brand, and 2) attacking people who publicly oppose GamerGate. It's basically just a massive group of well-meaning dupes who are motivated by a handful of charismatic, exploitative sociopaths with some early-stage anonymous rejects thrown in for black ops. As I said before, anti-GG people are subjected to absurd allegations based on faulty logic, confirmation bias and casual malice, and you can see evidence of all three things in the litany of links provided by Shadowex. However, I would listen to him when he says that "The entire smear campaign against gamergate is an absurdist conspiracy theory on the level of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or Chemtrails." Because he's right. The people who believe that there's some vast orchestrated conspiracy against GG have a lot in common with the people who believe that Jews are secretly running everything, or that Chemtrails gonna get ya.

This is the last thing I'm going to say about GG in this thread, because GG is beneath this thread.

 

[/quote]


I would argue that the inquisition as well as the Crusades were based on politics with religion used as a thinly veiled excuse.
Just as I would argue that religious laws and governments often have absolutely nothing to do with the books that are the supposed to be the base for their religion.
And there are 25 countries where the state religion is Islam but at least five of those have laws on the books for freedom of religion.
And they also are a mix of 4 different kinds of Islam with 3 countries allowing whatever kind you want.
But more importantly my friends grew up in New Jersey, went to public high schools, got degrees at Rutgers, worked at crap retail jobs, are Dr. Who fans, listen to the White Stripes, volunteered for Rush Holt and are Muslim.
They are Americans through and through.
The world is more complicated than one sentence.

And on that subject.
I repeat the point that I refuse to keep saying that I don't agree with the hand full of assholes you keep linking to.
Sure some of them have risen to the top.
But I don't feel a need to apologize for Valerie Solanas so I don't need to apologize for them either.