Oh my Lorem! The Sarkeesian Effect premiere was an even more glorious fiasco than we could have possibly imagined

jpageusmc:

Just to play devil’s advocate here, an easy explanation as to why any of Anita’s backers “don’t care” that they may or may not have been defrauded is because they believe that she is honest, and have no need to look in any deeper to her allocation system.

“People assume Anita is honest because she seems honest!”

Yes genius, people don’t think Anita is defrauding them because there is literally no evidence to back up that claim. This is a principle known as Occam’s Razor. She’s been completely transparent about her finances and gone as far as to register Feminist Frequency as a non-profit charity. There’s no reason to suspect any wrongdoing unless you’re actively searching for ways to discredit her. People have been trying to dig up dirt on her for years now and then best they’ve come up with is “Well, people really did give her an awful lot of money! That seems suspicious to me!”

jpageusmc:

This overeagerness belies an inherent non-willingness for fact-checking and follow-up due to the polarizing nature of the conflict and that those donating fiercely believed their side was right (hence, the gigantic explosion of donations in Q4 of last year).

Lots of people voluntarily donating to a non-profit charity is not fraud, not matter how strongly you disapprove of their (presumed) motives and doubt their willingness to “fact-check” or “follow-up”.

jpageusmc:

it could be seen that she is “pocketing” hundreds of thousands of dollars, which, if this will indeed turn out to be the case, is absolutely worthy of criticism no matter what side one is on,

Yes, maybe she could be pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars. And maaaaybe the Obama administration could be secretly selling abortion pills on the black market. And maaaaaaaaaaaybe Amnesty International could actually be an elaborate front for a cabal of war criminals. I mean, there’s not shred of credible evidence to support any of these scenarios, but these things are absolutely worthy of criticism and we must put our fact-checking hats on just in case everyone!

OK I’M READY POINT ME TOWARDS THE FACTS.

I mean, I read that, right? I’m not just dreaming it up because I’m all weekended out and exhausted even though I got a full night’s sleep?

Alan:

We have an idiom over here ‘Throwing the baby out with the bathwater’; do you get what I mean by that?

Something to do with Jordan Owen?

As a former Marine, one of my personal rules for living is: immediate skepticism of anyone with “marine” or “usmc” in their nym. Take that as you will, but it’s worked out pretty well for me. (I did once have a username that ended in “mc,” but I was stumped for a version of my preferred name that wasn’t taken).

There seems to be a bit of confusion here about a couple of terms.
(1) Devil’s Advocate: see the Wikipedia article. But being a Devil’s Advocate is NOT arguing in bad faith per se. The Devil’s Advocate was originally an RC priest who was assigned the task of making the best possible case against canonizing someone, in order to prevent an unworthy person from being elevated to sainthood. Since the GamerGaters are obviously incapable of making a well-reasoned argument for any position, it is quite reasonable for someone who disagrees with them to attempt to come up with the best possible argument for their position that they would have made if they were capable; and if that person has done the job well and in good faith (that is, made the best possible argument), and the resulting argument is a weak one (and jpageusmc’s argument was admittedly weak), then it increases the probability that your position is correct. (I am not judging the good/bad faith of jpageusmc’s position here; I am just pointing out that a fairly done Devil’s Advocate argument is NOT ipso facto a bad faith argument.)
(2) Mansplaining: This term started as a term for a man explaining to a woman something that she, as a woman, was well aware of. It has slipped into meaning an explanation made by a man to a woman, which isn’t IMO a good thing because it gets applied to a man trying to explain what many or most men think or feel, which is not something that a woman, as a woman, would naturally be expected to know or understand. Now clearly such an explanation can be patronizing, but that’s what the word “patronizing” is for. IMO it would be helpful if “mansplaining” were restricted to the original meaning, because there is no other word for that phenomenon.

An anti-feminist man mansplaining Anita’s Kickstarter to a group of feminist women is still mansplaining no matter what definition you want to use.

Unless that definition is “A breed of chicken” or something silly like that, I suppose.

@GOM, I’m going to second @SFHC’s here. Here’s the original story that inspired the coining of the word.

The word is thought to have been first used in 2008 or 2009,[13] shortly after San Francisco essayist Rebecca Solnit published an April 2008 blog post titled “Men Explain Things to Me; Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way”. In it, she did not use the word mansplaining, but defined the phenomenon as “something every woman knows”. Her post involved the story of a man she met at a party, who began to didactically describe to her a recent “very important” book (which it transpired he himself had not read but had read about in a review). The man needed to be told by Solnit’s accompanying friend three or four times that Solnit was in fact the author of the book concerned, before actually paying attention to and absorbing the information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansplaining

So by your definition, that would be “patronizing”, but not “mansplaining” because it he isn’t explaining something she would know “as a woman”?. The original definition is a man explaining something to a woman something she is more knowledgeable about in a condescending way. There was no qualifier that it only applied to things “something that a woman, as a woman, would naturally be expected to know or understand.” So yeah, you did just mansplain the definition of mansplaining.

Oh my god, did the mansplainer actually splain devil’s advocate to us??

“I always use mansplaining to mean when a dude claims to have more knowledge or expertise than the woman he is addressing. Despite her having more lived in experience and/or being more well-read, academically qualified on the subject.”
Yes, that is clearly “mansplaining” according to the original meaning. But, for example, explaining why men have difficulty with expressing their emotions is not — but it could well be done in a patronizing and/or condescending manner (and most of the time it probably would be).
@SFHC: I was thinking as I was writing my post that it was a perfect example of mansplaining in the extended sense that I am arguing against. As a guy who was a college English major half a century ago, I have never been a grammar Nazi, but I tend to be a fanatic against being sloppy with the meanings of words. Bad grammar usually doesn’t keep a comment from being comprehensible, but if you don’t have the same understanding of a word you can be in quite a mess. I’d sort of compare it to an artist painting a picture — when you pick up the tube labelled navy blue, you don’t want what comes out to be teal.
The value of “mansplaining” is that it conveys a meaning that was not previously expressible in one English word, while on the other hand we already have “patronizing” or “condescending” for more general purposes. I think “mansplaining” is a word that should survive but it is most useful if it is rather narrowly defined.
I have had about six headaches in my life and they invariably reduce me to a giant glob of quivering goo. I have never had a migraine, so I can only extrapolate what they would do to me. However, today I am having trouble with neuropathic discomfort in what is left of my feet — much less painful than a headache, but still quite annoying. I have drugged myself up with cold pills, which strangely are the only thing I’ve found that works. (One of my doctors prescribed amytriptilene, which not only didn’t work but left me an emotionless zombie.) So now I am light-headed and sleepy, and I have drunk a very strong cup of coffee to combat the sleepiness which of course exacerbates the lightheadedness. I am not sure that even at my best I would have been able to make my point without some degree of mansplaining, but in my present state … it’s a lost cause.

@Alan,

So is it the case that mansplaining is a subset of being patronising? I.e. where a man just assumes he knows more than a woman on any particular subject just as a consequence of being a man?

I would agree with that. Similarly a white person explaining race problems to a black person would be whitesplaining (another subset of patronizing behaviour). Patronizing explains that someone is talking down to the other, while the various ‘splainings’ describe that it is a privileged person doing so to a marginalized person.

“The original definition is a man explaining something to a woman something she is more knowledgeable about in a condescending way.”
That says what I meant better than what I said.
@Katz: I was trying to answer one or two posters (who IIRC was/were male) who appeared to be saying that the Devil’s Advocate position was ipso facto bad faith. That was all I meant to accomplish.
The best case against Sarkeesian is extremely weak, to the point of being vanishingly trivial. It misses the point by failing to recognizing the new paradigm of financing artists (in the broadest possible sense) in the internet world. When I by a book or a music CD, I hope that some of the money will go to the artist not only to pay for the existing work but to help finance future work of an unspecified nature — which may never be produced for any number of reasons, and to help the artist continue to LIVE. I don’t see why making internet videos like Sarkeesian’s should be held to any different standard. We don’t ask Taylor Swift to account for her profits or prove that she has devoted them entirely top producing new work.
Now if JB was pretending to ask for money to buy a crossbow for self-defense when she actually intended to spend the money for bonbons and scented fucking candles, I would probably have a problem with that.

Well, to be fair, I suppose Atlanta has the wrong demographic (too many Blacks) to attract much attention to the Sarkeesian blockbuster. I’m sure it will do much better in Vermont. /s