Cross-eyed Crosshair Crossfire…
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Not even God can argue with a shrug, which is why he created the universe to resemble one.
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Crazy days on TPB! On the one hand I find myself once again arguing against Vox, an extremely popular ‘libertarian’ blogger, who calls me ‘Wangsty’ (among other things) and believes bigoted rubbish like this:
Logic dictates that women must be encouraged to bear and raise subsequent generations. 50 years of experience indicates that there is no loss to society and substantial benefit from ensuring that the law and social structures support that role while hindering alternative roles. Granted, this does assume that societal survival is a positive objective.
While Acrackedmoon, a self-proclaimed ‘feminist’ troll (and the only person to have called me more names than Vox!) decides to diagnose my moral and psychological defects through, er, ‘highly motivated’ readings of my books…
Mr Bakker, you are disgusting. It’s not even that you are edgy or avant-garde. You’re just disgusting in a sad, banal way; reading this is like catching you masturbating to rape porn surrounded by wads of used tissue. Possibly your masturbating aid is your own steaming feces. And, not quite content with being found out (and feeling no shame, for that matter), you record it and upload it to youtube, and share around the link. Bakker is the piglet with the explosive diarrhea that’s very, very proud of the shit he’s just excreted. And he wants us all to smell it. Possibly follow his lead and taste it too.
Does it make me weird that I almost feel… I dunno, honoured?
Aside from pointing out that ACM missed her calling as a cherrypicker, I do need to correct her on one point: Three Pound Brain does not ‘pretend’ to be about battling misogyny, it’s about the fact that our brains only weigh three pounds and how this becomes painfully obvious when we look at the myriad bigotries that some of us are actually proud to display. TPB, ACM, is about you! And Vox.
And me. And, well, everybody who has a three pound brain.
Misogyny is simply a symptom of how stupid and self-serving we all are. As is racism. As is any outlook that lumps people into pejorative categories (like ‘neckbeards’), that urges or insinuates hatred of people based on simplistic identifications.
Our brains, given that they only weigh three pounds, are built to economize, so they continually over-simplify. In a sense, we’re simplification machines. They are also built to self-promote and to other-denigrate, which is to say, to place themselves on pedestals (the way I am now) and to dig holes for perceived competitors (the way I am now). They are, in other words, social machines as well.
Now this is a problem for all of us as a species, especially given the strange and perhaps tumultuous days to come. But, the same way everyone you know has pretty much all the inclinations everyone has only with the levels cranked high and low, for some people the personality EQ is way out of whack. We’re all allergic to social complexity, but some people just can’t stand it. We’re all inclined to dislike those who disagree or challenge us, but some people feel compelled to hate.
And sometimes, when everything seems fucked up, we find these extremists attractive—insightful, funny, courageous, what-have you. Why? Because they seem to give voice to our own inclinations. They make it easy to give in to our need for certainty and simplicity. They promise you things like racial harmony through racial purity, make traditional chauvinisms sound reasonable, or they savage things that challenge or complicate, while giving some inner dislike or fear or dissatisfaction a booming, hateful voice—because few things seem to empower quite so much as hate.
All Three Pound Brain does is remind people they have three pound brains. The fact that so many of those simple, hateful things feel so right (me awesome, they scum!) is the result of your brain being—as a matter of scientific fact—a self-promoting simplification machine. (One of the easiest ways to detect whether someone is having problems with their social complexity tolerance levels, I like to think, is the tendency to call perceived social competitors names).
I remember thinking Haidt’s metaphor of ‘the rider and the elephant’ cheesy when I first heard it a few years back, but reading The Righteous Mind has turned me around. Psychologists have been busy the last few years sorting those cognitive processes that are automatic from those that are genuinely deliberative—and as it turns out, the vast bulk of our determinations (especially when they are moral) belong to the automatic category. The more we learn about the deliberative side, the more it seems to have the job of socially promoting our automatic judgements, rather than explaining our own motivations (which largely remain invisible to us). Thus the automatic elephant and the deliberative rider. The first passes arbitrary judgment, and the second pretends there was a fair trial.
As Haidt writes:
the rider acts as spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn’t necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking. The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons for justifying whatever it is the elephant wants to do next. Once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm. (46)
The amount of research supporting this ‘post hoc rationalization model’ is fast becoming mountainous. And it certainly explains why all my attempts to change anyone’s mind about me (because, no, I’m not a misogynist) or about the proper role of women (because, no, the state should not coerce them into assuming their ‘reproductive duty’) have probably made me more of a laughingstock than anything!
“Why do you bother?” has to be one of the most frequent questions I encounter here at TPB. Every one of us has encountered fringe people with fringe opinions over the years. We all have the experience of looking someone in the eye and realizing that it quite simply does not matter what you say. So what do we do?
Nod and smile and slink away.
What could be more obvious? Especially when it comes to the web, where you have to work to communicate in the first place, let alone deal with all the tone-problems posed by text, or the volatility of the online disinhibition effect.
So why do I bother? A right-wing bigot on the one hand, and a left-wing hatemonger on the other. You gotta know I ain’t going to change their minds. And since my own positions are so wank and deflationary, there’s precious little chance they’re going to change mine.
My whole life I’ve been pinched between worlds. I grew up poor, in one of those rural houses set far enough back from the road that no one could hear the laughing, let alone the screaming and shouting. I loved books, but learned very quickly to keep them on the down-low. I remember thinking that university would set me free, that there, at least, I wouldn’t have to be secretive or defensive about my passions. My first year English Literature class cured me of that idealistic nonsense. Conan, apparently, has no place in serious literary discussions.
So I spent the next several years trying to be ‘serious,’ to have ‘serious’ interests I could share with other ‘serious’ people. Rather than resenting the denigration of my tastes—not to mention my class—I did what most everyone does, at first: I made fun of who I was, simply because that’s the price of human admission when you find yourself outside looking in. Aside from dress and accent and belief, you socially identify yourself by the things you love and hate. Thus all the advertisements on our T-shirts. ‘Identity claims,’ psychologists call them. So I ran down fantasy, cracked jokes about my D&D days, said things like, “Can you believe I was so retarded?” I did what I’m sure so very many lapsed fantasy fans have done, consciously or unconsciously. I bought into the ‘Myth of Literature.’
But what I didn’t do was swap out my friends. As a result, I found myself playing hypocrite in both worlds, not so much changing my tune as amending it, as if I were a vase with multiple motifs that could be turned this way or that to flatter the tastes of whoever seemed to count at any given moment. It would be graduate school that cured me of this particular disease: whatever desire I had to be ‘serious’ literally died within the first few weeks of my MA program. I became cynical in the modern sense, and devoted myself to mastering the game of taking and being taken seriously (in hothouse academic subcultures).
And this didn’t sit well either. After tumbling off a half dozen philosophical bandwagons, I came to the realization that it was almost all rationalization, people beginning with inklings or full blown conclusions, then cherry-picking whatever they needed to sound smart. This was certainly what I had been doing. How else could I have been so convinced at each turn, unless I was fooling myself somehow?
Then I began reading cognitive psychology. I was teaching this pop culture class, but I was so disgusted with semiotics that I decided to toss the assigned text in the trash, and to look at culture as a kind of evolutionary and psychological prosthesis. Two things came out of that class. The first was Neuropath (where I tried, among other things, to depict a nihilistic future – one I think we’re hurtling toward now – where biological imperatives replace moral ones (so leading to a mass normalization of the pornographic culture that ACM so perceptively takes as evidence of my misogyny!)). The second was my conversion to cynicism in a more ancient sense.
I was, and still am, absolutely astounded that I could spend all the years I had studying philosophy without encountering any real, empirical research on human cognition. I suppose it makes institutional sense in retrospect, given what those findings seem to entail (namely, that the ancient Skeptics were right all along), but I still find the sheer magnitude of the hypocrisy boggling. On the one hand, we have good reason to believe that humans are theoretical incompetents through and through, and on the other, we have this institution devoted to the study of human theory and theoretical competence that wants no part of it.
Hypocrisy. Everywhere I look, this is what I see. Especially when I find myself looking in the mirror. I feel it now, writing this… Really, when it comes down to it, I’m just covering my own ass here, aren’t I?
Of course I am. But at the same time, I know the information technology revolution is just underway, as are revolutions in a broad spectrum of scientific fields. The kinds of crazy changes we’ve witnessed in just the past couple decades are just ramping up. Our tools are about to become more powerful and more pervasive than we can imagine, and humanity, meanwhile, is stranded with the same old, horribly maladapted paleolithic psychology—one designed to dupe us into thinking we know things that we plainly do not.
My whole career is bent around the notion of spreading the hypocritical word—hypocritically. Since the social trend seems to be one of segmentation, ever closer fits between transmitters and receivers, I self-consciously decided to engage people with diametrically opposing views, particularly those possessing what I think is the greatest threat of all, moral certainty.
So with my books, I look at genres as specialty channels, as ways to engage audiences with views different than my own. Within those books, I always try to tweak the reader’s moral sensibilities, to show—not the ‘proper’ moral ‘answer’—but the complexities that so often undermine the apparent simplicity of our moral intuitions. Faith and gender, as it happens, are two of my preferred saws.
And with this site, Three Pound Brain, I try to periodically spark debates with those who, like Vox and ACM, I think entertain particularly troubling views. People who can’t laugh at themselves. People who are continually pointing fingers at others, condemning, blaming… People, in short, who trust their own illusory sense of moral superiority too much to be trusted. I do so, not with the intention of ‘converting’ people, but of simply making as many people as possible aware of the complexities that afflict all subject matters, and the infirmities that—as a matter of empirical fact—own our three pound brains.
And man o’ man do I get raked over the coals! But, then, as the Chinese proverb says, He who asks questions is a fool for a moment, but he who asks no questions is a fool for life. Someone’s gotta be extreme about doubt.
Don’t they?
Three Pound Brain 
I’m finding this discussion increasingly frustrating. I’m familiar with the post-hoc rationalization literature and I’ll be entering a cog/social PhD program in the fall at NYU to study implicit prejudice. You’re absolutely right to hammer on the importance of the points.
But that should make you even more aware of the possibility that you’re actually doing something wrong in your handling of women, sex, gender and rape – something that the personal nature of these criticisms makes it hard to acknowledge.
The best way to avoid groupthink is a devil’s advocate and the most accurate assessors of many attributes are critics. You should know the dangers of the fundamental attribution error, even applied to yourself: misogyny is not an on-off, either-or brush. Our society guarantees that almost everyone will likely espouse a misogynistic attitude or make a misogynistic statement at some point.
If you’re going to preach the gospel of modern psychology, you should try to apply its lessons to your own work. Intending to attack misogyny doesn’t immunize you from introducing misogynistic themes or elements into your writing.
How many more bullets do I need to bite? I’ve acknowledged many problems, many worries, many times in many different venues over the years. This is one reason why I need to set up a FAQ page, I guess.
What have I missed?
I don’t know – I’m not qualified to speak for you. But while I think you’re right about polarization, extremism, and cherrypicking in principle, hitting on those points every time you discuss ACM – as if the core of her argument is predicated on failing to grasp yours – seems like a failure to acknowledge that she’s not just spewing false positives. It perpetuates a situation where the two of you just shout past each other.
This back-and-forth has been going on for months, and it feels like it could’ve been concluded by a simple ‘I disagree with some of her methods, but I can’t say she doesn’t make some points worth real consideration’. Surely awareness of the whole rider-and-elephant situation allows us to recognize that we should be trying to assimilate information from even the most hurtful criticism?
Have you read her posts? Her initial post took the first 6 pages of TDTCB and an interview I did explaining why misogynistic readings were misreadings. Irresponsible in the extreme. Then add all the name-calling!
I’m not sure how one begins to ‘give the devil their due’ in such a situation. She certainly has no interest in ‘debating’ or ‘discussing’ or doing anything other than being the troll she declared herself to be – which is to say, bent on provoking anger and defensiveness for the purposes of mocking and shaming. You might be giving her more credit than she deserves.
And incidentally, a few of the social psych faculty at NYU believe that the distinction between ‘automatic’ and ‘deliberative’ is a patent simplification, a relic of Freud that needs to be done away with entirely. They want to model the brain as a system of interconnected modules that can’t be cleanly divided into ‘elephant’ and ‘rider’. Should be interesting to see where that goes.
I think this is the way things are headed as well. The ultimate picture, I fear, will be both much more complicated and much more depressing (more of a herd of elephants with multiple fleas). But the analogy is useful in demarcating what seems to be an important functional division as far as ‘moral reasoning’ is concerned.
To make a fantasy reference, I prefer to think of a centaur in terms of the merging and no clean division. But yeah, it the relative proportions isn’t really taken into account by that. But still, an engaging image.
Surely repeated acknowledgement that he is subject to the same failings as his detractors earns him at least partial credit?
Not just partial credit; he should pass the test outright. Of all the most annoying trends in modern thought, there is one that really stands out as being damaging to discourse.
Many years ago, an instructor of mine related that ALL work, philosophical and otherwise, comes with an implicit “I think” or “I believe” in front of it. The one damaging thing in modern thought is that people seem to be forgetting this. IF that “I think” or “I believe” isn’t made explicit, then people forget it’s there at all. We all assume that everything we read is automatically a fact because it’s in writing. People also assume that when they write it, it becomes some immutable statement of position from which they can’t deviate. Read some of the opinions left here for evidence. This bias is one of the reasons encyclopedia writers are so frustrated with Wikipedia.
This leads directly to what Mr. Bakker is talking about: people so confident in their own opinions because they forget that they actually ARE opinions rather than bald statements of fact. How can we debate people who already believe themselves privy to the truth?
We can’t. Of course, all of the above is just what I think, but you already knew that, didn’t you.
Good points Jonathan, though I’d argue that something like “The best available evidence indicates…”you when the discussion is scientific in nature.
That’s definitely more precise. Science is considered equivalent to truth far too often, and such a phrase might help clear the air a bit. Even so, everything that would be contained in a paragraph prefaced by this phrase would then be the thoughts of the person composing it, based on the best available evidence. I’m sure many of us have become aware that the very same scientific data can be interpreted in multiple, often contradictory, ways.
Anything that helps make it clear that what’s being typed isn’t The Truth is a good idea as far as I’m concerned.
But that should make you even more aware of the possibility that you’re actually doing something wrong in your handling of women, sex, gender and rape – something that the personal nature of these criticisms makes it hard to acknowledge.
What type of wrong? There’s a ‘communicating badly’ kind of wrong. When it comes to ‘this is mysogynist/the author is mysogynistic’ wrong, why do some women think the texts aren’t mysogynistic/the author is not mysogynistic?
The fact is, ACM is not saying the texts are mysogynistic for her, but instead saying they are mysogynistic for ALL women. This is blatently false. But she’s sweeping in a coral of people for which her word is the whole world.
The culturing of that is an ongoing lie. It’s not the whole world, obviously. At best she really believes the lie and thinks her subjective is actual a world wide objective measure. But I suspect she’s smarter than to confuse subjective and objective.
You seem to be buying into her stating some sort of global wrong yourself, when it’s a localised one.
The best way to avoid groupthink is a devil’s advocate and the most accurate assessors of many attributes are critics.
For you, is anyone who talks with reference to a text, a critic?
This seems an indescriminant legitimisation. If you just want to say ‘hey, try and listen to everyone’ without the whole ‘critic’ legitimacy, fair enough. Because that makes it more clear the mixed bag effect you get from listening to everyone.
Besides, how can some one who stopped after page six and therefore didn’t actually read the text be considered a critic?
When talking about acrackedmoon, you shouldn’t put scare quotes around feminist, or call her a troll. She is a feminist, not a ‘feminist’. She is a reviewer, not a troll. Just saying, you shouldn’t start your post about not being misogynist with being…misogynist.
Or does a white guy get to tell a queer woman of color whether she is or is not feminist?
Anyways, like the comment above said, examine your own work before jumping to defensiveness.
She’s a self-described troll and feminist.
Does a white guy get to tell a queer woman of color whether she is or is not feminist? I dunno. If I think she’s doing more harm to women than good, then I will call her on it the way I would anyone. It would be paternalism if I did otherwise. She’s the kind of feminist that drives men into the arms of Vox – who I guarantee you has a bigger audience than all of us combined. It’s a big, truly misogynistic web out there. If you don’t believe me, read Haidt’s book. The dynamics of these things are pretty clear.
I examine my work every single day. If ACM had simply asked me why so much seems so troubling, I would have gladly obliged.
A woman being outspoken and blunt doesn’t invalidate her points. You’re using the same arguments used to mute women’s voices for reasons of hysteria, insanity, etc. If you want to do any writing that has anything to do with gender and misogyny, I’d suggest not forgetting The Yellow Wallpaper.
People don’t stop being feminists the instant you decide they’ve crossed some invisible line. Have some respect for people’s essential dignity.
If you really cared, you’d look past her acerbity (which many of us women appreciate because it actually matches the tenor of our daily struggles) and examine her salient points about your writing, like the all-females-lose-their-minds-but-men-stay-in-control approach to female sexuality or the ever-present male gaze when it comes to depicting anything involving sex.
Let me just point out that, evidently, you think it’s fine for you to tell Scott what words to use and what punctuation to eschew. Should I dismiss your remarks as an example of ‘womansplaining’?
If discussion, debate, and disagreement can only flow one way (from women –> men, from underprivileged –> privileged) to avoid automatically qualifying as sexist or racist or what-have-you, then haven’t we simply replaced one unfortunate and unneeded authority-gradient with another, equally unfortunate and equally unneeded one?
Let me say also that Scott’s post is not about “not being misogynist.” If you think that that’s what it’s about, then it would seem that you’ve utterly missed the point.
Finally, it was my impression that ACM is a self-proclaimed troll? Doesn’t she have a page on her site devoted to her trollish triumphs?
Oh, and one more thing: Do you think there are certain minimum requirements a person must meet to deserve the title of ‘reviewer’? Can I, for instance, ‘review’ a movie I’ve never seen, or a book I’ve never read? I would think the answer must be no. If that’s the case, though, then ACM has never ‘reviewed’ any of Scott’s books (not to say she hasn’t reviewed others). I’m not sure how best to characterize what she’s written about Scott’s books, but ‘review’ doesn’t seem to fit, as a matter of gender-neutral, race-neutral fact. (Surely you agree that there are such facts, yes?)
you’re asking too many questions, delavagus, instead of nodding along and going “yes and…”
seriously though, that second paragraph and last paragraph sum up my own distaste for the blatant paternalism that certain white-guilt advocates prattle on and on about. if ACM were a balding white dude in a basement, there would be chuckles and scorn but certainly not the prim “oh, she has a voice, how dare you discount a queer woman of color’s voice, 6-pages and an interview is more than a enough metric when you classify as underprivilaged” bullshit.
Is everyone who calls themselves a feminist (and happens to be a woman) a feminist? No matter what they do towards the cause of female empowerment?
If you want to say “Well, only women can call out another woman as not being a feminist” okay. I don’t agree with it, but atleast I can see where your coming from.
But as is, it seems like the default is anyone can call out someone as not being a feminist – yet then you say Scott can’t, ’cause he’s a man.
Can anyone call it out? Or only women? Just call it if it’s only women – as said, I don’t agree with that, but I can atleast respect that is how you’ll be doing things in the meantime. I’d be listening to how you’re currently doing things.
I don’t have much to add, but I wanted to thank you.
As someone who attempts to reject certainty, I find many of your posts to be a breath of fresh air. At times you verbalize my own sentiments. At others you educate. The body of research that has begun to bring our cognitive short-comings to light is something of a revelation for me.
It’s perhaps a little off-topic, but I like that you call us simplification machines. I wonder if our quest for simplifcation, not only in morality but in science, is ill-advised. We’re seeking that unified theory of everything. An elegant simplicity that combines the macro and the micro. What if it doesn’t really exist, and we’re not wired to handle how it all really is?
It’s a question I wonder about as well. I actually like Chaitin’s idea that theories are kinds of ‘data compression programs,’ ways to sum big patterns up with smaller patterns. This would mean the answer to your question depends on the fundamental structure of the universe, the question of how many uncompressible patterns versus compressible patterns it possesses. He argues that the former far, far outnumber the former.
By the way, when you do put together your FAQ, the latter half of this post (beginning with “My whole life has been pinched between worlds” would be an excellent lead-in, IMO.
“Does it make me weird that I almost feel… I dunno, honoured?”
I think you enjoy arguing. It gets your blood moving and lets you show how damn smart you are. However, the idea that these bloggers and the things they (or you) say in this medium will matter, even a little, seems crazy.
You’ve got a “channel” in the form of a series of books, and woah… it’s a shiny bullhorn with gold tassles. But you’d rather cup your hands and scream at the top of your lungs.
I don’t get it. I think a FAQ on a fan site *for your books* that gives a comic book version of your ideas (bullet points, short sentences with monosyllabic words) would do more to impact the discourse than your bickering with these nobodys (Vox & ROH). Who’s got the time to wade through all the hysterics and bile?
I suspect that I’m the ‘nobody’ here! I do like arguing – but not this. I actually hate this debate. Part of the reason, probably, is that I realize there’s no real way to look ‘smart’ in these circumstances! I simply assume that I’ll come across as a pompous clown or something like that. But I know the way these things work: so long as I remain relentlessly civil, they’re pissing away their credibility. You can only shriek or thump your chest for so long, but facts drone on forever. A lot of people will be savvy to the possibility that we are as stupid as science is showing.
That covers the first half of my post. Why the reticence about a fan site for the books? Did you get burned/burned out with the Three Seas forum? Or does commercialism make you feel dirty in a way that accusations of misogyny never could? I feel like that would cater to a bigger audience, and thus have a bigger impact, than TPB. Please give me some clarity on this, Scott.
There are pretty extensive discussions of his work over at Westeros.com, can’t imagine a devoted forum having much more activity.
Not really what i was getting at, Luke. Scott should not be opening a forum of his own to discuss his books. He should have a proper authors website to *promote* his books. They are the message that should be broadcast.
If the responses here are any indication, this website does not pull much from his many 10s of thousands of fantasy readers, but from a handful of like-minded insiders echoing Scott’s ideas back at Scott, or trying to keep up with him by raising issues or pointing out distortions in his thinking.
The notion that this site will inform the group of readers he purports to pursue, or serve to promote his work, is the real (gulp) fantasy. Seems like more in-group pandering to me. Maybe the conclusion that should be drawn, the reason Scott chooses to engage with personalities such as Vox and ROH, is that he realizes his target audience has heard his message, and just didn’t give a damn.
I, however do. TPB, as great as it is, isn’t directed at a very big audience. Many more could be reached, and more accomplished, with a different kind of outreach.
I just don’t have the sales mentality, Willem. I’m too much of a monomaniac, too little in control of what I pursue where and when. I’ve been that way my whole life, and have given up trying to ‘change.’ This site is as much a concession I can muster, I’m afraid, even if it is a piss poor one as far as most of my readers are concerned.
In regards to Vox, I find his views toxic and wrong. His claim though is that he came to these views rationally. He claims that he examined his motives and biases and that his views are not based on them. He claims to have changed his mind based on facts and that his views are based on empirical evidence and personal experience.
I don’t want to be seen as a Vox apologist because I’m not but what is it you want from him other than to change his conclusions. I mean if his conclusion is that he is a super genious and that the data supports him then it seems to me that your complaint that he is too certain in his views is flawed. To me it seems like you just have to turn to the data and show that he is wrong.*
Also calling someone who’s against women’s suffrage a libertarian seems a bit of a stretch. To me Vox seems someone in favor of rule by the elite. Not sure what this political philosophy is called but it has little do do with maximizing individual liberty.
*As a side note I don’t actually want the blog to become a site bickering one reading of data over another. I like the philosophy and cognitive science stuff
He’s not a libertarian by any stretch. I actually think he’s a garden-variety fascist. But your criticism is well taken: I’m oversimplifying. The problem is that there’s no ‘data’ to ‘prove’ him wrong on his moral and social positions. I’m actually taking a ‘second order’ tack familiar to libertarians: given our inability to make definitive moral-theoretic claims (outside those consensus-commanding instances involving obvious harm, etc.), we have to leave people to their own moral devices.
He’s also fundamentalist Christian, which is going to fix a very many of his views and is also going to be the direct source of a lot of his certainty and an indirect source and predisposition toward a great deal more certainty. When discussing the topic of this post with any Christian (or any religious person), you simply can’t divorce “faith” from the discussion, as it’s going to unilaterally dictate much of the terms of it, though some of it might be possible with liberal religious interpretations.
Vox is rather like a chess player – his moves on the chess board, aimed at capturing the other king, are rational ones – within the frame of chess and it’s predecided goals.
It’s just that he never questions – should I be capturing that king? He’s entrenched in one particular frame.
Or to me, that seems the battle scenario. All of his rational is only within the confines of a structure he is not prepared to even see, let alone question.
I liked the biographical part of this post.
Porpentine:
“A woman being outspoken and blunt doesn’t invalidate her points. You’re using the same arguments used to mute women’s voices for reasons of hysteria, insanity, etc. ”
See Scott?
In the process of ‘gaming ambiguities’ this is analogous to ‘castling’ in chess: an important and convenient move that protects your core argument while moving more aggressive argumentative capacity into place. The phrase ‘mute women’s voices’ is an emotional trigger, designed to pray on the liberal sensibilities many of us develop after higher education, because we know them to be based on historical fact.
The question becomes: how do you attack this line and MAKE THEM SEE?
Well, you can point out the basic problem: a crackedmoon isn’t just being ‘outspoken and blunt’ (which I love), she is being hateful, offensive and deliberately disrespectful. What’s worse, and what never seems to be directly addressed is the core weakness of the opponents side: she never read the whole thing.
Now, preemptively, the knights start to jump from the back row to control the center:
“Why should she have to read something she finds disgusting?!?”
She shouldn’t. But she also shouldn’t deeply and vociferously criticize it without having taken the time to fully examine it.
“You’re gagging women!!!”
No, I’m asking ONE woman to please read through something completely before she begins personal attacks on the author.
And the game continues, until someone gets bored, chucks the table, or (rarely) CONCEDES THE POINT.
Personally, I’d rather just play a different game.
Scott isn’t wrong… Vox actually holds my grudging respect simply because he actually bothered to read the whole thing before disparaging it. And that worries me to no end, because Vox represents some extremely reactionary positions.
It’s disheartening, isn’t it? To me, all this simply illustrates how well and truly fucked we probably are!
I’m going to post on this in the near future, but it’s worth raising the points here. If you think of the Memosphere as any other complex system, the question inevitably arises, ‘How do we manage it?’ The first interesting thing to note, vis a vis what’s happening here, is the way you can look at the impasses you list, Jorge, as ‘natural management heuristics.’ Most of the tactics that ACM and her crew uses are the instinctive tactics we all resort to when trying to police the beliefs and attitudes of the ingroup. Think about it: the type of verbal savagery she directs at me has two edges, inner and outer. Since it’s going to do nothing but alienate and radicalize me (under normal conditions), you have to wonder if the real purpose is to keep the INGROUP in line, a scarce-concealed threat to anyone who dares violate solidarity: “This is what you will get if you don’t tow the line.” Syncophants only. And so, the parochial, idiosyncratic memosphere that ACM inhabits is kept in line. Much the same applies to the function of verbal abuse in Vox’s community, you might suppose. No one is ever ‘shamed into agreeing…’ but they are regularly intimidated into not voicing their misgivings.
You have to wonder though, given that the net is an environment that is entirely alien to the one these ‘management heuristics’ originally evolved in, what kind of aberrations we might expect. Modern marketing is in many ways the science of memosphere management, but since it caters to markets, and markets turn on perceived needs which themselves turn on socially mediated biological imperatives, it remains invested in maximizing irrationality…
So what does this all mean? That we should expect culture to become ever more polarized and irrational?
Scott, marketing isn’t a science. Not by a long shot.
It’s a thingie that sorta-kinda works better than random chance, but it’s far far far from being a science, something marketfolks spend whole careers trying not to admit.
But yeah, you can expect people to get more irrational. If anything – did you notice – over the years mankind on average has become more and more immune to discourse. As soon as some – any – meme latches on, it’s becomes stupidly hard to unseat it (of course, it has a nice side – immunity to discourse also means immunity to propaganda), turning most modern public debate essentially into two groups of people with fingers stuck in their ears, chanting “na na naaaa” at each other.
You really shouldn’t make such snide comments against serious literature.
Oh Goddamnit, spoilers for the Second Apocalypse in the comments of the ROH blog post. I’m only halfway through the second book.
I suppose this was bound to happen, what with occasionally looking at the author’s blog while reading the books, but the philosophy posts and feminism debate posts seemed safe to read…
Just wanted to say I think you’re doing a great job. I get so confused when I read accusations of misogyny on the internet–just because you write about it. I have never assumed Mark Twain was racist due to him writing stories with racists characters. I would also like to thank you for sparking such interest in philosophy between myself and my reading circle.
–Obliged,
Thanks, Chase! A little confirmation can be good for the soul now and again.
@Scott – you suck! 🙂 Cant let you get all high and mighty fulfilled from someone saying nice things about and to you.
Someone asked above about what, specifically, you’re doing wrong, so I’ll try to boil it down into a few things that bother me when you write about rape:
Women are always eroticized. The reader is offered graphic, male-gaze descriptions of their bodies as they rape or are raped. Women rape victims are stripped naked and described; women rapists are stripped naked and described; neither is true of the men. When a man rapes or is raped, his body is not examined in graphic, erotic detail. This holds true in your Earwa books and in Neuropath, so it is not a characteristic of the Earwa setting (and in fact I’m going to set that argument aside from this point on, because I think it’s a cheap out.) Rape is always depicted with a male gaze, to arouse the male eye.
Women are always damaged or destroyed by rape, whether rapist or victim. They are overcome by alien lust, forced to divulge secrets, or driven insane by the pleasure of raping (and then shot, and then made into a frat-boy panties joke.) Major male characters – whether Neil or Conphas – are by and large unmoved and untouched by rape. Even when it seems as if it could damage them, they block it out and remain agents in the story. And, of course, they are never destroyed by and rarely punished for the act of rape – a matter not inherently problematic on its own, but troubling when compared with the karma the woman rapist in Neuropath receives.
Men who use sex for manipulation (Kellhus) are masters in many other domains of intrigue. Women who use sex for manipulation are rarely allowed any other tools; they are reduced to mere seduction (e.g. Neuropath, where a trained, neuroprofiled field agent can think of nothing better to do than act out cheap porn with not one but two major characters, after which she fails in her mission and dies.) Psatma what’s-her-face, too, is given little to do except be passively raped; in fact this is explicitly described as her great strength. Serwa in White-Luck Warrior may be using sex to manipulate Sorweel, but if so she’s doing a poor job of it, driving him back into the enemy camp – and why does she need this tool when she’s the first woman character in the setting to possess all the same strengths as her male counterparts, including extraordinary intelligence and martial power?
I’ve considered whether this general tendency in the depiction of rape is an intentional theme, but if so, it’s one I’m comfortable calling misogynistic. The fact that it holds across settings that should be so very different is what really rankles at me.
“Psatma what’s-her-face, too, is given little to do except be passively raped; in fact this is explicitly described as her great strength.”
Psatma isn’t raped as far as I remember. She does fit the sex-as-only-tool-in-box theme though.
While the execution, IMO, left something to be desired and introduced more troubling elements than were necessary, I think the goal of Scott’s work is to examine why people are the way they are before judging them.
In this vein, poor-boy-makes-good is often, for all it depicts poverty, a defense of class boundaries. It reinforces the belief, “Everyone can make it!” without considering psychological footing that is unequal.
As such, characters such as Serwe/Esmenet/Mimara are meant to give us characters we relate to by via their frailties and strengths, but also characters that, as Happy Ent notes, do not have 20-21st century first-world ideas about their place in life.
The idea here is that there is no Arya or Dany to escape to, though IMO an accurate counter would be this is a problem. One person’s “escape” is another’s PoV providing a frame as well as an acknowledgement of women who did see through the veils…
Which Esme does, to an extent. But she’s still in the web, and I think this is the real meat of what Scott was trying to accomplish – “No one escapes the plate”. The women who fired the first shots, had the first thoughts about freedom, may likely have been women like Esme who were sex workers given their contrasting place in social hierarchies.
But seeing a bit behind the curtain doesn’t mean you see the Wizard, you just have an inkling about some levers and gears. That is perhaps the great challenge of Esme, that she isn’t completely free, that she’s an amphibious being, a mermaid who can sun herself on a Danish rock but not walk on land.
Now, within that framework, the books are still not perfect and I think everything you said still stands, especially regarding the rapes. But it would be interesting to ask where Scott succeeds or fails with the above goals, and how depiction of women might hinder or assist such goals. There’s also some telling-not-showing issues I have with several characters’ Char and Int scores, but that’s a whole other thing.
“The women who fired the first shots, had the first thoughts about freedom, may likely have been women like Esme who were sex workers given their contrasting place in social hierarchies.”
Sorry, that should be “Some of the women who fired…”.
Not trying to pretend I’m an expert on the history of women’s rights.
It’s nice to see some genuine criticism in all this madness!
I view Neuropath as a thematic compliment to the fantasies, raising the same kind of problems acrossed an inverted setting – all orbiting about the problem of nihilism. The situation with Disciple of the Dog is quite different, but still, I’m certain, bound to rankle many female readers.
Evil is sexualized in all my books, primarily because the primary icon of evil in modern society is the serial murderer, which is to say, the serial rapist who kills his victims. In this sense, ‘evil’ is clearly gendered in contemporary consciousness. Now what I’m always interested in all my books is the reader, their moral sensibilities and their biological drives (among other things). I always assume this reader is male. As a male, I know the ways of the male gaze. So the idea – always – is to engage them in conflicting ways, to draw them in with prurience, then saddle them with something difficult. The point is to render the kinds of scenes you find throughout much of the genre in ways that make them difficult to digest, that point to the conflicts and complexities. For me, the subtexts are so obvious that it often makes me wince. I have a very grim, very pessimistic view of male sexuality. In NP, for instance, one of the ‘future facts’ referenced is the discovery of a ‘rape module’ in male brains. It seems to be the case, for instance, that ‘male sexual vigilance’ is keyed to unconscious estimations of female vulnerability, that some men, at least, seem to track women according to automatic estimates of their ‘rapability.’ As dismaying as this possibility is, it seems to make a whole helluva lot of evolutionary sense, and to fit with observations of sexual violence that have transformed our understanding of chimps and dolphins, for instance. The point, at every turn, is to poke the reader and say, some part of this is you, some part of you likes this, irrespective of what you shout.
Now I’m sure that there are numerous instances where the ‘male gaze’ gets the best of me, but my feminist critics invariably cite those scenes where I am literally trying to provoke, self-consciously playing versions of the very bait and switch game I describe above. But no matter how true this may be, it’s an argument that I’m doomed to lose, as much because the default is to conflate depiction for endorsement as much as anything else. So here I am, being relentless critical, not only of the genre, but of male sexuality and where it’s headed, and being called a misogynist because I’m provoking by engaging – playing Nabokov’s game.
What makes this tack important, from a literary perspective, is the simple fact that given contemporary trends, the FUTURE WILL BE MORE AND MORE PORNOGRAPHIC. Why? Because we, as a species, lack the conceptual resources to make any argument regarding moral conduct outside instances of obvious harm stick. So as technologically mediated social change renders traditional imperatives obsolete, biological and commercial imperatives rise more and more to the fore, and acts that would have seen people burned at the stake mere centuries ago are sanctioned for the simple fact that the parties engaged are mutually consenting. Male sexual desire becomes an unsublimated market, gathering more and more resources, which leverage more and more commercially advantageous imperatives.
Young women have longer reproductive windows, which is why male sexual interest is keyed to youth, which is why women spend billions slathering themselves with chemicals, removing hair, and so one – to appear young. And we find ourselves in this very peculiar paradox, where the gradual political and economic ascendency of women (in the West, at least) is accompanied by a growing compliance to the dehumanizing demands of the male gaze. And we have this crazy situation where women escape traditional gendered oppression, only to find themselves caught in the vise of a more insiduous, nihilistic form (Esmenet, anyone?). They’ve escaped forced female circumcision only to want vaginal plastic surgery. It is well and truly fucked up, I think.
I think this is the central dilemma for modern feminism (with the possible exception of globalization). And it resounds through my books at every turn.
So yes, women get the short end of the stick in all my books. Why? Because they find themselves caught in predatory systems designed to exploit them. Depicting strong women, ‘magic exemptions,’ simply fuels the boot-strapping illusion that is strangling contemporary feminism: the assumption that the individual can overcome their social circumstances if they try-try-try and believe-believe-believe, and thus the tendency to hold the individual responsible for their exploitation. I want no part of that game: genre is rife with it as it is. Outside the problem of the Archie Bunker effect, I have yet to encounter one remotely convincing argument as why the approach I’m taking is inherently ‘bad.’ If my writing is provocative on these topics, then so much the better. I’m not penning after-school specials. I have no duty to conform to anyone’s ‘rules of representation.’ If it pisses you off, let’s have a debate about these things.
And for years this was the form before ACM began her shaming campaign: multiple debates, with people offering arguments on all sides. Now we have name-calling, acrimony and intransigence, and the real misogynists sitting back, laughing their asses off, saying, “See! See! I told you so…”
The depiction=endorsement problem is a tricky one to negotiate. Ask any heavy metal band (or just read interviews) and just how tricky it is becomes apparent.
Still, I find it difficult to reason with people who mistake works of fiction for an actually-existing utopia created by the author. I haven’t read much of ACM’s arguments, but from what I have read, it seems like she’s blaming you for creating the People’s Republic of Bakkeria, where the women are cheap and exploited and the men are lizard-brained rapists. And behind this is the reason for the PRB’s creation (and ACM’s smear campaign): deep down, you love a world that looks like this.
This feels like a restatement of the argument you’ve presented above, but I think the idea that some people believe that your fiction is more nonfictional than you ever intended is interesting. If anything, it lends credibility to your ability to create a fictional space.
I find myself wanting to scream, “IT’S FICTION!” to the people I overhear debating “The Hunger Games”, which seems to attract the same sort of attention you’re getting from ACM. It has the obvious difference that it was written by a woman, which lends it a sort of “I’m-X-therefore-I’m-automatically-allowed-to-make-fun-of-X-and-you-can’t-object” immunity.
Just bizarre.
Bizarre, but completely natural. The way I look at it, so long as I am careful, and so long as my representations are critical, and so long as I’m saying something novel and at least potentially important, I’ll just keep trucking along.
You gotta break eggs. The wonderful thing about this latest coincidence is that it allows me to show how ACM and Vox are so similar in so many respects, despite paying lip service to diametrically opposite idealogies. Same shaming/ridicule tactics, certainly, as well as the same inability to genuinely reconsider their moral commitments. Slaves to the Elephant. The primary difference, it seems to me at least, is that ACM primarily relies on moral outrage to defend her pachyderm, whereas Vox is bent on rationalization.
The real question is one of how to best engage these positions. Cause I tell you what, the kinds of political polarization we’re seeing all across the West could simply be the beginning… We literally have no idea how the web is going to rewire the Meme Economy.
This is one reason why I find ‘internet rules’ like Godwin’s Law so pernicious. The big lesson of the Holocaust was that civilization doesn’t matter, that all of us are capable of slipping back into barbarity at any time. That’s a point you literally can’t bring up anymore without people clucking about you wearing white after Labour Day. The biggest lesson recent history has given us, chased away because of Godwin. I understand what it was meant to do, but this is what it seems to have done.
Johnathan – There are some people who confuse depiction and endorsement. That isn’t, as per my understanding, exactly what Moon is saying.
To me Moon’s point is that depiction, regardless of authorial intent, is endorsement unless done with some very strong cues condemning what is being depicted.
Her issue – and it is shared by many, including myself to an extent – is that certain narratives which include sexual assault are often depicted in a certain way, for a certain purpose, and the complexity of it is handled poorly or in a throw-away fashion.
Some recent examples are:
1) The erotic manner in which certain rape scenes (such as the one at the end of TWProphet) are depicted.
2) The forgiveness of a just-about-to-be-raped woman by her attacker.
3) The infantilizing of women in sex scenes (which Scott addresses above, though not to my personal satisfaction but I need to think on my objections).
I suppose that could be what’s happening, but if Moon is saying that depiction is endorsement regardless of the author’s intent, excluding those instances that include some type of textual disclaimer, that is still confusing depiction with endorsement. If I see endorsement when the intent was depiction, then I still made the mistake, although the author could have done a better job with the depiction.
And that’s what I think might actually be Moon’s argument: I don’t like the WAY that you show this. I don’t know that there’s a proper way to depict anything, let alone rape. The complexity of rape varies with the situation. Some rape cases are very straightforward and simple. Others can only really be understood by the two people involved, and debatably not even then.
I also think that too many people confuse lack of talent for genius, inserting motives behind scenes that are just rape scenes. Go to any website where David Lynch films are analyzed and read the depth to which people suppose he might have gone in constructing his stories. Same goes for the Star Wars series. Sometimes the rape scene isn’t supposed to be the focal point and shouldn’t be subject to such intense scrutiny as a carefully-crafted statement about women’s rights, sexual or otherwise.
Stylistic objections are certainly acceptable, but there’s also a point where we can get a little carried away.
Saajan,
Well, lets hold up on ‘the erotic manner’. Did you find that rape scene erotic? What your talking about is whether someone else might find these scenes somehow erotic, right? Granted that while you have the evidence that you didn’t find them erotic, ACM didn’t find them erotic and a whole bunch of people (likely everyone you know) didn’t find them erotic, you’re estimating someone out there might still find them so? I think it’s possible – but I wonder if that…person…would still be that way regardless of whether they read the book or not?
On #2, maybe I have an odd take on this, but this is ‘damnation’ world. An unforgiven rape would lead to a stupid ass eternity of extra agony for what is…well, I guess this is the contraversial edge. It’d be fucked up for her, but it would not be eternity (and given what damnation is supposed to feel like, some fuckwits raping dick doesn’t seem to be what damnation is supposed to feel like). And she’s a smart woman and can judge the extent of the crime vs the fucking rediculous punishment (an e-fucking-ternity of torture!). I’m guessing Scott is aiming for the evangelicals (the pro death sentence kind) and maybe aiming at everyone is perhaps alot to aim for in one book (then again, you only live once – probably). Even I feel like I’m reducing the idea of rape here, but at the same time compared to an eternity of torture – how does one condone torture at all, let alone the absurdly long time of eternity (to even describe it as a ‘long time’ is stupidly short)? Mimara probably couldn’t condone eternal (extra) torture for her rape. To me she’s making a genuine moral choice in what is supposedly an objective morality. And if she had decided not to forgive, that too would be a genuine moral choice to me as well.
Scott,
and acts that would have seen people burned at the stake mere centuries ago are sanctioned for the simple fact that the parties engaged are mutually consenting.
I’ll admit, this raises my ‘And what the fuck is wrong with that?’ hackles.
Are you talking about what people do in their crazy bedrooms, or what can be plastered around commercially because people were paid enough to grant ‘consent’ to do something? Because not long ago both would get you burned at the stake, but I’m not sure I’d categorize them both as being the same. Yeah, maybe it should be obvious to me, but I have some sort of drive to really determine which side of the line you’re on (not merely assume).
@Johnathan – I shouldn’t speak for Moon, so I’ll give you my version. Depiction is endorsement when it fails to properly clue the reader as to the position the narrative is taking. Not endorsement in the sense “the author secretly believes that X is good” but rather “this at best fails to subvert and likely contributes to at minimum a desensitized/ignorant view of problem X”.
(Now, a “funny” moment over on the Westeros forums was when someone used The Handmaid’s Tale to justify Tyrion’s poor treatment of a prostitute so there will always be the clueless among us.)
@Callan – I think the issue taken with eroticism and rape is that not only has it been done to death, it shifts things away from the victim perspective. I see Scott’s argument about showing people how desire makes us complicit, and I do think this is important as we move into a pornification of Western society where the at times brutal realities of the industry are glossed over in the name sexual freedom.
So I can see what he is doing and why he feels it is important, I think the issue is how the scenes don’t make me understand the situation from the position the victim. I think scenes with the Inchoroi may also be too fantastical/alien for people to draw RL significance, but that might just be me. Contrast this with one line from Serwe at the moment in TDTCB she is resigned to being a victim, “Don’t be mean to me.”
I don’t know if it will go through moderation, but I linked this comment thread on ROH. I still maintain some hope for a meeting of the minds or, if possible, engagement by new voices.
Also, we’re still going strong in “Gender and Genre III” over on Westeros.
saajanpatel:
“Depiction is endorsement when it fails to properly clue the reader as to the position the narrative is taking.”
I’m going to split hairs a bit, so bear with me. This sentence implies that the artist is responsible for whatever interpretation is begotten by the mind of the spectator. It says, “Because you didn’t give me all the hints and signposts I needed to make choice A, it is your fault if I make choice B.” I don’t know if that’s what you actually want to say. If it is, we may just need to agree to our differences.
A more accurate statement would have been, “Depiction is PERCEIVED AS endorsement when it fails…” That statement is pretty much spot on, declaring that I, as an artist, really can’t blame the people who misinterpret my work. They’re just working with whatever toolkit they have, and sometimes the integrity of the art is just not going to allow the number of clues that will keep everybody on the same page.
“…this at best fails to subvert and likely contributes to at minimum a desensitized/ignorant view of problem X.”
Lack of denial is not the same as affirmation. However, I think that many people interpret it exactly as you’ve phrased it here. I’m not sure there’s any real solution to that little problem. We all need to live with the possibility of misinterpretation, and I don’t think we should saddle ourselves with the responsibility for all it entails. Further, I believe it’s foolish to do so. Could Bakker hone his craft to make it less ambiguous for those people who examine his work for misogynistic undertones? Of course. But he would never make it less ambiguous for everyone. And what would be next after misogyny?
I think the issue taken with eroticism and rape is that not only has it been done to death
The spoiling/ruining of what are otherwise erotic elements? Has it been done alot before?
So I can see what he is doing and why he feels it is important, I think the issue is how the scenes don’t make me understand the situation from the position the victim.
Thinking on it, there could be some distancing. Frankly after Serwe’s POV soon after her capture in TDTCB, I felt I was spiraling into a pit of dispair (almost stopped reading over it). So I guess I’m actually kind of afraid of seeing the victims POV there. Could barely keep up with the husbands secondary victim status. But yeah, maybe there’s something to get at there about that sort of distancing?
1) Scott, I would suggest you take what you’ve posted here and make it an official blog post. I realize you’ve said as much before but the clarity of your mission statement I thought was really beneficial, for all that I still have qualms about the execution. I can tell you upfront you will be taken to task for many things in that post, but I also think it will push several important issues to the forefront.
2) Johnathan – Heh, why I mentioned The Handmaid’s Tale story. Any attempt to show the tragedy of the victim’s mindset likely carries the risk of signaling some kind of endorsement, whether it’s of the “this evil is actually good” kind or “these people brought their suffering on themselves kind”.
Perhaps we will always be looking at a spectrum of some kind, but I think it is important to really look at Lolita and The Handmaid’s Tale more deeply and see where these cues to the reader are…sadly it will be some time before I finish either.
3) Callan – I think eroticism and victimization are often tied together – how many shows/films have the woman getting her shirt torn up by the bad guys to reveal her breasts?
I think there’s criticism to be made about Serwe’s arc, as Seth pointed out she’s part of a negative trend. What I think is worth considering, regardless of how good or bad a job Scott did, is that there are many tragic people who are like her.
Understanding the mentality of someone who subjects themselves to abuse is important, especially given the troubling trend an old communications prof called “The pornification of America”. This goes back to what I believe Scott was talking about when he mentions shifts in morality that would have seen us burned at the stake ->
We’ve removed the stigma of porn but not to the benefit of those trapped in the middle and lower rungs of the industry. Instead we’ve forgiven ourselves for *watching* porn, which is a nice bit of moral grifting that matches a little too perfectly with sex/beauty-as-commodity.
I think eroticism and victimization are often tied together – how many shows/films have the woman getting her shirt torn up by the bad guys to reveal her breasts?
How is that an example of spoiling the ‘erotic sexual assault’ genre? What your talking about has been done to death. I don’t think the spoiling and problematising of sexual assault has been done everywhere? To me, the mentioning of the female features is like Bakker mentions a nice meal, then throws a massive turd onto it (the sexual assault and rape) – there is nothing tasty there – he’s spoiled it. As real sexual assault and rape is, not some pretty hollywood exploit version is.
Does the rape scene at the end of TWP read to you like your shirt ripping example?
Understanding the mentality of someone who subjects themselves to abuse is important, especially given the troubling trend an old communications prof called “The pornification of America”.
Well, weve shifted from that rape at the end of TWP to Serwe. I’m not sure anyone in the TWP subjected themselves.
Frankly yourself and Scott sound a bit conservative and stuffy on the matter? I do pay I think alot of porn just doesn’t have a human relations element. I have seen one directed by a female former porn actress (bought in a store dedicated to womens erotica – which frankly was a much nicer store) and she built up some sort of human connection in the work she produced, which she talked about in the extras. And yes, it’s too easy for people desperate for money to be pulled in to something they don’t really want to do. But frankly, although in other job types the emotional level isn’t quite as personal, I see alot of other jobs in the capitalist system that fuck people over emotionally too. Particularly in the resteraunt field. We like our service industries – but we don’t think too much of how the people working in them are being fucked over. But maybe we worry about the sex industry more because hell, it’s sex and we feel like worrying more about something related to that than a chef pressured enough to become suicidal? Anyway, I’d pay a capitalist porn industry is, particularly without much restrictions on it, going to just chew people up and spit them out. Somewhat moreso than it does in other industry types.
@Callan: The meal-turd analogy is a good one, I’m not sure I see the value in that kind of depiction – maybe it gets would be date-rapists to reconsider their stances? But then I don’t share Scott’s negative outlook on male sexuality – it’s too dark and goth for me honestly. Sex is powerful, but it can build a bridge of intimacy and heal people as much as it can harm them.
As to capitalism and porn, just to be clear I was guesstimating Scott’s opinion. For myself, the views of a porn director expressing how much he’s helped women speaks volumes. (from here):
“I sleep at night,” he informs me, his voice rising, “because I know, in my heart of hearts, I’m giving people money, that could not hold a job at fucking McDonald’s, for the most part. I’m paying people’s rent.”
He waves his hands spastically.
“It’s a lot more than I can say for a lot of the companies in America, pieces of shit, like Madoff, and Enron, all of these son of a bitches the Bush administration funded that do nothing but take, take, take! Here, I just give, give, give! And this is a fact!” he shouts, wild-eyed.
“We are helping these girls! Anybody that comes into this business, for the most part, is a broken toy.”
He leans towards me, earnestly attempting to make himself understood. “We’re giving them a place where they can make money, and get by, so they’re not standing on line in a welfare department. Thank God for people like me!”
He bangs the desk.
@Callan: The meal-turd analogy is a good one, I’m not sure I see the value in that kind of depiction – maybe it gets would be date-rapists to reconsider their stances?
Well, think of your own example of the ripped blouse. How does that usually turn out? Villain rips blouse, bewbies, hero so angry, beats villain, saves girl. The audience for this isn’t date rapists – it’s a much larger demographic (or so I’d contend). And Scott’s pissing in their weaties.
I notice Kalbear was saying Lolita worked out because (as one example), you start with the protagonist in prison. That’s pissing in weaties as well, but perhaps alot blunter.
Anyway, that’s the theory. How would you reach people who like the blouse ripping and try and disrupt that exploitation and their belief that in the end that all works out (it certainly works out in the story, of course…hero saves day, etc)?
Anyway, as an opproach vector it seems possible. Once again, if I had idle money, it’d be facinating to try and run some sort of scientific test on it. Hopefully such a test would say it has an effect on reducing the exploitation cycle. Hopefully.
“We’re giving them a place where they can make money, and get by, so they’re not standing on line in a welfare department. Thank God for people like me!”
I don’t know how much of a Shindler he is. But it’s funny that basically these ‘broken toys’ – well, what happens to them? They’re left to the wind? We all need money and so do they? So where does it come from? It’s okay if the world grinds them down? It’s only bad if this guy does it (and that’s assuming he does)?
Fact is society seems to have abandoned these ‘broken toys’, if they end up looking for money from this guy (why don’t they just do the shitty walmart job?). Why are we demonising this guy, then? Indeed, what if he is doing a better job than the society that stoops to judge him? If society is doing a shitty job at supporting these people, he’d only have to do a mediocre job to actually be better. What’s the line – starvation isn’t a sin, it’s only when fat men make gravy of other mens lack that it becomes so?
Anyway, here’s the blog of an independent escort, which I think gives you an idea of the person.
*looking briefly at the link* oh for fucks sake (yeah, I should have read it first – I took your quote to be representative).
The female director I wrote about – not this stuff. Does not do this stuff.
Argument still applies though – why are they going to this if they could just easily grab rent money from a wide variety of other choices?
“It’s nice to see some genuine criticism in all this madness!”
I’ll leave Requires Hate and her genuine criticism, and that of Nick Mamatas, and many other intelligent individuals who have provided just this, aside. I believe that you are unable to approach these ‘outsider’ claims about your writing with any degree of rationality. And – because it is more than sufficient to view you as a writer of misoginyst fiction purely on the strength of your own words.
“Evil is sexualized in all my books, primarily because the primary icon of evil in modern society is the serial murderer, which is to say, the serial rapist who kills his victims. In this sense, ‘evil’ is clearly gendered in contemporary consciousness. Now what I’m always interested in all my books is the reader, their moral sensibilities and their biological drives (among other things). I always assume this reader is male. As a male, I know the ways of the male gaze. So the idea – always – is to engage them in conflicting ways, to draw them in with prurience, then saddle them with something difficult. The point is to render the kinds of scenes you find throughout much of the genre in ways that make them difficult to digest, that point to the conflicts and complexities. For me, the subtexts are so obvious that it often makes me wince. I have a very grim, very pessimistic view of male sexuality. In NP, for instance, one of the ‘future facts’ referenced is the discovery of a ‘rape module’ in male brains. It seems to be the case, for instance, that ‘male sexual vigilance’ is keyed to unconscious estimations of female vulnerability, that some men, at least, seem to track women according to automatic estimates of their ‘rapability.’ As dismaying as this possibility is, it seems to make a whole helluva lot of evolutionary sense, and to fit with observations of sexual violence that have transformed our understanding of chimps and dolphins, for instance. The point, at every turn, is to poke the reader and say, some part of this is you, some part of you likes this, irrespective of what you shout.”
Let us examine your statement of what you do. You write fiction explicitly in mind for a male readership, writing from a male point of view, using prurient male-focused sexual themes and the overt male sexualization of females, e.g. the male gaze, predatory male preoccupations with rape, evil portrayed as sexual politics, the last strongly hinged on gender. You have chosen to write in a fantasy setting to attract readers who find this sort of thing potentially titillating, pinned by your underlying philosophy formed along a narrow line of evolutionary cognitive speculation which posits the existence among other things, of a “‘rape module’ in male brains.” Fiction, in which women are frequently if not exclusively depicted in positions of victimization or marginalization in the text and who are made subject to predatory male desires. A place where even “magical exemptions” prove the rule of your settings, and rationalized because you feel certain that the depiction of strong women “simply fuels the boot-strapping illusion that is strangling contemporary feminism: the assumption that the individual can overcome their social circumstances … ” And because you wish to “provoke” or play as you call it, “Nabokov’s game.” You conflate enforced female genital mutilation which has the aim of preventing clitoral stimulation during sex with voluntary cosmetic procedures of a typically non-invasive nature most often seen for reasons of personal vanity.
Both statements are certainly provocative. Female circumcision and vaginal cosmetic surgery are not the same procedure. You are not Nabokov.
That your writing could be interpreted as something other than fundamentally misogynistic requires a leap of faith, not a failure of reason. Your underlying philosophy is by your own framing self-consciously – and I would argue, institutional tendencies which are common in the genre and are a part of your own privileged outlook as a white Western male – misogynistic.
“I view Neuropath as a thematic compliment to the fantasies, raising the same kind of problems acrossed an inverted setting – all orbiting about the problem of nihilism. The situation with Disciple of the Dog is quite different, but still, I’m certain, bound to rankle many female readers.”
That this indeed “rankles” female readers, you seem to find of little import. This is less surprising in the wake of your revelations here about whom you are writing for – it’s certainly not female readers by your own admission.
Ultimately, whether the basis for this misogyny is down to your interpretation of cognitive theories as you claim or something more troubling, is immaterial. Both reflect or are inspired by a hatred of women, whether you wish to lay the blame ultimately with evolutionary biology or with society. The actual end product you do not denounce or show counter examples of in your fiction, but exaggerate, literally fantasize, and depict knowing well their toxicity. This has to be the strangest “defense” of feminism that I have ever encountered.
Aside from this being an inherently problematic approach, you are perpetuating the same stereotypes you supposedly wish to fight. It remains unclear how exactly the mechanics of this is supposed to work: offering a bit of what you like ‘if you like this sort of thing,’ i.e. mysogny and sexual violence directed towards females, to an audience who are likely to be highly receptive considering they are both male readers (in an increasingly hard core pornographic world as you state) and genre readers, a genre which you admit “is rife with it.” Yet you seem to think this will shock people right out of their cognitive or societal predilections.
Your primary strategy once stripped of its jargon appears to be the hope that people who are already interested and turned on by depictions of institutionalized misogyny will inexplicably find it off-putting in your novels. This sounds akin to a habitual smoker being encouraged to smoke a series of cigars until they are sick. Aside from the unlikelihood of dispelling ingrained habits by such a stratagem, this simply doesn’t work with something like a text.
This brings us to another claim of yours, which to me seems just as suspect: that your depictions of misogyny are likely to discomfort a misogynistic reader because of your sub-text.
Like dialog in a porn movie your sub-text is more likely to be ignored than noticed. And like watching porn there is no indication that people reading this sort of thing will like this sort of thing any less after reading more of it. There are a number of studies which show that watching porn is more likely to encourage more watching of porn, not less. And in some cases possibly lead to addictive behaviour or at the very least, a certain desensitization to pornography. Perhaps this is for the best, as the future, according to you, is likely to be very pornographic.
“What makes this tack important, from a literary perspective, is the simple fact that given contemporary trends, the FUTURE WILL BE MORE AND MORE PORNOGRAPHIC. Why? Because we, as a species, lack the conceptual resources to make any argument regarding moral conduct outside instances of obvious harm stick. So as technologically mediated social change renders traditional imperatives obsolete, biological and commercial imperatives rise more and more to the fore, and acts that would have seen people burned at the stake mere centuries ago are sanctioned for the simple fact that the parties engaged are mutually consenting. Male sexual desire becomes an unsublimated market, gathering more and more resources, which leverage more and more commercially advantageous imperatives.”
Aside from your actual fiction, you seem to have some very strange ideas for a champion or even an alley of feminism. You state (emphasis as above, mine):
“Young women have longer reproductive windows, which is why male sexual interest is keyed to youth, which is why women spend billions slathering themselves with chemicals, removing hair, and so one – to appear young. And we find ourselves in this very peculiar paradox, where the gradual political and economic ascendency of women (in the West, at least) is accompanied by a growing compliance to the dehumanizing demands of the male gaze. And we have this crazy situation where women escape traditional gendered oppression, only to find themselves caught in the vise of a more insiduous, nihilistic form (Esmenet, anyone?). They’ve escaped forced female circumcision only to want vaginal plastic surgery. It is well and truly fucked up, I think.”
“I think this is the central dilemma for modern feminism (with the possible exception of globalization). And it resounds through my books at every turn.“
These comments shows such a fundamental lack of awareness about core feminist concerns that it is difficult to know what to say other than point them out. There is no sign of any political or economic ascendency of women – in the West or anywhere else for that matter.
Women continue to rank significantly behind men in terms of real wealth, wages, protection, rights, reproductive autonomy, and political representation in government. Even the inroads made towards equality over the past decades – hardly “ascendency” – are under threat and erosion. That you think women have escaped “traditional gendered oppression” suggests ignorance of the plight of millions of women around the world who suffer from it daily, including in the West.
And to assume that the insidious misogyny which operates on a more informal level can not affect your own point of view – further weakens any claim you might make about how you’re working for positive change – and not, in fact, a very real part of the problem. It suggests that you are not as clear-eyed about your own biases as you profess.
“So yes, women get the short end of the stick in all my books. Why? Because they find themselves caught in predatory systems designed to exploit them. Depicting strong women, ‘magic exemptions,’ simply fuels the boot-strapping illusion that is strangling contemporary feminism: the assumption that the individual can overcome their social circumstances if they try-try-try and believe-believe-believe, and thus the tendency to hold the individual responsible for their exploitation. I want no part of that game: genre is rife with it as it is.”
Your only defense to this admission that I can see is that you honestly don’t write your books for a female readership. But this is doubly toxic as you are both excluding women from your readership and reinforcing their lack of fictional representation in a genre aimed at a group of readers societally (and you believe), biologically primed to oppress, sexualize, and rape women.
“Outside the problem of the Archie Bunker effect, I have yet to encounter one remotely convincing argument as why the approach I’m taking is inherently ‘bad.’ If my writing is provocative on these topics, then so much the better. I’m not penning after-school specials. I have no duty to conform to anyone’s ‘rules of representation.’ If it pisses you off, let’s have a debate about these things.”
Yet numerous people have provided strong arguments as to why this approach is not just ineffective, but toxic. You have shut then down either on the basis of tone, or for a failure to understand your admittedly “obvious” subtexts, or for misunderstanding your intentions, rejecting out of hand that they might have good reason to disagree with both your approach and your underlying assumptions.
Instead, you’ve focused on insulting language (and that you were called names first) and unsubstantiated claims that the charges of misogyny in your work have seriously impacted your sales and by extension, your ability to put food in the mouths of your children – which seems both cringeworthy and pure hyperbole.
You have defended yourself over the course of numerous posts and comments by claiming that your detractors and critics were all part of a groupthink conspiracy suffering cognitive bias which was the only reasonable source of their failure to agree with you. That by disagreeing with you, the were not engaging with you on the basis of your requirements for engagement – the latter which are not yours to dictate if you truly wish to engage with critics of any sort. Just as it is not up to you, a male in a male dominated society, to dictate the terms of how to engage with feminism to feminists.
“And for years this was the form before ACM began her shaming campaign: multiple debates, with people offering arguments on all sides. Now we have name-calling, acrimony and intransigence, and the real misogynists sitting back, laughing their asses off, saying, “See! See! I told you so…””
But your own statements are sufficiently damning, so perhaps this is enough to put rest your claims to be a feminist-champion-despite-all-appearances-to-the-contrary.
You admit you write for a male reader, with a male-focused (and dubious I believe) take on psychology and sexuality, actively repress women in your fantasies, consider the traditional struggles of core feminism won (though I recall you stating elsewhere that you think feminism has clearly “lost” so perhaps you are only showing a wearisome inconsistency), seek to provoke readers but consider outrage over your work either mean-spirited or misdirected, or else down to people not understanding your self-evident subtext (and one gets the sad feeling, “native genius” is implied as well with such references as “playing Nabokov’s game”), and finally, you make the spurious claim that to attack you on these issues is to let the “real misogynists” win.
The last point makes me think how in an average crowd of people, especially among those who know each other, everyone will admit that racism exists, but no one there is themselves a racist. It seems clear to me that you believe that no one with a Three Pound Brain can possibly be a misogynist despite the presence of misogyny in your writing.
But then perhaps I have misunderstood your plain statements above, and failed to engage with them on your terms. Having I expect, a less than three pound organ of engagement.
You are a strange, vain bird, E.M. I have to admit, since I take ACM to be so obviously biased, so obviously uninterested in facts or reason or whatever might throw critical light on her agenda, I find it hard to take her defenders seriously. She exhibits all the signs of being all elephant, no rider.
Recent polls suggest that feminism is regarded as a perjorative term by the majority of young men and women. Womens studies programs are being rolled back, and across the US, in particular, conservatives have been very successful circumventing Roe v. Wade – as well as instituting other reproductive-related legislation at the state level. At the same time, more girls than boys are entering university, where they enjoy better outcomes. Single women also outnumber single men when it comes to home-ownership. If these trends continue to accelerate, then our economic future will be gendered quite differently. The problem of the overwhelmingly white male top 1% is an entirely different story. Meanwhile, things continue to get more and more pornographic.
As for Mamatas, I welcome you to make sense of his defense of ACM standards, how ‘content analysis’ of 6 pages of a novel and an interview provide grounds for misogyny. It frankly mystifies me.
The rest of your critique puzzles me, insofar as you seem to think that depiction really does equal endorsement. So I have some questions:
1) What is wrong with writing with male readers in mind? Is it wrong to write with female readers in mind?
2) I think it’s pretty self-evident that I’m not Nabakov. But why should I be condemned for using the strategies he used (and was condemned for, far more ferociously than me, because people are prone confused depiction for endorsement)?
3) Given that feminism is on the retreat, isn’t it sensible to suggest that the movement needs to experiment with new strategies?
4) Is it wrong to put questions to feminists, then to call attention to their repeated refusal to answer? Isn’t it simply paternalism to not critique them the way you critique anyone else?
5) Why does depiction equal endorsement?
6) Given that I’m not lying, are you really suggesting I should just shrug my shoulders, and say, “Yep! Me misogynist!”?
7) How, specifically, is my grasp on cognitive psychology ‘dubious’?
8) What characteristics should we look for when trying to distinguish between rational and constructive versus irrational and destructive feminists?
I always assume this reader is male.
Why?
Because they generally are.
@Callan – I can’t claim to know the motivations of everyone in porn, and I have heard of lesbian groups doing erotic performances that are from what I’ve been told by women very fem-positive.
At the same time, I think there is, at minimum, reason enough to investigate the parasitical nature of the industry.
I think Scott is right to wonder when liberal values align so perfectly with consumption without examining what goes into production.
Well, I’ll just throw my two cents into this – I’d far more eagerly star for bisexual BDSM porn (and yeah, I know that male actors in pron are pretty much caverject junkies) than work at some dead-end fast-foodery or wallmart’s halls of bleakness (of course, I have to do neither since my work in ITSec is paying quite nicely, but if the part of my brain that deals with “them mysterious cowpewters” died, investigating kink.com’s “for hire” list would be definitely higher priority than investigating “classical” alternatives with shittier pay and comparably shitty environment)
In the end, “job shittiness” is subjective – some people carry out (absolutely socially vital, but quite unappealing in terms of sights, tastes and odours) work at sewage processing facilities and are quite content with it.
I on the other end am doing a very tidy and safe job of, essentially, renting out my brain to a bunch of self-important, arrogant, all-too-selectively educated uber-rich motherfuckers so that they can use it to compensate for their own misgivings and maybe prevent themselves from tripping on their very own overgrown and underwashed IT-penis (in all likelyhood they will irrespective of my best efforts, but by that time me and my folks have already laughed our way to the bank, and will likely be hired to pick up the pieces after the disaster). 03 likes to joke that what I’m doing is “brainstitution”, and it’s not entirely inaccurate.
Saajan,
and I have heard of lesbian groups doing erotic performances that are from what I’ve been told by women very fem-positive.
Yeah, this. I’m guessing it engages alot of (sensual) human connection. This sort of thing which engages actual connection and relationship between people is possible. I wish it were the majority (100%, even).
At the same time, I think there is, at minimum, reason enough to investigate the parasitical nature of the industry.
And also the indifferent nature of society, if these ‘broken toys’ really need to resort to this stuff to live. I guess I’m bleeding heart thinking of welfare stuff, I suppose.
I think Scott is right to wonder when liberal values align so perfectly with consumption without examining what goes into production.
I’m not sure I could stand walking through an abattoir, yet I still eat the plastic packed meat from the supermarket. Perhaps there’s a few areas where we overlook the production, in the current state of society?
@Callan + 01:
If nothing else, I suggest reading They Shoot Porn Stars (linked again here.)
Overlooking production is always a moral decision – sweatshops are proof of that as much as anything.
I’ve known “broken toys” who, with treatment, have gone on to be diplomats, lawyers, poets, etc. But sexuality is something we’ve become open about only as it related to its pleasurable aspects – as in, sexuality as a means to sell you something. People still cringe if someone is open about their sexual abuse, something the seedier elements of the Church have used to great effect. But we need not seek such extremes, look at cultures where larger, voluptuous women are seen as beautiful – where are these figures in media? How often are they presented as sexually desirable, as opposed to the girl who is on the sidelines or appreciated *in spite* of their weight, despite fact that many men – just not your standard white male – would find them incredibly sexy?
But, back to sex work. The question is what are the psychological effects of being in porn or sex work? For some, it might be a comfortable and maybe even enjoyable way to make a living, but looking at the rapid turn over, predictable cosmetic surgeries, increased drug use, and anecdotal evidence as to the psychological damage research into its overall effects should be done.
There was a time when feminism, at least, managed to separate sexual freedom from commodifying of sexuality. Now we seem to be moving into a world where the window has shifted dramatically to consumer concerns, as if most people who watch porn would have no issue with their significant other engaging in such an activity.
Damn reply button, why are you so high up 😦
Well, anyway, Saajan, I’d say that high turnover is pretty common in all highly stressful jobs – and porn is a stressful job. Psychological aspects likely vary from person to person and from company to company, as well as from one community to another, but the physical aspects are pretty much consistently demanding (it’s all fun and games untill you have to re-shoot this particular scene five times).
Also, untill quite recently it was quite a terminal career (and dead-end jobs are pretty shitty irrespective of whether you’re supposed to suck penises or serve fast-food and put up with fast-food client and management culture).
So no surprises here.
As to predictable plastic surgeries – I don’t really see a problem with that. We have the (limited) technology to (slightly) re-shape the human body. So why shouldn’t people reshape it for fun and/or profit? Flesh is a machine, not a temple of a spitefull lovecaftian abomination.
Some body shapes seem to appear more attractive than others (Is a bodybuilder with six-pack abs “equally beautifull” compared to a bloated mouthbreathing slob with a six pack ‘o beer? I think not, though of course some people might like the latter due to the fact he comes with free beer 😉 ) so it’s reasonable that people will seek to conform to those shapes, especially in an industry that is heavily concerned with visual appeal.
As for “commodification of sexuality”, I just find the very concept hypocritical. Nobody laments commodification of physical labor (which will likely be completely extinct in less than 50 years anyway), or commodification of creativity, of mental competence, of the very attention itself… But lo and behold, sexual intercourse is such a precious damn snowflake that it cannot be a commodity (as if there ever was a time when it was something other than a complicated expensive commodity). I say that’s just wooey bullshit. Sex’s nothing special. Just yet another human activity that can be contextually pleasurable.
As far as I (and ethical systems I can relate to) am concerned, a situation when people “would have no issue with their significant other engaging in such an activity [porn/sex work]” is not only acceptable, but desirable, and will make world a better place for everyone, sex workers included.
World where acting in porn is, at least, not less respectable than work of some office barnacle is IMHO a nicer world, as long as the shift doesn’t happen at the expense of office barnacle work’s already limited appeal.
P.S.:
Of course, skymonster servants and people deeply invested in sex being a “special” thing that (unlike physical and mental efforts of other kind) is not to be rented out will have an issue with that. I suspect it is a “Hume fork” thing, but wonder what their arguments would be nonetheless 😀
Writing with a male reader in mind is slightly different than “the reader (in my mind) is always male.”
I focused on this statement as part of understanding why you write what you do, and what you think about what you write. Writing exclusively for a male reader seems likely to support the claim that what you’re writing is potentially hostile to female readers (if by nothing else on the basis of exclusion) and the status of women in general, in genre, through the negative/limited agency presented/reinforced to your hypothetical male reader.
The statement that you’re playing “Nabokov’s game” is in my opinion provocative. Like the one comparing female castration with vaginal plastic surgery for cosmetic reasons. Which is exactly what I said. However, it does suggests a certain arrogance*, but I’m not really concerned about that.
*[It may have a very slight bearing; I’ve read three of your books and I don’t think that thematically or in terms of prose that you’re in the class of writers that for example Nabokov belongs to. Nor am I saying that you claim to be. But its not uncommon for a highly skilled writer to do something such as provoke successfully with their writing, and have that approach copied – and botched by a lesser talent. Being provocative, or attempting to shock, can be an empty technique if there isn’t something meaningful behind it. It also I suspect, takes deft handling to pull off.]
I don’t think the statement that “feminism is on the retreat” is a given. I disagree with this appraisal. It may be under threat, as it always has been since its inception. To say it has accomplished its goals is to overlook the ongoing struggle.
And I remain surprised that you think writing for a male readership, writing female characters with disputable agency or freedom from male gaze, in a setting full of patriarchy, male predation, violence and sexualized evil is likely to represent an effective “new strategy.” It’s not new exactly, and hence, not really provocative. This is pretty much the bulk of the fantasy genre, to a matter of degree.
Of course it’s not wrong to put questions to feminists. But as a male writer, who writes male fiction, self-avowedly for a male reader, fiction of a sort which is intended to provoke and uses sexualized violence and sexualized evil, it would do well to tread lightly and respectfully while doing so. While there is no reason why you can’t do all of the above, it doesn’t make you a bright shining feminist star in the firmament without some good explanations.
Chief among such signs of respect, I might theorize, is not to start off dictating terms, or explaining to feminists how feminism has either won or lost, or denying feminists the right to be both angry and to conduct their side of the fight as they see fit.
Depiction can reinforce existing norms. It can produce both prurient interest in “these things” and help maintain a status quo where the depiction goes unquestioned. Where would modern capitalism be with out their admen and TV?
Now, I do understand, I think, that you believe you’re setting up a sub-text that questions your depictions in a way which makes the whole thing subversive, but I can’t say I found this to be the case in the moderate sample of your writing that I have read. And since it is fiction, every scene, every character is there because of the writer. It’s a choice made and one assumes, for a reason. Hence we can question the author – that being you- about their choices, because no one else can know for certain why they have been made. But this doesn’t mean that we even have to agree with your answers. You have been questioned, and you’ve come back saying you’re among other things, fighting misogyny*. If so, I don’t think yours is an effective method.
*[I wonder how many fans exactly have come to this realization, unprompted? Do people who read you books ever go away afterwards wanting less of this type of fiction because of the subtext and depiction, or are they just now conditioned to want more of it? Porn certainly seems to function this way, especially with male viewership.]
Even if you are telling the absolute truth, I question your methods and your expectations. As I’ve stated, I don’t agree with you over your stance on psychology or how you weight certain aspects of popular theories, especially in evolutionary biology. I’m not alone in this, and a cognitive error on your part can be just as pernicious as if you set out to write misogynistic fiction out of either institutionalized forms or some personal hatred. I also think your own bias could be more deeply set than you acknowledge. Fantasy is rife with this, as you point out, and while trying to tweak expectations about certain tropes I can imagine it can be easy to actually end up supporting a fair number of them by accident.
Hubris may be mixed in there too. I think anyone in your position thinking they know more about how to fight misogyny than the people who suffer from it, may be headed for a tumble. But I don’t believe in the slightest that you personally hate or abuse women. I’ve never sought to suggest that, but I do find your writing problematic in these areas. I really couldn’t care about your personal life. Avadavats from friends and your wife are equally unmoving for just these reasons.
I’ve happily read authors who were fascist sympathizers, Catholics, communists, anti-Semites, bigots, crooks, and even people as overtly sexist as V. S. Naipaul and as personally loathsome as H.P. Lovecraft. Your personal proclivities are not my concern. There’s only been a few authors whose personal ideology has put me off their books, such as Neil Asher and John C. Wright. But they are both mediocre writers and ones who frequently include their politics in their actual books. For these reasons, but mostly the former, I now pass on their work.
We should be sceptical about many of the cognitive psychology claims you make. They come from areas of the discipline that are both most in flux and most frequently overturned by subsequent studies or a reexamination of the studies. Evolutionary biology is at its murkiest end here, and while some of what you’ve talked about isn’t terribly controversial, some of it is. I don’t hold with your fascination with Haidt either. He makes some good points but he’s far too fixated on the US and his core idea far from watertight, as the hide of any good pachyderm should be. I think your rape-module theory should be viewed most cautiously. In short, much of this remains highly debated and isn’t something that I think vindicates your insistence that moral certainty or nihilism is the world’s greatest current threat or that people who are criticizing you and your work, are just part of some ingroup bias or club of hate.
Most of us are intelligent, fairly self-aware cynics. I understand and actively search for bias and have a good grasp on my own strengths and weaknesses. I’m not particularly alike to Requires Hate, I’m not even that close in my overall ideology I suspect. As a white, middle aged, Western heteronormative male, I’m in fact much closer to your own. I sit in a place of privilege.
But I happen to agree more with Requires Hate on the issue at hand, than you. Whether that is the elephant or the rider, we’re both going the same way. I don’t have any degree of hate for you, not even your writing. That’s in part why I shake my head when you go on and on about how no one is engaging with you, by your reckoning, no one is being reasonable, by your standards, and why everyone else but those who agree with you, seem to be subject to a mysterious phantom ingroup hatred of you. I don’t buy it. I’m not that invested in all this, and my opinions however imperfect are really just based on what I think about what I’ve read in your books, blogs, and what you’ve said in a couple of interviews.
I suspect more than ingroup or outgroup, I can sympathize with Requires Hate and other angry posters because after six months you’re still firing off things like this:
8) What characteristics should we look for when trying to distinguish between rational and constructive versus irrational and destructive feminists?
This question shows me far more than I suspect an answer would on your part. And not even being female, it just sets my teeth on edge. It is a sort of pugnacious ignorance. You have, it would appear, a real talent for this. There is something in this which to me, strongly suggests that you just don’t get it. That you honestly don’t see that by framing the question in this manner you’re trying to hijack the discussion.
Insisting that people be polite, be civil, is a well effective way of unbalancing a discussion. It’s a proven way of shutting down dissent of marginalizing especially women and minority groups. The Romans understood this and used civilization as effectively as any other tool in destroying and controlling their rivals and foes. By framing the question, by dictating the terms, you can keep people at arms length and censure on these grounds anything that want despite the fact that emotion as you agree, intuition if you would, is a very important part of people’s thinking – as much or more as any appeal to reason. I think people like Requires Hate have good reason to be angry. I appreciate their frank rudeness, and their impatience. This isn’t the Model UN, but the internet after all.
And it’s not rocket science. You’ve banged on a lot about how people can be certain. How people can differentiate in such matters, between “the real misogynists”* and those who just write fantasy books which appear on the surface misogynistic. You seem frustrated and perplexed, or at least dogged, spurred on to impossible lengths by people not being as interested in this whole question of certainty as you are.
But I’m not really seeing that as an issue. People review books, even fragments of books. We come to conclusions, and the ones I’ve seen – and my own – all referenced the material and/or your own discussions. I don’t need to be certain, I’ve got a good approximation. And in a case like this, it’s functionally as good as an absolute conclusion albeit more flexible.
Life is short and mostly disappointing so I’m signing off of this one now. I’m sure you’ll have some good answers, I might check back, I might not. No doubt I’ve not answered all your questions but I’ve tried to cover as many as I could. However, I’m bored of this now beyond words – and considering how verbose I am, that’s no small admission. You’ll have to do the best you can to muddle through with the rest of your regulars.
*Whom I have discovered that wherever they are, they’re hanging out with the “real terrorists” so we’re right to be worried.
You wrote, in response to Bakker:
This is what I don’t understand. Why should asking this question set your teeth on edge? You go on to say, “Insisting that people be polite, be civil, is [an]… effective way of unbalancing a discussion.” Really? It seems to me that the precise opposite is true: there’s no better way to ‘unbalance a discussion’ than to be rude and uncivil. And don’t straw-man me here. I’m not denigrating emotional responses as such. Sometimes emotional responses are exactly what’s called for — that is, sometimes they’re entirely rational. (I think the whole ’emotion vs. reason’ dichotomy is a bunch of bullshit: emotions are often reasonable, and reasons are often emotional.) But surely there’s also a time and place for cool-tempered dialogue. Honestly, I don’t see how anyone could deny this without embracing full-blown irrationalism. If that’s your end-game, then just be up front about it. That way, the conversation can end here and now.
I don’t see how a mere question — and, moreover, one that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable, perfectly understandable, perfectly worthwhile question — can be such a horrible, horrible thing. How can you straightfacedly compare Scott asking this question to “Romans… destroying and controlling their rivals and foes”? It seems… well… it just seems crazy to me. Off the wall crazy.
I’m being totally and completely genuine when I ask: What in bleeding hell are you talking about?!
Well, I’m kinda late to this party, but I just noticed that Mr. Edwards wrote:
“Depiction can reinforce existing norms. It can produce both prurient interest in “these things” and help maintain a status quo where the depiction goes unquestioned. Where would modern capitalism be with out their admen and TV?”
Humbug, I say.
First, there is very little to no evidence of fiction ever ascending to reliably influence a large group of people in a coherent ideological manner. So fiction’s capacity is, to put it very mildly, sensitively and politely, devoid of any rigorous confirmation and wildly speculative.
Second, marketing shenanigans, usually, do not rest on depictions that are supposed to be interpreted as fictional. Wildly artistic, symbolism-rich campaigns seem to have a very unpredictable “hit and miss” effect if my dear marketcritter friends are to be trusted.
So, all in all, no parallel can be drawn between works of fiction and “typical” works of advertising.
Third, overall capacity of marketing to actually create de-novo demand (as opposed to merely steering existing demand to a particular brand) and capacity to cause long-term alteration of attitudes in a reliable and coherent manner is subject of much debate, and, in a word, questionable.
It’s not just a case of depiction meaning endorsement in the sense of approval, it’s also depiction meaning endorsement of a world view.
Sexuality isn’t that simple– there’s fun and love as well as bleak optimization. No doubt there are evolutionary advantages to people liking each other, but I don’t see evolutionary psych people writing as though they ever had a friend or were one.
For your own mental flexibility, try imagining writing for women. And when I say writing for women, it would probably be better to think about particular women you know rather than the idea of “women” you’ve developed from arguing with feminists or from evolutionary psych.
Jo Walton’s _Among Others_ (a fantasy memoir about her adolescence, and nominated for a Hugo) might be useful. There’s a wide range between kickass heroine and victim of the system.
How well do you think someone who’d spent their life financially secure do writing about poor people, especially if they only imagined financially secure people reading their stories?
The problem of course is that depiction doesn’t automatically mean endorsement in either sense: it can mean criticism as well.
The evopsych stuff simply speaks to the dimensions of the social problem as I tackle it in Neuropath. The question of the male gaze, the degree to which it is cultural versus biological, is immensely important to a whole spectrum of gender issues. The social constructivist ideology, which has lost all credibility in so many different spheres of discourse, has simply got to go.
Writing FOR women is something I hope to do once The Second Apocalypse is finally completed. Point well taken.
He’s not a libertarian by any stretch. I actually think he’s a garden-variety fascist.
Oh Scott. Your ignorance fits nicely with your blatant intellectual dishonesty, hypocrisy, evasiveness, and inept philosophizing. You clearly don’t even know what a fascist is; I note that your position on women’s suffrage is demonstrably more fascist than mine, since women’s suffrage was the very first plank in the Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle. You don’t need to take my word for it, here’s what Benito Mussolini had to say:
Italians! Here is the program of a genuinely Italian movement. It is revolutionary because it is anti-dogmatic, strongly innovative and against prejudice. For the political problem: We demand:
a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility for women.
It’s also hysterical to see you complain about being diagnosed with moral and psychological defects through readings of your books when you didn’t even bother to read mine, or my columns, or very many posts on my blog before leaping to do the same to me. Finally, you left out the umlauts that you so adore. It’s not “Wangsty”, it’s “Wängsty”.
The problem is that there’s no ‘data’ to ‘prove’ him wrong on his moral and social positions.
That’s not the real problem. The real problem is that there is considerable logic and empirical evidence supporting my moral and social positions. You and those of your intellectually inept ilk are going to be like children sitting around in the rubble of the bombing of Stalingrad, shivering, starving to death, and wondering what happened. And future historians will be looking back at the equalitarian era in the West with the same wonder that we look at failed historical societies, marveling that anyone ever thought it was a functional system, let alone a desirable one.
To me it seems like you just have to turn to the data and show that he is wrong.
There you go. First present the logic, then provide the empirical evidence that supports the logic. It’s not hard, but it runs the risk of discovering that your cherished assumptions and conceptual are wrong.
Also calling someone who’s against women’s suffrage a libertarian seems a bit of a stretch. To me Vox seems someone in favor of rule by the elite.</b.
You are making the common error of confusing voting with liberty. The two not only are not synonymous, they are not even reliably correlated. Consider: does the citizen of Iran who can vote possess more liberty than the non-citizen resident of the USA, who cannot? All societies are ruled by an elite, the only question is how that elite is selected.
So you’re one of the good fascists?
I see fascism as the most straightforward political expression of human cognitive shortcomings. So whenever I encounter someone who’s belief system unerringly flatters their race or class or gender, or caters to notions of ‘purity,’ or nostalgic cartoons of the way things were, or simple regimes of authority (compliant to their interests), things like that, I tend to smell fascists, even though I know it’s counterproductive to call them such, simply because it’s not a flattering term.
I’m sorry, but that’s the way you smell to me (and to many others, I’m sure).
Vox, you claim: I’ll go even farther. Bearing and raising children is far more important than anything any working woman has ever done in her professional career in the entire history of Mankind. The silly, short-sighted, white trash teen mothers on MTV are contributing more to the human race than the most intelligent, highly educated, and accomplished women have ever done for it.
I wonder has a man ever done anything more valuable to society than raise a child. and what are some examples.
I, for one, think that children should be raised neither by men nor by women.
Children should be raised by well-designed, extensive, standardized expert systems. Off course, it would require somewhat better pattern-matching solutions (likely custom dedicated hardware) and a helluva debugging effort, but it would be nice, reliable, and most importantly maintainable, ensuring that over time all anomalies can be ironed out.
Raising children is too important to leave it to a diverse crowd of variably failible, weak, glitchy meatbags irrespective of what kind of fleshy thing can be found between their lower appendages.
Pinhead is the only one here talking sense!
Also, determining the genetic makeup of a child is certainly too important to trust it to random motherfucking chance.
Seriously, people don’t pick a surgery team to operate them by flipping a coin, do they ?
It’s just ridiculous when you think about it – in fact, it’s far worse than the raising thing, since errors in upbringing can be to some degree corrected later, while genetic fuckups tend to stick around to ruin the poor kid’s life forever.
P.S.:
I’d frankly not entrust gestation to humans as well – but artificial wombs seem a mite far away.
My understanding is the artificial womb will be here in our lifetime.
Well, don’t quote me on that, I’m an IT person not a meat jockey, but from what I’ve heard from a friendly “life scientist”, on one hand, wombs and placentas are quite complicated, so things might turn out very hard if you want a “fully non-biological” womb, but on the other hand a zygote is goddamn tenacious (there were cases of people carrying an ectopic pregnancy to term – the little not-quite-person doesn’t quite care which blood vessels to invade), so at least theoretically, some of the problems can be done away with if you can get away with using a “disposable bioengineered anancephalic animal host on life support” (actual quote btw).
But sadly, I doubt anancephalic bioengineered “host cattle” will ever recieve green light. A shame really :(. Such a beautifull concept
“a) Universal suffrage polled on a regional basis, with proportional representation and voting and electoral office eligibility for women.”
Which explains all those famous female fascist leaders…hey, what?
Yeah, if this is Vox’s vaunted logic at work I figure I haven’t missed much by largely ignoring posts relating to him.
Well, the thing is, we talk about what’s in a book and controversial content of a book – but this is the living, breathing! Although books may propegate bad ideas – well, what do you do when ideas (we think are bad) are already walking around, being enacted by someone? Surely one can’t just focus on the books?
True, but I have no interest in Vox’s arguments. I read some stuff on his site can concluded there was little to gain.
ACM’s got a point about that “fallen angels” line.
It depends – peoples baseline values often don’t match. What is a yummy meal (a burger) to one person is yucky to another (a vegetarian). Exact same content, different points.
That said, what point did she describe?
She said it was awful. Which, let’s face it, it is. Bite THAT bullet, Bakker!
Oh, an aesthetic point…mayhap, mayhap!
Which explains all those famous female fascist leaders…hey, what?
Yes, because fascism had so many male leaders in its historically short period of political viability. Let’s face it, you had no idea it would be so easy to catch Wängsty out on his ignorance of fascism. Claiming that opposing women’s suffrage is fascist is very much like arguing that opposing gun rights is republican.
Haha pretty much everyone here is crazy, but you’re *way* crazy.
“I am totally not fascist in any sense of the word but one day people like you are ‘going to be like children sitting around in the rubble of the bombing of Stalingrad, shivering, starving to death, and wondering what happened'” lol
The thing is, to Vox ending up like one of those children is a very real threat to him, in his mind (well, very real if he weren’t so gosh darn smart (which is actually if he weren’t so adherant to his orthodoxy, but nm)). It gives you an insight into what are, for him, genuine fears.
How about top bureaucrats, mid-level bureaucrats — minor bureaucrats? Anything that might show that your quote actually reflects fascism, not fascist propaganda. Much is attributed to fascism that was actually deceptive propaganda, which shouldn’t be surprising; they were shameless liars. The juxtaposing of “election” with “fascism” should raise a red flag or two, as while fascism used deceptive election politicking to gain power, how prominent were fair elections after it was firmly established?
I think TPB is doing its job just fine. It’s nice to encounter such a passionate mix of minds, of conceptual frames, something which might have never, ever, happened in TPB’s absence.
Ask Vox. He seems to know something about statistics.
You might even say there’s a sort of communicative coherency going on in the last 200+ comments as all these polarized perspectives clashed.
Congrats Bakker. Wicked post, btw.
Scott wrote:
“They’ve escaped forced female circumcision only to want vaginal plastic surgery. It is well and truly fucked up, I think.”
I see what you’re saying, but you are making a dangerous move by comparing the two. Maybe they are both representative of male oppression, but much more is taken by the former than the latter.
Suddenly this discussion got interesting again thanks to Seth’s very incisive post… you know, someone who has actually read your work.
“They’ve escaped forced female circumcision only to want vaginal plastic surgery. It is well and truly fucked up, I think.”
Who says they escaped it? “As many as 100,000 women in Britain have undergone female genital mutilations with medics in the UK offering to carry out the illegal procedure on girls as young as 10, it has been reported.”
Perhaps you’ll begin taking my point about immigration transforming the native culture once white Canadian girls are getting their clits amputated. Although I suppose it’s possible that you’d support this development, since we’re not only informed that you are misogynistic, but can’t be certain that a culture where women still possess their complete genitals is superior to one where they don’t.
After all, the one thing you know is certainty is bad….
“Perhaps you’ll begin taking my point about immigration transforming the native culture once white Canadian girls are getting their clits amputated.’
….Dare I ask where this point about immigration will be located?
Also, don’t get your hopes up, I doubt I’ll be making relocation plans anytime soon. 😉
Two wrongs don’t make a right, Vox. Tell me: do you think you’re same as everyone else, in that you simply rationalize your unconscious moral intuitions, or that you are the exception? So many of the arguments you make suggest that you suffer from a ‘purity preoccupation,’ a basic tendency to be disgusted by perceived complications. This has never bothered me, even though I live in the country with the highest per capita immigration rate in the world. I’m often the racial minority when I go to my gym for instance. But I know many who are freaked out by it, who feel very, very threatened – and all of them cook up arguments to make their anxiety sound rational. They scrounge up little stories (‘atrocity tales,’ anthropologists call them) that seek to mobilize sentiment against perceived pollutants (which always – happily – happens to be the ‘other guy’) – in effect to make the situation worse!
Given that ‘purity preoccupations,’ as useful as they may have been in the stone age, cause little more than misery now, don’t you think we should strive to teach people about them, to get everyone to lighten up? There’s nothing more superficial than skin.
But the bottom-line, Vox, is that your political preoccupations make you look weak, a slave of your anxieties. The world you paint is one filled with boxes, everyone in their proper (racial, sexual, economic) place, where the enlightened elite (or as you like to call them, you) enforce the social simplicity from which harmony (as opposed to the conflict that typically results when you box people) will naturally flow. An anxiety free world… and preposterous on so many levels I don’t even know where to begin!
Since you’re talking about systems that include economies, you’re talking about systems more complicated than economies, which, by your own admission, means you’re talking about systems that you cannot know with any real certainty – which means, that your social theory is nothing more than a guess. Which means that you would sort all humanity into boxes – institute oppression on an unprecedented degree – all on the basis of guesswork… Give this shit up, please. As leery as I am of libertarianism, I would far rather see you embrace that than this! Seriously. It should be beneath you.
Dude, you gotta let these ugly elephants go.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought FGM is predominantly a procedure parents partial to a certain branch of Islam carry out in regards to their children, not randomly chosen neighbor kids. So hypothetical Canadian girls are not at risk, no ?
Do scalpel-wielding immigrants of traditional beliefs hunt down random little girls now?
Hey, know you’re suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect–isn’t this the one thing you specifically and repeatedly go to pains to reject? That everyone is stupid, but you’re as stupid as the rest of us?
https://twitter.com/#!/esedia/status/194149368868241410
You’ll have to walk me through this one. How, exactly, is my incompetence leading me to claim a competence I don’t possess?
Hmmm. That was supposed to link to the tweet. Try http://www.twitter(dot)com/#!/esedia/status/194149368868241410 …obviously replacing the (dot).
I think the new cartoon version of Bakker that’s going ’round is–very smart guy who tries to intellectually prove he isn’t sexist by showing how his critics aren’t smart enough to grasp his nuances.
Which is really kind of depressing and ironic given TPB posts like this one.
The whole discussion is on this guy’s twitter feed: kind of rough stuff. Apparently you ‘think you are some sort of brilliant writer’, ‘write rape porn’, etc.
https://twitter.com/#!/Paul_C_Smith
Twitter is their preferred medium for a reason, I suspect. One step up from name-calling, logically speaking!
This is the problem I see in letting the most interesting – however contentious – parts of Scott’s claims ending up buried in the comments.
Scott’s comment to Seth is far and away, IMO, better than the actual Cross-eye post.
very smart guy who tries to intellectually prove he isn’t sexist by showing how his critics aren’t smart enough to grasp his nuances.
More that moral indignation silences other parts of the brain.
The accusations made – what’s the track record of those who make accusations? 100% accuracy? That’s a pretty remarkable score – but the moral indignation stops the rest of the mind being critical of such an apparently perfect judgemental accuracy rate. The moral indignation silences the rest of the brain that might otherwise think ‘actually all people are fallable, including these accusers’.
Just say if you think a 100% accuracy rating on judgements is actually not remarkable.
Tell me: do you think you’re same as everyone else, in that you simply rationalize your unconscious moral intuitions, or that you are the exception? So many of the arguments you make suggest that you suffer from a ‘purity preoccupation,’ a basic tendency to be disgusted by perceived complications.
Ooh, so you finally read John Haidt… I was interviewing him before you’d ever heard of him, Scott. You’re still trying to put me in the conservative box and it still doesn’t fit. Also, everyone doesn’t simply rationalize their unconscious moral intuitions, that’s a provably false statement. I suggest you need to put down the social science theory for a while, read some history and do some math. When I add 2+2 and get 4, I’m not rationalizing my unconscious moral intuition, I’m doing something called “addition”.
This has never bothered me, even though I live in the country with the highest per capita immigration rate in the world.
How wonderfully non-racist you are! Good Canadian! This simply means you’re even more ignorant than you’ve already shown yourself to be. All of the precious Canadian values you hold so near and dear, despite your “uncertainty”, are on their way out the door. And when they’re gone and you’re living in a recreation of a third world hellhole like Detroit, you’ll be lying on the ground wondering what happened and why that mean group of thugs knocked you down and took your wallet when your heart was so pure.
What is so relentlessly stupid about your lunatic left-liberalism is that you believe a mere change in geographic location is going to magically change the uncivilized of the world into an advanced civilized population. It won’t. It never has. Unless kept strictly in check, with sufficiently small populations that are forced to conform to the norms of the native population, the immigration transformation effect will radically alter the invaded society and make it more like the one from which the invaders came. It’s why even good left-liberal Oregonians put bumper stickers on their cars that say “Don’t Californicate Oregon”; because the Californians fleeing California are trying to recreate the very mess they fled.
Since you’re talking about systems that include economies, you’re talking about systems more complicated than economies, which, by your own admission, means you’re talking about systems that you cannot know with any real certainty – which means, that your social theory is nothing more than a guess.
Now you’re underlining your ignorance of both history and biology. You think it’s nothing more than a guess when biologists try to keep foreign predators out of populations where the prey aren’t accustomed to them? You’re an ignoramus and a charlatan, Scott, and trying to evade the salient matter by theorizing about why I recognize the totally freaking obvious isn’t working. History, demographics, mathematics, biology, and statistical analysis all speak as one in this regard.
Riots in London. Rapes in Sweden. Burning cars in France. Mass murder in Norway. 100,000 clits amputated in the UK. And as far back as 1968, people saw this coming… and yet you still can’t see it in 2012 when it is already happening right in front of you.
Perhaps when an individual from a barbarian culture without a driver’s license kills someone you know, or rapes a woman of your acquaintance, you’ll pull your head out of your navel long enough to realize that your idiotic “it’s a small world” theory of a rainbow society was never more than a child’s historically ignorant dream. It doesn’t bother you yet because you haven’t suffered any material harm yet. When you do, you’ll change your tune fast enough.
“…you believe a mere change in geographic location is going to magically change the uncivilized of the world into an advanced civilized population. It won’t. It never has. Unless kept strictly in check, with sufficiently small populations that are forced to conform to the norms of the native population, the immigration transformation effect will radically alter the invaded society and make it more like the one from which the invaders came.”
You’re assuming that “civilized” is an advancement from “uncivilized”. There is no basis for this in anything but opinion and cultural inertia.
What is your threshold for invasion? What is the list of criteria that must be met in order for you to change your description of a population from migratory or transitory to invasive?
Actually from a historical and biological perspective, none of your evidence suggests anything more than the fact that we get along a helluva lot better than we did in the past. Riots? Sounds horrible. Funny how crime in Canada has dropped with the growth of immigration. This is invisible to you, of course, since you’re incapable of seeing anything that doesn’t confirm your view.
It’s funny how simply looking at the human race as just that – the human race – leads to all the labels. Rainbow society? What else has it ever been?
That fact is, Vox, the world was a helluva lot more violent when everyone was sorted into their nifty little boxes. The research is out there, if you don’t believe me. Pinker’s new book is a good place to start. But then, I guess any research that conflicts with your view is garbage, because you are the self-professed gold standard… Or could it be, you’re simply a hate-mongering buffoon? Yet one more me-me-me messiah?
So you really are the first person in the history of the human race to ‘get it right’? What do you call it: the Anal Retentive Theory of Social Theory… the one where everyone lives and behaves the way you say they should?
Tell me, honestly, you don’t see how ridiculous that is?
I will say that ive thoroughly enjoyed the commitment that Vox shows. Id like to think hes one of the worlds best trolls but clearly hes a true believer which in the end makes him a zealot.
Zealots can be quaint and cute as long as they have no access to levers of power, which thankfully he doesnt. Im sure he would say that he invented lever’s but whatever.
Strangely enough, even if I’m likely one of the people Vox wishes to deport, I see something in what he is saying though the hyperbolic “They’re after your daughters!” is a bit overwrought.
Do liberals, by advocating for mass invitation of immigrant populations, threaten their ideal society by granting citizenship to those who don’t see the world the way they do?
How much of democracy is a numbers game? How much of it rests in the hands of the judiciary that can resist a reactionary backlash immigrants might bring to social issues?
It’s a question worth debating, no matter the final position one takes.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, Vox.
Are you certain? How can you, the Apostle of Uncertainty, possibly make a statement like that? I can mathematically prove that two negatives make a positive, after all. -1*-1=1. Scott, you have said that you’re hypocritical like everyone else, but the more important issue is that your philosophy is intrinsically incoherent, which renders your arguments both illogical and irrelevant.
1) Are negative numbers wrong?
2) If they are wrong, does that automatically entail that positive numbers are right?
3) Exactly how does a correctly-solved math problem translate into a statement about morality?
4) At what point did operators and operands begin to be interchangeable with reality on any but the theoretical level?
As was covered a day or two ago, it’s important to distinguish between epistemic and doxastic certainty. Of course, the two are related, but if I am not mistaken, Scott and others here warn against the pernicious effects of belief certainty. There’s nothing wrong with trying to know about our world with greater certainty (epistemic). Of course, assessing your position as one of genuine epistemic truth is doxastic certainty, not epistemic. There are also benefits to some doxastic certainty, but also a great deal of evil arises from it as well. Probably the majority of human evil comes from people with certain belief that might have been averted if they had taken the time to reflect on how much they don’t know. Anders Breivik was sure that what he was doing was right, and that certainty allowed him to murder scores of people. The jury is still out whether Breivik is insane, which will might fray the direct connection between moral certainty and this atrocity, but Breivik was probably agitated by exactly the kind of rhetoric you use. I believe he even derived part of his motivation from the writings of your boss. A person doesn’t do the things Breivik did when they have a sound understanding of what we can and can’t be sure about.
What comes before determines what comes after…. Vox you are a product of what raised and shaped you… Robert Beale is a Minnesota entrepreneur, founder and former CEO of Comtrol,[1] fugitive,[2] tax protestor and convicted felon who was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for tax evasion.[3][4][5]..Beale is the father of political columnist Theodore Beale (Vox Day)… its sad that your so outspoken and have such an audience to be such a bigot at heart. This isn’t a personal attack, but a show that at heart the concept of the “Emperical Priority Principle” (Emperical Priority Principle (sometimes referred to as the Principle of Before and After) asserts that within the circle of the world, what comes before determines what comes after without exception. The Rational Priority Principle asserts that Logos, or Reason, lies outside the circle of the world (though only in a formal and not an ontological sense). The Epistemological Principle asserts that knowing what comes before (via the Logos) yields “control” of what comes after. In Bakker’s works ring true. Your system is outdated as its had its millennia or two to run its course. Your intelligent I give you that, as programming synthesis takes a lot of time and patience, but your concepts on society show how short minded and repetitive you really are.
Dear Vox,
Your angry rants amuse me beyond belief. Your ability to choose and employ cherrypicking arguments just so you can BE RIGHT and SCOTT WRONG (this is a good meme), only proves how utterly you have no idea what you’re talking about and fall victim to your shortcomings. I wonder how can you make “logical” statements that women should be encouraged to bear and raise babies and there alternative roles should be hindered just so society can procreate? For a libertarian that seem damn “unliberal”. I won’t even comment on your religious belief, I’ll only say – for a fan of logic and rationalization you seem to miss the point that human believes are not the truth – they’re just certainty, proof acquired by the brain and I don’t think I need to point wrong convictions and believes made people do some horrible stuff (Crusaders, anyone?).
Ir’s pathetically obvious you fell on “alpha animal” mode – cherrypick arguments and information and tear down your opponent down with them. Pretty caveman style.
We get it. You hate to question your beliefs and convictions.
Oh and talking about thirdworld hellholes – I’m from one. And though I have no idea what Canadian values are (putting labels again, are we?), but when I came across Scotts books, I knew immediately we shared the same truth (yes truth, not belief, because Science, history and experience goddamn says so). Tell me, how can that be possible if according to you Scott can’t wrap his mind around third world hellholes?
We talk about wrong beliefs and convictions here and the objective truth. That’s what the Three Pound Brain is for.
I can only hope that you will be able to actually debate sensibely.
Humoristically yours,
Bogdan Spasov
P.S.: Try and remember this picture next time you decide to write here, or for that matter anywhere besides your own blog.
Vox: “I fail to see what a rhinoceros comic has to with the unassailable logic of my arguments.”
You’re assuming that “civilized” is an advancement from “uncivilized”. There is no basis for this in anything but opinion and cultural inertia.
That says it all about you uncertainty morons right there. You’re the intellectual version of the women chopping off their daughters’ genitals. And yes, I will absolutely argue that “civilized” is an advancement from “uncivilized”.
Funny how crime in Canada has dropped with the growth of immigration.
The growth of immigration in Canada is mostly from South Asia, China, and the Phillippines. In the USA, it’s from South and Central America. In Europe, it’s from Africa and the Middle East. This doesn’t support your point about different boxes, it supports mine. Trying to argue that because Canadian immigrants haven’t caused major crime problems in Canada, all immigration from all societies is beneficial is absolutely ridiculous. Also, Canada’s minority population is still relatively small at only 16 percent. Minorities tend to be well-behaved when they are significantly outnumbered.
The US, on the other hand, now has that many South and Central Americans alone, 17 million more than Canada has people. Perhaps the ideal solution would be to send them all north since you believe that 50 million Latin American immigrants wouldn’t have any negative effect on Canadian society.
So you really are the first person in the history of the human race to ‘get it right’? What do you call it: the Anal Retentive Theory of Social Theory… the one where everyone lives and behaves the way you say they should?
You’re not only wildly wrong, but you’re projecting here, Scott. I’m not the one who is trumpeting any groundbreaking new theory. In fact, I’ve already pointed out precisely the opposite; the outcome of this grand experiment in electing a new people across the West was predicted before I was even born in Enoch Powell’s famous “Rivers of Blood” speech. And the importance of preventing the overrunning of the native population has been standard policy in most nations for centuries.
Breivik and Merah are only the first examples. And once the governments get involved due to the popular pressure, it’s going to get extremely ugly, all due to the pro-vibrancy theorists and the politicians who foolishly believed them. It has nothing to do with anyone behaving the way I say they should, I’m merely pointing out the obvious consequences of people behaving the way they observably behave.
How much of Powell’s speech has actually been realized in the 44 years since he gave it? He was reacting to the American civil rights movement and upheaval at the time and mistook it for a permanent state of escalating violence and not something that would gradually resolve and improve.
Breivik and Merah are very good examples of just what people here have been saying about the dangers of belief certainty. If you take your views, put them on steroids, give them a psychotic breakdown and several semi-automatic weapons, you have Breivik! Hands down, that is Breivik. You can’t take one paranoid native and consider his actions a failure of multiculturalism. They’re the failure of Anders Breivik. You’re arguing in circles here. And what better example of the perniciousness of moral certainty can there be than Merah and the ongoing intractability of the Jewish/Islamic battle?
“This doesn’t support your point about different boxes, it supports mine.”
How? This doesn’t make any sense. Are we all Chinese? Ah I see, these are the superior people. Immigration doesn’t work, unless it does, in which case it doesn’t count.
“Trying to argue that because Canadian immigrants haven’t caused major crime problems in Canada, all immigration from all societies is beneficial is absolutely ridiculous.”
It seems like a reasonable counter example to the claim that immigration is an unmitigated evil, at least so long as it remains below your magic proportion of pop.
Last time I checked, the “Latin americans” you seem to despise more than a little bit were predominantly Christian, predominantly Catholic, and pretty damn devout.
If anything, assuming you indeed believe that “immigration of people with different beliefs will make local culture more like their culture”, you should be welcoming Latin Americans since society will be (per your own theory) bent closer to the ideas of piousness, prudence. and hypothetical-omnipotent-mythical-creature worship.
Or did Latin America get overrun by Ze Mooselums and Cthulhu Cult while no one was looking ?
Catholics don’t count as Christians in Mr. Protestant’s narrow world-view, friend.
I will also say this:
I’m hispanic and I have a huge picture of Cthulhu hanging up in my room. I also have Cthulhu slippers, a Cthulhu keychain (like a Jesus fish with tentacles!) and a Cthulhu bumper sticker.
Hey! Maybe Vox is right!
Speaking of projecting, Vox’s concern is that he imagines these immigrants would behave the way he observably behaves. In a way, he has atleast one case study to support this – you can hardly argue with Vox that nobody behaves like Vox, can you?
Indeed if the immigrants did all act like him, you can be certain they’d have a box for him. And given he acts in a ‘logical and rational’ way (ie, the right way), it’s only a matter of time before these immigrants start getting logical and rational in the same way, if they aren’t already. It’s a powder keg!
Imagine Vox after Vox, stepping off the boats! Does he piss you off and seem absolutely unable to adopt any other cultural values apart from his own, to any degree? Exactly!
Frankly, if I felt every immigrant would enact the same practices as I would and I was Vox like, I’d be damn leery about immigration as well. The things these immigrants will stoop to! The boxes they will make!
Exactly, he takes his reference point to be himself. What else can he possibly conclude?
Yeah. Makes for a complicated puzzle to unravel, doesn’t it? 🙂
“That says it all about you uncertainty morons right there. You’re the intellectual version of the women chopping off their daughters’ genitals. And yes, I will absolutely argue that “civilized” is an advancement from “uncivilized”.
Well, start arguing.
And stick to attacking the issue, not my tendencies toward the genitalia of an idea. 😉
How much of Powell’s speech has actually been realized in the 44 years since he gave it?
Most of it.
In fifteen or twenty years, on present trends, there will be in this country 3 1/2 million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to Parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s office. There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of 5-7 million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by different sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.
He actually underestimated the numbers. The non-British population was nearly 10 million, 14% of the population, in 2001 and is even higher now.
The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker: whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.
Those Sikh practices now look pretty good in retrospect compared with the cliterodectomies, human sacrifice, rape, and honor killings practiced by the newer immigrants to Britain. Of course, Scott can’t say that there is anything wrong with any of those things; that would amount to committing certainty!
Breivik and Merah are very good examples of just what people here have been saying about the dangers of belief certainty. If you take your views, put them on steroids, give them a psychotic breakdown and several semi-automatic weapons, you have Breivik! Hands down, that is Breivik. You can’t take one paranoid native and consider his actions a failure of multiculturalism.
Of course you can! That’s the entire point. The theory of multiculturalism rests upon the idea that people from various cultures can happily live together in peace. Breivik’s actions are alone sufficient to disprove that, and there are thousands of other examples that do the same. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that “belief certainty” is dangerous, then it is wildly stupid and massively irresponsible to provoke it rather than respect it.
There are no shortage of scientific studies demonstrating that people and animals strongly prefer their own kind, and that integration leads to significant social problems and a reduction in social cohesion. If you genuinely believe that “belief certainty” is dangerous, then the most irrational thing you can do is to is intentionally advocate policies that are bound to unleash those dangers. You’re waving a red flag in front of a bull even as you complain that the bull is dangerous. That’s insane.
If anything, assuming you indeed believe that “immigration of people with different beliefs will make local culture more like their culture”, you should be welcoming Latin Americans since society will be (per your own theory) bent closer to the ideas of piousness, prudence. and hypothetical-omnipotent-mythical-creature worship.
Sure, because there are no significant cultural differences between the USA and Guatemala. Your attempt at logic is inept.
Speaking of projecting, Vox’s concern is that he imagines these immigrants would behave the way he observably behaves.
That’s absolutely false. I don’t amputate my daughter’s genitalia. I don’t commit honor killings. I don’t live off welfare. I don’t drive without a license and kill people. I don’t rape Swedish women, sell stolen goods in Italy, or burn French cars. You keep following Scott’s lead in attempting to make this about me and my psychology rather than the observable behavior of large population groups. Not only doesn’t the tactic work, it merely underlines the fact that you can’t even begin to defend your own case.
It seems like a reasonable counter example to the claim that immigration is an unmitigated evil, at least so long as it remains below your magic proportion of pop.
The problem is that I’ve never made that claim. I’ve always stated that societies can handle limited immigration from other civilized societies; this can even be beneficial. However, a society that permits too much immigration is destined to see itself transformed in accordance to the cultural preferences of the incoming population. How much is too much? That is the debate we should be having, but of course, it’s one those intellectually castrated by the uncertainty principle can never have.
“Sure, because there are no significant cultural differences between the USA and Guatemala. Your attempt at logic is inept”
Why, it is of course possible that Latin Americans have traits that you would not find to your liking, in addition to their religious and social attitudes that are very much like your own.
Care to enumerate what traits indigenous to Latin America and not vividly represented in current USA are you concerned about ?
Or are you concerned that Latin Americans will bring some currently unknown phenomenon, some kind of “hypothetical cooties” ?
Me: Speaking of projecting, Vox’s concern is that he imagines these immigrants would behave the way he observably behaves.
Vox: That’s absolutely false. I don’t amputate my daughter’s genitalia.
True. Just her suffrage. And the recognition of rape being possible in any marriage she enters into.
I don’t commit honor killings.
Yes, you only promote killing when your morally certain. Which is different from honour killings – those guys are totally doubtful when they do that.
I don’t live off welfare.
Society provides the security and structure for where you get your money, but you consider yourself as having earned it all by pure personal merit.
I don’t drive without a license and kill people. I don’t rape Swedish women, sell stolen goods in Italy, or burn French cars.
And what drives that behaviour? Doubt? Uncertainty as to whether the act should be performed? Hardly.
Yeah, you don’t rape Swedish women. Unless you married one then she declined to have sex at some point, as to you there is no rape possible in marriage. And I’ve no idea what sort of companies you invest in – probably the only criteria being that they are the most profitable.
You recognise the intensity and drive of these people – the threat of that. As much as you know your way around a firearm and it’s effects and what would happen when you’re in front of the barrel rather than behind the trigger. How is that psychology, rather than just plain ol’ rational logic?
You keep following Scott’s lead in attempting to make this about me and my psychology rather than the observable behavior of large population groups.
The observable behaviour being the large population groups psychology.
Fact is I thought I put in something towards your argument. The way you observe these groups, you think they will be just as morally certain as you are (you’re not describing them as a bunch of doubters, are you?). And you do indeed exist, of course, so why couldn’t others be just as morally certain, but a sort of dark side of the force? So maybe there are people with that dark side certainty amongst these groups – and maybe they will do whatever it takes to enforce their status quo. Ie, if you don’t put an immigration policy on them first, they’ll put one on you?
How? This doesn’t make any sense. Are we all Chinese? Ah I see, these are the superior people. Immigration doesn’t work, unless it does, in which case it doesn’t count.
Of course it makes sense, you simply can’t see it. Chinese culture is civilized, though not advanced. Do you seriously think that a similar influx of white Americans, Nigerians, or Somalis would play out in a similar fashion? Canada has a) a relatively small immigrant population that is b) from one of the less problematic societies. Naturally, it hasn’t seen the same problems that those with larger immigrant populations from the less civilized societies have.
But even too much Chinese immigration can be a problem. Look at Tibet and Indonesia.
Very well, here are five questions for those who are simultaneously attacking belief certainty and the idea that immigration should be limited.
1. On what basis do you claim open and unlimited immigration is to be preferred to limited immigration?
2. How do you balance this claim with the assertion that belief certainty is dangerous?
3. How is belief certainty in open immigration any less dangerous than belief certainty in limited immigration, or any other belief certainty for that matter?
4. On what basis is “uncivilized” society superior to “civilized” society?
5. Does immigration inevitably transform societal laws, cultures, and traditions?
“4. On what basis is “uncivilized” society superior to “civilized” society?”
This is the only one I’m biting on, since we’re having about 5 debates at once, and I’m really only a part of this one.
Simply put, uncivilized society isn’t superior or inferior; it’s just different. This all depends on how you define each term, but notions of superiority are simply statements of preference. Some people act as if there is one dot on the left, marked “uncivilized”, one dot on the right, marked “civilized”, and a line connecting them. Moving to the right is “forward” and to the left is “backward”. Any points that fall above or below the line are seen as aberrations. Movement to the left is viewed as heretical. There is nothing but opinions and cultural intertia behind such associations.
Your turn.
Oh comeon Jonathan. Do you really want to argue all societies are equal? That progress is impossible?
How about this. I will claim that the desire to live is a universal *preference*. More people are able to live and live longer in modern civilized societies than could live in uncivilized societies. QED?
@Gareth:
I’m not arguing that they’re equal. I typed that they were different, which is not at all the same. Inferiority and superiority are value judgements, not descriptions of some absolute qualities of uncivilized and civilized. Saying that something is superior is altogether different than saying it is blue.
“More people are able to live and live longer in modern civilized societies than could live in uncivilized societies.”
If the quantity of people who are able to live and the quantity of years included in those lives is your sole measure of superiority, which is what I think you’re getting at here, then you’d be correct is assuming that civilized is superior. I whole-heartedly disagree with you on those measures. Which leads me to the Anti-Bakker:
@Vox:
Those life averages include the people who spend 10 years connected to an oxygen tank. They say nothing of the quality of those long lives. See the above paragraph.
The rape/AIDS thing: not every uncivilized society does this. Not every civilized society has chemical cocktails. Even of the ones that do, those cocktails can be withheld from the people who need them because they’re gay, for instance. An uncivilized society can be better or worse than a civilized society. The same goes for a civilized society. It seems like you’re arguing that a society is better simply by virtue of being civilized. It might actually be that your definition of “civilized” is simply “a society that is better.” I’m not really sure what you’re defining civilization to be, so we might just be typing past each other.
The societal comparison thing: you’re using your own measuring stick to measure societies that wouldn’t even have known how to read said stick. You’re taking your own measures of success and superiority, applying them in retrospect to two groups, and then determining one of them was better because it reaches farther up the stick that you made. Neither one is better. They’re two completely different ways of living, with two entirely different philosophies. They were probably completely incompatible with one another for this reason. From the perspective of a modern, Westernized thinker, one is going to look better. From the perspective of an ancient tribal American, “better” might be different.
1. On what basis do you claim open and unlimited immigration is to be preferred to limited immigration?
Atleast for myself, such an option could be scientifically tested in some way. After all, were not just saying ‘unlimited immigration’ in the same way you’re saying ‘limited immigration’. Again you see others as being just as certain as you. A scientific test of open immigration in some way, would be interesting.
Or we could just take your word for it.
2. How do you balance this claim with the assertion that belief certainty is dangerous?
Your reading a claim made because that’s what you’d do – just claim one conclusion then stick to it. A scientific test would be interesting.
3. How is belief certainty in open immigration any less dangerous than belief certainty in limited immigration, or any other belief certainty for that matter?
See #2.
4. On what basis is “uncivilized” society superior to “civilized” society?
When the people who define ‘civilised’ are not.
5. Does immigration inevitably transform societal laws, cultures, and traditions?
As a product of such transformations, you know they do. Your argument is that the transformations should end at you. Exactly you, actually.
“However, a society that permits too much immigration is destined to see itself transformed in accordance to the cultural preferences of the incoming population. How much is too much?”
I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but this actually is a debate worth having.
What transformations are you predicting Vox – changes to the law? Changes to what society accepts as moral?
I guess this is where people, including myself, are getting lost. I see your argument that things we value like gay marriage are threatened by an influx of conservative demographics, or that an influx of labor today might prevent the ability to draw in engineers tomorrow when we need them, but then you lose me when you start getting into you apocalyptic hyperbole.
And don’t worry, you can reply to me directly, you won’t get race cooties from a ‘net connection. 😉
Memetic cooties travel fine over TCP/IP, since TCP/IP was designed with spreading various information in mind 🙂
Simply put, uncivilized society isn’t superior or inferior; it’s just different. This all depends on how you define each term, but notions of superiority are simply statements of preference.
So you see no superiority in one society where people live 30 years longer on average than another, or inferiority in a society where men rape children in order to cure themselves of AIDS versus one in which they take chemical cocktails? Let’s be perfectly clear: would you would regard Austro-Hungarian society of 1875 to be superior to the Mongol society of 1175?
What transformations are you predicting Vox – changes to the law? Changes to what society accepts as moral?
The specific details of the transformation depends upon the society, the societies from which the immigrants come, and the relative size of the immigrant population to the native one. But the transformation is absolutely inevitable, which means that if the members of a society value their laws, traditions, and culture, they have to realize that they are assured to lose at least some of them as part of that process.
The ironic thing is that people at TPB get exercised about my ideology while simultaneously celebrating the immigration of people whose ideologies should be far more abhorrent to them.
I see your argument that things we value like gay marriage are threatened by an influx of conservative demographics, or that an influx of labor today might prevent the ability to draw in engineers tomorrow when we need them, but then you lose me when you start getting into you apocalyptic hyperbole.
I suggest you look more closely at what is taking place in France, in Hungary, in Italy, in Nigeria, and other places around the world. Breivik and Merah are not the psychopathic outliers that everyone would like them to be. They are the expected harbingers and there will be more of them before long. We are the beneficiaries of an unusually long period of relative peace, and as has often been the case during such periods, we are totally psychologically unprepared to see the martial patterns developing again.
You can’t possibly imagine that native populations are going to continue to accept substantial immigrant populations with 50 percent youth unemployment, debt-deflation, and currency collapse.
My reply to this is actually a few posts above, where I replied to Gareth. Nesting threaded responses and all that.
I already conceded in my post that living was a *preference*. I qualified it by saying I think it is a universal preference. Then I stated what I think are objective measurable conditions for how one society better satisfies this *preference*. Your saying either that it’s not a universal preference or that more people living longer does not satisfy this preference. I’ll put myself at 99.9% certain that both of my claims are correct;)
“I already conceded in my post that living was a *preference*. I qualified it by saying I think it is a universal preference. Then I stated what I think are objective measurable conditions for how one society better satisfies this *preference*. Your saying either that it’s not a universal preference or that more people living longer does not satisfy this preference. I’ll put myself at 99.9% certain that both of my claims are correct;)
Ah, I think I glossed over the importance of that word. At any rate, my personal preference is for a high quality of life. Living 50 wonderful years and dying in my sleep is preferable to living 50 wonderful years followed by 30 more miserable and pain-filled years before death. You’re not “correct”, but you’re not wrong either. You just have a particular worldview which works for you. I like that. But I’m sure you can understand that my view is different, and no less “correct”.
@Vox: You seem to have lumped in several concerns into a giant ball of anti-immigration.
Seems like at least some of the crime is more due to education and economic factors. It’s your (perhaps unintended?) sweeping claims and implications that immigrants by their intrinsic nature are more likely to steal or riot that rankles people. I’ve dealt with being a “job stealing Jap” when there were no actual Japanese to be found, so I suppose I’m less phased at this point.
Now should a society import more human capital during a recession if it doesn’t see economic gain from doing so? I’d agree that this is a bad idea. I haven’t seen good data on the immigration question for the US, let along nations I’m not in, so I can’t put forth a position at this time.
As for honor killings and the like, crimes motivated by non-Westerners, I think it’s problematic to consider these apart from the general issue of domestic violence which is incredibly prevalent even when you discount violence motivated by non-Westerners. Is the net benefit of immigrants undone by the negative actions of a small number?
I suppose one could make the argument that crimes perpetrated by immigrants is a threat that can be reduced with the simple step of decreasing immigration, but this presupposes that immigration provides no value to an accepting country. I’m assuming your position is we already have enough immigrants to reap the benefits, that we’ve already shifted to the point where we’re sliding into the negative?
You aren’t the first person to worry about influx of immigrants, I know it’s a concern among secularists and some liberals in the UK as well. Naturally, you have a horse in this race that most of us don’t, which is concern for Christianity, so from that standpoint your position will be more reactionary than most TPB’ers I suspect.
I’m not sure the U.S., which given my past understanding has been more successful in assimilating immigrants than Europe, has as much to fear as other nations do.
we are totally psychologically unprepared to see the martial patterns developing again.
I’d argue were having this discussion because were quite capable of seeing martial patterns developing.
Take heart – you’re not the only one under examination.
The rape/AIDS thing: not every uncivilized society does this. Not every civilized society has chemical cocktails. Even of the ones that do, those cocktails can be withheld from the people who need them because they’re gay, for instance. An uncivilized society can be better or worse than a civilized society. The same goes for a civilized society.
Irrelevant. We were considering the direct comparison of two societies, not all possible societies. But you’ve made it quite clear that you place no intrinsic value on civilization, so I have no more regard for your opinion than I have for that of an illiterate cannibal. You’re an intellectual savage and therefore merit no regard from the intelligent and civilized.
But does he merit regard from you?
“We were considering the direct comparison of two societies, not all possible societies.”
Yes, but you used that comparison to argue for the superiority of all civilized societies. Just following your lead, my brother.
“But you’ve made it quite clear that you place no intrinsic value on civilization…”
Correct. And I can do that because we place our own values on it; you value it highly for your reasons, and I don’t place nearly so much value on it. People have differences in value attribution all the time. Literacy is only valued in a society that uses the written word. I can’t then say that you’re wrong because of the value that you place on civilization for being itself. After all, you made your measuring stick and you are free to use it how you see fit. But you also can’t condemn me for attributing my values in an entirely different way. My stick looks different.
We all run into people who disagree with us, and many of them have reasons for their arguments as strong as our own. Not knowing how to talk to each other doesn’t make either one of us ignorant. It makes us different. What we need to cultivate is a sense of humility to understand that our interlocutor might actually have a point; that there’s a good chance he’s more intelligent than we are, even on our own scale.
What you’re actually doing is saying, “You disagree with me for reasons I don’t understand, so you must be retarded.” I don’t understand many of your reasons at all (mostly because you’re not really giving many reasons) but that doesn’t seem to be keeping me from engaging you. I haven’t even compared you to a cannibal yet. :-0
My opinion may no longer warrant your regard, but remember that everything you’ve typed here, Vox, is an opinion. (An opinion based on science is still an opinion.)
Seems like at least some of the crime is more due to education and economic factors. It’s your (perhaps unintended?) sweeping claims and implications that immigrants by their intrinsic nature are more likely to steal or riot that rankles people.
Irrelevant. Even if the crime is caused by a lack of education and wealth, what is the point of permitting immigrants who lack them and thereby importing the inevitable crime? In the USA, the primary problem with Latin American immigrants isn’t actually crime, but rather the burden on the social welfare net and their inability to drive without killing themselves and others. “It is reported that while 5% of the population in the area is Hispanic they are involved in 25% of the fatal traffic accidents.”
When you’re importing low IQ immigrants, you import a wide range of problems you’d never anticipated. I was behind two Africans in a car a few months ago in Europe. They literally could not figure out the roundabout system and sat there discussing this difficult dilemma for more than five minutes, unable to realize that the cars coming from the right could be safely ignored. Then, with multiple people behind me honking at them, the driver finally pulled out to the left, going around the roundabout the wrong way. It was only sheer luck that they escaped a nasty head-on collision. Barbarous people simply are not equipped to live in advanced, civilized societies, much less maintain and sustain them.
But let me be clear. Immigrants from low crime societies aren’t likely to cause crime problems, although they will cause other problems. Immigrants from high crime societies generally will. People don’t change their cultures, values, and mindsets simply because they changed their physical location. This isn’t rocket science.
I haven’t seen good data on the immigration question for the US, let along nations I’m not in, so I can’t put forth a position at this time.
I have. If you compare the immigration rates to GDP growth rates, you’ll see that the correlation, to the extent that one exists, is negative. Immigration isn’t the main problem, debt is. And it’s not as big a problem as 2x more women working is; at least immigrants also provide new consumption. But in general, the lowering of wage rates that immigrants have provided has not helped the welfare of the general population of the USA.
Naturally, you have a horse in this race that most of us don’t, which is concern for Christianity, so from that standpoint your position will be more reactionary than most TPB’ers I suspect.
I’m not at all concerned for Christianity. It grew from 12 people to dominate the world after all; God can certainly take care of Himself. My concern is for the world as it turns from Christianity and gradually returns to all the pagan nastiness that Christianity stamped out. I don’t know how many child sacrifices and mutilations one needs to read about before concluding, you know, maybe it would be a good idea to reconsider the direction.
Would someone plox define civilized ?
How many ipads per capita and what obnoxious superstitions are verboten, if any ?
Also, Vox, you seem to have ignored my question about exact sourced of Latino concern, which is sad, since I’d really like to know what the fuss whith having more Catholics moving in all about. I shall hereby repeat it 🙂
======
It is of course possible that Latin Americans have traits that you would not find to your liking, in addition to their religious and social attitudes that are very much like your own.
Care to enumerate what traits indigenous to Latin America and not vividly represented in current USA are you concerned about ?
Or are you concerned that Latin Americans will bring some currently unknown phenomenon, some kind of “hypothetical cooties” ?
======
“Would someone plox define civilized ?”
I’ve been trying to get Vox to do that, but he’s got many things on his plate right now.
I’m releasing a book in which I try to do that, and I think I’ve nailed it down as far as I’m concerned, but I don’t actually think that having it defined would help us understand what in the world Vox is trying to put out. The root of the problem as I’m understanding it here is that dude can’t really understand that other people have different, and equally valid, views. The civilization and immigration disputes both seem to have that theme.
If you’re really curious, I can cut-and-paste the definition I came up with, but I’ve already done some hijacking to this discussion… 😉
good copypasta is always a treat. go ahead 🙂
Well, I can’t get to the document right now, but I think I remember it nearly verbatim:
A civilized society is one displaying a supply-side focused culture of manufacture, dedicated to the service of an ever-increasing number of invented needs. The four main points being a supply-side focus, manufacturing, ever-increasing numbers, and invented needs.
That’s what I came up with for “The False Division.” It’s quite a load of fun, actually.
Also, Vox, you seem to have ignored my question about exact sourced of Latino concern, which is sad, since I’d really like to know what the fuss whith having more Catholics moving in all about. I shall hereby repeat it
Look at how they live in their own countries. They’ve achieved nothing, built nothing, and produced nothing of import, with the exception of some pretty models and excellent soccer teams. Immigrants from those societies are very unlikely to contribute anything positive to American society. They have no respect or liking for the Anglo-Saxon Protestant values upon which the USA was originally founded, nor do they abide by them. Furthermore, their numbers have now reached the point where separatist movements are probable; we’re already hearing rhetoric about Aztlan, La Raza, and “taking California back”.
Or are you concerned that Latin Americans will bring some currently unknown phenomenon, some kind of “hypothetical cooties” ?
The phenomenon isn’t unknown. It’s called “Mexification” and the results are visible throughout the American Southwest. Victor Davis Hanson regularly chronicles the results of it in the San Fernando Valley.
The root of the problem as I’m understanding it here is that dude can’t really understand that other people have different, and equally valid, views.
Yes, because that’s such a difficult concept. Look, I speak four languages. I live in a society where people have vastly different views from the one in which I grew up, some of which I’ve adopted, most of which I have not. But what I’ve learned from living in America, Europe, and Asia is that most people are idiots, so their different views are almost always ill-considered, poorly reasoned, unevidenced, and easily invalidated. I understand that your views are different, but unless they are both logically consistent nor empirically supported, they’re not equally valid with my own.
You subscribe to what Heinlein calls “the democratic fallacy”. But while one has a perfect right to hold one’s erroneous opinions, that doesn’t make them any less erroneous. The fact that you can’t show my arguments to be incorrect, but instead waste your time concocting vacuous theories about me shows how fundamentally poor your reasoning skills are. You’ve got nothing, so you retreat to ad hom in lieu of substantive criticism.
Would someone plox define civilized ?
Brought out of a savage, uneducated, and primitive state.
I don’t know what’s worse: how wrong you are, or how you’re obviously just a racist prick.
Mexicans never give anything back eh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Quinones-Hinojosa
This guy got profiled in Nature, due to being one of the hardest working researchers in ANY biomedical field.
Being Hispanic, and being involved in the biological science myself makes me hate your living guts Vox. Sorry Bakker, but I’m putting this guy under the box of ‘racist asshole’. Judgement passed, deal sealed.
Painfully accurate. Just so you know, Jorge, this falls under the ‘giving rope’ category. He’s pretty much become his own counterargument at this point.
The incoming numbers he brings in with him, however, should freak everyone out. This shit is alive and well… People need to be reminded.
Correction: both logically consistent AND empirically supported
“I understand that your views are different, but unless they are both logically consistent and empirically supported, they’re not equally valid with my own.”
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Stop kneecapping yourself by insulting other people when you try to get a point across. You value logic and empirical evidence. Noted.
“You’ve got nothing, so you retreat to ad hom in lieu of substantive criticism.”
Coming from the person who compared me to an illiterate cannibal. See the above response and read it again.
“Brought out of a savage, uneducated, and primitive state.”
You want to know the sick part? Now that you’ve actually stopped insulting me and taken the time to address the issue, I actually understand where you’re coming from. But when I look at the word “savage”, I see a cultural distinction being made. You might consider ancient tribal Americans to have been savages, and I would disagree with you. You might also just consider bloodthirsty, warring, and brutal people to be savages, and then I agree. This gets tricky when we consider that genteel people can act like savages. You might look at the word “uneducated” as being descriptive of somebody who never went to a formal school. I would reply that not all education takes place in an institution. You might whole-heartedly agree with that, and then we’re reading from the same page. When you say “primitive”, it seems like you mean “pre-civilization”. That one is more difficult for me to understand with respect to your own position.
My definition of civilization, given in another post, is far more specific. Savage, uneducated, and primitive are all relative terms that depend on what you consider their opposites to be. I’m thinking those opposites are genteel, formally educated, and technologically advanced. The main points of my definition aren’t dependent upon value judgements:
1) Supply-side focus: either you usually apply your efforts to problems of supply or problems of demand.
2) Manufacturing: either you use it or you don’t.
3) Ever-increasing: it’s either necessary for the continuation of civilization or it isn’t.
4) Invented needs: they’re either actual or their not.
I’m sure I’m missing something, but I’ve tried to introduce some rigor into the definition. The definition that you gave is less specific, and if that works for you, great. But now that I actually know what in the world you’re talking about instead of just trying to wade through the insults, I can better understand why the two of us don’t see eye-to-eye on the issue of civilization: we’re not really even talking about the same thing.
One time I saw a white girl texting while waiting at a traffic light, even AFTER the light turned GREEN!!!
I want her and everyone who looks like her deported.
I really thought the Negative Numbers Multiplication Refutation of Two Wrongs and Rightness was the stupidest possible thing that would be written here, but I was wrong.
5+7= Africans are dumb.
Discuss.
Thank god…someone else with a sense of humor! 😉
Got a good chuckle out of this one.
“Look at how they live in their own countries. They’ve achieved nothing, built nothing, and produced nothing of import, with the exception of some pretty models and excellent soccer teams. Immigrants from those societies are very unlikely to contribute anything positive to American society.”
It’s not their entire government, or, Cthulhu help, entire country immigrating.
Also, there are many reasons for state failure beyond them having some “culture cooties” – success is more than 50% luck, for societies, people, species and products.
“They have no respect or liking for the Anglo-Saxon Protestant values upon which the USA was originally founded”
1) being more specific would be appreciated
2) are you sure that average mexica immigrant (who, quite often, is coming to take a job too shitty for natives, at conditions that no reasonable employer would dare foister on a native at the risk of litigation) is less respectable of those un-enumerated values than average American of similar educational and class background ? If yes, on what grounds ?
“Furthermore, their numbers have now reached the point where separatist movements are probable; we’re already hearing rhetoric about Aztlan, La Raza, and “taking California back”
Well, on one hand, here one has to agree – that could be a concern indeed.
On the other hand, if I had a dollar every time some celebrity-for-a-day engages in flamboyant separatist rhetoric…
This recent column by Fred Reed appears relevant. If nothing else, it punctures the silly notion that my perspective is even remotely unique.
The Coming Race War in America was published in 1996 by Carl Rowan, the black columnist and former ambassador to Finland. The title is not ironic. He foresaw a major racial explosion. The book of course was furiously ignored. It should not have been. It dealt with an apocalyptic vision that has lurked around the edges of American consciousness since before the Civil War. And still does. We just don’t talk about it….
Our racial policy has proved a disaster. Sixty years after Brown vs. the School Board, blacks have not assimilated. They constitute a separate people having almost nothing in common with the surrounding European society. They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration.
Needless to say, throwing 50 million Latin Americans into the mix isn’t likely to prove terribly helpful here. The fact that even Jews, who are historically extraordinarily pro-immigration, now support the Arizona immigration laws should serve as a warning that problems loom on the horizon.
“They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. ”
So having a musical preference different from mainstream is, in itself, a sign of poor integration and possible threat ?
Sweet robots, that’s extreme.
” All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed.”
Um… so, one can’t have “own dialect, customs, dress and names” and be, essentially, same old good middle class chap ?
duly noted.
@Jonathan
Point conceded about quality of life.
“They fiercely maintain their identity with their own music, dialect, customs, dress, and names. All attempts to turn them into middle-class whites in darker packaging have failed. Only relentless governmental pressure forces an appearance of partial integration.”
Not seeing it. Music, dialect, customs, dress that one could note as having its origins among African Americans -> Most of that has been happily assimilated by Americans.
I see an incredible amount of integration in various parts of the US, so I’d need data to think differently.
Ye basterds have specialsauce names and music. What moar data do ye need ? 😀
🙂
I wonder what qualities they are supposed to be absorbing? I mean, wow, they even have to like the same music? Why, what practical element is there in that?
Never mind to be a middle class you have to have middle class money. Which is generally an accumulation thing over generations and if you happen to have a structure where the number of middle class is not increasing (or indeed decreasing), how on earth do these guys suddenly become middle class – what about all the people who aren’t immigrants who aren’t middle class? If an immigrant aught to do it, why are there so many people already resident who aren’t?
Strange terrors.
”’evopsych narrative mode on”’
Kin selection really did a number on mankind, didn’t it ? 🙂
Relevant:
Jonathan Hontz:
“Simply put, uncivilized society isn’t superior or inferior; it’s just different.”
I know of only one way to determine whether a society is superior to another: if people prefer to live in it (and raise their children in it), when given a choice between the two. Since there are vast amounts of people who were born in uncivilized societies, but want to move to civilized societies, and not vice versa, the conclusion seems straightforward.
[…] already received a rave review from one of the bloggers over at Three Pound Brain, during a very long, intense discussion that began with RSBakker’s musings on people who […]
[…] uses the pseudonym Vox Day. What follows will be quotes from the discussion, which took place at Three Pound Brain, the blog of science fiction writer R. Scott Bakker. I’m going to try to keep them in […]
@delavagus
“Well, Bob, I’m glad you asked…”
One reason why it sets my teeth on edge is because it is a shit question. Floating in the void, sheared as it were of the context in which was asked, it is as you observe, outwardly innocuous. On closer examination, it’s more pernicious.
It’s a heavily mined question containing the following: “to distinguish between rational and constructive versus irrational and destructive feminists.” This line is key, but not in the way you might think at first glance.
For it sets up the answerer – and by suggestion I suppose, all feminists, to have to prove that they are not being “irrational and destructive” as a first order of business. Or that feminism must by definition, be “rational and constructive.”
Feminism is not these things, positive or negative, and I would suggest that it is not up to Bakker to define it or require this before he engages in discussion with it. It is the “advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.” At least that’s what Wikipedia would say.
So why ask this question? Well, trying to suggest the terms by which we can discuss feminism is hijacking the discussion before it even starts, I would argue. Bakker is not just setting the terms however, he is setting the definitions for *good and bad feminism* and incorrectly.
And he is secreting a loaded payload inside it which will allow him to later say “you’re being irrational and destructive if you can’t prove you’re not.” Ignoring the question or answering it incorrectly, places control in his court.
Talk about setting up straw men! Bakker’s building a straw castle with a gasoline moat behind which he is inviting the answerer to sit down in, in my opinion, with this. No thanks.
Intentionally or not anyway, it sounds like handing terms to feminists, when Bakker is ostensibly in a discussion with feminists, not the chair of a philosophical roundtable where he may rule things in or out of order.
What *is* rational feminism? Rationalism is a problematic term itself in any discussion involving an oppressed or marginalized group. There is a long history of this word being used against women, specifically to shut down demands for equal rights on the basis that women are not as rational as men. This, often coupled with the demand that only rational discussion will be considered to advance their argument.
So, in effect, setting qualifiers and disqualifying women all in one fell swoop. This technique has a well documented history both in politics and psychology and is still used frequently against feminism and civil rights in general, to denigrate and obstruct.
And as usual, the advantage of using this strategy lies with Bakker.
The dominant gender, the dominant culture always sets the rules for what constitutes “rational discussion” and for that matter, what is considered “civil,” in the dominant society – and hence what is or is not by extension, “constructive.”
Telling people they are being irrational or destructive is a way to disqualify outspoken minority figures. It can function as a way to shut them out, and to shut them down. “You are being an angry minority, we will not engage with your complaint! Come back when you’ve cooled off … ”
If you say something I don’t like hearing and I can retort that you are doing so in a way that I don’t like, I can shift the focus from the grievance to the tone of your argument and keep the discussion going round in circles without me having to deal with the actual issue. Yes, if everyone is shouting all the time, it is hard to hear what people are saying but demanding polite rules of order is dangerous as well. And the latter has the historical baggage of being a tested method of denigrating feminist arguments.
That I have to explain this, sets my teeth on edge because it should be familiar to anyone who knows much about the history of feminism or civil rights. It has a real perversity to it, because you can use it to say that feminists striving to promote feminism are not being constructive if you can paint them as being either irrational or uncivil – thus blocking them from in fact advancing the equality of women which is the real basis for whether feminism is in fact constructive. And this is why this technique is both insidious and prone to pissing off people who recognize it.
It goes way back, too. Demanding civility while discussing civil rights can be used to deny those rights to anyone who can be shown as being uncivil. Hence its connection to the Romans and the primacy they placed on Roman civilization. They were cognizant of this technique and wrote about it themselves, remarking how troublesome “barbarians” were as easily conquered by giving them porticos and bathing, law courts and togas, as they could be by armed campaigns.
Add the fact that this is coming after a lot of discussion has gone by on both sides about specific issues and it really feels like a question which is intended to paint the opposing side as irrational and destructive until proven otherwise which allows for all sorts of mischief and misdirection on Bakker’s side. If nothing else, you can keep moving the requirements indefinitely until you are satisfied that your opponent is using terms and tone that meet your needs. Most will either give up and go away or you can simply declare victory on this basis alone.
This is why I was loath to even give these enumerated questions of Bakker answers because they are an excellent way for Bakker to control the discussion – and to avoid the questions/accusations that have been asked/suggested, previously and repeatedly – and they have, here and elsewhere, sometimes politely, sometimes rudely.
——–
or the digested explanation:
Hypothetical Feminist: I find your book contains elements which I view as misogynistic.
Hypothetical Anti-Feminist Writer: I dislike your tone and you are being uncivil by accusing me of misogyny without sufficient proof other than your opinion. Prove you are not being irrational and destructive and that you are rational feminist and not some other sort of feminist. Otherwise I will consider your criticism as not being constructive and without basis.
Hypothetical Outcome: No one is forced to discuss the actual issues in the text. The two circle without progress trading insults until one or the other gives up or declares victory. Mix and repeat.
I just don’t understand – that’s the reason I’m asking this question. Is your point that I should not, given our times, question the effectiveness of different feminist tactics?
“advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.”
Can someone attempt to advocate, but actually screw up and speak against women’s rights instead?
If you think it’s impossible and that everytime someone wants to advocate this, they suceed at doing so, then I can start to get where your coming from. If such is so, I guess it would appear that the infallable is being questioned on whether it has failed. From that position that probably looks like someone introducing a false capacity for failure as a question to simply smother the infallable advocacy.
[…] we need to talk about what he has to say on the subject of women, sexism and feminism in his own work. Which is, frankly, both frightening and creepy as fuck, but made even more problematic by the fact […]
[…] evil commited by men against women” — but also on his own words, taken from a reply Bakker made to one of his own web site’s comments in 2012. She excerpted a great deal of his […]