It's a Man's World!

[Luther Blissett]

I'm plenty nice.

[tapitsbo]

Not nice enough to give me any real digestive issues.

Not that I'd be among the ranks of those who really can't play nice with "nice".

I'm impressed by PW and guruilla addressing each other directly. Such direct human interaction is rare.

[guruilla]

That would seem to be the real hidden "Bro-Code": apparently any man who doesn't listen to Mommy and revile himself and his sex must be a misogynist. It's not really shocking to me to see how deep the rot has gone; but it is a bit of a "mindfuck" to learn that it passes for some people at this forum for "progress."

Seriously? This is pretty hideous stuff. The fact that you drone on & on about the pitfalls of culture & ideology and yet bring this Freudian garbage to the table (under the guise of psychology as if that's some etched-in-the-grain universal truth & not half-baked Blame-the-Mother pseudoscience) says a lot about your level of self-awareness, or lack thereof. I have no interest in a debate, but I just couldn't not say something in defense of PW. She's absolutely right, you need a lesson—nay, a fucking seminar—in empathy.

This passes for an argument in which world? (Or is it meant as education?) What I read is a personal attack, plain and simple, devoid of any informational content besides hostility, with a jibe about my lack of self-awareness, and an addendum about my needing a lesson in empathy!

I agree that what Guruilla and other MRA supporters are doing is turning up the heat of the hostile climate for women that already exists on this site.

You can assert this all you want, but it doesn't make it so. Again, there is no attempt to engage with anything I have said, but only a spray-and-pray denunciation based on imagined motivations and affiliations and some supposed "situation" around women's rights and needs, to which one person's (one man's) experience is irrelevant. (I have never even read about MRA except at this thread.)

Yeah, like maybe years of watching livestreams of hidden cameras on women to see what their lives are like at work, out in public, and at home.

Just imagine being nice…now just do that permanently.

Being nice = not arguing with anything anyone says?

The way in which the "empathic" "progressive" and "human-rights-concerned" people here make their arguments ~ through shaming, attacks, demeaning and superior moral stands ~ reveals a lot about the depth and validity of the values being so violently propounded.

The goal is to harass the voice of dissent (me) to the point that it self-implodes or explodes, thereby fitting neatly into the scapegoat mechanism. It isn't working, because the only thing that counts in any engagement is how much those involved are coming from an internal sense of what's real, not how attached we are to our ideological beliefs, or how many voices we can get to back us up.

My experience here is of expressing things that I have seen and come to understand, not alone but within a marriage and a shared individuation journey with a woman, and of being met with a slow, steady assertion of a correct way of thinking, and, now, the huddling together of certain voices to amplify the “signal.” But the signal is really noise, emotional, opinion-based, and nonrational, divorced from and even opposed to factual data (all of which has now gone out the window at this thread). We have moved past the attempt to “gently” correct the dissident voice, there is now a “rounding up” and a stigmatizing (as misogynist, for example) in order for it to be shamed into silence.

The dominant voices don’t need to be in the majority for this to work; they only need to appear to be so by the sheer force of their conviction (see above). Self-righteousness and stridency signifies to the group that this is the true consensus, and then others instinctively, I might even say blindly, align with the “power” (i.e., the force) of the ideology being brandished. Not to align with that power is to risk being identified with the wrong-thinkers, and scapegoated along with them. Fear drives the herd, into pre-prepared structures of the ruling ideology-class.

Congrats, all you progressive thinkers! Another victory for your masters!

The last time I had this kind of experience was in 2010, when I realized I had unwittingly joined a spiritual cult. The signs were slow and insidious but eventually undeniable. It began with the recognition of an internal inconsistency (hypocrisy) to the beliefs of the group (i.e., the teachings of the guru). The next step was seeing how any attempts to question this internal inconsistency, or even just to point it out, were meet with a seemingly benevolent attempt to correct me and bring me back into the fold. I was told that I was failing to see the deeper Truth, the goodness of the guru (the ideology), and that my skepticism was only the result of my ego’s resistance to this Truth.

(If I question feminism, it is because I am a misogynist but don’t know it yet.)

The next step was when I failed to capitulate to the “gentle” pressure to conform and began to be seen, and painted, as a disruptive, potentially malign influence, as beyond the pale, someone who needed to be policed, contained, silenced, and finally removed from the discussion in order to protect the rights of those who were dedicated to the Truth, in other words, aligned with the dominant ideology.

(How can we make RI a more welcoming place for women?)

At this point, verbal force was applied (i.e., bullying), after which my attacker was congratulated on his “straightness” and I duly and dully withdrew from the space.

Deja vu, deja vu, deja vu.

This isn't to say I will withdraw, or that I won't. Only that I've been here before and there was a lot more at stake back then (my marriage, for one thing). So compared to that, this is more like an especially fraught form of entertainment in which I get to find out who my allies are, or if I have any. On the other hand, after a certain point it ceases to be productive, and all that's really happening is a distressed attempt to correct people's misperceptions and misrepresentations of me. This of course is not only futile but even feeds into the mechanism of group-think, because once the scapegoat is chosen, all his bleeting will only confirm that he is a goat.

So barring a significant change in direction, this is going to have to be my last bleet (at this thread).

.

[brainpanhandler]

I'll be addressing the "factual data" as promised once I find the time and energy. In the meantime maybe in the interest of broadening your perspective you might adopt a different outlook and look closely at the factual data offered in this thread with an eye toward seeing if it really holds water relative to the stated goals of the offerer. You can always go back to being yourself.

[slomo]

I've been watching the train-wreck this thread has become. My original intention was to attempt to deconstruct the idea of "Patriarchy" by giving well-supported examples of areas where men experience worse outcomes. The spirit of this intention was not to inflame the gender war, but rather to break down the barriers towards mutual understanding between men and women as groups. (If you follow the "which gender are you thread", you can see the evolution of this intention; note to BHP, that thread could not have been anything other than flame bait, and yet you attempt to scapegoat other for starting this.)

I did acknowledge, upon AD's snarky prompting, that it may be possible to show that women systematically experience unjust outcomes more than men do. However, a factual demonstration of justice asymmetry has not occurred. Instead, what has happened is the same thing in any online forum where radical feminisms are criticized: "misogynist" straw men, ad hominem attacks, with few actual scholarly responses (I'll give PW her due, she did actually present some fact-based refutations, although I disagree with her interpretations of some of the data, since the statistics presented are marginal, i.e. population-averaged, and not adjusted for relevant factors, i.e. do not reflect valid causal inference). If this were a more heavily moderated board, the next step would be to ban the offending individuals.

It's been illuminating for me, because it reveals that the core readership of RI does function a bit like a cult (as Guruilla has pointed out). In addition, some of the long-time members who have generated some of the foundational mythology of RI have revealed themselves to me to be utterly unreliable, and therefore (for me) this thread, along with the related threads, undermines the factual basis of this foundation.

In a way, it's quite liberating to me. I can now release the part of me that was attached to some of the darker conspiratorial worldviews offered here. Congratulations. Not only have you edged me a little farther away from the feminism that was the basis of my childhood worldview, you have also made me much more skeptical of "mind-control" and "brainwashing".

So ... I thank you! My world is now just a little bit brighter and more cheerful than it used to be.

[brainpanhandler]

I very definitely did not start the gender poll thread as flame bait. The fact that you are apparently certain that I did tells me something about your ability to read people's intentions and jump to conclusions. I started that thread to gather some sort of actual data about the gender composition of the membership here. Period. I figured it would sink to the second page in short order. But you go ahead and believe what you are already certain of. You're good at that apparently.

[Luther Blissett]

…
The goal is to harass the voice of dissent (me) to the point that it self-implodes or explodes, thereby fitting neatly into the scapegoat mechanism. It isn't working, because the only thing that counts in any engagement is how much those involved are coming from an internal sense of what's real, not how attached we are to our ideological beliefs, or how many voices we can get to back us up.
…

The ideological side that you're taking here is that of the status quo, though, the one aligned with almost all hegemonic power systems.

Slomo, Project Willow's statistical refutations are not marginal. If anything, the thrust of this thread is.

I still think that these energies would be better spent observing the ways in which women and men of the middle and lower classes and those without power are in the same boat regarding oppression and suppression. But the mean folks posting here don't want to look at the data for the ways in which these things happen to women as well.

[brekin]

Oh, excuse me. Pardon, coming through. Sorry, thanks.

[Wombaticus Rex]

It's been illuminating for me, because it reveals that the core readership of RI does function a bit like a cult

Which, uh...which one?

The "Parapolitics is a Criminal Science" Jacobins who know that fighting off WOO is just as important as finding that next data point?

The "I'm Just Asking Questions" Essenes who know the real legacy of Jeff Wells was the jellyfish and not the politics?

Then you've got the Albarelli Fundamentalists, the Dolan Schism vs. the Vallee Quantum Indeterminists, not to mention the Synchromysticism Jihad that tore through here awhile back...but damn, it was all awhile back, huh? As RI defaulted into commentary on current events vs. actual worldview analysis & engineering, that worldview became invisible consensus around here.

Personal animus aside, there's an egregore here, and it has wants & needs of its own. All the recent arguments keep looping recursively back to the same crude faultlines and flashpoints, because the egregore wants change. All participants get treated as raw material for alchemy. Myself included: I'm just observing here.

The egregore is right, though. The worldview RI has defaulted to is somewhere between media criticism and support group; while I am grateful for the lack of TO THE BARRICADES, COMRADES!! here, the stench of impotence is nothing nice.

Our disillusionment left us with nothing but each other, and clearly, a lot of you are re-thinking that deal.

[brekin]

WR wrote:

Our disillusionment left us with nothing but each other, and clearly, a lot of you are re-thinking that deal.

Brilliant.

[zangtang]

only making plans for Nigel - xtc?

[slomo]

Slomo, Project Willow's statistical refutations are not marginal. If anything, the thrust of this thread is.

I mean this in the kindest possible way, but: the bulk of the readership here is quantitatively illiterate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_distribution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_inference

Ignoring the fact that the readership here is, for the most part, not academically qualified to review any quantitative argument whatsoever, the level of peer-review that seems necessary to render my point would require me to write a review article on par with what I would do for my job. Since I'm not getting paid to do this, the year of effort required seems not to be worth it. In addition, even if I were to spend that year, the resulting product would still garner the same level of ideologically-driven feedback with no substantive, quantitatively informed refutation.

I don't think there's any benefit to my participating in this discussion any further. As my favorite left-leaning ideologues are fond of saying, "It's not my job to educate you."

[slomo]

Our disillusionment left us with nothing but each other, and clearly, a lot of you are re-thinking that deal.

Indeed.

[Sounder]

guruilla » Mon Dec 21, 2015 5:44 pm wrote:

…
The goal is to harass the voice of dissent (me) to the point that it self-implodes or explodes, thereby fitting neatly into the scapegoat mechanism. It isn't working, because the only thing that counts in any engagement is how much those involved are coming from an internal sense of what's real, not how attached we are to our ideological beliefs, or how many voices we can get to back us up.

…

The ideological side that you're taking here is that of the status quo, though, the one aligned with almost all hegemonic power systems.

I don't think so, guruilla's personal experience comes from a world that makes great pretenses toward liberal values, and yet are anything but 'liberal' in their determination to twist the system toward their elite advantage. This, as you say, 'hegemonic power system' uses ideological pretenses of both the right and the left to cultivate and justify 'proxy' thinking, as a primary means to devalue ideas and 'an internal sense of what's real'. That is what makes the system hegemonic. The status-quo is reactive mind thinking.

Slomo, Project Willow's statistical refutations are not marginal. If anything, the thrust of this thread is.

Certainly, if one is fair, we will see both pros and cons coming from both sides of the issue. One can agree with the general thrust of a given assertion, yet still disagree on many particulars, and vice versa of course.

Which is to say, people do well to see other folk as being more than labels that make for lazy attacks.

I still think that these energies would be better spent observing the ways in which women and men of the middle and lower classes and those without power are in the same boat regarding oppression and suppression.

Bingo, I do believe that slomo was trying to make that point by suggesting that these are better framed as being class rather than gender issues.

But the mean folks posting here don't want to look at the data for the ways in which these things happen to women as well.

You found me out, I am a mean person, that is why I practice very hard to be a nice person. But I am quite sure that everyone on this site sees that ' these things happen to women as well'.

[MacCruiskeen]

Our disillusionment left us with nothing but each other, and clearly, a lot of you are re-thinking that deal.

Indeed.

I haven't followed this thread (or at least not closely; I've skimmed it), but for the record: I would be very sorry to see slomo go.