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gjm comments on Open thread, Feb. 01 - Feb. 07, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 01 February 2016 08:24AM

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Comment author: gjm 05 February 2016 01:58:18PM -2 points [-]

I don't think anyone is saying that Roosh wants rape. Only that he wants (many instances of) rape to be legal. Which is in fact what he wants (or, at least, what he says he wants; he may not be sincere).

There is a risk of the noncentral fallacy here -- if someone proposes to make a small minority of atypical instances of something legal, that's not fairly described by saying they want to legalize whatever-it-is. But AIUI most rapes are committed on private property, even if (as I can imagine Roosh might want to) you take "rape" to imply outright nonconsent and force or threat or the like. (I confess I don't have statistics to hand to back up this claim.) If I'm right about this, then Roosh is proposing to legalize most rapes, and I think it's reasonable to describe that by saying he want to legalize rape.

I'm sure it's true[1] that he wants to do this because he sees bad side-effects of the illegality of rape, rather than because he would like there to be more rape. But I think this is very often the case when people propose to legalize things, and therefore saying "Roosh proposes to legalize rape" doesn't amount to claiming he likes rape.

[1] Or at least true-according-to-what-he-says; again, he might not be sincere.

Comment author: ChristianKl 08 February 2016 12:05:17AM 1 point [-]

I don't think anyone is saying that Roosh wants rape.

Given that people call the gatherings proposed by Roosh to be gatherings of rapists, I'm not sure whether that's true.

Comment author: Crux 06 February 2016 02:48:45AM *  0 points [-]

I don't think "sincere" is the best word to use here.

You're contrasting "interpret him literally" with "assume he's not sincere", but I don't see a connection. It's entirely possible that he's completely sincere in his attempt to communicate certain information through a satirical article. That is, he may be honest in his communication attempt but speaking in a way where interpreting him in too straightforward of a way would lead to misinterpretation.

This is I believe what he's doing. See here for another post of mine, building on the points I made in my previous reply to you. It seems clear to me that he's writing a satirical polemic against a societal trend that he believes exists where women are not expected to bear personal responsibility for certain actions (such as voluntarily increasing their time preference through alcohol consumption).

For reference, did you read his article in full?