Bolsonaro & Orban read UK feminists?
No, LP, anyone who is paying attention doesn’t know that, and neither do you.
Mind you “feed directly back” is confusing in itself – does she mean gender critical feminist talking points nourish right-wing extremist discourse, or does she mean they draw strength from them? Are we supposed to be aiding and abetting right-wing extremist discourse or is it supposed to be aiding and abetting us? Or both?
Or neither? Probably what she means is just that there is some overlap – but that doesn’t sound nearly as damning, does it, because naturally there’s some overlap, because we all overlap at some places. We all have a lot of shared beliefs and views, which we leave on the back shelf in favor of arguing over the ones we don’t share.
The funny thing is, the view that men are not women and women are not men used to be part of that vast boring taken for granted common ground, that nobody bothered to fight over because nobody thought otherwise. Now it’s equated with the murder of 8 million Jews.
Or as DaveDavidDave put it more succinctly –
It’s more simple than any of those. There is a strand within woke “thought” that goes: if we can associate the labels “right wing” or (preferably) “far-right” with an idea, then the idea is automatically disqualified, and we win. There is nothing more substantive to the practice than that.
It might be even more simple. When I would try to explain how the motivations and reasons of the gender critical feminists and far-right conservatives differed, I would regularly be told “It doesn’t matter— we don’t care.” As far as they’re concerned the ends are the same: preventing them from getting what they insist they need and deserve: acceptance as the gender they identify with and access to those single-sex spaces.
If reasons don’t matter to them then other people don’t matter to them, because there could be a legitimate concern about causing unnecessary harm. And, frankly, if our reasons don’t matter then they don’t really give a damn about their own reasons. They’d drop one argument and pick up one inconsistent with it, if they can use it to get to their goal.
I’ve seen trans people compared to drug addicts. I’m not sure I’d agree with that, but this laser-focus on validation at all costs and damn the reasons does seem to resemble someone craving a fix.
Consequentialism dominates their thinking, which simultaneously justifies “victory by any means” and “intent never matters”. So “lying for Jesus” is perfectly ok because their motives are pure.
I unequivocally oppose consequentialist thinking: it’s sloppy, unsophisticated, and evil.
What Coel wrote —
— reminds me of the ice cream debate, where Nick defines a debate, then he changes the subject to win:
That certainly explains the use of clown fish, black women, intersex/DSD individuals, infertile/postmenopausal women, “sex is a spectrum”, etc. in their “arguments”.
BKiSA: Egoism dominates their thinking, such as it is.
Your criticism of consequentialism seems overbroad and overboard, and you’ve ascribed to them both negation and primacy of intent. Naive act consequentialism can permit lying for Jesus, it is true. The primary alternative, however, is usually a form of deontology, which prohibits lying for Anne Frank. Or perhaps a virtue ethics, which is content-free circularity amounting to doing what your favorite blue checkmark does.
Unless you’re taking an emotivist view, and “consequentialist thinking is evil” just means “boo consequentialism”.
Well I’m not exactly a complicated person… And I hope to god I never need to lie for Anne Frank because I more or less can’t.
The TRA campaign to conflate gender critical feminism with the far right is, of course, just smear-tactics, Guilt by Association, and Poisoning the Well. If there is one thing I’m definitely done with, it’s uncritically accepting other people’s accounts of what somebody else is thinking or saying. If someone is a bigot, I prefer to find out for myself rather than take somebody else’s word for it. If not, I would be in the TERF-bashing camp today. Besides, even bigots are not automatically wrong about everything. I have been bigoted about many things in my lifetime. It still didn’t make me an unreliable source on the question of whether two plus two equals four or five or something else entirely.
That having been said, I do see a real danger here. I can’t help noticing that the YouTube algorithm has started suggesting a lot more right-wing crap [1] since I started specifically looking for gender-critical content. I have no doubt that this is largely due to the fact that right-leaning sources are pretty much the only ones willing to give a platform to anyone not 100 % uncritical of the prevailing gender ideology [2]. I don’t blame anyone for using whatever channels are open to them to get their message out there as long as they’re not outright nazis, actively endorsing violence etc.
However, I have also heard people I agree with on the gender issue say things that made me uncomfortable (usually along the lines of “Trump may not be perfect, but…”). It may not be rational to think that any enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nor is it rational to conclude that the red team is good because the blue team is bad. But if cognitive psychology – or world history for that matter – should have taught us anything at all, it’s that humans are not particularly rational, and it’s not limited to those who disagree with us. I’m sure we can all think of former allies who turned 180° and joined the far Right after a bad run-in with the woke crowd. People are tribal by nature, and embracing political homelessness does not fall naturally to most. It’s almost impossible to accept that there are no good guys, so tempting to conclude that any tribe is better than none. If you manage to get people sufficiently pissed off they might just decide that “I don’t care who wins, or what else is included in the deal, or who else gets hurt as a result, as long as these assholes lose!”. People also crave (not just logical, but ideological) consistency, which is why people rarely change their minds on just one topic. Again, there is no rational reason why disillusionment with wokism should effect your views on climate change, the best way to deal with Covid 19, or who won the 2021 election, but humans are not particularly rational…
Maybe I’m just paranoid after seing so many movements I used to associate with get captured by either the far left or the far right in less than ten years, but I would hate to see the same thing happen to gender critical feminism, and at the very least, I think it’s a problem worth thinking about.
[1] Here’s a simple heuristic for determining if a channel has a Right-wing bias: 1) Does it put out regular content? 2) Did it manage to get through the period from November 2020 through January 2021 without posting anything critical of anyone not on the Left? If the answer to both questions is yes, that’s a major red flag right there!
[2] Just like they were the only ones willing to give a platform to women like Ayaan Hirsi Ali (now on the Right. I wonder why?) who were speaking out against FGM or the Burqa.
Bjarte, I often feel the same discomfort, but I remind myself that I am not one of the people who requires purity of thought. I can agree with their position, and disagree with their reasons, and I can disagree with nearly everything else they stand for. I refuse the guilt by association, because if you are truly thinking for yourself and not just swallowing what the “right” person said, you will find yourself agreeing with someone you disagree with most of the time. My agreeing on this issue with their conclusion doesn’t make me one of them, but we have gone so far down the rabbit hole of ideological purity that I even find myself questioning my beliefs if the “wrong” sort of person agrees with me.
Purging the “impure” from leftist ranks and from feminism are not going to help either movement. Refusing to hear discussion of the other person’s point of view is not a good decision, since being able to understand and accurately argue with their position can make your arguments stronger.
I don’t believe the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but I do believe there are instances where we can find common ground with people we often wouldn’t be seen dead agreeing with.
iknklast, I don’t have a problem with any of that. I guess I should make it clear that I don’t see any indication that we’re on a particularly troubling path yet. All I am saying it’s that it is a real danger and something to be aware of. I don’t think gender critical feminism is any more vulnerable to capture than other movements. I’m just not sure it’s less vulnerable either. There was a time when I thought that skepticism was less vulnerable, and we all know how accurate that turned out to be..
Bjarte, I’ve seen the same phenomenon in my own YouTube recommendations. It’s rather annoying, but the algorithm seems to be rather simplistic. It does a good job of matching content with largely homogeneous groups, but it apparently doesn’t really do much on the individual user level.
180s are an unfortunate inevitability, I fear, for many reasons. For one, operant conditioning works, and being a heretic among your tribe will create unpleasant experiences which build negative associations. Build enough of these, and the negativity can easily be associated with the entire tribe. We are predisposed to be agreeable with those who are nice to us and combative with those who aren’t, and so begin to disagree on more and more things. And this is before we get into things like splitting and ressentiment.
A falling out is almost always a cascade, regardless of what (or whom) the falling out is with.
Nullius, Bjarte:
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the YouTube algorithm is there for your convenience or is working on your behalf.
I assure you that it works just fine and is entirely fit for purpose. It’s just that YouTube’s interests do not resemble yours in any way.
Nullius, latsot
I’m not disputing any of that either. I always assumed the algorithm was basically designed to maximize the number of clicks (based on the logic that “people who clicked on X in the past were more likely than others to also click on Y”).
As I said, I don’t read too much into the recent surge in Right-wing material filling up my suggestions in itself. Besides the all too fresh memory of what happened to the late atheo-skeptical movement, I guess one of my reasons for worrying is that – despite what some Movement Skeptics might say – I don’t think slippery slope-type reasoning is inherently fallacious in principle [1]. Indeed everything we know about cognitive dissonance makes slippery slopes all the more plausible.
So, let’s say you make an entirely pragmatic decision to make a common cause with parts of the Right to stop the TRA takeover. But now, once again, you have a stake in defending your choice. You also have a stake in keeping the alliance together and not antagonizing your new allies. You may even come to genuinely like some of them. So you decide to cut them some slack and defend them from criticism up to a certain point. You might even go so far as attacking other feminists if they say anything too critical of your new bedfellows. And before you know it, you’re in a justification spiral pushing you ever further to the right. I haven’t looked sufficiently into the fallout between Meghan Murphy and Karen Davis to make any sweeping statements, but it might be the start of the kind of thing I’m talking about.
[1] Slippery slope arguments may not be logically “sound” in the sense that accepting the premises while denying the conclusion leads to a contradiction, but science was never based on Aristotelian syllogisms anyway, again despite what hardcore Popperians might say.
I’d say that slippery slopes are a reason for caution. Slippery slopes exist. People and organisations and nations slip down them. History is not short of examples.
I’m in no rush to ally with the right. But I won’t dismiss arguments arguments and articles solely because they are made by right wing people, as many on the left expect me to.
I’ve drawn a line of my own in the sand, but I reserve the right to rub it out and draw another one at any time.