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Viliam_Bur comments on November 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: ArisKatsaris 01 November 2014 03:42PM

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Comment author: advancedatheist 02 November 2014 12:03:58AM 7 points [-]

AlterNet discovers the Manosphere's "secular sexism":

http://www.alternet.org/gender/christian-right-dying-who-fuels-misogyny-enter-secular-sexists-gamergate-and-mra-movement

I find this whole Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction/Neopatriarchy development fascinating because it shows the failure of the progressive project to control the human mind. In the U.S., at least, progressives have a lot of control in centrally planning the culture towards Enlightenment notions of democracy, feminism, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, etc. Yet thanks to the internet, men who previously wouldn't have had the means to communicate with each other have organized in a Hayekian fashion to discover that they have had similar damaging experiences with, for example, women in a feminist regime, and they have come to similar politically incorrect conclusions about women's nature. And this has happened despite the policies and preferences of the people who hold the high ground in education, academia, law, government and the entertainment industry.

I can see why the emergence of secular sexism drives progressive nuts, because they wrongly believed that sexism depended on certain kinds of god beliefs that have fallen into decline, as this AlterNet article explores. Uh, no, why would anyone have ever thought that? We can't observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along. If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light - well, you can't blame that on theology, now, can you?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 02 November 2014 12:01:44PM *  11 points [-]

The linked article is so misleading that I wouldn't try to derive any true statements about reality from it. It fails to mention any legitimate points of their opponents, and then concludes they don't have any. Five minutes on google would probably give better results.

(I strongly bite my tongue here to avoid going into specific details, but I spent the last month observing GamerGate and it is fascinating to watch how good job can media do to prevent some information from being ever mentioned, and how all information about this topic ultimately comes from the same two or three people.)

One thing, though. The article is pushing a narrative "all our opponents are actually the same" while in fact the only thing conecting them is, well, being opponents of one specific group in one specific topic. For example, there are many feminists in the GamerGate movement (no, Christina Hoff Sommers is not the only example), and also there are many people believing that feminism and men's rights are not contradictory. So the whole paradigm of "dark forces are rising" may be just a convenient excuse to explain away some specific failures or a specific group.

Comment author: Azathoth123 03 November 2014 01:28:02AM 11 points [-]

The linked article is so misleading that I wouldn't try to derive any true statements about reality from it.

I believe advancedatheist is using it to illustrate the Progressive reaction to the Manosphere.