How 4000 rabid SJWs learned to stop worrying and love Slatestarcodex
Sooo I’ve finally got a proper keyboard to write on and that means the one thing some have been really waiting for (at least I have): an account of how on earth Scott Alexander of all people secretly (and until recently, unknowingly) kind of controls the most radical major faction of finnish feminism.
That One Feminist Community is nowadays nationally notorious; something spoken of indirectly but often, and most of the relevant people immediately recognize which community people are talking about, when they do. It all started a bit more than a couple of years ago; there was this one community of feminists, by white cisgender studies majors, for white cisgender studies majors. An unimpressive garden dying from its own pacifism, it had a pretty major problem with creeps, TERFs, SWERFs, 101ers and other time-wasting people whose entropic pressure eventually degrades any unwalled feminism-related garden into an endless bog of pointless debates on stupid questions. Not good. Not Steel Feminism (I’ll be using that name for mine so I don’t need to get drawn in debates on whether stupid position X is feminism or not, because I can definitely say it’s not Steel Feminism and that’s the only one I’ll bother to defend; straw and weak feminisms are bad and people who do them should feel bad).
I had been arguing with the undesirables a lot when the admins finally realized that they weren’t doing their jobs and asked for assistance. Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for a lot of people whose existence most weren’t even aware of, I was the most credible candidate for the job: an obsessive no-lifer on sick leave who was already doing that exact thing without a badge. My style of arguing was aggressive but it would get the job done. Oh yes, it would get the job done way more than any of them anticipated. (I’ve mellowed a lot since then, due to some interesting status psychology dynamics stuff I’ll explain more in a later post; basically “Niceness, Community and Civilization” isn’t the only stable low-conflict equilibrium in existence, and “An Armed Discourse is a Polite Discourse” is in my experience more suitable for situations with a substantial fraction of lower-quality participants; and reading Living By The Sword pointed out a pretty strong failure mode to me, I updated and decided to do things so that I’d keep a more comfortable distance to that failure mode)
The group’s rules said that offenders are given three warnings before a ban, except in exceptional situations. In other words: “stay as long as you wish, ruining the atmosphere for everyone else, nobody who can do anything about it is going to do anything about it”. And when all one has is emergency powers, everything starts looking like an emergency. I’d deliberately provoke the people I wanted to remove, get them all heated up, and suddenly spin around and appear with my badge and banhammer, ready to kick them out for doing the exact same stuff I was doing five minutes ago. Showy, effective, and absolutely ridiculously unfair. I got close to the edge once, and the other mods were discussing taking away my badge but I called their bluff with the brilliant negotiating strategy of “just ignore the problem until it goes away” and it did; I was indispensable and consequently untouchable, as most of the people I did purge were actual creeps, douches and other universally agreed undesirables. “First they came for the creeps, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a creep…”
…Finally they came for the white feminists, and the white feminists had nobody to speak for them because there was nobody left who was interested in defending those who think the solution to “these women might have their choices in clothing restricted to conform to prevailing norms” is “therefore we need to restrict their choice in clothing to conform to prevailing norms”. The purges gradually expanded to cover everyone who spoke out against steel feminism. Sex work abolitionists, transphobes, racists, conservatives, and all other varieties of less-universally agreed undesirables were removed one after another, policing of people’s actions and words expanded outside the group, jokes about Stasi became a regularity among the mods as the old ones left in disgust and were replaced by new ones who agreed with my vision, and flashy public declarations made it absolutely clear that the new way was not like the old way.
As this reign of terror continued, the community turned into a desolate wasteland of who am I kidding it absolutely ballooned in size despite constantly tightening its admission criteria so that nowadays joining it is almost like a post-ww2 job interview. (that, my friends, is what an underserved market looks like) Over 4000 members, about 250 waiting to get in right now, and if one calculates it as a fraction of the population it’s equivalent to a quarter million americans. Of course, one shouldn’t do it that way, it’s absolutely verboten to do it that way, but if one did do it in the verboten way it’d be a quarter million. Just saying.
One key factor in this was that the enforcement of the rules was brutal, but pretty fair for what’s essentially an “exit, no voice” community run by the arbitary fiat of the ruling junta of me and my cronies. I made it a priority to be especially relentless in crushing those whose bullshit could superficially appear to be on the “right side” of identitarian tribal politics; one remarkable situation was where one comment suggesting that it’s not that bad for a woman to sexually assault a man led to instant banhammering and a million flies complaining about how the rape apologist in question wasn’t given a second chance. I pointed out that nobody would’ve asked for mercy if the genders had been reversed, and won a fuckload of respect among the consistent and a fuckload of reputation as someone who simply doesn’t give a shit about the popular opinion among the hypocritical. I’m the Vlad Tepes of feminism, what are people going to do about it, other than go somewhere else?
Of course, there was, and still is, a consistent outflux of people; the banned ones, and the ones who didn’t want to wait to get banned. Nowadays there is a regular fire cycle where approximately twice a year somebody notices the strict enforcement of rules, gets upset, gathers a splinter group, and finds out the hard way why our membership criteria are so strict as all the barbarians whom our high walls keep away join the splinter group, ruining it. Alternatively they turn into That One Feminist Community Lite (now with 100% less promethea!) as a result of adopting relatively strict rules themselves.
The tyranny of That One Feminist Community is kept in check by accountability, as ultimately its point is to create value for the target audience. One important way of creating such value is to actively invert the standard hierarchies of who gets heard and who gets taken seriously. We don’t care if we need to silence men to give women space, or white people to make it so that PoC can feel comfortable discussing their experiences with racism in white feminism, or cis people to let trans people genuinely define themselves. Those people have the rest of the world for themselves, and while we don’t want to invert the rest of the world, having That One place where the roles are reversed is important. (A lot of people seem terminally unable to understand the difference of “we think there should be That One space which caters to these specific access needs” and “we want to make the entire world be the same”, which is frustrating to no end. Okay, there are some norms we want to universalize like “no rape apologia, regardless of the genders of the people involved” but that’s not the same thing.)
Now this is where things get interesting. I’ve established myself as a prominent figurehead of an unapologetically radical community with merciless enforcement of norms consistent to a degree relatively unheard-of in most communities. In other words, I’m un-bingocardable because people trust me not to be X even if I say things that superficially sound like X, and I have a reputation for doing such stuff all the time. It’s for the good of the community even if people don’t understand it immediately, but they usually do because they don’t feel the need to reject it immediately on identitarian grounds and I don’t do weak arguments. Weak arguments aren’t steel feminism. I’m the one pointing the conceptual superweapon which means it can’t be pointed at me even if I tell people to point it away from someone. That’s powerful and very important, and this is the point where Scott becomes relevant.
Controlling the memetic environment is one of the most powerful ways of “brainwashing” people. When one gets to decide what’s normal, one gets to decide what people’s brains automatically conform to without the need for conscious attention. This gets used a lot. The things not subject to debate are the most important things, and one of such things is staying true to reality even (especially) if it’s more complex and nuanced than naive theories would suggest. I get away with using “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics 5″ as a source right there in the open, just by doing some rhetorical trickery around it. (”I don’t agree with it 100% but I’m not going to say it’s really wrong in any specific claims it makes”) Hardcore intersectionality allows us to frame pretty much anyone in pain as being oppressed by something and therefore their pain needs to be at the very least not contributed to by us (the reason why feminists care about structural oppression more than they care about other kinds of suffering is the same reason oncologists care about cancer more than cluster headaches, but the basic fundamental is still to reduce pain and injustice in the world), and thus we even defend people like RooshV when they’re attacked in unfair ways. Bad feminists don’t give a shit about the collateral damage they do to non-shitlord basement dwellers when there’s an opportunity to use the low status of basement-dwellerness against a shitlord, but we aren’t that kind of feminists and the prior for such people getting a banhammer in their posterior in Our Community is pretty damn close to 1 if they don’t cut that oppressive crap.
This commitment to reality first has also the amusing side effects of making the moderate conservative feminists far more unreasonable in their claims. The people who say stuff like “practically all abusers are male” [motherfucking sic from their website!] are the established and respected state feminists we constantly criticize (as an organization, some of our best friends can be members but the organization itself is corrupt and propped up by some old-ass bourgie capital and democratic inertia instead of good arguments), while the “evil misandrist radical feminazis” believe the reality is far less simplistic and abused men face may kinds of systematic erasure and unique problems that differ from the experiences of abused women. It’s kind of hilarious, and kind of sad, but most importantly it’s kind of extremely useful as steel feminism is deliberately bulletproofed against empirical attacks by appropriating those attacks and incorporating the evidence in itself. My long-term plan is to create a situation where people with reasonable moral axioms and any degree of consistency in their beliefs have no other choice than to join steel feminism, at least in substance if not in style, and then all those people win and the bad SJ gets purged along with everything else that hurts people and all kinds of access needs will be accommodated in their own places.
And that’s how 4000 radicals will be made to believe every sufficiently solid argument that comes out of slatestarcodex, at least eventually, depending on how difficult inserting it as an unchallenged background assumption into the memetic environment will be.
Also did I mention I did this while on sick leave, for social anxiety and depression of all things? Yeah, taking over locally influential political movements is “side hobby”-level stuff for me. Taking over the world is “actual ambition”.
4 months ago · tagged #win-win is my superpower #steel feminism #ambitious trans girls · 4 notes · .permalink