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...
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social justice. Show all posts
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Turning the lights on
My friend Daniel has a post over on his blog about how the dreaded Political Correctness actually seems to have improved (and continue to be improving) people's general behaviour over time. A good part of this post is in response to a comment by another fellow known only as "Mike" on Facebook. Mike is of the opinion that things were better in (presumably) the 50s, when New Zealand society was by and large more homogeneous.
Or was it?
One of the things that you notice when you research any dissenting point of view (pacifism during World War I and World War II, to take a recently-relevant example) is that you often find that it was more common than conventional wisdom would have you believe. The thing is, history is a political exercise - and so dissenting accounts are often written out of the primary narrative.
This doesn't have to be actively conspiratorial - people work according to their own biases, and the science suggests that humans are really bad at being fully conscious of these. Also, if certain behaviours or attitudes were shameful or dangerous at certain points in history*, it makes sense that people who held those views or indulged in those behaviours would tend to be secretive for reasons of self-preservation (and thus not make it into the "official" history).
My point is that commentators like "Mike" often suggest that the increasing visibility of (for example) gay, trans, and other gender/sexuality issues is the result of a more accepting society making those lifestyles more common; or (for another example) that the recent spate of publicised police violence in the US is the result of criminals becoming more dangerous (or sometimes of police becoming more racist); or that increasing rates of reported sexual assault are the result of a lapse in society's morals.
I think this it's much more likely that our more accepting society (plus the boom in self-publishing on the internet) is simply making it easier to talk about all of these issues in public, in a form that is semi-permanent and easy to refer back to.
It's not that none of these things happened in the 50s - they just happened in the dark, and now we're turning the lights on.
_____
*Homosexuality and socialist views both come to mind.
Or was it?
One of the things that you notice when you research any dissenting point of view (pacifism during World War I and World War II, to take a recently-relevant example) is that you often find that it was more common than conventional wisdom would have you believe. The thing is, history is a political exercise - and so dissenting accounts are often written out of the primary narrative.
This doesn't have to be actively conspiratorial - people work according to their own biases, and the science suggests that humans are really bad at being fully conscious of these. Also, if certain behaviours or attitudes were shameful or dangerous at certain points in history*, it makes sense that people who held those views or indulged in those behaviours would tend to be secretive for reasons of self-preservation (and thus not make it into the "official" history).
My point is that commentators like "Mike" often suggest that the increasing visibility of (for example) gay, trans, and other gender/sexuality issues is the result of a more accepting society making those lifestyles more common; or (for another example) that the recent spate of publicised police violence in the US is the result of criminals becoming more dangerous (or sometimes of police becoming more racist); or that increasing rates of reported sexual assault are the result of a lapse in society's morals.
I think this it's much more likely that our more accepting society (plus the boom in self-publishing on the internet) is simply making it easier to talk about all of these issues in public, in a form that is semi-permanent and easy to refer back to.
It's not that none of these things happened in the 50s - they just happened in the dark, and now we're turning the lights on.
***
Love & Pop has my review of Life Of Crime. It's a Coen-brothers-esqe people-being-bad-at-crime movie with Jennifer Aniston and Mos Def in it. It's not bad.
_____
*Homosexuality and socialist views both come to mind.
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