When a college feminist decided, one cold night in 2014, to burn her personal copy of pseudofeminist Christina Hoff Sommers’ book The War Against Boys, the internet’s antifeminists responded as if Hitler himself had risen from the grave.
“Universities bring book-burning back, one page at a time,” declared a blogger at TheRebelMedia. After an extended comparison with the infamous book burning campaigns of the literal Nazis, he declared that “[t]he burning of Hoff Sommers’ book is a striking visual synecdoche for the malaise afflicting free expression across not only North American college campuses.” In a featured article, A Voice for Men described the burning as a “disturbing” example of “misandry in academia.”
On the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one angry dude declared that
If you’re burning a book, you’re basically admitting to being not just a bigot, but one who doesn’t even have enough confidence in the strength of their own views to believe that they can stand up for themselves without needing to silence and censor those that oppose them.
If we set aside the fact that, unlike the Nazis, who confiscated the books they burned, a person burning their own copy of a book that is readily available to others is not actually censoring anything, he’s got a point.
So it’s interesting to see how many of the Internet’s antifeminsts and Anti-Social-Justice-Warrior-Warriors are embracing a proposal from one of their own to literally censor all academics who teach stuff they don’t like.
On Change.org, professional feminism-hater Carl Benjamin, known on YouTube as Sargon of Akkad, has started a petition demanding that “UNIVERSITIES” — presumably, every single one of them — immediately “Suspend Social Justice Courses” because he thinks that “social justice” professors are up to no good.
In vague but melodramatic language Benjamin proclaims that
Social justice has become scientifically illiterate, logically unsound, deeply bigoted and openly supremacist.
He doesn’t specify exactly what kind of supremacism he’s complaining about here; presumably not white.
Nor does he ever define exactly what courses count as “social justice courses.” There aren’t any departments of Social Justice that I’m aware of. [EDIT: Oops! Turns out there are.] Does Benjamin mean a tiny handful of, say, women’s studies courses taught by radical feminists? Or does he hope (at least in his wildest dreams) to take down the humanities and social sciences as a whole?
Social justice professors are indoctrinating young people into a pseudoscientific cult behind closed doors that is doing damage to their health, education and future.
Well, technically, I guess, virtually all college courses are taught “behind closed doors,” since the doors of lecture halls generally do get closed before class begins. Technically, I’m writing this post behind closed doors, because I don’t leave the doors of my apartment wide open. (People might wander in; the cats might wander out.) I suspect that Benjamin himself wrote up his petition behind closed doors!
Benjamin goes on to declare that
[s]ocial justice … has become another ideology fit only to pave the road to Hell, so it is time to turn around and choose another path that is concerned with reason, science and improving the lives of every human.
If only some evil Social Justice English professor has indoctrinated Benjamin in the devilish art of writing without resorting to hackneyed cliches.
But that’s pretty much all there is to Benjamin’s petition. Somehow, thought, the vagueness of Benjamin’s plan hasn’t stopped 9,878 people — so far — from signing the petition.
It is, however, possible that some of the signers are a little bit confused as to what exactly they’re signing.
Indeed, the top two most-liked comments on the petition, for example, were written by people who seem to think that Benjamin’s proposal to peremptorily censor all college courses that he thinks are excessively social-justicey is, somehow, a defense of free speech?
Benjamin has posted a video in which he explains his crusade in a little more detail. It’s possible that somewhere in it he answers the question of how exactly his plan to drive all professors he doesn’t like from all the college campuses in the world is actually a crusade for free speech.
Here’s the video in question:
Oops! Wrong video. Let me try again:
Huh. I don’t think that was it either.
No, that’s clearly not it.
Ok, ok. I found the real one here.
But it’s 40 minutes long. I sampled the first 2 seconds, and that was about all I could bring myself to watch. So I guess I’ll just have to resign myself to a life of servitude under the jackboots of the Social Justice warlords. Still, that’s a far better option than actually watching a Sargon of Akkad video all the way through.
I’m honestly still not quite sure what “Social Justice” courses are. The only school I can think of that actually has a named Social Justice program is Roosevelt. The Social Justice Studies BA at Roosevelt requires both economics and statistics courses in addition to the social sciences component. The other coursework includes readings by such notorious SJWs as Aristotle.
Our old friend, the golden mean fallacy.
Because I really want to find a middle ground between “consent is necessary” and “she shouldn’t have been drinking if she didn’t want to be raped.”
I jumped on the “wage-gap” thing without fully reading the rest of the sentence.
Richard, while it’s fine to enjoy doing stats and discerning trends and whatnot, these numbers are lost lives, lost homes, broken families and broken lives. It’s enjoyable to do stats, but you have to tie it back to society and the people in it. Otherwise your results lose meaning, and you end up dehumanizing the most vulnerable of us.
Statistical methods are the words of power. Don’t play with them.
See, now this makes me feel better. I can have civilized talks with real people and not be shunned away. I wouldn’t lie to you, I was on another site called patheos.com and maybe I can on a little strong but I wanted to have a serious discussion. They said I was blatently sexist and misigynist and blocked me. So this site has similar rules, their’s had “disagreeing is welcome” but I guess I disagreed too much. I look forward to learning a lot with all of you, I have research studies I’ve read and would love you know your thoughts on all of them. I’m actually kinda excited. So if I come off as just another fool, please don’t disregard me, I’m still learning too.
They are and I value them. I’m not some super fortunate sheltered white kid. So while I have an interest in statistics, I know it relates back to the real world, where people live and people die. I’ve learned to cope really well with death since it’s changed my life so much. We always have a joke in my family, the current ratio of funerals to weddings is pretty bad. There is a face, a name and story behind every victim of rape, of murder, of anything, it’s very important to remember that when dealing withe sensitive information.
@Richard,
We’re happy to have disagreement here. People are banned for not actually engaging – for being repetitive in the face of solid rebuttal, for not actually interacting with replies, for being racist or sexist in the face of being told not to. Internet’s full of people who will happily come here and fill up a board with hate, and we don’t want that.
You’re free to post studies and ask our opinions on them; many of us here are professionals who deal with statistics and can approach it at that angle, and many more can approach it from a human-impact level very well. There are great resources here for learning, if you’re willing to listen.
For starters: complaining about Anita Sarkeesian, then saying that “it’s only a joke and I don’t actually believe it” is a way to shield oneself from facing the uncomfortable truth she’s telling. This is what jokes are often for.
Stop shielding yourself from it. Face it directly. Assume she’s right, and look at the evidence for contradictions. If you don’t see any, then she’s probably right.
My apologies, IP, for engaging after I suggested that you shouldn’t, but I feel I have to pick up on this.
In my experience, people who say “I like to debate on the internet” tend to mean “I like to say provocative things to strangers in order to cause them emotional hurt, usually without their consent.”
Before you object to this, Mr Via, please remember these four things:
A) You have not asked the consent of the people you’ve chosen to debate with before doing it.
B) You’ve intentionally picked topics which are emotionally distant to you but not to them.
C) You’re doing it with strangers, rather than with friends, which is a strange way to do one’s hobbies.
D) If you would like to prove me wrong, you can invite me to debate whether or not a G-class main sequence star can have its equilibrium dominated by gas pressure rather than radiation pressure. It is true that I am an astrophysicist and you are not, so it might be an uphill fight for you; but surely a person who indulges in debate for the pure joy of the topic isn’t only going to pick weaker opponents, are they?
I’m on your side when it comes to this, although it doesn’t seem that way I know.
I think you want to argue consent, what does and does not constitute consent.
“Can two drunk people have sex and both wake up next to each other not remembering the night before”
MRA’s tend to say that drunk sex always equates to men being the rapist and women being the victim, regardless if there was no clear yes or no from either party.
I’m not about to victimize a woman’s choice of drinking and that being her asking for rape, that’s ridiculous. I don’t know anyone with that position, certainly no middle ground there.
I like to discuss this further, just maybe on a separate thread.
@EJ (TOO)
I would pay good money to see that debate.
@EJ (The Other One) You’re absolutely correct. I would certainly like to think I’m in this for more than something as petty as emotional damage to the other side. At the end of the day, where does that leave us, certainly not understanding the issues any better.
I’d like to state that I really don’t want to use THIS thread to debate any topics as of now. Seeing how this section pertains to Sargon and his petition, a more comfortable setting is in order, one in which people agree beforehand to give consent about topics they may or may not want to talk about.
Maybe so, but everybody has weird hobbies here and there.
I’m not here to prove you wrong, you obviously know more about certain topics than I do, the same goes for me to you. I’m still learning, but isn’t everyone, we are all somewhere in life, always learning. I need some time to study and become an expert, part of that is being proven wrong myself. I think I know things that I may not, as a community, we should advance the knowledge of everyone around us.
What sparked this thought in my head was a statement I read many years ago on the internet of all places. It was two parts: 1) That debating usually on strengthens two opposing views to be even further apart, and 2) Internet conversations always lead to a comparison to Hilter.
It’s a little funny, I try to go into an argument with the knowledge the opposing side has some fair criticism.
Many of the altright who criticize SJWs don’t do so using the things SJWs actually say; they criticize the strawmen in their heads; or they deliberately misunderstand or misinterpret SJW arguments, even when they are patiently corrected. Most fair criticism of feminism and other SJWs comes from within the movement.
@Richard
You’ll be banned if you violate the commenting policy, especially if you’ve been warned about it once (or more). If you become tedious and boring, you risk being banned. If you start spewing racist, misogynist, or transphobic attacks (among a few) you will probably be banned.
If you have a meltdown, you may be banned or you may not, because troll meltdowns are the most hilarious thing ever to some of us (others don’t find it so awesome).
This? This is bullshit:
As others have said, this shit ain’t fun to those it actually affects. You want to talk about privilege? It’s privilege to be able to think prison statistics and abortion are just intellectual topics for a fun debate.
You want to know what privilege is? Privilege is the normal shit, that you take totally for granted, that everyone should be able to do but are not able to do. Everyone should be intellectually far enough away from prison statistics to be able to have a fun little debate about them! But not everyone is. It is your privilege that you are able to do this thing, a privilege that everyone ought to equally enjoy.
The nature of privilege is that we don’t normally see the privileges we have (because, remember, privilege is normal shit), but we are acutely aware of the privileges we lack. A white, cisgender heterosexual male person enjoys huge numbers of privileges, which, again, are hard to see because why in the hell would you think about being able to walk down the street without being harassed as some kind of special power that you have? That’s normal. Walking down the street without harassment is normal. So you don’t notice it unless it’s specifically called out to you, or you make a conscious effort to notice that this normal, and not special in the slightest, ability that you have is something that many, many other people lack.
But socioeconomic privilege is the one privilege that most white men do not have. So that’s the one that they notice the most and get hung up on, and talk about constantly as if it’s the only privilege that exists in the world, or is the most important thing ever. That’s the privilege that white men talk about more than anything else, because that’s the one they don’t usually have and they don’t even notice the many privileges that they do have.
Then they get upset when women, or people of color (or heaven forfend, women of color) or LGBT people, or whatever, tell them to cry a fucking river. It’s not that lacking socioeconomic privilege is great or that anyone thinks not having it is fine. It’s that these other groups also lack socioeconomic privilege plus a metric fuckton of other privileges that white men do have.
It’s like saying that yes, it’s not good that you have to carry a 10 lb weight with you in this race, but you have a long row to hoe if you expect me to care much about it when I am carrying 50 lbs, and the person next to me is carrying 200 lbs. And the more you bitch and whine and carry on about your 10 lb weight, the less sympathy I have for you and the more I want you to shut the fuck up.
And if you approach me expecting me to have a fun, lighthearted debate about the 50 lb weight that is dragging me into the ground, you are going to get a nasty surprise because I don’t think this shit is fun. At all. And your gaping, yawning privilege at being able to think it’s all in fun is not amusing to me. It’s not cute or precious. I have no time whatsoever for it, and neither will most people.
What’s the solid middle ground between my belief that women are real human beings with intrinsic worth, and the belief of misogynists that they are not? Or my belief that people of color are real human beings with intrinsic worth, and the belief or racists that they are not? Tell me the middle ground that people are supposed to find with those who think they are not fully human.
Isidore,
Exactly. Every time someone comes here who “likes to debate” or sees both sides as equivalent, tends to lead with “SJWs/feminists say – fill in the blank with a strawman -” without bothering to ask the commenters what we think about the issue and without arguing against something David actually wrote in his post.
That’s why I have a hard time believing they want to discuss things in good faith and aren’t just sealions.
Notice that Richard didn’t actually present evidence that universities are enacting some sort of fascist SJW regime and he didn’t respond to what anyone said about safe spaces and trigger warnings. He merely changed the subject to his love of debating and made general equivalencies between the sides.
I’m baffled that you said “you’re absolutely correct” and then disagreed with me on the very next sentence. Perhaps you simply didn’t understand; alternatively perhaps you deliberately didn’t care and just waited for your turn to speak.
Let me try to communicate better by interpreting my own statement as if it were a verse in a rap battle.
In this passage, EJ is using the word “people” to mean “Richard Via”, and spells out the phrase carefully rather than simply saying “two-bit bully.” His intentional third-personness is intended to be polite and so not cause Via to immediately disregard it by going on the defensive.
Here, EJ brings the matter back to consent, reminding Via that he’s shown a fuzzy understanding of it; and also points out that Via has made the assumption that others want to debate with him, an assumption which is not only impolite but also shows a lack of empathy.
Here EJ reminds Via that we are human and thus what truly matters is our emotions, not any level of rational though. He invites Via to mention things that matter to him personally, revealing himself as a human and bonding on a personal level rather than simply attempting to protect himself by remaining aloof. This is both a reprimand to the alt-Right shibboleth of “rationality” but also a reminder that Via can be respected and welcomed as a fellow human being if he abandons deliberately antagonistic behaviour.
(He’s a sly lyricist, that EJ.)
Here EJ once again sets up a double meaning. On the one hand he points out that Via is doing this in an SJW space rather than among his own people, thus reinforcing the impoliteness and unwelcomeness of his behaviour. On the other hand he delivers his first direct diss of the verse, suggesting that Via in fact has no friends.
Here EJ issues a challenge, reminding Via that for all his white-boy-on-the-internet swagger, he is among people who know much more than him on many topics. By using the metaphor of astrophysics, he suggests that Via knows equally little about the topics that he has chosen to challenge the women in the community about, but is unaware of the depths of his own ignorance on these topics because he does not give them the prestige that he affords to the hard sciences.
(For the uninitiated, even a small G-class star is dominated by radiation pressure rather than gas pressure. This is an incredibly interesting topic but is not relevant here.)
Here EJ ties the astro reference back to his starting point, echoing the first statement he made. He predicts that Via will probably decline, and suggests that if he declines here against an educated white man when he would not decline against a less educated woman or a person of colour on a topic he respects less, it’s because Via is tacitly admitting to being motivated simply by cruelty, sadism and contempt.
In summary, EJ both calls Via out as a two-bit bully, and also lays open the path to reconciliation if he were to acknowledge this and seek to become a better human being.
Note also the lack of mic drop: having learned from other members of the community that dropping mics is a bad idea from an electronics engineering point of view, he instead laid it down respectfully.
(nsfw, some bad words)
@ Policy of Madness, I’ll be sure to follow all those rules, which I have read already.
I understand what privilege is, I know where I stand in that group of people. Not all people are on equal footing, there are many many many different types of privileges out there, each with a different weight on their life experiences with different people and groups. The big three would be Male, White and First World, of which I have all three. Everything from the way you dress, what you eat, color of skin, orientation, everything comes down to how others will perceive you and how easy or difficult your life will be.
I think the middle ground on both sides is being taken a bit out of context here. There is no middle ground on certain things, like murdering someone or not murdering someone, or as you stated
I don’t think we’d find many people other than some white supremist KKK members hold those values. Even those groups have been cornered to a fringe minority of people.
I should have stated where topics often have 50/50 of near that of a split disagreement, you can often find things the two agree on.
I’ll love to talk some more, and learn from you and your experiences.
Donald Trump is the GOP frontrunner. Just saying.
Hmm, someone come searching for a debate, huh?
This should be fun.
Er…
The Republican front-runner for the US presidential election has a platform built almost entirely out of racism. Out of “We’re-better-than-them”, and fear-mongering, and scapegoating.
Further: The KKK may be the only ones that believe it explicitly, but there are a whole lot more who believe it implicitly, through thoughtlessness or more traditional bigotry.
EDIT: Yeah, what IP said.
Of course you don’t. Because you know you’d get your brain-dead arse kicked six ways ’til go fuck yourself.
Such empty posturing.
As I read that I was bursting out laughing, why didn’t I think of him? I think he’s more of a nationalist than a racist, but that’s probably him just hiding that from the public.
I respectfully disagree, I’m simply following the advice, or at least trying to, of a certain EJ (The Other One) to ask for people’s consent before talking about topics they may not have wanted to. So, on another thread would be a better place.
Pffffffff yeah, this is gonna be good.
Yeah, why did you not think of anything?
Probably because I think he more nationalist than racist. Wanting to get rid of Muslims, Mexicans, beating China, ect. His views are definitely not ones I conform to, but knowing what I do about the Donald, he was probably raised to believe he was better than any other type of person.