I've been advised to come here and defend myself.

If you haven't been watching closely, David Gerard has been spreading these same smears about me on RationalWiki, on Twitter, and now here. His tweets accuse me of treating the Left in general and the social justice movement in particular with "frothing" and as "ordure". And now he comes here and adds Tumblr to the list of victims, and "actual disgust" to the list of adjectives.

I resent this because it is a complete fabrication.

I resent it because, far from a frothing hatred of Tumblr, I myself have a Tumblr account which I use almost every day and which I've made three hundred posts on. Sure, I've gently mocked Tumblr (as has every Tumblr user) but I've also very publicly praised it for hosting some very interesting and enlightening conversations.

I resent it because I've posted a bunch of long defenses and steelmannings of social justice ideas like Social Justice For The Highly Demanding Of Rigor and The Wonderful Thing About Triggers, some of which have gone mildly viral in the social justice blogosphere, and some of which have led to people emailing me or commenting saying they've changed their minds and become less hostile to social justice as a result.

I resent it because, far from failing to intellectually engage with the Left, in the past couple of months I've read, reviewed, and enjoyed left-leaning books on Marx, the Soviet economy, and market socialism

I resent it because the time I most remember someone trying to engage me about social justice, Apophemi, I wrote a seven thousand word response which I consider excruciatingly polite, which started with a careful justification for why writing it would be more productive and respectful than not writing it, and which ended with a heartfelt apology for the couple of things I had gotten wrong on my last post on the subject.

(Disgust! Frothing! Ordure!)

I resent it because I happily hosted Ozy's social justice blogging for several months, giving them an audience for posts like their takedown of Heartiste, which was also very well-received and got social justice ideas to people who otherwise wouldn't have seen them.

I resent it because about a fifth of my blogroll is social justice or social justice-aligned blogs, each of which get a couple dozen hits from me a day.

I resent it because even in my most impassioned posts about social justice, I try to make it very clear that there are parts of the movement which make excellent points, and figures in the movement I highly respect. Even in what I think everyone here will agree is my meanest post on the subject, Radicalizing the Romanceless, I stop to say the following about the social justice blogger I am arguing against:

[He] is a neat guy. He draws amazing comics and he runs one of the most popular, most intellectual, and longest-standing feminist blogs on the Internet. I have debated him several times, and although he can be enragingly persistent he has always been reasonable...He cares deeply about a lot of things, works hard for those things, and has supported my friends when they have most needed support.

(DISGUST! FROTHING! ORDURE!)

I resent it because it trivializes all of my sick burns against neoreactionaries, like the time I accused them of worshipping Kim Jong-un as a god, and the time I said they were obsessed with "precious, precious, white people", and the time I mocked Jim for thinking Eugene V. Debs was a Supreme Court case.

I resent this because anyone who looks at my posts tagged with social justice can see that almost as many are in favor as against.

And I resent this because I'm being taken to task about charity by somebody whose own concept of a balanced and reasonable debate is retweeting stuff like this -- and again and again calling the people he disagrees with "shitlords"

(which puts his faux-horror that I treat people I disagree with 'like ordure' in a pretty interesting new light)

No matter how many pro-social-justice posts I write, how fair and nice I am, or what I do, David Gerard is going to keep spreading these smears about me until I refuse to ever engage with anyone who disagrees with him about anything at all. As long as I'm saying anything other than "every view held by David Gerard is perfect and flawless and everyone who disagrees with David Gerard is a shitlord who deserve to die", he is going to keep concern-trolling you guys that I am "biased" or "unfair".

Please give his continued campaigning along these lines the total lack of attention it richly deserves.

whereas it reacts with actual disgust and lack of philosophical charity to feminism, social justice, Tumblr, etc

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/20/social-justice-for-the-highly-demanding-of-rigor/

Yvain admits that he had negative personal experiences with feminists that may have left him prejudiced. It's a bias, but at least he is aware of it.

Biases aside, I think that many people, including Yvain, are concerned by the large political influence that SJWs can exert.
NRx, as wrong as they might be, hold virtually zero political influence at the moment, hence debating them is just an intellectual exercise.
SJWs can influence mainstream media, college policies and even legislation. They are perceived as hostile towards straight white men, and especially towards geeks (nerds, sci-fi fans, gamers, etc.). For people belonging to these groups, political opposition to SJWs is a matter of self-preservation.

It's about the difference in quality of debate. Their manifold flaws notwithstanding, at least most neoreactionaries are articulate (Moldbug almost esoterically so). SJWs on the other hand feel entitled to go apeshit on you -- to hell with convincing and productive debates.

The steelmanning is due to the fact that neoreaction is a strange composite of a few very good things (originality, aesthetics, appreciation for virtue) dispersed in an extremely toxic medium of hatred, drive for dominance, and undue confidence in the rightfulness of their own ideas. (Most of neoreaction only makes sense from a sociopathic perspective). A mind that is wise and cautious in judgment sees the good along with the bad and figures out these guys can't quite be total sociopaths if you listen to them talking about what they like and strive for (and besides some of them can put up a strong case for their position), and so proceeds to attempt to filter the good ideas from the hateful drivel. A productive discussion may sometimes ensue; NRs may be quite hateful, but their natural habitat is the ivory tower rather than the sewage system that is the comments section. If you want far right low level trolling, there are better places for that.

By contrast -- I don't know what your experience was with SJWs, but this is how it was for me -- SJWs do nothing but low level trolling. They aren't going to give you anything you can conceivably desire out of the discussion (not even timely exit); they just want to fight. It's a great stretch of imagination to connect their verbal abuses to that one trait that psychologically distinguishes left from right, tenderness of heart. It's not difficult to see how they can be even worse than NRs at endearing themselves to one. The fact that they managed to exasperate Scott, who comes off as a supernaturally patient person in general, is a fact that should bear some consideration.

Tumblr!social_justice and Tumblr!feminism (note the Tumblr! part) are not political ideas, though; they're more closely described as echo chambers (whoops, sorry, I meant to say "safe spaces", of course.) where meaningless duckspeak is endlessly repeated - so reacting with disgust and ridicule to them is arguably appropriate given LW's and - plausibly - SSC's goals. Neoreaction at least makes the grade as something that's (marginally) politically relevant. Which is still not saying much, of course.

Having only a passing familiarity with Slate Star Codex, I can't claim to have much knowledge of the context here. However, using information gleaned from this comment alone, I would say that polite steelmanning is probably the default reaction to a lot of things as far as LW readers are concerned (this is obviously and sadly untrue outside of these circles), and that if feminism, social justice, and Tumblr were reacted to with genuine disgust, something probably happened to justify that disgust. If I'm wrong about this, feel free to inform me.

Where did Yvain state this? I didn't think he had any neoreactionary friends.

These things are disgusting. Slate Star is increasing in reasonableness.