So an angry dude wandered into the S**t Reddit Says subreddit recently — one of the few feminist-friendly, largely manbaby-free hideouts on Reddit — and left a pretty amazing rant, attacking the SRSers as, well, see for yourself.
I’m not even going to bother fisking this one. I think it’s probably best experienced in its original wall-of-text form.
In case that image is hard to read, here’s the text:
You’re the most f**ked up group of people currently alive (self.S**tRedditSays)
submitted 1 day ago by LewisExMachina
I’m sure you’re gonna devour this account too, but whatever. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that every time I call you out my account gets spammed and your cronies try to doxx me, but I can’t let you keep doing what you’re doing. The harassment you put people through on a daily basis is way worse than anything /fatpeoplehate was ever accused of. Who knows how many men you’ve driven to suicide just because they have something between their legs. But you don’t fucking care, because they made a rape joke and that makes them worse than Nazis. I guess rape is worse than murder now. And since men can’t be raped any man who says he was raped has to deal with it while a female who says she was raped is instantly believed and rewarded for her bravery. And you think women have it worse? Fuck off, women are treated like little princesses while men are treated like shit. Maybe you have a point with the catcalling thing, but everything else you say is bullshit and based on lies meant to devalue men and increase the value of women. Soon you’ll force the government to add the ability to make more money (27% more) by just checking off a “I’m a woman” box on a job sheet. Us men will just say that we’re transwomen (since that’s also something you support) and get that money too, so you’ll be back to square 1 where men and women make the same salaries. If you want to make the same money then don’t take maternity leave, dipshits.
And what’s with all the hate on video games? You don’t even like video games, and we do. Why is that a problem. If something makes a group of people happy and it doesn’t inherently hurt anyone else then why is that such a bad thing? Women don’t want to play video games, they just want to police the development of video games and its community. !??!?!? Seriously just fuck off. Go fight for unisex bathrooms or showing your tits or something I can get behind rather than video games that you don’t even play. All of the girlfriends I had wanted nothing to do with video games and that was okay. How would you feel if we started policing makeup, saying that makeup led to violence and should be banned? You’d hate it, because it’s a stupid baseless accusation meant only to hurt one gender. Which is exactly what the attack on video games is.
I don’t know what to say here other then you probably all need to get laid, then you’ll calm down.
Indeed, a thing of beauty.
Maybe the word should be nonrationality, not irrationality.
Not everything in the world can be approached from a strictly rational point of view.
Intuition and emotion play a big role in our thinking.
When I make a decision, I usually use my emotion and intuition first. If my thinking backs up those first two, then I’ve probably made a good decision. If it doesn’t, then I usually start again.
Imaginary Petal, that’s very well put. It’s a pity some of the most prominent (as in, vociferous/rich/famous) mostly white male atheists are blind to the various beams in their own eyes (sexism, white supremacy, glibertarian worship of the so-called “free market” etc. etc.).
Personally, as an atheist I identify very much with what you said.
@Orion:
It is my considered opinion that there is strength in numbers, especially when it comes to political movements; and to me movement atheism is exactly that. One lone individual getting angry is easy to dismiss; a hundred individuals getting angry together in an organised fashion can actually change things.
I’m not after a community. I’m fortunate that I have a lot of friends and I feel welcome in many places, and so I’m not after a group of people to not-worship with or anything like that. If I wanted to, I could sit quietly at home not-believing and that would be fine. I do not feel oppressed. I acknowledge my privilege in being able to say this.
What I’m looking for is a movement which wants to confront priests and churches over the abuse of their powers, and to prevent society from looking away deferentially when they see those abuses. I believe that peaceful coexistence is at present impossible, and I want to be part of a movement which acknowledges that.
I also believe that you’re known by the company you keep. If someone is willing to keep company with child abusers (Bernard Law, for example) it tells me that they’ve looked at the abusers and then looked at the victims, and decided to alienate the latter rather than the former. Likewise, if someone is willing to keep company with rapists (Michael Shermer, for example) it tells me that they’ve chosen to exclude that rapist’s victims in order to keep the rapist as a friend.
Therefore, when I say “in or out” I mean “do I want to remain as a politically active member of a movement which is happy to throw Rebecca Watson under the bus in order to keep Richard Dawkins happy, bearing in mind that if I remain then I have essentially consented to that underbussing?” The answer to that is obviously no.
However, it also means “do I want to leave and therefore weaken the only movement which, as far as I know, is serious about holding churches to scrutiny and willing to risk the social backlash that occurs every time they do so?”
This is why I asked kupo about Humanism: if that’s a movement which is willing to be sufficiently hardline then I’ll become a member in a heartbeat.
Hello.
“The Makeup is a lie !” (not to say the cake, i guess) says the guy who splash himself everyday with Axe (the perfume, not the lumberjack tool) in hope it has the same effects it has in commercial adds.
Permadeath videogames are goods. Even online ones : i used to play Battle Royale games (old CGI/Perl script browser games… ah, nostalgia) where you have to recreate your character each week and where you can day the first day, implying you have to wait a full week till the next session. This kind of game may be quickly turn down by GGers nowaday.
On traditionnal ones, i am times to times playing ZAngband.
About TRPG and board games, i had and continue to play a lot (less TRPG, alas, more board games). Maybe i have never been in the good places, but there has been almost no women in the groups i have play with (at most, one, but not the same for each group). But that does not mean they are not playing. Sadly to say too is that, at least in the major part of the groups i have played with, when a male player plays a female character, you can choke to the amount of stereotypes that are used…
I know there are tools like Rolisteam to play TRPG online, but i never had the occasion to try it. If someone want to try it one day…
And for non-heroic RPG, let go a Call of Cthulhu, to remember how frail our characters are…
Have a nice day.
@Kat:
In my experience, intuition is the process of rational thought happening very quickly that it’s subconscious. When I make an intuitive leap then it’s normally because I’ve done that particular type of thinking so often that the pattern-matching parts of my brain have begun to recognise problems of that type and can fill in the blanks for me. To me this happens a lot with maths, simply because of the amount of it I’ve done.
As such, I agree with you that intuition and conscious thought should back one another up, but I don’t see them as separate.
(This isn’t to say that intuition is always right, of course: just like logical reasoning, if the assumptions underlying it are wrong then the outcome will be wrong too.)
@Kat
When it comes to emotions, I’ve never understood why they have been portrayed as conflicting with rationality. I’m not even sure I agree that emotions are non-rational. Emotions aren’t imaginary, but actually exist in our heads as a matter of fact. When we act, we keep other facts of life in mind, so why shouldn’t we also take into account our emotions and the feelings of others. This just seems utterly rational to me.
@opposablethumbs
I don’t know who said it first, but I’ve always been fond of telling smug atheists something to the effect of: Congratulations! You’ve figured out the answer to the easiest question in the world. Now move on to something more difficult.
@EJ (The Other One)
I’ve had that experience too, and it’s pretty amazing.
But I’ve also had experiences where I just couldn’t have known something via rational means. I chalk it up to intuition but YMMV.
And then there are emotions, which are wonderful things that give life meaning. That said, sometimes I have to overrule them and go with what my brain says.
I prefer the term “nonrational” to “irrational” because the latter can be a pejorative term.
@ Kat & EJ
I spend a fair bit of time explaining that there’s nothing irrational or supernatural about intuition.
The best definition I’ve heard, and the one I’ve stolen is “The unconscious processing of subliminal clues”
@Kat:
I like your use of “nonrational”, although I suspect that that’s simply both of us using a euphemism treadmill.
I don’t see leaps of intuition as irrational either. Irrational, after all, has a strict definition: “Cannot be expressed in the form m/n for integer m, n.” Since human minds don’t work in floating-point, everything we do is rational, right?
@Alan:
That’s a good definition. I’m stealing it too. Who did you steal it off?
@ EJ
Unfortunately I can’t remember (otherwise I would give credit). It was from some psychologist or psychiatrist I was once talking to.
On the word thing, how about arational? That’s pretty neutral.
kupo says:
Next time a guy tries that tell him he should have worn make up. Sound as sincere as possible. Then say it could help reduce the overlarge size his nose seems to acquire as he goes around sticking it into other people’s business.
@Imaginary Petal
I think that plenty of people see being rational as relying on verifiable facts alone, not emotion or intuition. As though anything but verifiable facts were suspect in some way.
I believe that this is because they are not well acquainted with their own emotion or intuition.
And of course when they do use their own emotion or intuition, it’s different. Then it’s rational.
These are people who are infatuated with their own thoughts and so could never find a flaw in them.
@EJ (The Other One)
Now you’ve gotten into higher math. I’ll have to take your word on that!
@Alan
“Arational”–why not! It’s not in my Webster’s but that’s okay.
Alan, you don’t happen to be friends with Mihaly Czikszentmihali do you?
@ Orion
I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage. Who’s that?
Emotions are definitely rational. Fear helps keep ourselves safe. Anger can too. Happier emotions help us with prosocial bonds. Which also keeps us safe as it allows us to work together and protect each other.
It’s not like I think about emotions on those terms while I’m experiencing them. I just don’t see the smug douchebro position of emotions being useless and a sign of weakness as being quite as rational as they think it is.
That attitudes also contributes to the negative stereotype of atheists not having feelings.
Emotions aren’t rational, they’re heuristics. It takes a while to reason through why standing there while an elephant is charging you is a bad idea, but it takes very little time to be scared and get out of the way. Very useful. But then bigotry comes from emotions making people believe things that aren’t true, because emotions are fast rather than accurate.
But my position on people who claim to be purely rational is much like my opinion on people who claim to use pure logic. All humans have emotions (except maybe a couple instances of brain damage) and claiming not to have them just means they’re ignoring their effect. And sometimes their arguments also seem to pretend that other people’s emotions don’t exist, and that’s definitely irrational.
And if you find yourself charged by an elephant, it is not the time to ignore your emotions because they aren’t rational, it is time to run for your life.
I briefly entertained the fantasy of buying some nice, garish eyeshadow, wrapping it up with a note inside that says, “I know how much you like makeup. I thought this shade would look great on you!” and handing it to him, but I’m not that mean. He’s actually a nice guy and he looks up to me as a mentor and I don’t want to hurt that relationship for a passive-aggressive dig. But it’s fun to fantasize.
@guy
I wouldn’t say emotions = rational, but enotions are REAL, and the rational thing to do is acknowledge this reality and take it into account.
@Kupo
Speaking as a guy, I think that while that’s going a bit too far, making a joke about how you don’t wear makeup but could get him some would probably have resulted in him laughing and apologizing. Assuming he is someone you’d want to be friends with, he probably wouldn’t have said it if he thought it would upset you. Either it was a joke he didn’t realize you wouldn’t laugh at, or he thought you were wearing makeup and it wasn’t having the result you thought.
I’ve been on this site long enough to know that it’s not always so easy for women to just speak up, but when you feel you can, do so. Because many men really don’t realize it’s hard for women to speak up, and when they wonder if something is offensive they’ll glance at the women in the room and figure that they’re not upset so it’s fine. Then when they hear about women they don’t know getting offended, they’ll figure those women must be oversensitive because it doesn’t (look to them like it does) offend the women they do know.
@IP
Yeah, exactly.
@WWTH, guy:
My Rogue Trader party have chosen to call the cannons on their spacecraft “Powerful Arguments.” That way when they meet space pirates, they can overcome them with powerful arguments instead of having to admit that they’re resorting to mere violence.
This is what I see a lot of smug dudebros do as well: they name their emotions “rationality” and “objectivity”, and then they can claim that they’re dealing with everything using rationality and objectivity instead of having to admit that they’re resorting to mere emotions.
It’s a childish gambit, and it’s sad to see people deluding themselves so childishly. I suspect it may be because, for whatever reason, they’ve persuaded themselves that having emotions is bad and therefore it’s important to pretend that they don’t have them. Goodness knows why.
@kupo:
This might be a good learning opportunity for him, then. If it’s you saying it rather than someone else then it might get through to him more effectively and cause him to reexamine the way he treats women.
You are, of course, not obliged to do so; but it might be an opportunity.
@ EJ
Some of my associates refer to what they do as “percussive diplomacy”.
I’m fully aware of this. It doesn’t need to be explained to me. It’s also not my job to teach men not to be sexist assholes.
Alan,
Mihaly Czikszentmihali (he tells English-speaking audiences it’s “me high, chick sent me hi”) is a psychologist known for studying a phenomenon he calls “Flow,” which he described for the public in a book of the same name. Flow, he says, is a state of mind that skilled people in a variety of fields experience while applying their skill, and also one of the most satisfying human experiences.
The basic idea is that at any given time you’re either in a “reflective” mode where you are stopping and consciously thinking about what to do, or an “experiential” mode, where you’re just reacting immediately and automatically to stimuli as they come in. Fear or anger can force you into a very unpleasant experiential mode, but experiential mode is usually very pleasant. Part of why people like walking or like driving is that they can be active without having to think too hard. Reflective mode can be pleasant, such as sitting and reading a good book, but it can be very unpleasant if it’s forced by anxiety, and most people prefer not to be in reflective mode for a long time without a break.
When you try something new like skiing or driving or playing League of Legends, or you run into a new problem in a familiar field, you’re forced into reflective mode; you have to think about every action. This is bad because most people don’t like it, and it cripples you performance. If you have to think about every action before you act, you can’t react quickly to surprises and you cant do more than one thing at a time.
Once you’re experienced, you no longer have to stop and think. You’ll do the routine steps automatically and even when there’s an unexpected problem, it’s a familiar problem, and you immediately know how to correct. You can “flow” your way through normal tasks in experiential mode. If you’re very, very good you can even perform at a high level under intense pressure and stay experiential, but sometimes people “choke” under pressure because they start to think about the stakes. Once you start thinking, you stop flowing, and you’re forced to think about how to act instead of just acting.
In addition to laying out the theory, he interview lots of people — pilots, athletes, etc. — about how it feels to do their thing. As not above, most people rate the sensation of flow as highly satisfying. People in flow are known to get “lost in their work” and become unaware of the passage of time. In some cases they describe time appearing to stand still or the world going into slow motion.
@ Orion
I’ll have to check him out; a lot of what you mention tallies with some areas of interest of mine. What you say about driving is similar to how we describe ‘skill’, ie something that becomes automatic (compare the sweaty experience of learning to drive and the ‘how the flip did I get here?’ standard of driving when you’ve got the hang of it.) I think there’s probably some wider implications of his work too, so I’ll defiantly be following this up. Thanks!