nightpool said: Wait how does money being a social construct invalidate ethereum? I don’t get the connection
It depends what you want to use it for. The typical example is buying a house: if you flip a bit in the cloud somewhere that says “I own this house” you may run into difficulties if someone else is occupying the premises and refuses to vacate. At this point you would normally call in mediators in the form of the State, which has a land titles office and legal system with experience going back a thousand years of negotiating property disputes. But then if you’re relying on a trusted middleman, what value is cryptocurrency providing in this scenario?
As with Bitcoin, management of the currency is an inherently political process where various stakeholders campaign for the changes they think are necessary and try to convince people to their point of view. The end result is distributed in the same sense that the rest of the financial system is distributed across multiple banks and government bodies, it’s just more fragile and even less efficient.
So far the killer app for Bitcoin is converting cheap Chinese electricity into US dollars while evading capital controls, which is neat I guess, although not something I get particularly excited about.
Isn’t the killer app buying drugs?
This is the only thing anyone I know has used bitcoin for (myself included!)
The killer app is also speculating and getting rich or at least a bit less poor. I turned a friend from “very poor” to “has a surprising amount of savings for a person of their class background and economic situation, even when accounting for the fact that they spent half of it on something important” just by telling them bitcoin exists. It doesn’t take that much of market savvy to transfer the average investor’s money into more deserving hands.
And then there’s anything else where money needs to change hands easily, fast, and at a low price across the world. Remittances, international trade, etc.
It is estimated that Africa imports nearly 83 per cent of its food. African leaders are seeking ways to feed their peoples and become players in the global economy.
In the second edition of The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, I argue that Africa can feed itself in a generation. However, efforts to achieve such an ambitious goal continue to be frustrated by policies adopted by Africa’s historical trading partners, especially the European Union.
There are at least three ways in which EU policies affect Africa’s ability to address its agricultural and food challenges: tariff escalation; technological innovation and food export preferences.
African leaders would like to escape the colonial trap of being viewed simply as raw material exporters. But their efforts to add value to the materials continue to be frustrated by existing EU policies.
Take the example of coffee. In 2014 Africa —the home of coffee— earned nearly $2.4 billion from the crop. Germany, a leading processor, earned about $3.8 billion from coffee re-exports.
The concern is not that Germany benefits from processing coffee. It is that Africa is punished by EU tariff barriers for doing so. Non-decaffeinated green coffee is exempt from the charges. However, a 7.5 per cent charge is imposed on roasted coffee. As a result, the bulk of Africa’s export to the EU is unroasted green coffee.
The charge on cocoa is even more debilitating. It is reported that the “EU charges (a tariff) of 30 per cent for processed cocoa products like chocolate bars or cocoa powder, and 60 per cent for some other refined products containing cocoa.”
The impact of such charges goes well beyond lost export opportunities. They suppress technological innovation and industrial development among African countries. The practice denies the continent the ability to acquire, adopt and diffuse technologies used in food processing. It explains to some extent the low level of investment in Africa’s food processing enterprises.
The EU is an evil empire, government aroundfucking in the economy hurts some of the worst-off people in the world, and rich hippies are ruining everything; news at eleven.
neoliberalism-nightly said: I mean I agree with the first part with the squatters, but cryptocurrrency does provide an robust way to record the transfer of the currency in question. But it does change the logistics in a way that will probably change the political economy provided it doesn’t get crushed by state control.
nightpool said: Hmm. I think I disagree. Cryptocurrencies provide a marked improvement in the state of the art in the technological recording of accounts, in that they’re independent of any given authority (although not ALL authority, but you can almost always swap one out for another one and maintain the same underlying technology, and most of the time even the same blockchain) and their full transparency in transaction processing.
How is being independent of mainstream finance / government an advantage for anyone who isn’t trading in contraband?
Because you’re trading one authority for a different authority (the dev team and various mining pools) with a much shorter track record.
Counterpoint: the military designed the Internet to be independent of a central authority, they seemed to think it was useful.
IP address blocks are centrally assigned, so no :P
The advantage is pretty obvious to many: they expect the dev team and the mining pools to have less of (motivation * opportunity) to abuse their authority in certain ways. That with the correct incentives in place, the length of the track record wouldn’t matter as much, and instead it would be about whether the devs and pools would do the shit the state does. Mainstream finance and the government treat a lot of things effectively like borderline contraband (eg. payment processors giving trouble to the sex business) or exploit even legal actors (eg. the perception that the state is fucking around with the money supply to help undeserving cronies is a pretty strong ideological motivator behind alternative currencies).
I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.
The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.
I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.
I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.
I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.
But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.
So I gave my take on it:
The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
The conclusion only makes sense if we assume that structural and institutional power are virtually the only forms of power that exist.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
…
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
…
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
…
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
This grosses me out more than I can properly articulate. The idea that if you ever “win” a social conflict that you’re really the bad guy is gross as all hell. The idea let’s virtually anyone off the hook. Were you successfully criticized for your behaviour? Congratulations, your detractor is a bully abusing their superior social power against poor meek little you. You fire a woman for getting pregnant, and she succesfully sued you and damaged your business’ reputation? What an abuse of power, you poor little thing. You harrass someone online and they actually stand up to you? You shouldn’t have to stand for such mistreatment. Were you cruel to a friend, and now less people want to hang out with you? You’re the real victim here.
This is the weaponization of the pretense of meekness. It’s the whine of particularly nasty members of the religious right, who complain, in naked envy of Saudi Arabia’s ability to persecute “deviants,” that their detractors would never be so critical of militant islam.
So yes, it feels fucking fantastic.
None of this is to say that anything in the name of ‘winning’ a social conflict is acceptable, or that one cannot be disprortionate, excessive, or sadistic and cruel towards others in response to mistreatment, or that what you’ve identified as mistreatment is accurately described as such. Nuance, proportionality, and compassion are excellent virtues. But it is vastly unjustified to cast ‘winners of social conflict’ as nearly equivalent to abusers of social power attacking the weak in place of the strong.
I don’t think dick-pic-sender’s name should have been released to the internet at large. Large, diffuse groups on the internet are personally removed from the situation, are frequently full of unprincipled people, and the individuals involved frequently feel like a snowflake in an avalanche. Consequently the people involved are often ignorant or apathetic of the scale of harm they as a group are causing, which can quickly become vastly improportionate to scale of the harm to which the group is responding.
I do think it’d be entirely fair game to show the messages to people within dick-pic-sender’s social group. It’s fair for the people in your life to know how you treat others, and I don’t think you necessarily deserve privacy when you treat someone poorly through unsolicited messages (IANAL, but I think the law generally agrees as well).
And for the love of fucking god I wish people would stop defending people like dick-pic-sender by trying to cast them as weak, bumbling little angels. Aside from the fact that there’s not much justification for it: you can mistreat the strong. You can be cruel to anyone. If you’re gonna argue that excessive responses, cruelty, and internet mobs are bad, do it because those things are bad in principle, not because they’re being used against a particular victim class you wanna defend.
op’s post is like the ultimate example of everything i find foul about the lesswronger worldview
even though the lesswrongers claim to be against “toxic sj,” in reality they just subscribe to a twisted backwards grotesque parody of the most misapplied sj identity politics, except in their version the primary “marginalized community” which they must fight for and protect at all costs is “dudes who are experiencing consequences for being shitty to other people.”
and notice the whining about “the actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them”- any sensible person would decide that the solution would be to fight to make it more difficult for aggressive men to mistreat people, but op seems to be implying that instead, we should try to make it should be easier for less aggressive men to mistreat people. it’s completely backwards and awful tbh.
also, i’m really grossed out by op comparing the backlash that the dickpic sender received to the harassment and mistreatment that trans women and eating disordered women receive. especially appalling is the implication that the dickpic sender has been hurt by the patriarchy on a level comparable to the harm the patriarchy does to trans women and eating disordered women. this is ludicrous, standing up to a sexual harasser isn’t comparable to bullying marginalized women, fuck off.
Do two wrongs make a right? Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad? Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed? Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your straight-line prior. You should
already you’re assuming that it was “wrong” to publicly shame the dickpic sender. tsk tsk.
Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad?
certainly. but the op wasn’t just trying to claim the response was excessive, but also attempted to cast the pickpic sender as a persecuted innocent. which is absurd.
Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed?
sending a naked picture to someone is pretty clearly a sexual act, and performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is indeed many times worse than public shaming.
Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
no, i think performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is inherently evil and shameful.
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an
individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional
information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your
straight-line prior. You should(swap! (*belief* 'straight-dude-g359) bayes-update new-evidence)
what possible additional information would make me decide the dickpic sender was actually an okay dude.
i….. i hate this. i hate this so much.
Thank you for your explanation. The last bit was in response to your framing of the situation as a between-group conflict and the lesswrongers taking a side. The problem is that there are ways to draw the line (hyperplane?) based on meta-level or object-level criteria, but even if you draw it right through the original culprit, you will sound like you are endorsing either sexual harassment or online hate mobs.
I understand you better now. I kind of assumed that you were a utilitarian. For a virtue or deontological ethics-ist your stance makes more sense. Or even an old-fashioned randian objectivist who thinks you forfeit your rights when you break the social contract, which I assume is an unfortunate accident.
thinking that people have a right to tell other people when they’ve been mistreated by someone isn’t incompatible with a utilitarian viewpoint. especially if one believes- as i do- that the beneficial deterrent effect of the punishment outweighs the harm caused to the dickpic sender. people are less likely to mistreat others if they know that the person they mistreat might inform other people. furthermore the dickpic sender will be less likely to act that way in the future.
i don’t think the dickpic sender “forfeited their rights”- it doesn’t remove any of his rights that people think negatively of him because of how he treats people. i’m not saying he should be killed or thrown in jail or whatever- but people he’s mistreated have a right to speak about it.
This means that dick pic sender would still deserve to have his name circulated as a terrible person if dick pic receiver had replied “what a beautiful penis you have” and then posted the screenshots by accident.
Our society with its expectations of masculinity on the other hand /rewards/ boundary-pushing when it works and punishes only when it fails.
Edit: Dick pic receiver has the right to post receipts. I am more critical of third parties; public shaming when it comes to victims posting receipts is a-ok. The victim is not the person who is punching down, the hypothetical internet person who reblogs the clear name of the guy might be.
i don’t buy this at all. i don’t buy that more masculine dudes get rewarded for sending unsolicited dickpics. i buy perhaps that more masculine dudes are more likely to get away with crossing peoples boundaries, because of the implicit threat of violence they can credibly maintain, but this idea that they’re getting rewarded for it is absurd. (as is the implication that this is unfair primarily to the less
masculine men who can’t get away with disrespecting peoples boundaries,
rather than unfair to the people the more masculine dudes get away with mistreating)
in the incredibly unlikely event of an unsolicited dickpic which was positively received (which i seriously doubt even exists), and the screenshot being posted by accident, then yes, i people who found out about that would still have the right to evaluate that action and for it to affect how they think of the person who sent the picture.
oh hey, i just saw the exchange which this whole thing is about: [link]
so just to clarify, THIS is the dude who OP and the-grey-tribe are casting as a poor gentle victim who only experienced backlash because he wasn’t masculine enough to get away with it, and had he been more “alpha” or whatever he would have been “rewarded” for disrespecting peoples boundaries:
lmaooooooooooo okay
Holy shit!
By the way, that woman’s “edits” are a thing of sublime hilarity.
I think the original argument still holds very well. When one is winning, it means the adversary is losing, and that usually kind of inevitably means one’s own side is stronger than the adversary’s in that specific battle. Sometimes people gathering together power to beat up on those who violate important rules can be useful to enforce those rules (just like cops are supposed to arrest people who do physical violence, and we don’t tell them to stop the instant they gain the upper hand), but they should never forget the simple fact that if they’re winning, they are the stronger side.
If people consistently remembered this one weird trick, it would probably help reduce toxic forms of sj by several dozen percentage points. Shifting the mindset from “I’m lashing out at the Oppressor and thus anything is justifiable” to “I’m using my contextual power to beat up on someone with less contextual power and my actions need to take that into account or otherwise I’ll just be a bully” would force people to keep in mind that with great contextual power comes great contextual responsibility and sometimes people need to even restrain themselves.
no, i don’t buy this. there are better ways to establish a sense of proportion and restraint in sj than to adopt a self-defeating ideology that any success in a social conflict is a sign that your opponent is actually an innocent misunderstood victim.
no, someone isn’t inherently the stronger side if they win. sometimes the underdog successfully stands up for themselves, and that doesn’t automatically mean they have structural power. dickpic sender didn’t suddenly become an underdog the moment someone stood up to him.
and there’s this whole framework here- “It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate
aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying
structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being
aggressive”- which is clearly just the discredited 4chan “alpha/beta male” framework with a fresh coat of paint.
and i mean, it’s appalling to use the logic of “but the ~alpha males~ get away with it!” to defend this kind of behavior anyways, but why, why, why, of all people, is James McRippedBro here being assumed to be a “less aggressive” “beta” male when literally every indicator suggests the exact opposite.
No, you’re misunderstanding my argument and this is calling for a reductio.
Let’s say Fallon Fox is catcalled by some rich white cis guy who has very much structural power over her. She proceeds to beat him up. I think there needs to be a way to describe the type of power Fallon has in the situation where she’s beating up the guy. If we are not able to say that she has a certain type of contextual power which is very much defined by the fact that she is indeed kicking his ass (in this case it’s the fact that she’s a skilled MMA fighter and the random guy is not), we are missing something epistemically important.
Similarly, in the social realm there is something which is the equivalent of “who is able to kick whose ass” and which isn’t a 1:1 match to structural power or anything like that.
If Fallon were to beat up the guy very badly, we wouldn’t listen to protestations that “he was still white and cis and rich and thus he still had all the power in the situation” because we would be missing something very important. Sometimes beating a guy up very badly might be warranted (such as in self-defense against assault or attempted murder), but it doesn’t make it any less true that the guy got beaten up, and that factor which led to his upbeatenness is relevant for the considerations, because in some situations That Factor ends up outweighing other considerations. If you beat someone up for having $5000 more in their bank account than you, their economic structural power over you is far less relevant than the fact that you beat them up. And that’s what I’m arguing; that if people don’t recognize when they’re beating up someone they might do exactly that thing except socially.
And empirically, even though this particular instance is most likely not an example of that thing, it nonetheless happens. I know because I have personally done it precisely because I wasn’t keeping myself aware of the presence of this factor and it’s quite embarrassing and shameful in hindsight and people should not do the same mistakes.
Idea: Instead of trying to convince everyone that their continued existence is immoral, work on reducing the water needed for various daily activities.
(Note: I’m going to use <angle brackets> for my paraphrasing. “Quotation marks” will be reserved for direct quotes.)
Stuff that starts with <Man, wouldn’t it be better if the outgroup, who disagreed with me, would just die?> is incredibly distasteful. Someone should write this author a letter starting with nostalgia for the days when everyone thought queer people would all die of AIDS, or pieces about how malaria is nature’s punishment for people with a different ethnicity from the letter-writer having too many kids, or something.
His behavior seemed eccentric and harmless at the time, but as more members of our country’s .01%—almost always male, and almost always white—become engaged in the attempt to draw out life spans, the potential dystopian consequences are harder to ignore.
<Your continued existence is inherently harmful to me> is a very strong and aggressive statement. Honestly, if my continued existence is inherently harmful to her, screw her, I’m not suicidal and I’m not obligated to be.
There aren’t many futures more chilling to me than one in which not even the march of time can free us from our oligarchs.
How about the futures where everyone keeps having to die, indefinitely?
But establishing a much longer life expectancy, whether that means a life that lasts 120 years or 500 years, would demand solutions to many fresh problems: Who pays for the treatments that make prolonged life possible? How would people afford basic expenses during their extra decades when they’re already struggling to provide for themselves now? Would we be living more years only so we could work more years and if so, is the longer life bargain worth it?
You just said that billionaires would buy the treatments for themselves. And, sure, living longer might be unpleasant, but if so, (assuming people get less ridiculous about suicide) you can just not do that? Do you want access to life extension tech or not? Pick one. How is providing more options inherently bad?
Maybe it’s just me, but the tone of this article seems to be <~it’s dystopian when my enemies aren’t dead uwu~>.
This cavalier vapidity led Packer to summarize Thiel’s vision of an ideal future as one in which “a few thousand Americans … live to a hundred and fifty, while millions of others … perish at sixty.”
Imagine playing so many zero-sum and negative-sum games that you stop being able to believe that benefits for some people can only be achieved by hurting other people at minimum an equivalent amount.
Most Americans aren’t interested in clinging to life at all costs, and most of us don’t want to live much longer than we already do. We (rightly) suspect that our quality of life will diminish as time passes, and feel guilty about further taxing the environment and finances of those left to care for us. That’s not a “pro-ageing trance”—that’s common sense and basic decency.
Look, part of anti-aging is about making sure quality of life doesn’t drop that much. Also, stop feeling suicidal because of environmentalism, that’s wrong, and regarding the environmentalists who did that to you: SCORN DEM.
And as Silicon Valley titans ignore their own water crisis while trying to devise ways for their individual, water-consuming selves to stick around for an extra century on top of all the new lives we’ll be welcoming onto the planet, we’re equally justified in withholding the good Samaritan status they try to claim.
Apparently we don’t deserve to live because some of us take baths and go swimming, then? How about we improve water efficiency and look at non-lethal methods of reducing population-growth-induced harms?
It’s disconcerting to see intelligent people treat aging as a “fundamental unsolved problem” or a “side-effect” instead of an elegant solution to an ecosystem that entails living beings using limited resources.
List of people who think my grandfather’s death is an “elegant solution” to their concerns:
Nazis
This author, apparently
Life needs to be recycled so more life is perpetuated; just give a listen to “The Circle of Life” if you need refreshing on that point.
So, I need to die so you can have 20 kids, is that it? I’m already here and your kids aren’t. For someone who seems like a feminist, you sure seem to value the creation of new humans over the individual rights of existing ones.
When I think about the nightmarish possibility of a world in which health care inequalities are even further exacerbated, two things come to mind. … The second is of one of my favorite bell hooks quotes: “Women and children all over the world want men to die so they can live.”
STOP PLAYING ZERO-SUM GAMES, STOP TELLING ME I’M OBLIGATED TO LET YOU WIN ZERO-SUM GAMES
Give me a world in which oligarchs and politicians are biologically incapable of staying in power for centuries or else, please, give me an early death.
Local discourse norms prevent me from actually giving the response this statement seems to merit.
Aaaand that’s the lowlights of the article. Ugh. Thank you, Amelia, for showing this to me.
This is an excellent snark on a terribly and extremely shitty zero-sum person.
and yeah, I’m also thinking of a very deserved response which is totally against all discourse norms worth having in public (reverse-engineering the response from this information shouldn’t be that hard for the people who really want to know; it’s cheap, it’s a classic, and it’s very terrible in this context)
Idea: Instead of trying to convince everyone that their continued existence is immoral, work on reducing the water needed for various daily activities.
Or just eliminate agricultural subsidies. Fucking alfalfa alone makes up almost all of the California water deficit and is far less economically efficient than pretty much any amount of water used for household purposes.
What DO they grow alfalfa for? Yeah I always thought shaming people for showers was dodgy in comparison to other water uses.
they feed it to cows
which are then fed to people
and the amount of water that is indirectly consumed through a single steak is absurdly huge (can’t be arsed to google the specifics, but it is) yet they won’t let price mechanisms balance water use naturally, but subsidize water-saving toilets instead
Idea: Instead of trying to convince everyone that their continued existence is immoral, work on reducing the water needed for various daily activities.
Or just eliminate agricultural subsidies. Fucking alfalfa alone makes up almost all of the California water deficit and is far less economically efficient than pretty much any amount of water used for household purposes.
I just read a text exchange in which a guy tried to flirt with a stranger on Facebook by sending her a picture of his penis. The woman responded by ridiculing him, sending him lots of pictures of other men’s penises to demonstrate how horrible it is to receive dick pics, and suggesting that his dick was small and diseased. He got angry, and asked to end the conversation, which she didn’t do. Then he asked her not to share the conversation, and she posted the whole thing publicly, along with his name. Now it’s on my news feed because lots of people are reading it and finding it hilarious.
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this is tragic.
The perception of dick pics as disgusting, low status, and worthy of ridicule is part of the larger perception of sexuality as shameful. I would much, much rather live in a culture where I sometimes received unwanted images of strangers’ genitals as part of clumsy flirting than to live in a culture where being open about sexuality is about as safe as making violent threats.
I would love to live in the nearby world where “you’re cute, wanna see my dick/vulva?” is a polite way of finding out whether an attractive stranger feels like sharing a casual online sexual interaction. The man’s actions in this exchange make me feel a lot more like I live in that world than do the woman’s.
I recognize that, given we *don’t* live in that world, *and* that the world we do live in includes a lot of people who feel women should be grateful for male attention and never allowed to protect themselves let alone retaliate, dick pics are often (usually?) more of a harmful spam tactic than a kind of benign if inept way of flirting.
I think it’s a good idea to discourage spamming people, and also to discourage treating women as if they have no right to refuse sexual advances.
But please, please, do not confuse strategic choice of social norms with the rush of a cheap status-boost. Do not play along with the game where we all punish each other for having bodies in the context of Christian purity and original sin.
So I gave my take on it:
The boy in question may not, himself, have realized he was performing an aggressive move. He may have just been emulating a move that he saw as successful, because when aggressive men make that move they often *are* successful.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
If you’re making some fedora-wearing neckbeard cry delicious man-tears, if you’re viciously shaming some size 0 fetish model for promoting unhealthy body standards, if you’re screaming at some transgirl for “invading your safe space” and “not being a real woman”, if you’re savaging some internet pundit for using “transgirl” because they haven’t kept up with the lingo-of-the-week… you’re almost certainly attacking someone who’s probably been hurt worse by the Patriarchy than you have.
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
The conclusion only makes sense if we assume that structural and institutional power are virtually the only forms of power that exist.
It’s generally the less aggressive males, attempting to emulate aggressive strategies without even realizing that the underlying structure of the strategy is aggression, that get piled on for being aggressive.
…
The actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them.
…
If you’re winning the fight against a particular person, I guarantee you they aren’t the kind of person you think you’re fighting against.
…
Because if you’re successfully attacking, and they aren’t successfully defending, then that almost certainly means you have more structural and institutional power than they do.
Feels nice, doesn’t it?
This grosses me out more than I can properly articulate. The idea that if you ever “win” a social conflict that you’re really the bad guy is gross as all hell. The idea let’s virtually anyone off the hook. Were you successfully criticized for your behaviour? Congratulations, your detractor is a bully abusing their superior social power against poor meek little you. You fire a woman for getting pregnant, and she succesfully sued you and damaged your business’ reputation? What an abuse of power, you poor little thing. You harrass someone online and they actually stand up to you? You shouldn’t have to stand for such mistreatment. Were you cruel to a friend, and now less people want to hang out with you? You’re the real victim here.
This is the weaponization of the pretense of meekness. It’s the whine of particularly nasty members of the religious right, who complain, in naked envy of Saudi Arabia’s ability to persecute “deviants,” that their detractors would never be so critical of militant islam.
So yes, it feels fucking fantastic.
None of this is to say that anything in the name of ‘winning’ a social conflict is acceptable, or that one cannot be disprortionate, excessive, or sadistic and cruel towards others in response to mistreatment, or that what you’ve identified as mistreatment is accurately described as such. Nuance, proportionality, and compassion are excellent virtues. But it is vastly unjustified to cast ‘winners of social conflict’ as nearly equivalent to abusers of social power attacking the weak in place of the strong.
I don’t think dick-pic-sender’s name should have been released to the internet at large. Large, diffuse groups on the internet are personally removed from the situation, are frequently full of unprincipled people, and the individuals involved frequently feel like a snowflake in an avalanche. Consequently the people involved are often ignorant or apathetic of the scale of harm they as a group are causing, which can quickly become vastly improportionate to scale of the harm to which the group is responding.
I do think it’d be entirely fair game to show the messages to people within dick-pic-sender’s social group. It’s fair for the people in your life to know how you treat others, and I don’t think you necessarily deserve privacy when you treat someone poorly through unsolicited messages (IANAL, but I think the law generally agrees as well).
And for the love of fucking god I wish people would stop defending people like dick-pic-sender by trying to cast them as weak, bumbling little angels. Aside from the fact that there’s not much justification for it: you can mistreat the strong. You can be cruel to anyone. If you’re gonna argue that excessive responses, cruelty, and internet mobs are bad, do it because those things are bad in principle, not because they’re being used against a particular victim class you wanna defend.
op’s post is like the ultimate example of everything i find foul about the lesswronger worldview
even though the lesswrongers claim to be against “toxic sj,” in reality they just subscribe to a twisted backwards grotesque parody of the most misapplied sj identity politics, except in their version the primary “marginalized community” which they must fight for and protect at all costs is “dudes who are experiencing consequences for being shitty to other people.”
and notice the whining about “the actual aggressive males get away with it, because no one wants to fight them”- any sensible person would decide that the solution would be to fight to make it more difficult for aggressive men to mistreat people, but op seems to be implying that instead, we should try to make it should be easier for less aggressive men to mistreat people. it’s completely backwards and awful tbh.
also, i’m really grossed out by op comparing the backlash that the dickpic sender received to the harassment and mistreatment that trans women and eating disordered women receive. especially appalling is the implication that the dickpic sender has been hurt by the patriarchy on a level comparable to the harm the patriarchy does to trans women and eating disordered women. this is ludicrous, standing up to a sexual harasser isn’t comparable to bullying marginalized women, fuck off.
Do two wrongs make a right? Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad? Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed? Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your straight-line prior. You should
already you’re assuming that it was “wrong” to publicly shame the dickpic sender. tsk tsk.
Is it possible that the response to something bad is also bad?
certainly. but the op wasn’t just trying to claim the response was excessive, but also attempted to cast the pickpic sender as a persecuted innocent. which is absurd.
Do you think seeing pictures of genitals is worse than being publicly shamed?
sending a naked picture to someone is pretty clearly a sexual act, and performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is indeed many times worse than public shaming.
Do you think that male genitals are inherently evil and shameful?
no, i think performing a sexual act with someone without their permission is inherently evil and shameful.
The lesswronger mindset is that you must /update/ your beliefs about an
individual based on evidence. That means after you hear additional
information about a straight dude, you won’t continue to use your
straight-line prior. You should(swap! (*belief* 'straight-dude-g359) bayes-update new-evidence)
what possible additional information would make me decide the dickpic sender was actually an okay dude.
i….. i hate this. i hate this so much.
Thank you for your explanation. The last bit was in response to your framing of the situation as a between-group conflict and the lesswrongers taking a side. The problem is that there are ways to draw the line (hyperplane?) based on meta-level or object-level criteria, but even if you draw it right through the original culprit, you will sound like you are endorsing either sexual harassment or online hate mobs.
I understand you better now. I kind of assumed that you were a utilitarian. For a virtue or deontological ethics-ist your stance makes more sense. Or even an old-fashioned randian objectivist who thinks you forfeit your rights when you break the social contract, which I assume is an unfortunate accident.
thinking that people have a right to tell other people when they’ve been mistreated by someone isn’t incompatible with a utilitarian viewpoint. especially if one believes- as i do- that the beneficial deterrent effect of the punishment outweighs the harm caused to the dickpic sender. people are less likely to mistreat others if they know that the person they mistreat might inform other people. furthermore the dickpic sender will be less likely to act that way in the future.
i don’t think the dickpic sender “forfeited their rights”- it doesn’t remove any of his rights that people think negatively of him because of how he treats people. i’m not saying he should be killed or thrown in jail or whatever- but people he’s mistreated have a right to speak about it.
This means that dick pic sender would still deserve to have his name circulated as a terrible person if dick pic receiver had replied “what a beautiful penis you have” and then posted the screenshots by accident.
Our society with its expectations of masculinity on the other hand /rewards/ boundary-pushing when it works and punishes only when it fails.
Edit: Dick pic receiver has the right to post receipts. I am more critical of third parties; public shaming when it comes to victims posting receipts is a-ok. The victim is not the person who is punching down, the hypothetical internet person who reblogs the clear name of the guy might be.
i don’t buy this at all. i don’t buy that more masculine dudes get rewarded for sending unsolicited dickpics. i buy perhaps that more masculine dudes are more likely to get away with crossing peoples boundaries, because of the implicit threat of violence they can credibly maintain, but this idea that they’re getting rewarded for it is absurd. (as is the implication that this is unfair primarily to the less
masculine men who can’t get away with disrespecting peoples boundaries,
rather than unfair to the people the more masculine dudes get away with mistreating)
in the incredibly unlikely event of an unsolicited dickpic which was positively received (which i seriously doubt even exists), and the screenshot being posted by accident, then yes, i people who found out about that would still have the right to evaluate that action and for it to affect how they think of the person who sent the picture.
oh hey, i just saw the exchange which this whole thing is about: [link]
so just to clarify, THIS is the dude who OP and the-grey-tribe are casting as a poor gentle victim who only experienced backlash because he wasn’t masculine enough to get away with it, and had he been more “alpha” or whatever he would have been “rewarded” for disrespecting peoples boundaries:
lmaooooooooooo okay
Holy shit!
By the way, that woman’s “edits” are a thing of sublime hilarity.
I think the original argument still holds very well. When one is winning, it means the adversary is losing, and that usually kind of inevitably means one’s own side is stronger than the adversary’s in that specific battle. Sometimes people gathering together power to beat up on those who violate important rules can be useful to enforce those rules (just like cops are supposed to arrest people who do physical violence, and we don’t tell them to stop the instant they gain the upper hand), but they should never forget the simple fact that if they’re winning, they are the stronger side.
If people consistently remembered this one weird trick, it would probably help reduce toxic forms of sj by several dozen percentage points. Shifting the mindset from “I’m lashing out at the Oppressor and thus anything is justifiable” to “I’m using my contextual power to beat up on someone with less contextual power and my actions need to take that into account or otherwise I’ll just be a bully” would force people to keep in mind that with great contextual power comes great contextual responsibility and sometimes people need to even restrain themselves.
Anonymous asked: Are you the one behind the Soldiers of Odin brand? Because I read about it in the news.
I’m not the person who’s been in the news, but I’m involved with the project. A lot of the media coverage has been misleading in the sense of making it look like it’s just one person from ‘The Party Formerly Known as the Communist Party’, while in reality there are numerous people involved, ranging from communists to libertarians and anything and everything in between.
