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bad history foids incels misogyny

A Vindication of No Rights for Women: A Terrible Incel Manifesto

Mary Wollstonecraft is not impressed

On the Incels.is forums an angry and somewhat grammatically challenged commenter tries to explain why misogyny is a-ok and women don’t need rights.

“Misogyny is absolutely normal and healthy,” Persecuted begins.

Often misrepresented or reduced to irrational hatred. Misogyny is only rational answer that man can have to degenerate and idiotic behviour of cumdumpsters.

Well that’s quite a start.

It’s realisation that only metric of foids value is how usefull they are to men and since holes are worst at almost everything than men, thier rights should be taken away and thier roles reduced to mothers and housewifes.

I’m pretty sure society already tried this. Let’s just say it didn’t work.

In fact, most of the positive qualities associated with femininity are result of strict patriarchal supervision. It’s men who created an image of a woman that prelevant in culture.

“Prelevant.”

Foids by nature are devoid of those positves qualities and as such strict control of female behaviour is a key to stable society, since foids themselves don’t posses any ability to control themselves.

Those self-uncontrollable bitches!

Moreover, since foids already leech most of society resource and contribute to society less than men, that means that thier role isn’t crucial in society, so getting rid of thier rights would only benefit society.

Time for the world’s largest [CITATION NEEDED]. Make it retroactive for all the other bullshit he’s peddling here.

By making foids a property of a father and then husband, we shift burden from of financially providing for a whore from society to a father and then husband.

You know, dude, that most women pay their own bills, right? It’s not like they get a monthly whore allowance deposited in their bank account.

If you disagree, you’re a cuck and waste of space.

Ah, yes, calling someone a “cuck,” the most powerful logical argument of all.

In a followup comment, Persecuted suggests that women needed to be forced into motherhood at a young age.

If given a choice, foids themselves have no want of being mothers, especially with below-to-averege males. Mothership is obviously patriarchal concept, as even feminist note. The liberated foid only became mother and wife after a years of taking Chads’ sperm and settles in her 30s, way after her ovaries past prime. In past, foids were forced by society to give birth at young, prime age, most suited for child birth.

Also this system is created to profit of[f] degeneracy, in which foids take lead, and financial dependency of average citizen

A lot of terrible ideas knocking around inside this guy’s mostly empty head.

Naturally, Persecuted’s miniature manifesto has received an overwhelmingly positive response among his Incels.is colleagues — except for one dude with only a handful of comments to his name who suggests that the manifesto-writer move to Afghanistan, rousing the ire of others in the discussion.

Most are enthusiastic about Persecuted’s blatherings.

“Yes,” writes RetardedChinlet.

I think even a happy, well-adjusted sexhaver man ought to have a healthy dose of misogyny. It’s what women deserve and even want deep down. This fantasy of gender equality is sheer fucking insanity.

“Foids are less than men,” adds uo89997, a little more concisely.

I’m pretty sure that no one who uses the term “foid” is contributing much positive to civilization. But we all deserve the same rights nonetheless.

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Nequam
Nequam
2 years ago

Shorter:

comment image

Last edited 2 years ago by Nequam
Fred B-C
2 years ago

As always when these people vomit for this long, he comes tantalizingly close to some key realizations.

“In fact, most of the positive qualities associated with femininity are result of strict patriarchal supervision. It’s men who created an image of a woman that prelevant in culture”, for example. Very true! Might you conclude from that that, therefore, that image is a myth, a lie, a self-serving construct? No. The conclusion is that we didn’t believe in this lie enough and really, really need to sell it!

And the other commenter’s insight: “I think even a happy, well-adjusted sexhaver man ought to have a healthy dose of misogyny”, too. Wow, so you’re admitting that your misogyny has nothing to do with your access to sex! Fantastic!

And, as David rightly notes, most of the people who spend their time doing blase assessments of other people’s contributions have none of their own to make, and are just free riders trying to benefit from other peoples’ work. As I point out to anyone invoking the “Western civilization” supremacy malarkey, the fact that Mozart is badass does not mean that bigots are writing concertos. I remain convinced that a lot of the most overt bigots are people with deeply internalized self-loathing.

GSS ex-noob
GSS ex-noob
2 years ago

These guys don’t even see how their … let’s be generous and call them ideas … work against them, too.

I mean, if a young woman knows she’s going to be nothing but a brood mare for some man, might as well go for Chad so the babies will be cute, or a rich guy to buy her a big house and nice clothes.

Nobody’s going to be panting after these losers.

Same as it ever was, boys.

.45
.45
2 years ago

@ Fred B-C

That is one thing that always bothers me about people who claim the Dark Ages set back technology and society hundreds of years or whatever, that we’d all have flying cars, cold fusion, and a moonbase if they hadn’t happened.

It seems like nobody thinks it through to the logical conclusion. The Dark Ages are generally thought, at least by the layperson, to be centered on White Europe (I add that qualifier because that is what I remember at any rate).

Sooo… what they are saying is that only White people’s technological achievements are important and the rest of the world, basically all brown at that time, doesn’t count for anything. And this strikes me as so odd, because the people I have seen making jokes about this and talking about it are not intending to be racist or even realizing the implications.

(I am a fan of the idea that White people honestly didn’t accomplish much on the world stage until they got guns and decided to run with it. A bit over simplified, and gives a lot of credit to what was a rather primitive and ineffective weapon at the time, but you get the idea. I will now await your complete rebuttal of the whole thing.)

.45
.45
2 years ago

Huh. It not let me edit. Oh well.

@ GSS ex-noob

We all know most of their little theories and ideas revolve around justifying hurting and punishing the foids for not worshipping them and their dicks, rather than any genuine effort to make a better society.

Fred B-C
2 years ago

@GSS: That’s exactly why they are demanding coercive monogamy. Insofar as one could imagine a thought process in hate-poisoned brains like this, the idea would be that if women are forced into marriage, then thanks to the gender ratio roughly every man gets a woman. They’re literally hoping that they are better than the alternative of remaining unmarried, which of course is based on the immense social coercion even assholes like these manage to downplay that would be required to motivate people to get married or else face destitution and social isolation.

Of course, you’re still right in that even in that highly coercive scenario, one where even they may end up not being that happy (since even male choices for marriage can be effectively constrained in such an environment), they still have the fundamentally fascist thought that “This will work for me because I’m sure that they’ll set the bar just below me“. In reality, of course, this approach doesn’t free up the 10s from the Chads. People like them almost certainly won’t have millions of dollars or social connections. The net result of these systems is always that relationships become subordinated to families either trying to maintain their status or climb the social ladder.

And it is in direct contradiction to their ideas about how everyone else needs to just work hard. For the marginalized, they won’t accept anything beyond the most brutal “free competition”. But for them? Enforced monopolies please!

@.45: To be fair, most people I know of who are articulating that idea are mostly focusing on the horrors of the Dark Ages in the context of Europe. The fact that the area that had the Roman Empire, which really was (for all its immense flaws) pushing forward many kinds of science and progress, would backslide so badly is still horrifying. Other parts of the world may have had their own reasons that may have delayed or advanced progress, but the Dark Ages made sure that Europe was giving nothing to humanity for a good five hundred years when there was an underlying infrastructure that, had it been maintained, could have continued real progress. At the least we wouldn’t have lost a ton of fantastic science, history, art and philosophy to various forms of data entropy and Christian neglect.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

@ .45 & Fred B-C

I sometimes feel like we’re heading into an era of almost Unenlightenment. And I worry that might lead to a new dark ages. Now of course in one respect, there’s so much technical and intellectual inertia, one would hope that it would be impossible for science and learning generally to take a retrograde step.

But then you see, not only is there a pretty large contingent of people who are actively and unapologetically unrational and anti learning, we’re putting people like that (or at least are willing to pander to people like that) into some of the highest offices in the world. And it is a global phenomenon. Previously there may have been pockets that retained cultural knowledge, like our appendices store spare gut bacteria. So like how the Renaissance was possible because the Arab world had kept copies of the old Greek and Roman books. So once people were willing to shrug off ignorance and superstition, they didn’t have to start from scratch.

But we live in an interconnected world now. There are anti vaxxers and conspiracy theorists able to exchange information and motivation across every continent. I wonder how much critical mass would have to be achieved before the “no one likes experts any more” attitude becomes prevalent and dominant? If people could just hold the views themselves that would be fine. But what happens when they become mores imposed by law? Scary thought.

Still, I’m a perennial optimist; and I have a lot of faith in humans generally. So I’m sure it will all work out. Ironically I see a lot of room for hope in all the reactions to recent terrible events. World pulling together, pragmatism, reliance on objective truths etc. I guess maybe irrationality is something that can only exist in a reasonable safe environment. But existential crises force you to face up to reality or not survive.

So, as we say here in response to any misfortune, mustn’t grumble.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

Further to my above, a trivial example…

Since WW1, long range artillery crews compensate for Coriolis Effect.

So I’d feel pretty confident taking on a battalion of Flat Earthers.

ETA: The christian right is pretty well represented in areas with oil industries. Whether in government, management, or the workforce. But I bet none of the oil companies employ young earth creationists as geologists.

Last edited 2 years ago by Alan Robertshaw
Fred B-C
2 years ago

@Alan: I’m always pretty dismissive of that kind of rhetoric. We know that people are always predisposed to think that it was better when in the past, that this is a fallen age; and we know that people it takes a lot to actually truly destroy a society. In addition, we are in a time when we have a media diet that is beyond any throughout history, so it is incredibly easy for us to feel the deluge of bad news. Pinkerian optimism rooted exclusively in delusions about the current system beiing perfect are bad, but things are generally improving. 

Take your animal rights concerns. Obviously the era of factory farming, widespread unnecessary animal testing, etc. is new, but this is also the era where we are articulating the idea of animal rights at all. Contrast that with the ease with which ancient civilizations declared some animals unclean.

The anti-intellectualism element is a serious problem, but not really that new either. We’ve always had demagogues, we’ve always had idiot populists. Before Trump there was Reagan. Before Reagan there was Jackson.

And if there is a collapse of civilization globally, which is literally unprecedented in history, there’ll be countless universities, and areas that do value learning. Not least because everyone can see the importance of the knowledge we have. Even the screechiest anti-vaxxer still wants their cell phone.

So, for example, is the anti-expert opinion spreading? Not really. Zoomers may be slightly more likely to take a flat earth seriously, for example, but that comes from a healthy media diet where they tend to have a default open minded position. 

And you yourself note another pretty big limiter on the ability of the most foolish to do too much damage (and I am putting aside the foolish and delusional in positions of power because that problem is also not new): idiots don’t tend to win wars that well.

The only qualitatively new problems that I can see that we are really facing are climate change and WMD proliferation and control. They’re dire problems, but similarly dire problems have been solved in the past. 

Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
Kat, ambassador, feminist revolution (in exile)
2 years ago

[A] happy, well-adjusted sexhaver man ought to have a healthy dose of misogyny. It’s what women deserve and even want deep down.

Finally, a response to Freud’s question, What do women want? Answer: misogyny!

Mothership is obviously patriarchal concept, as even feminist note.

Yes, obviously.

Big Titty Demon
Big Titty Demon
2 years ago

@.45

Re: guns enabling European colonialism

It was ships and forged steel, wasn’t it, until it got to rifles?

@Alan

Re: hatred of experts/knowledge

I think that the splintering of fields into too many ultra specialized disciplines will be what does us in, really. Eventually no more progress will be able to be made because everything is just too specialized. That and that everything has to be new at all costs, no one ever does reproducibility studies, so nothing is ever checked to see if our body of knowledge is actually real or not.

Re: creationism

To be honest, I don’t see why not. I know the pool of people being pulled from for the oil placement R&D computational and applied mathematics is heavily Christian. I doubt that it makes any difference to the science of oil well capitalism what a person’s personal belief of a certain type of rock strata/oil layer means in their universal history, as long as they have a common understanding on the porosity/distribution/whatever it is geologists do for oil companies, I wouldn’t know, I’m not a geologist.

KatInBoots
KatInBoots
2 years ago

@Fred B-C

Thanks for articulating the annoying problem with Pinker. I really enjoyed his writing back in the early 2000s when he was stayed in his lane and wrote about Psychology and Language. It got me interested in these fields as a young undergraduate student. The idea that this is “the best of all possible worlds” would make Voltaire laugh.

KatInBoots
KatInBoots
2 years ago

In case it’s unclear, I no longer buy Pinker’s books or agree with what he’s writing. He appears to have started to believe the hype of his fans and let it go to his head. There’s not a lot of people (i.e., men: I’m not aware of any women, or others of diverse gender identities, who try to do this in the same way) who can pull off the “Public Intellectual” persona without acting like a self-important dick. And yes, I’m aware of the ad hominem in this statement, but it seems to reflect a true narrow-mindedness and inability to truly understand the reality of how people, other than themselves, live and think. By extension, such intellectualism suggests that these other approaches to the world don’t matter and the people who embrace them are “less than.”

I’m looking at you, Peterson. And also you, Dawkins. I like to imagine that Hitchens showed up in an afterlife he never believed in and is still processing the existential crisis.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

@ fred b-c

this is also the era where we are articulating the idea of animal rights at all.

The idea of animal rights isn’t entirely new of course. There’s Jainism for instance as a pretty hardcore example. A lot of Jains wear masks, so as not to swallow insects (I can see their point, I do swallow a lot of bugs on my walks. I do feel pretty guilty about that; once I’ve stopped choking.) But there’s animal rights type talk going back a long way. Buddhism and Hinduism obviously has a lot of that; but you can find similar arguments from scholars of pretty much all beliefs. I personally think that this might be a self correcting problem. As zoonotic pandemics become more frequent and severe, there might just be pragmatic pressure to recognise the threat and mitigate against it. So that would be a social response. But also it seems people on plant based diets don’t really have to worry about such things; so in the longer term there might just be an evolutionary response. I think there’ll be a bit of Gaia Theory in action.

As you point out, it may be that all anti science views ultimately are self defeating, or at least not practically sustainable. You can hold anti science beliefs now because society cushions you and protects you from the consequences. People who reject relativity can still use satnavs for example. It only becomes directly dangerous to you when you reject things like medical advice. But a world where everyone either rejected science, or science was suppressed, would be an existential threat. Although, as you say, such a scenario is unlikely, even with the demagoguery. And I think ultimately social and evolutionary pressures will mitigate against that happening.

But this was one example I was thinking of.

https://www.london.edu/think/who-needs-experts

@ btd

I doubt that it makes any difference to the science of oil well capitalism what a person’s personal belief of a certain type of rock strata/oil layer means in their universal history

Hmm, that’s a really good point. I’m now reminded of the bit from 1984 where O’Brien explains how Doublethink also applies to science. Where he says that the stars are just bits of fire a few miles away; but scientists sometimes find it useful to imagine they are huge objects at many light years distance.

There’s nothing new in that of course. Even the most conservative church elements didn’t have a problem with the heliocentric model. So long as anyone writing about it acknowledged that this was just how the universe appeared to be; and that in reality the earth was the centre of god’s universe.

So I guess even oil prospectors could work on those lines.

As for over specialisation, I remember some old Asimov stories where the culture in academia was very much ‘stay in your lane’. At the time I thought that seemed far fetched. Interdisciplinary studies are so useful. You probably know the story that Alvarez was pretty certain there had been a huge asteroid impact; but wondered why there was no evidence of this in the fossil record (that he had heard about anyway). So it wasn’t until he was at a conference many years later where he was able to ask some palaeontologists whether anything unusual had happened 65 million years ago.

I would hope that now it’s so easy to share knowledge, people from various fields could easily check on the work of people in other fields. But as you point out, there is a trend to specialisation, and I guess there’s so much material available now in each field, that maybe people don’t have time to look at other fields.

I guess with so much information now, it might be harder to be a polymath. There’s just too much to take in.

But like I say, notwithstanding the above, I do have great faith in, and hope for, humanity.

If we can survive the Toba event or the Younger Dryas, that would suggest we’re pretty robust as a species.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

@ fred b-c

this is also the era where we are articulating the idea of animal rights at all.

The idea of animal rights isn’t entirely new of course. There’s Jainism for instance as a pretty hardcore example. A lot of Jains wear masks, so as not to swallow insects (I can see their point, I do swallow a lot of bugs on my walks. I do feel pretty guilty about that; once I’ve stopped choking.) But there’s animal rights type talk going back a long way. Buddhism and Hinduism obviously has a lot of that; but you can find similar arguments from scholars of pretty much all beliefs. I personally think that this might be a self correcting problem. As zoonotic pandemics become more frequent and severe, there might just be pragmatic pressure to recognise the threat and mitigate against it. So that would be a social response. But also it seems people on plant based diets don’t really have to worry about such things; so in the longer term there might just be an evolutionary response. I think there’ll be a bit of Gaia Theory in action.

As you point out, it may be that all anti science views ultimately are self defeating, or at least not practically sustainable. You can hold anti science beliefs now because society cushions you and protects you from the consequences. People who reject relativity can still use satnavs for example. It only becomes directly dangerous to you when you reject things like medical advice.

But a world where everyone either rejected science, or science was suppressed, would be a, self inflated, existential threat.

Although, as you say, such a scenario is unlikely, even with the demagoguery. And I think ultimately social and evolutionary pressures will mitigate against that happening.

But this was one example I was thinking of.

https://www.london.edu/think/who-needs-experts

@ btd

I doubt that it makes any difference to the science of oil well capitalism what a person’s personal belief of a certain type of rock strata/oil layer means in their universal history

Hmm, that’s a really good point. I’m now reminded of the bit from 1984 where O’Brien explains how Doublethink also applies to science. Where he says that the stars are just bits of fire a few miles away; but scientists sometimes find it useful to imagine they are huge objects at many light years distance.

There’s nothing new in that of course. Even the most conservative church elements didn’t have a problem with the heliocentric model. So long as anyone writing about it acknowledged that this was just how the universe appeared to be; and that in reality the earth was the centre of god’s universe.

So I guess even oil prospectors could work on those lines.

As for over specialisation, I remember some old Asimov stories where the culture in academia was very much ‘stay in your lane’. At the time I thought that seemed far fetched. Interdisciplinary studies are so useful. You probably know the story that Alvarez was pretty certain there had been a huge asteroid impact; but wondered why there was no evidence of this in the fossil record (that he had heard about anyway). So it wasn’t until he was at a conference many years later where he was able to ask some palaeontologists whether anything unusual had happened 65 million years ago.

I would hope that now it’s so easy to share knowledge, people from various fields could easily check on the work of people in other fields. But as you point out, there is a trend to specialisation, and I guess there’s so much material available now in each field, that maybe people don’t have time to look at other fields.

I guess with so much information now, it might be harder to be a polymath. There’s just too much to take in.

But like I say, notwithstanding the above, I do have great faith in, and hope for, humanity.

If we can survive the Toba event or the Younger Dryas, that would suggest we’re pretty robust as a species.

Masse_Mysteria
Masse_Mysteria
2 years ago

— thier role isn’t crucial in society, so getting rid of thier rights would only benefit society.

Galaxy brain here forgets that once you apply this line of thinking to one set of people, you can easily go on to expand it to others. Whatever one’s metric for “crucial for society”, I’m pretty sure online ranters would be pretty far down the list. Not to mention that I kind of thought the point of society was that you get to have all sorts of things, and not just the ones that are “crucial”, since the other stuff brings beauty and learning and such.

@Alan

So I’d feel pretty confident taking on a battalion of Flat Earthers.

I was going to say that they would probably allow the curvature and such as a “helpful theoretical model” that just happens to bring about accurate results, but then you went and mentioned the heliocentrism thing in your later comment and spoiled the fun. Boo.

Last edited 2 years ago by Masse_Mysteria
Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

Apologies for the double post. Sometimes comments get stuck in moderation, but if I reboot the computer I can post them. Maybe some sort of cache thing? But then the originals sometimes show up.

Still, as someone who remembers when we just had to post letters, I find it amazing and wonderful that we have this technology at all!

Surplus to Requirements
Surplus to Requirements
2 years ago

@.45:

I am a fan of the idea that White people honestly didn’t accomplish much on the world stage until they got guns and decided to run with it. A bit over simplified, and gives a lot of credit to what was a rather primitive and ineffective weapon at the time, but you get the idea.

Not guns so much as tall ships capable of semi-reliably crossing the Atlantic and prowling well down the west coast of Africa. That the natives they encountered had not mastered ironmaking obviously also helped. The massive (genocide-fuelled) expansion of their resource base, for a while seriously outstripping their population growth, gave the Europeans of that time the resources to have the Renaissance.

There has, for much of history, been a pair of innovation hubs: an eastern one fairly stably in and near China the whole time, and a western one that’s been more prone to wandering about. This was in the Middle East 6000 years ago, moved to the Mediterranean Basin from maybe 2500 to 1500 years ago, back to the Middle East until maybe 500 years ago, then western Europe, and recently across the Atlantic to the United States, but now maybe moving back to Europe. If the western light is, somehow, extinguished entirely, at least there is still the one in China.

jrochest
jrochest
2 years ago

Just a tiny nugget to add to discussion:

people who claim the Dark Ages set back technology and society hundreds of years or whatever, that we’d all have flying cars, cold fusion, and a moonbase if they hadn’t happened.

The Dark Ages were named that by scholars of the late antique/early medieval periods because of a lack of written sources from the 6th to 8th centuries, not because they were a huge technological step backwards. That’s literally all they meant by the term, although now it has racial/cultural baggage galore.

The Roman Empire was a technological high point in Western Europe because the Romans introduced lots of things to the western tribes (Aquaducts! Roads! Heated public baths! Drainage!) that were common in older Eastern Mediterranean cities. Most of that was too expensive to keep up in smaller settler communities when the western empire collapsed, and the lives of most people hadn’t changed much anyway. But the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire kept right on ticking until the fall of Constantinople, and that’s where most of the great libraries, scholars and research centres were. After the Ottomans conquered Byzantium lots of that knowledge got translated into Arabic, and in that form got ‘reintroduced’ in the Renaissance.

Lots was lost, but lots was saved. It just changed hands and got translated a lot, as knowledge always does.

This has nothing to do with incels, misogyny or anything else, of course.

BigKitty
BigKitty
2 years ago

Just to focus on one tiny flash from the vast kaleidoscope of horrors implied by this illiterate a-hole’s rant: I wonder why incels imagine that, in a world where every woman has to be married to a man, any man, by age 17, just in order to survive, their designated wife would necessarily be a six-foot-tall blonde beauty with the physique of a Victoria’s Secret model?

Don’t they realize that in such a world, lots of dudes would necessarily end up married to “hideous hambeasts,” “disgusting landwhales” and other women who wear a size larger than 0, or maybe glasses, not to mention women whose wrist circumferences, eye position (canthal tilt?), facial features not sufficiently similar to those of Scarlett Johannson, etc. might not meet the exacting incel standards for female acceptability?

And don’t they realize that in that world, the women who did meet those exacting incel standards would be allocated to the richest and most powerful dudes — not, for example, your typical incel gamer living in his mom’s basement?

Fred B-C
2 years ago

@KatInBoots: Yeah, I find myself of two minds about Pinker, because on the one hand his caricaturing of intellectuals/feminists/the academy/folks like Chomsky is jsut incredibly stupid and self-defeating but on the other hand I find his general approach to be accurate enough. Yes, people like HJ Hornbeck have made some fair points that he tends to cherry-pick the picture that he wants to see, but it’s not just Pinker who has seen that real progress has been made. What most people focus on is that the overarching narrative of progress used to callously dismiss the real remaining problems (and to downplay the scale of the serious new problems we have, like he does by toeing the line of dismissing even tepid concerns over climate change as alarmism while still conceding the basic underlying science) is not just vile and often based on dishonest data (e.g. he decides to try to downplay rate rapes with anti-feminist mythology instead of focusing on the literature that indicates that the number of women who will be assaulted in their lifetimes is trending downward) but also exactly counter to what people need to do in order to fix those problems. He really, really sucks at understanding the nature of last mile problems.

But what I’ve always noticed is that there is a fundamental dishonesty at the heart of his approach. On the one hand, we are to trust progress. On the other hand, we are to say “Thus far and no further about it”. Like all disingenuous conservatives, liberals and centrists, we are supposed to put revolutionary and even reformist political change off the table and just accept a gradualism. Why? If big smart changes in science and technology precipitated shifts that changed our circumstances, why can’t big smart changes in our institutional sciences do the same? Well, because Pinker is a capitalist. 

A Marxist could very easily point out that he is acting like a Marxist who has arbitrarily decided that late-stage capitalism is the high point of human civilization. 

So I end up agreeing with Pinker and arguing that part of the progress forward is… institutional revolution. And whatever objections people like him have, they can’t be based on a lack of optimism.

@Alan: Yeah, I thought of the Jains and the Buddhists too, but not only was it restricted to pretty limited environments (in this case two counter-cultural religious movements that on their own have never made substantial changes to animal rights even when Buddhists were actually in charge – Ashoka is the only example I’m aware of and even he was a pretty limited set of ecological and rights management), but in any case the discussion was much less sophisticated than we are having now. When I talk to an average person about, say, factory farming or whatever else, I have a reasonable anticipation that they will care about the treatment, even if they may not want to actually do the work or embrace the costs to change it.

@Masse: “And then they came for me”. Fascists and bigots will always forget the fact that the systems that can be used against their enemies can be used against them, and will in fact be used against the vast majority of them. That’s why they’re fascists and bigots.

@BigKitty: Same thing. People who want a stick always assume the stick will benefit them. That’s why they want the stick. If they weren’t irrational, they wouldn’t be incels.

@jrochest: Right, but even the Byzantines sitting on all of that inherited Greek and Roman knowledge did not make any substantial advancements and slid into slow decline. There are tons of charts for any number of measures of output, and it just plummets after 400 and only slowly recovers. The Dark Ages were pretty real.

TacticalProgressive
TacticalProgressive
2 years ago

@.45

That is one thing that always bothers me about people who claim the Dark Ages set back technology and society hundreds of years or whatever, that we’d all have flying cars, cold fusion, and a moonbase if they hadn’t happened.

It seems like nobody thinks it through to the logical conclusion. The Dark Ages are generally thought, at least by the layperson, to be centered on White Europe (I add that qualifier because that is what I remember at any rate).

Sooo… what they are saying is that only White people’s technological achievements are important and the rest of the world, basically all brown at that time, doesn’t count for anything. And this strikes me as so odd, because the people I have seen making jokes about this and talking about it are not intending to be racist or even realizing the implications.

(I am a fan of the idea that White people honestly didn’t accomplish much on the world stage until they got guns and decided to run with it. A bit over simplified, and gives a lot of credit to what was a rather primitive and ineffective weapon at the time, but you get the idea. I will now await your complete rebuttal of the whole thing.)

While that may be one take on the subject; my impression is maybe a modicum more charitable in that in regards to how “The Dark Ages held humanity back”; as at leat for me: actually don’t predicate itself on the notion that “White people’s technological achievements are more important compared to that of the rest of the world”, because obvioually it ignores the contributions and advacements of people’s cultures and sociaties that contributed to humanity and the technological advancements therein; but rather the more nuanced and more likely take (so so I feel at least) of “The regressive stagnation and reactionary geo-politics of so called “White Europe” was inflicted and imposed upon nations, cultures and societies besides it’s sphere that also forced stagnation or at least belated progress upon those outside of Europe through impacting spheres outside of it.

It would be difficult for the rest of the world that lay outside of Europe to make progress in big leaps for technology or even just academics to massive degrees if they are being impacted, influenced and held back by the fundimentalist theocracies and the self intrested, self agrandizing monarchs of Europe during this age of militant anti-enlightenment and the wars and politicking that come with it.

Granted this might also admittedly be missing a few other factors; but I feel that this may be the more likely scenario given the age.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

@ fred b-c

Ashoka is the only example I’m aware of

One of his edicts was a prohibition on the killing of ‘useless’ animals.

So if I was a cow I’d be constantly missing deadlines and forgetting to turn up to meetings.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
2 years ago

@ katinboots

I’ve just learned of the existence of the word ‘ultracrepidarian’.

It seems it might be handy for discussions on this topic.

Last edited 2 years ago by Alan Robertshaw
Lizzie
Lizzie
2 years ago

Well it looks like ultracrepidarian Elon is busy spreading his opinions on twitter about widely used medications now, saying that adderall is an anger amplifier and should be avoided at all costs, Wellbutrin should be taken off the market, SSRIs are less effective than psychedelics yada yada. So even if he does buy twitter, and doesn’t actually reinstate the ‘drink bleach to cure Covid’ idiot, it looks like he will easily fill the ‘bad medical advice’ gap.