The horrible philosophy of the Manosphere

First, a little background: the following post is one I was kindly invited to write by Professor Philip Moriarty as a guest post on his blog "Symptoms Of The Universe". The invitation came off the back of  a conversation I had in comments on this post here.

If you're interested in reading that conversation (or rather that series of conversations - there were a few threads) my handle there is "ObjectiveReality". This is because Prof Moriarty has a WordPress blog and my Wordpress login is "ObjectiveReality", if he had a Blogger blog like mine, I'd have been "Wolfboy"(1) as I am here.

For a very tl;dr version of the backstory, Philip ended up on a podcast with another Philip (last name Mason) who more usually (at least on the internet) goes by the name of Thunderf00t. If you're not familiar with him, Mason is an atheist YouTuber, a sometime science YouTuber, and a virulent antifeminist.

In the course of this conversation, Mason expressed the view that the lack of women in STEM(2) fields was due to sexual dimorphism. Philip addressed this view at length here, pointing out that the evidence for such a view was not good (to say the least) and invited Mason to comment. After a long period of silence, he asked again and was treated to an astoundingly puerile exchange via email, which he lays out at length here.  

To be honest, this is not especially surprising (most denizens of the Manosphere(3) are significantly less intellectually rigorous than they like to claim) but it is a deeply irritating example of the awful way in which these people argue.

A better example (I hope) after the jump...

My god, sir - you bloody read it, didn't you?!

Now, I'm aware that I've pretty much abandoned this whole interblag thing for quite a while. Stuff like that happens when you have to work in order to eat, and your only non-work computer is deceased. However, I am spurred to action because of an incredible occurrence - someone has reviewed Normality. Reviewed it very positively.

See, when Vish (my co-author) and I wrote Normality, we had high hopes but were actually not entirely convinced it was playable. We found out that it was when we ran it ourselves, but we still weren't convinced anyone but us could run it. I whacked it up on my own free site and the wonderful One Thousand Monkeys, One Thousand Typewriters because I thought it'd be interesting to see if anyone gave a hoot.

By in large, they didn't - which is fine. Normality is after all an extended angry rant, regardless of its merits as a game or a setting. Then I got an email from a fellow by the name of Wess, who called himself "Suicide Puppet". He was enamoured of the poor twisted thing, is (I believe) considering some companion work for it.

He's also started a blog called Blur about RPGs - specifically those he considers to be doing interesting conceptual things with the hobby. And he gave our little baby pride of place as his first review.

Thanks Wess. You guys should totally go check out Blur - it's shaping up to be something really interesting...