Well here’s a terrible post for you all from an incel who thinks he’s come up with the ultimate excuse for pedophilia, oh sorry hebephilia — you know, the one in which they want to fuck girls 14 or younger.
“Mental age should be taken more seriously than birth age,” MuddyBuddy writes in a recent post on Incels.is.
One issue concerning inceldom is that mentally most of us are developmentally behind our peers. Foids tend to prefer dating men their age or older. Never younger. However soyciety thinks it’s the worst crime ever for a man in his latest 20s or 30s to date a 14/15 yo foid. For many incels their drivers license might say 20 or 30 something but mentally we’re still teenagers. It’s impossible for us to ascend with women our birth age.
It’s also ludicrous to assume an older birth age male is default the groomer when dating a young teen foid. Both are equally sexually inexperienced and mentally the same age. People’s actual mental age should be what’s really displayed. Not saying this would completely cure inceldom but it would help many.
What the fuck, dude. You need to be on a list.
Needless to say, MuddyBuddy’s colleagues on Incels.is think he’s on to something.
“Yeah I thought I would grow out of my JB ]jailbait] attraction once I was no longer a teen, but that’s not the case,” notes 이지금.
It’s only natural that missing out on a developmental milestone (taking each other’s virginities at ~13-14) leaves us forever stunted in that mental stage.
Dude, virtually no one is losing their virginity at age 13 except in your fevered brain. The average age at which American teens first have sex is 17. As one recent study found, only about 5-14% lose their virginity at 14; for 13 year-olds, the spread ranges from roughly 3-6%.
“[F]rom a moral/ethical, but non legal standpoint,” adds Silverberry,
it would at the very least be less unethical for a 25 year old incel to bang a 14 year old foid than for an experienced 25 year old chad to, since the supposed power gap is less.
Society of course paints this issue as giga taboo and just says “adults shouldnt have sex with minors, simple as that,” and doesn’t even entertain any contrary thoughts.
Meanwhile, TheDarkEnigma explains that he thinks
it is wrong to be sexual with a prepubescent foid. But by the time they are in their mid-teens they are capable of consent if they are taking naked pictures of themselves and initiating sex. A 15 year old is much closer to being adult than to a toddler.
It’s more than a little creepy to see the word ‘toddler” show up in a discussion of age of consent laws.
Words2_live_bye bursts a few bubble by pointing out that
it’s not like we would be able to be with teen girls either. Even if it was legal and socially acceptable. Some of us are just too far gone in terms of sociability and autistic ways.
Can’t get women my own age, can’t get older ones, and can’t get younger ones.
Well, maybe there’s a good reason for that.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@Fred B-C
Stick around and you’ll find out that this blinkered, childish, and immoral argument is exactly what incels — along with their political kin, the pickup artists (PUA) and men’s rights advocates (MRA) — say. Except for the part about men being powerful.They’re held down and held back by feminists. Why shouldn’t incels be able to have sex with any hot babes (8+ to 10+) they desire? Feminism is to blame.
@Squack:
You don’t address any of the examples we actually give. Like the blatant hypocrisy that we are detecting in the incels. And the blatant hypocrisy one can see all over this site from the manosphere, over and over and over. Let’s try some. Notice how some of these are hypocrisies and others are inconsistent failures of analysis.
You may notice how these hypocrisies are not only fractal, they are connected to entire core pillars of supposed conservative thought. Now ask yourself: How many conservatives have ever once cared at all that they actually are deeply in favor of government being a solution when they offer the absolutist idea that government is the problem?
Squack, what is so contemptuous about this response is that you not only immediately go into whataboutism but also that you just assume that I didn’t think about your lame ass objection before this. If you had an ounce of intellectual charity, you could have asked me what may have made me come to such a strong conclusion. You just assumed I was making a strawman, even though I had discussed how I hadn’t even advanced the argument formally yet. You hadn’t even heard my case, because I hadn’t offered it, but you decided it must be bankrupt. What incredible dishonesty!
Not only are there people who justify abortion in distinct ways from this, but this isn’t a contradiction. Because we hold a premise, stated out loud, that rights conflict and that governments can intervene to protect some. Most leftists and liberals will tell you this. In the case of abortion, most liberals and leftists hold at least one of the two following premises that negate the apparent hypocrisy:
1) The fetus isn’t human or fully independently alive. It does not have the right of protection that other
2) The fetus has no right to hijack the mother’s womb without her consent.
A fetus is an entirely dependent being that causes serious biochemical changes, who will almost certainly inflict immense pain on the mother (or require a C-section, an act of outright surgery), and who may kill the mother. Even the easiest pregnancy is a complicated, difficult process.
In contrast, when it comes to vaccination, we are talkng about a harmless injection that will protect other adult living humans (and, yes, even unborn children, something conservatives who were shrieking about herd immunity ignored – guess what happens if a pregnant mother dies of COVID, Squack?). So the calculus of the public versus the private need is utterly different. Preserving the right to an abortion preserves the right of a woman to not have to go through a difficult, long-term heath issue at the cost of a non-person; preserving the right to people not getting a shot protects them from a momentary inconvenience at the cost of real people. Hence the different outcomes of reasoning. And we told you all of this, ahead of time, and did our homework.
What’s particularly fucking telling, my dude, is that I’ve actually prominently hitched my wagon to the violinist argument as being much more important than the fetal right argument. I have pointed out that we can accept that the fetus has some important moral character and should be protected without accepting that abortion should be illegal. Precisely because a mother has the right to control her body. I even think that the willful, malicious destruction of embryos should be viewed as more than a property crime and that a forced abortion against a mother’s consent should probably be treated as something closer to murder than assault.
But you may notice, Squack, how few liberals and leftists are actually talking about forced vaccination or serious government quarantine. Precisely because it is worrisome to us, and something we would only want to adopt as a last resort, due to the scale of state coercion. In contrast to conservatives, who, you disingenuously sweep under the rug, advocate for abortion instead of comprehensive family planning and economic protections that would make it easier for people to plan their families and be willing to consider having an extra child, instead of dealing with the crisis of climate change, and while they know full well that the criminalization strategy for managing abortion doesn’t work.
Conservatives are so dishonest that they will conflate your workplace insisting that you be vaccinated, which has an evidence-based rationale to protect other workers and the public, or other mere consequences for not being vaccinated as being outright compulsion. This is not only a lie, but also even a violation of their radical free market beliefs. How many conservatives who think that businesses should be allowed to discriminate against gay and trans people threw a fit about having to wear a mask on the premises when the business itself firmly agreed with and supported the mandate?
But while we’re talking about abortion… what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, right, Squack? Conservatives routinely justify government intervening to protect the fetus but not to protect the rest of us living adults from a virus. Conservatives also are happy to talk about how they are pro-life, until the child is born. Then they’re happy to believe in the death penalty, to cut welfare services for children, etc. They are even quite happy to be in favor of violent bombings which happens to kill a lot of children, even unborn ones. They don’t actually act in evidence-based ways to reduce the number of abortions. They happen to pick the thing they know won’t work, abortion criminalization, but will help them control women’s bodies. You know full well that the inconsistency actually exists the other direction as well, but just didn’t mention that one. Why? Because you’re a partisan hack?
Let’s go back to Roe v. Wade for a moment. Blackmun (at the time a conservative but who ruled in ways that many liberals found to be reasonable) argued that there was a balance between the needs of the state, the unborn mother and the child, hence the trimester system. Clinton then went on to try to argue for as few abortions as possible, keeping it rare and safe. These perspectives are definitional to liberal thought and are far more nuanced than your bullshit attribution.
And this is emblematic of the problem with your perfidious bullshit, Squack. I recognize that arguments are complicated. Individual conservatives may be capable of nuance. But from “Government is the problem” to free market absolutism to free speech absolutism, conservative arguments are just not like liberal and left arguments. Liberals and leftists simply do not utter claims that they intend to be absolute
You can see this in the Tea Party, Squack. Go back and look at much of their rhetoric. They weren’t arguing that this specific intrusion into public life was a bridge too far, that specifically granting health care was a huge problem. You had a huge portion of people, many of whom happily supported PATRIOT and Iraq, getting their panties in a wad about big government. Their signs, their rhetoric, etc. was about the principle of big government in general. Not the specific tradeoff in this one case that they opposed. That’s how conservative activism works in practice, Squack. Broad, universal, inflexible slogans that they offer not just as slogans or broad principles but as their actual objection to a policy or actual reason for a policy, over and over and over again, that contradicts some other broad, universal, inflexible slogan. They are Schrodinger’s Debater, both fascist and libertarian as needed.
Contrast this with “Defund the police”. See how that’s a specific policy call? And people who call for it routinely make clear that they don’t mean to do so completely, but to do so insofar as possible. Do you see how that is not the same thing as simultaneously alleging that government is the problem and then demanding government build that wall?
You can’t even phrase my argument correctly, Squack. I didn’t say all conservatives are hypocrites. I said that conservatism as an ideology produces hypocrisy as a feature, not a bug, because the actual underlying belief is as I described. You didn’t even try to address that. You didn’t even try to address conservative hypocrisy in general, instead immediately going for a limp and false attempt at whataboutism.
Because I think all rights are balanced against each other. Something that is routinely noted even among anarchists like Albert. And myself. I’m an anarchist. Something you could have discovered with a simple Google search, and didn’t.
No contradiction here. You didn’t even try for it.
And how is wealth cognate of bodily autonomy? It’s not.
However, you may notice that despite my concerns over unlimited drug use, I am actually a pretty staunch defender of drug decriminalization, even for very hard drugs, with a focus on rehabilitation and medicalization of the problem. Precisely because I am consistent that we should be able to control what goes into our body, as long as doing so harms no one else. That last proviso, that your right to move your arm ends at my face, is a pretty big one, and comes from classical liberal thought there.
Meanwhile, anti-abortion conservatives routinely are pro-drug war. Which you didn’t mention. Did you not notice? Or did you not care?
Flounce indeed. Try again, Squack. My position is that conservatism in terms of root, defining ideas, like the value of small government, is inherently, massive inconsistent. I am not denying that there are liberal and left-wing hypocrisies, nor that there are complicated matters of nuance. I am arguing that conservativism as an idea so routinely obliterates nuance so that there is no excuse for the overt contradictions, and that they do so to disguise that they too have a nuanced worldview, one which happens to be nuanced in bigoted ways. Address that or don’t, but don’t just spew nonsense at a strawman while getting mad at me for allegedly doing it.
@Snowberry:
That’s exactly what I’m pointing out. It would be hypocrisy, Snowberry, except for those conservatives who actually argue that brown people are inferior. (I am partially using the word “hypocrisy” to refer to “Mine rules for thee but not for me”, as in the argumentative sense, but I think it still applies even in the narrower sense). To say that some should be treated differently than others with no reason isn’t just arbitrary, it’s hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is special pleading.
And conservatives do themselves say they host such a belief. They will say that they are in favor of the universal rights of people. They will use the language of universalism to defend themselves while then not applying it to others. It is exactly the frequent hijacking of liberal and left-wing language that exposes them to the charge not just of arbitrariness but also hypocrisy.
I agree that what conservatives actually believe is what you are suggesting. But that’s not what they say. Hence it not being just arbitrary, but hypocritical and dishonest. If they said it out loud, they would be being arbitrary or bigoted, but they rarely do.
@Frog:
I have! I think it’s a succinct summary, but I do think the idea should see formal demonstration.
@Fred B-C
Your reply indicates to me that you are severely intellectually-bankrupt. You haven’t proven anything, beyond your own anal suppositions for which you provide no evidence whatsoever. If I so much as criticize one of you, you all go “cItAtIoN nEeDed” but yet, you vomit up tons of claims for which you demonstrate no need at all to prove, with facts.
“I didn’t say that conservatives were hypocrites, I just said that conservatism is hypocritical”
Same thing. Someone who bases their politics and life on hypocritical beliefs is a hypocrites, of necessity. And I stand by what I said about bodily autonomy, if you have the right to destroy a fetus regardless of whether or not it’s human in any meaningful way, I have the right to refuse to insert a needle into my body, regardless of whether or not someone else suffers. You don’t get to just pick and choose, pal. And I don’t know who the fuck Albert even is.
You call yourself an anarchist, but you’re all “government needs to lock people in their houses so they don’t catch the flu” and you probably want more checks from the government. I’d bet you
re living off of them permanently.
Trolly here gives some good examples of “hypocrisy” which are not actually hypocrisy.
“Fetal personhood” is a conservative concept which is incoherent from a liberal perspective. The correct framing here is “conservative people’s beliefs don’t necessarily trump my liberally-influenced choices”. One can argue whether it is really the morally/ethically correct position to take under specific circumstances (abortion in this case) but it’s not in any way hypocritical or inconsistent.
Most people are not actually required to take the coronavirus vaccine (the ones who do have to are very limited, specific occupations where you can still “opt out” by quitting your job). The general consensus among liberals is that people can freely choose not to, but people who choose not to do so when there’s no medical reason for it are recklessly endangering those around them and should be treated accordingly.
Unless you’re talking about childhood vaccines, in which case children who don’t get vaccinated are potential plague carriers and treated accordingly (absent a valid medical exemption, they’re not allowed into public schools). I’m not sure about countries other the US, but in most states, parents aren’t actually forced to vaccinate their children, but they can get in trouble for falsifying their vaccine status and/or not providing alternate education. Regardless, childhood vaccination isn’t even a liberal view; it’s a majority view.
In the case of vaccines? See above. In the case of anything else? Absolutely not. “The state intruding on the bodies of private individuals” is very much a conservative thing. I mean, they’re largely against abortion, tattooing, trans care, voluntary sterilization, some forms of cosmetic surgery… and then during those brief periods where we had forced sterilization of “undesirables”, that was largely a conservative-driven thing.
Ignoring that virtually no wealth is “independently-produced” (at most, some sources of wealth are independently-owned), ignoring that liberals do not see taxation as “seizing”, ignoring that only communists (and most liberals are not communists) want to “redistribute” to the extent that it would suppress ambitions toward wealth or even affect most wealthy people to any meaningful degree, how would that be inconsistent with any other position typically taken by liberals? And I mean actual liberals, not strawmen. Again, one can argue whether this position is morally/ethically correct, but the actual correctness of such a position doesn’t determine whether it is hypocrisy.
Hey. Dishonest asshole. Over here.
You didn’t cite shit either. You offered up a “fact”. You didn’t cite that liberals accepted a particular view either with some link to some peer reviewed study or a publication or anything. You sure as fuck didn’t link to the violinist argument, or any public defenses of vaccination requirements or mask mandates. So… what was that about hypocrisy again? Why should I put in more time than you in a comments section?
But I did offer facts, Squack. I referred to, amongst other things,
Now, you can contest any of my claims if you want, or ask for a source, and I can fucking provide them, you candy-ass. But don’t have the audacity to hold me to task for responding to your sourceless, evidenceless strawman of my argument with my own logic. Have the courage to contest my arguments or don’t, but don’t try this weaksauce shit. It’s particularly galling because most of what I discussed is a matter of public record. I shouldn’t need to point you to a fucking link to prove that a lot of people make both pro-free market and anti-immigration arguments. When I refer to Sargon, I shouldn’t need to embed a link to his petition or to HBomberguy’s video on it. If I was making some detailed argument from peer-reviewed scholarship that required you to be able to assess some specific data or methodology, that’d be one thing. But that’s not the conversation we’re having.
But I know for a fact that will happen, jackass. Because I actually do this a lot. The moment you see peer-reviewed citations, and historians, and need to get into the weeds of evidence, your eyes will glaze over and you’ll go back to irrelevant shrieking.
You could have picked any of my arguments and tried to explain why something I identified wasn’t actually proof of a position, and I could have then replied and if it became necessary pointed you to some sources. We didn’t get that far because you’re a fucking clown.
But try it, Squack. Actually contest any of my actual points with your own evidence and watch as I find you sources. Put up or shut up, punkass.
Oh, and try to avoid reifying your opposition too, asshole. Putting aside that not every claim is equally necessary to document, I didn’t ask you to cite a goddamn thing. Other people who are not me maybe did. When you made a claim I found to be factually false I corrected you as to how I saw it, but I didn’t [CITATION NEEDED] you. But hey, it’s not okay for me to hold conservatives collectively accountable for their shared association, right? It’s not okay for me to treat conservative B in fashion X based off of what conservative A did or said, while it’s okay for you? How’s that fucking petrified forest in your eye, brother?
No it’s fucking not. People are not wholly defined by any one ideology they hold. And ideologies are abstractions. They’re averages. There will be some people who more or less closely match the definition of the ideology, or break from the center point. And I have no fucking doubt that if it was convenient for you that you would suddenly be able to invoke this distinction, because it isn’t a distinction without a difference.
Did you not catch the fucking memo that “whether or not it’s human” is actually one of the things being fucking debated, you clown? Asserting that liberals are hypocrites because they treat things they view as non-human as non-human is to circularly assume your argument to be true. And you have the gall to accuse me of dishonesty and strawmen and intellectual bankruptcy. What an asshole.
I usually am more polite than this, I really am, Squack, but you have really proven that you’re just not seriously engaging with people.
Which doesn’t respond to me illustrating the difference, that you refusing to do that makes me sick. An actual human.
But what’s even fucking worse, asshole, is that if you just stayed in your goddamn hole, maybe we could have a chat about whether or not you should be required to be vaccinated. But you won’t. You’ll intrude into public space and affect everyone else’s bodily autonomy with your fucking germs. That’s why it’s not analogous.
A woman getting an abortion is like someone kicking an unwanted guest out of their home even when they know it will kill that person. It’s harsh, but it’s defending their own property. Every conservative on the planet would applaud her and demand that the law make it easier for her to defend her property from people she doesn’t want on it. You refusing to get a vaccination is like a person who is dumping toxic waste on their property which is leeching into mine. There’s no “picking and choosing” here. The circumstances aren’t analogous. So all we’ve learned is that you don’t know how to make a proper argument from hypocrisy. Which doesn’t make my properly formed arguments to hypocrisy invalid.
And you also ignored how abortion laws aim to not only ban abortions but even empower individuals to engage in vigilante enforcement, while what has been done thus far for vaccination has been to make it so that you need to be vaccinated to keep a job or what not but not compelling you to do so on point of jail or force. Disagree? Cite a fucking source, you hypocrite.
And Michael Albert is an anarchist philosopher and one of the key figures at Z Magazine. Hey, remember what I said about you ignoring sources just a bit above? Fucking called it. You could have Googled and gotten an idea. You didn’t. I’m not going to hold your hand for you.
Quote me as saying that. Want to bitch about strawmen, you fucking human rhinovirus? Want to complain about sources? Put up or shut up.
I have never taken food stamps. I have Anthem through my state health insurance. But even if I did, so what?
Many anarchists don’t suggest that people should starve because the state failed to live up to the needs of the community. As long as we have to deal with a state, it should be doing the job that a community of free association would do in a just society. There is a minimum basic income in a participatory economy. (It’s an anarchist model for an economy that Michael Albert sketches in Parecon, a book I will confidently predict you will never fucking read even if I point to it in arguments against you, because insisting that, no, I’m actually made of straw and then trying to light me on fire to prove it is better for you than not lying).
If you actually talked to anarchists, you might realize how few of them give anyone any shit for taking what they can from government. But why understand your opposition? That’s only something for liberals to do! Squack can just run his goddamn mouth until he can power a perpetual motion machine!
And many anarchists also agree that, under extremely rare circumstances, communities have a right to protect themselves from collective threats. Chomsky has informally defined anarchism as the claim that all uses of power and force must be justified and the burden of proof is on the one using the force, but he offers an example of a parent pulling a child out of the street to show that the burden can be met. This is elementary anarchist theory. And a fucking global plague is a reason to maybe ask people to stay home if they can, and gently enforce that rule.
So the only thing you’ve shown, Squack, is that you’ll fucking throw a toddler-sized temper tantrum if I don’t conform to your strawman. Instead of asking me what my anarchism means and what my philosophy is, and only from that determining if I am being inconsistent, you just assumed it without having met me, despite the fact that a lot of my views are publicly available.
And yet I’m supposed to show conservatives this infinite well of intellectual charity because, well, you’re clearly not on the left so you deserve special treatment. That’s really how depthful this is, you brat. How about I don’t do that? How about you admit that your behavior proves that it’s either perfectly acceptable to do what you accused me of doing, making a strawman of conservatives that’s much more evidence-based prima facia than anything you’ve said here and much more charitable, or that you’re an asshole and should change your behavior?
@Snowberry:
And in pretty much every case what he offered as examples of hypocrisy that weren’t were also not examples of an arbitrary distinction 😀 .
I see Dipshit the Gullible is back. Yawn.
@ Fred B-C
Speaking of using Google to look things up, a quick interwebs search did not enlighten me as to the term “freeze preacher”. You use it several times. Is it is a reference to Daddy Freeze or something else?
@.45
“Freeze Peach” is a derisive way of referring to conservatives’ very selective and hypocritical “concerns” about free speech, similar to the way “Buttery Males” was a mocking reference to conservatives’ bullshit “concerns” about Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server (“but her emails!”).
Seriously, are conservatives capable of doing anything that isn’t deeply hypocritical?
@.45: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Free_Speech_vs_Frea_Speach_and_Freeze_Peach
The Squacklette has admitted to being a teenager, I doubt it’s actually thought through any of it’s positions, it very likely inherited them from it’s parents. That does not mean it shouldn’t be asked to justify those positions, but it does mean that it is unlikely to be able to do so as it hasn’t come to them rationally.
@Jazzlet: Please don’t refer to someone as “it” unless that’s their preferred pronoun. Either that’s misgendering, which is specifically mentioned as being against the comments policy, or that’s dehumanization, which is suprisingly not listed among the examples of what is against the comment policy – but I’m pretty sure that falls under “other asshole behaviors”. Regardless, while David usually lets trolls stay for long enough to be a vaguely amusing chew toy for those who enjoy that sort of thing, he does eventually ban them. It behooves someone who doesn’t want to be treated as a troll to follow the spirit of the comments policy.
It’s a pity English doesn’t have a set of pronouns that exclusively mean “gender unspecified because the gender is not known.”
I want to say that some of my Scandinavian knitting buddies have mentioned their language supports such a construction, but I can’t remember if it’s the Swedish or the Finnish knitting buddies. Though given the stereotypes regarding Finnish introverts, I wonder if it’s Finnish.
Not remembering things makes me peevish. Perkele….
Ah, pigeon chess has resumed, I see.
Victorious Parasol:
As opposed to what? You mean like having separate singular third person pronouns for male person, female person, neutral generic person of unspecified gender and neutral specific person of unknown gender? In English, the last two are combined in “they”.
Finnish famously lacks gendering, so there’s only a neutral pronoun equivalent to “they” in singular third person. Swedish used to have only male and female singular third person but has recently introduced a neutral option equivalent to “they”.
BTW it blew my mind when I saw it pointed out that many (?) nonbinary people feel unsatisfied with singular “they” because the pronoun is universal, not specific to nonbinary people (which would actually make it a normative third gender). Like you wouldn’t normally refer to known men and women as “they” because it’s customary to prefer a gender specific pronoun. That’s apparently why some people prefer nonbinary neopronouns.
Obviously, in Finnish nobody is entitled to gender specific pronouns so the issue doesn’t come up with nonbinary people either. In English I say I prefer “he” because it’s customary and de facto necessary to communicate that I’m a man. I haven’t yet had the experience of being misgendered in English, so no idea how it’d feel as a non-native speaker. Or if I were unnecessarily non-gendered as “they” in English.
Incidentally, the Finnish equivalent of non-person singular (“it”) is often used for persons in informal language. It’s not automatically dehumanizing, but certainly stylistically fraught and easily disrespectful in the wrong context. I might even say it’s dehumanizing in the context of formal Finnish, as well as in English.
Yeah, sorry @.45, but there really isn’t a good way of describing freeze peachers without using the mocking term. I could say “right wing ‘free speech’ activist”, but even that isn’t really fair becuase some right-wingers do actually have some principles. A “freeze peacher” is a generally right-wing person who effectively acts as a free speech absolutist, accusing private platforms of censorship for banning or restricting anyone or any speech, demanding absolute platform rights, etc. But I refuse to call them free speech absolutists because they’re not. They’re too internally inconsistent, and very rarely come to the defense of restrictions on speech targeting the left, like anti-protest bills, the current anti-CRT hysterics, etc.
Sargon is the ideal example: He made a petition to ask universities, both public and private, to violate academic freedom based off of his boogeymen, without even bothering to create criteria to define what a social justice course would be, clear guidelines for how long this was going to go, or actual indications of a real pattern of harm that could actually be averted by his censorship. More broadly, I have never met any of these guys who will agree to hand you their platform, whether it be their YouTube account or their own server, to host your ideas. They’re either so monumentally entitled, dishonest and/or Internet brain-rotted that they’ve forgotten that Twitter is not necessarily a public utility. (And even if it were, you can’t come to a park and harass people either).
I would love some more neutral term to refer to their position, but I haven’t found one. They’re not free speech absolutists, they’re not libertarians, they’re just massive hypocrites. The best I can think of is “platform access free speech conservatives”, but even this is misleading because they haven’t quite realized that what they’re actually complaining about is the lack of a particular positive right while also being against positive rights. And the freeze peachers are found everywhere from the mainstream Republicans all the way out to the alt-right, so we can’t even isolate it to a specific cultural problem.
@Kat: Do they actually say that? In that many words? They may say that in their echo chambers, or when you scratch at them (and notice how they have to pretend they’re not powerful, which is just a special case of what I’m talking about – finding a way of not admitting that they’re just engaging in the just world fallacy as an entire identity). I’ve read WHTM for years (even commented sometimes in the past) and the number of times someone has been that straight, that honest, is pretty low.
It’s obviously true that the alt-right tends to be a little more direct about their hate and supremacist ideology, but you’ll notice how they all still have mythologies they use that act as if to pretend to play the game as the liberal does, as Sartre pointed out. MRAs have male abuse, supposed unequal treatment of men in the criminal justice system, etc. It doesn’t matter that they, like CH Sommers with boys in schools, infer discrimination merely from unequal outcomes when it comes to the groups they are defending, which is another example of hypocrisy for Squack. PUAs have their biotruths about how women supposedly behave that justifies their behavior. MGTOWs and incels have myths about female dominance. Nazis talk about the supposedly inconsistent ways that white and non-white nations are treated in terms of tolerating ethno-politics and immigration restrictions.
One time, i was talking to an alt-manospherian who had just recently tried the IQ-race bull and I pointed out to him how Flynn’s data and the growing consensus was that women had a higher IQ. Suddenly he was the biggest IQ skeptic on the planet: He wanted to actually see the databases (when he never would have for Rushton or Lynn), he was skeptical about what IQ meant, etc. The blatant hypocrisy was staggering and I was able to do some damage to his position with it.
In every one of these cases, you can challenge the evidence and the debate will be about something else. They won’t even perceive certain challenges (one of the most eye-opening things to ever happen to me was a debate with Maddox where his bro followers simply did not see women telling them about sexism and kept focusing on my responses even refusing to respond to those women when I cited them and pointed out their blindness). Because the underlying ideology is indeed the hateful thing. But even people as blinkered as incels can’t admit that the hate came first, that none of their complaints about female treatment actually matter because they would still be supremacists even if none of those things were true and they conceded that they weren’t true. And indeed, for many people, admitting precisely that, without excuse, actually gets them out of the cult. Having to admit, without any mythology or rationalization, “I am actually the bad guy” is not something most people can withstand.
@Jazzlet: That’s not really an excuse, though it is something to bear in mind. I was more cantankerous in debate when I was that age than I am now, but I was also more committed to actually debating fairly and trying to be polite than he was. And since I was in high school debate, I had actually read my opponent’s position, indeed even sometimes adopting conservative positions for the sake of debate. Squack could be more informed, more honest, more judicious. He could be committed to reading what his opponents say directly and specifically.
@ Snowberry
Sorry you are absolutely correct, I should have used ‘they’. I have no defense, but do have whiny excuses – I hadn’t had a whole cup of coffee at that point nor had my meds kicked in both of which fuck up my ability to think clearly.
@ fred b-c
In one of the entrance tests for bar school we were given a proposition and then five minutes to prepare our argument in favour of it. As it happens mine was ‘there should be the minimum restrictions on free expression’. But when you go into the room to the panel, they ask you to argue in favour of the opposite position. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise.
But I think it’s one thing to conduct such experiments in the abstract, another to play devils advocate when real people are telling about their own experiences.
There is value though in considering what validity an opponent’s position might have; or arguments they can make in their favour. An exercise I teach to new barristers in case prep is that the first thing they should do is write their closing speech, but then the second thing they should do is write their opponent’s closing speech.
There’s a truth to power thing; and sometimes the hardest person to make listen to uncomfortable alternatives is oneself. But I think it’s essential to be able to do so.
As an aside, I always prefer fiction where ‘the bad guys have a point’*. Just makes for a more interesting narrative. I think the original Rollerball is a good example of that.
(* It has to be a valid point though, not merely a counter position based purely on assumption or dogma.)
@Alan: I agree entirely about the difference between devil’s advocacy with real people and real experiences and with abstract notions, but I actually want to make a point both Tim Wise and I have made.
Even the devil’s advocate stuff is actually just a bit different when it affects you personally.
I won’t get into details, but there was a point in our debate team where there was a case of sexual abuse. We just missed it. It was fucked up and awful. The fact that I could have been so blind to a dynamic still haunts me, and was an important point that guided me to be more attentive to the secret legacy of abuse and trauma.
We had to debate the issue of mental health protection for rape victims. On the negative. My partner burst into tears by the end. I too was deeply bummed. It sucked. We had to find a way of debating the issue (I actually don’t remember if we won because it didn’t matter, but I seem to recall that we did) despite the fact that in that moment we desperately wanted the affirmative to win for real.
Debate as an exercise can teach us to view the world as BS, to view the world as about what you can get people to believe, to stop respecting truth. And so it can deeply entrench privilege. Even on issues that seem somewhat abstract. In high school debate, every debate came down to nuclear war unless it came down to philosophical analysis or topicality. Your case increases the budget by .01%? Well, that causes economic collapse and World War III! Because if you have no rules for argumentation, nothing beyond the structure of the round, why not pretend that everything is literally the most important topic ever?
It was an important insight later to realize that not everything can be debated equally, fairly or politely. “You deserve to die” is not a debate that should be had, in my opinion ever but even for those who believe in the death penalty with a very different set of standards than “Does God exist?” Being so blase about matters of life and death is much easier for people who are insulated from them. (And you can tell when you find the issue that really gets them mad. It’s often something like feminism that suddenly makes something personal. It’s why people like Thunderfoot and Sargon, who can recognize fallacies anywhere else, stop being rational on the topic).
So I think it goes beyond intellectual charity and beyond courtesy. I’m not as anti-debate as some on the left, but I do think we need to be very careful about how we do it, and why, both internally and against conservatives, in order to avoid advancing some bad norms.
Even when it comes to the personal, I definitely have seen people devil’s advocate themselves into an ugly position because they fell for some trick of their own mind. We should always test an idea on multiple levels.
And I too like when the bad guys have a point. In my writing, especially in the roleplaying campaign I’m doing right now, I’m always balancing trying to find an interesting ideology for the villains. In those cases, even dogmatic ideas can be interesting if you find a unique perspective on the world that has some merit to it as a fundamental lens to look at reality through.
@ Fred B-C
I certainly wasn’t excusing Squack! I too could argue my position at that age, and earlier coming as I do from a family that enjoys friendly arguments, well friendly to the extent that the goal is always to win, but that win won’t result in fallings out (?falling outs? not sure).
@ fred b-c
I must confess I can see some circumstances; but that’s an animal rights thing.
You make some very salient points though; and of course the above example happens in every capital case sentencing. People literally argue for their lives; often in person.
But that’s the law for you. One part of my job is giving people advice about potential litigation. That does involve being very blunt about the strengths and weaknesses of their cases; and the limited achievable outcomes. So that is pretty much playing devils advocate with real people. And it’s one of the toughest bits; even though one is trying to act in the client’s best interests.
But that’s why there’s a saying here about the different legal roles: “Solicitors take your money; barristers make you cry.”
@ fred b-c
This popped up for me the other night. (The algorithm seems to know I’m a fan of all things 1984). But it refers to something called Epistemic Injustice. I’d never heard of that before; but some of the points remind me of what you’ve been saying about hypocrisy and how people demand different levels of evidence for positions they do and don’t already agree with.
@alan: But notice what we’ve done. We’ve made it so that that debate, when it happens, must be done twice. First, there must be certainty beyond a reasonable doubt of the crime. Then there must be an additional debate about sentencing.
The problem with the average debate bro approach to a topic isn’t just that they think everything is debateable meaningfully, especially in a given format (e.g. live discussion instead of written essays or a conversation). It’s also an assumption that the negative and affirmative on any given topic is fundamentally equal. We would change a lot just by saying that any argument that has a bigoted outcome must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the affirmative.
And Abigail Thorne is badass. Philosophy Tube rules, but I haven’t watched this video specifically, but I am sure it is thoughtful.
@Jazzlet: Oh, I didn’t imagine you were, I just wanted to note that while we can recognize that and maybe cut some slack it’s still not a total excuse or explanation.