brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?
mankind will never be free until the last vice cop is strangled with the guts of the last NIMBY
#this is hyperbole please don’t murder nimbys
this just in ozy frantz totally cool with strangling vice cops
well they are kidnapping innocent people, sometimes for decades, and committing assault
it’s self-defense
(via ozymandias271)
1 week ago · tagged #murder cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 28 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
How many people had their lives ruined? How many killed by cops? How many wives lost husbands to prison, how many fathers lost daughters? #Hate it!
(via metagorgon)
2 weeks ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 9,308 notes · .permalink
mankind will never be free until the last vice cop is strangled with the guts of the last NIMBY
#this is hyperbole please don’t murder nimbys
this just in ozy frantz totally cool with strangling vice cops
frankly…
2 weeks ago · tagged #death cw #violence cw #okay maybe don't murder vice cops either #mostly because you would get in trouble for it #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 28 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
wait wait wait wait wait wait
any gun control scheme that fails this specific edge case regardless of the reason deserves “mass scorning”
is that what you are saying?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding this suggestion.
Are you, @socialjusticemunchkin and by proxy @ozymandias271 (Though ozy has not stated the necessity for scorn and the degree of wrongness of the answer), by the above statement, in fact intending to say that any gun control scheme that fails to give MLK (understood to mean MLK in his current state, if you want to retcon MLK to have firearms training then do so explicitly, if he did already then source your evidence) the ability to purchase a firearm is A) shitty and B) deserving of mass scorn?
Any scheme that would render MLK specifically unable to get firearms, due to reasons that are political instead of competency-related, is what I’m saying. If he had eg. some health issue that would’ve made him unable to shoot straight it is one thing, but stuff that relies on “the government has decided this person is a bad person” is another. And a reasonable degree of training in safe handling etc. would obviously be retconned into the question, as it’s intended to be about the difference between MLK and some random guy somewhere.
Some further clarification: because the government is evil, it could still possibly find a way to prevent MLK from getting guns even with a reasonable system.
But the point of the test is to determine whether it’s obvious that MLK would’ve been totally barred from having guns; if it requires a significantly non-trivial degree of creativity from the State to find out a way to bully people it doesn’t like one can consider the test passed at least in the “not needing to mass scorn people” sense, but simple and naive things like “no guns for people on the no-fly list” need to be discredited from the popular discourse.
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 65 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 65 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink
Another post on Galileo’s Middle Finger, having finally finished the book. (Previous posts: Maria New and prenatal dex, also various posts in the tag #michael bailey cw?)
Galileo’s Middle Finger (hereafter GMF) is a strange book. On one level, the book’s content is pretty easy to make sense of: Alice Dreger has been involved in a number of dramatic academic controversies over the course of her career, and she figured (sensibly enough) that people might enjoy reading a book that retells these stories. To some extent, she just presents the book as “a memoir of the controversies I’ve been involved in.”
However, she also claims that these stories are connected by an overarching theme, which is something like this:
“Scientists and activists often find themselves at odds, on opposite sides of angry battles. But everyone should recognize that truth and justice are intimately connected: you can’t help the victims of injustice if you don’t care about the facts of the situation, and if you’re in a unique position to explore facts (such as an academic job), you ought to steer your investigations toward the social good – not by sacrificing the truth, but by looking for the truths that can help. Activists need to be more concerned with truth, and scientists need to be more concerned with justice. And if both sides followed this advice, they would be at odds far less often.”
All of this sounds very agreeable to me; I think I already more-or-less agreed with it before I read Dreger’s book. But do Dreger’s accounts of various controversies actually serve as useful examples of this stuff? Not always. And Dreger’s attempts to link everything back to her theme produce some awkward results.
Besides a few minor subplots, there are three controversies narrated in GMF. First, she narrates the controversy over Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Second, the controversy over Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, which accused anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of genocide as well as various other wrongdoings. Third, Dreger’s investigations into Maria New and her struggles to get her criticisms recognized by government bodies and the public.
Of these three, it’s the Tierney/Chagnon case that most directly fits Dreger’s theme. Tierney’s book was a work of shoddy hack journalism which made spectacular allegations that have been uniformly refuted by later investigators. (N.B. Tierney made many allegations, and some of the more minor ones have been less clearly refuted, but those weren’t the ones that made headlines.) Nonetheless, shortly after the book came out, the American Anthropological Association quickly endorsed Tierney’s book – the academic equivalent of reflexively believing a callout post without checking the sources.
Reading this in terms of Dreger’s theme seems straightforward: in its concern for justice, the AAA neglected the value of truth, and thus failed to even serve justice.
Even here, though, the theme strains a bit. The Tierney debacle was not exactly a conflict between “activists” and “academics”; the people under-valuing truth in the service of justice were the academics of the AAA. (Tierney could arguably be called an “activist,” but Dreger treats him – rightly, it seems to me – as a hack journalist from whom more concern for the truth cannot be expected.)
The Maria New story also lacks a clear instance of an activist failing to sufficiently value truth. In that story, Dreger is the activist, raising ethical concerns from the outside about an established academic, and her activism is directly grounded in science that she believes that academic is ignoring. She may intend this as an example of “activism done right” (about which more later), and/or as a case of an academic caring too little about justice. But it’s not as though New is ignoring justice because truth is her only value; as Dreger notes, her prenatal dex work has produced little in the way of academic knowledge. So again, it’s hard to see this as an illustration of the theme.
So far, it looks like Dreger has failed to exhibit an example of activists behaving badly, although this is crucial to her theme. The third story (well, first as presented in the book), about Michael Bailey, is her main (and only) example of this. But of the three stories, it’s that one that fits the theme least well.
Dreger’s account of the Bailey controversy shares a quality with her account of the Chagnon controversy: both are told as stories of lovable and humane, if out-of-touch, researchers being persecuted by ignorant people who don’t understand them. Dreger spends a great deal of text talking about how much she personally likes Bailey and Chagnon – Bailey is a personal friend, Chagnon she met while investigating that controversy. As “characters” in the book, they downright glow. They’re funny, they’re good company, they both have cute and harmonious marriages.
It makes sense to write stuff like this in order to humanize people who have been demonized by others. But one has to note here that none of this bears on the “truth” side of the things. It’s certainly possible for someone to have committed genocide and still be a warm and sparkling conversationalist at the dinner table; it’s possible for Michael Bailey to be a great guy if you know him personally, and nonetheless to have been wrong about trans women.
With Chagnon, this tension never becomes relevant, because as a matter of simple fact, Chagnon was exonerated by multiple serious investigators. With Bailey, the tension is glaringly relevant, because the issue of whether Bailey is actually right never gets fully addressed in Dreger’s treatment. Indeed, she treats it almost as an irrelevant side issue. Where is the value of truth here?
To be fair, Dreger does put her beliefs on the table about the issue. But these beliefs seem to reveal little serious interest in the questions involved. She seems to have uncritically bought the Blanchard-Bailey line – possibly because she only cares about these issues insofar as they affect her good friend Michael Bailey? – and to have done little investigation into academic work on transgender beyond this.
Astonishingly, for instance, the phrase “gender dysphoria” never appears in GMF at all. (A word-search for “dysphoria” turns up only one result, in the title of a Blanchard paper cited in the endnotes.) When Dreger presents her account of trans women, she talks about (for instance) transitioning as a choice made by feminine gay men in order to better fit into homophobic social environments, stressing that these people might not have transitioned if feminine gay identities were more accepted in their local environments. I’m willing to believe this happens sometimes – but Dreger seems to actually not know that gender dysphoria is a thing. This is in a book published in 2015. One wonders if she’s ever even looked up the condition in the DSM (which changed the name from “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Dysphoria” in the 2013 DSM-V, but even before that had included dysphoria as one of the two major diagnostic criteria).
Dreger has a page on her website, written after GMF was published, in which she responds to questions about “autogynephilia” and states her current positions. Again, she never mentions gender dysphoria. Of Blanchard’s androphilic/autogynephilic typology, she says that “I think what I’ve seen from the scientific clinical literature and socioculturally suggests this division makes sense.” She does not provide any citations, and does not address critiques (see here) that the data show a continuum which does not separate well into two clusters.
I belabor all of this because Dreger’s indifference to the truth here simply makes GMF fundamentally incoherent. I agree with Dreger’s theme; I have no clue how she thinks the Bailey story illustrates it.
But wait – Dreger’s claim is that activists value truth too little in their quests for justice. Does this hold true for the activists who attacked Michael Bailey?
Again, Dreger seems to not much care. She devotes a lot of space to the claims made by these activists, but mostly to express confusion over them. Noting that some of them display what look to her like signs of autogynephilia, she scratches her head: why are they angry at a book for talking about autogynephilia? One would think that someone in Dreger’s position – someone interested in getting to the bottom of situations where truth and justice appear to conflict – ought to answer a question like this. Dreger doesn’t. Her attitude is basically: “who are these weird people attacking my friend Michael? What do they want? They’re so confusing! Michael is a scientist, so maybe they don’t like science? Jeez, who knows!!!”
What she substitutes for consideration of these issues – and let me be clear, this is not nothing – is a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the nasty, dishonest ways in which the activists tried to ruin Michael Bailey’s reputation. They were, in fact, really nasty. But people don’t just do things like that for no reason. What about the larger questions of truth and justice here? Why do these activists believe Michael Bailey is so harmful? Could it be the case that Bailey is harmful, to the point that defaming him is a net good?
Dreger never mentions this sort of idea, but it hangs uncomfortably over her whole book. She bemoans the fact that her work on Maria New – which is generally polite and non-nasty, if very harsh on New – has failed to make appreciable waves in the world, beyond loading the first page of Google results with dex-critical pages. On the other hand, Bailey’s book is now solely known as the subject of a stormy controversy, which received huge amounts of media discussion. What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done? What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough? And, putting it the other way around, how can Dreger assume that the anti-Bailey crowd didn’t have truth and justice on its side, just because they were nasty and vicious to her friend?
In Dreger’s telling, Andrea James is a scary asshole who sends her possibly-physical threats via email, and Michael Bailey and Napoleon Chagnon are precious cinnamon rolls. But fighting for truth-and-justice is not the same as identifying the Nice People and the Mean People. These may in fact be (I hate to say it) largely unrelated endeavors.
A serious book about activism, science, truth and justice would begin with these disquieting possibilities, and then explore from there. (One example that book might look at: Dreger’s earlier non-nasty activism for intersex people has gotten stuff done.) Dreger’s book instead stays in an overly cozy universe, where “fighting for good” and “defending her lovable buddies against the bad meanies” can never be conflicting goals.
“What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done? What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough?”
I really want more serious treatment of this question from someone sensible. Obviously I really hope the answer is no, and I am tired of discourse from people who seem like they would actively prefer the answer to be yes (although maybe it’s only my bias making them seem that way.) But yeah, doe anyone know of any decent book-length discussions of the issue which look at real-life situations?
The answer is no because the moment you decide that nasty activism is necessary to get the job done you completely lose the capacity to distinguish “cases when nasty activism is a distasteful necessity” from “cases where nasty activism can be used to punish people for saying things that make me upset, or just for the crime of being unpopular and perceptible to me.”
This is proving too much. If one contrasts nasty activism to violence, one could say the exact same thing, and to some degree it’s quite true (PoliceMob being a very good example of insufficiently restrained violence, contrast with BadSJMob), but the actually correct answer would probably be “it’s possible to use it usefully, but most of the time it’s a bad idea and completely abstaining from it is way less likely to be harmful than using it indiscriminately”.
TL;DR and a fucking massive disclaimer to not get this misunderstood and misrepresented by everyone: I think most nastiness is excessive and unwarranted, but consider it at least possibly excusable in some situations where people are reacting to sufficiently shitty things, and Bailey is up there in the list of “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, along with the likes of Judge Rotenberg Centre etc.; and it’s really shitty that if I say “Bailey is terrible, scorn him”, some asshole somewhere will take it as endorsement of heaping abuse on some kid whose only crime was not being up to date with their shibboleths.
(descriptions of dirty tricks, nasty sj, and other dark underbelly-of-the-world things below the cut)
2 weeks ago · tagged #nastiness cw #transmisogyny cw #cissexism cw #suicide cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 54 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink
wearing the hijab is a feminist act, not wearing the hijab is a feminist act, having sex is a feminist act, not having sex is a feminist act, getting a job is a feminist act, not getting a job is a feminist act, being strong is a feminist act, being weak is a feminist act,
The thing I want to do is affirming and good. Your behavior, on the other hand!
EDIT: Wait no, your behavior is the behavior of a precious cinnamon roll too good for this world. The problem is THEIR behavior!
It’s as if doing whatever the fuck is true to yourself is a feminist act while subsuming others to an outside normativity is the one act that isn’t…
(via shieldfoss)
3 weeks ago · tagged #steel feminism #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 44 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
Progressives and conservatives? Retired 20th century factions. Now it’s SJ, Altright, and Everybody Else.
No libertarians?
I think the nature of political coalitions means that they generally get lumped in with the alt-right.
I will fight to the bitter end for libertarians to be SJ
Even the goddamn Fountainhead was about oppressive cultural norms hurting people and the things they care about
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 25 notes · source: fatpinocchio · .permalink
Principled stances on taxation:
- “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
- “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
- “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
Unprincipled stances on taxation:
- “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
- “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.
If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:
“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.
In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.
I prefer the rational, factual, logical stance on taxation:
Taxation isn’t theft because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use those resources/services. Because there is literally no moral difference between paying the government to provide those resources/services and paying a private company to provide those resources/services. And if you choose to live a lifestyle which uses those resources/services, you’d just be paying a private company to provide them if the government didn’t do so.
So it’s got nothing to do with the Greater Good or a social contract. It’s just business. The business where if you want/need something, you’re expected to pay the person who is providing it to you if they choose to be paid for it, which does not magically change when the person providing it that chooses to be paid has a government title.
Now, people are certainly free to try to argue that nobody should have to pay for things they want/need and/or nobody should be allowed to expect payment for the resources/services they provide, but those ideas would have to apply to literally everyone, not only to people in the public sector.
(Also money is not property anyway, money is a medium of exchange of property, but an exploration of that fact is outside the scope of this particular topic.)
No. No. This is exactly, exactly, the unprincipled stance of the social contract, even if you say that it isn’t.
I already proved it’s not via explaining how reality actually works. Reality doesn’t magically stop being reality just because you don’t like it. *shrug*
John is not chosing to use the service “Get shot by the police,” so any argument that it’s not theft because he chose to use that service and has to pay for it is super skeevy.
So why are you making that argument, then?
You cannot equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway, then claim that it’s a service you have to pay for. What the actual
So why are you making that claim, then?
[1] I already proved it’s not via explaining how reality actually works.
[2] So why are you making that argument, then?
[1] You really really didn’t.
I really, really did.
[2] … so why are you making that argument then?
Post with that argument has your username on it as the author, dude. If you honestly think that I am you, you might want to go see a shrink about that.
1: “Prove” is a word. Words mean things.
Indeed they do. And I proved my point. Still waiting for you to prove yours.
Otherwise, whenever you say nothing but “you really didn’t” I will respond with nothing but “I really did”. Ball’s in your court.
2: That literally never happened, unless you are referring to the part where I was enumerating unprincipled ideas.
So you’re saying this post never happened? Or that it was somehow magically written by me even though it has your name as the author? We got a live one here, folks.
… did you miss the “not” in that post that makes it mean the exact opposite of what you’re trying to engage with?
Oh, no, I got that you think the idea that “equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway ” is a service, is skeevy.
What I’m wondering is why you’re saying that’s a service if you already know it’s skeevy to say that’s a service.
And then you went totally off the rails to ask me why I made a point that you were actually the one making, and now I’m honestly confused. Like, I don’t fucking know why you think “equip a large mass of people with guns, explicitly charge them to hurt you if you don’t do what they say, then hurt you anyway“ is a service. You’re the one who said it, you tell me why you think it’s a service.
I’m wondering why you’re implying it’s a service.
You may have forgotten. It was here:
Taxation isn’t theft because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use those resources/services.
That’s the skeevy bit. The bit where you said taxation isn’t theft because the things taxes pay for, like being shot by the police, are services.
“Segregation enforced by cops funded by taxes is not oppression because you’re paying the government for resources or services you voluntarily chose to use by not changing your lifestyle to not use the ‘whites only’ drinking fountain…”
(via shieldfoss)
1 month ago · tagged #racism cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink
Principled stances on taxation:
- “Taking property is theft!” (Anarcho-Capitalism)
- “Claiming you own property is theft” (Anarcho-Communism)
- “Taking property is theft, but acceptable for the Greater Good” (Various consequentialists)
Unprincipled stances on taxation:
- “You CAN own property but taking it isn’t theft because of a Social Contract that you never agreed to.” (Unprincipled capitalists, e.g. most modern ideologies)
- “Claiming you own property is theft, but if you use the car that Comrade Iosef drives, the police will get you even though it isn’t Comrade Iosef’s car” (Unprincipled communists, i.e: “communists.”)
Surely you can’t define theft without a concept of property, thus you can’t define property in terms of or in opposition to theft.
If you accept a consequentialist position on taxation then the debate is over:
“People would prefer to hang on to things, but there are reasons why we have to take things away from them, for the greater good”.
In practice most of the social contract viewpoint comes back to this anyway, as people wouldn’t defend a social contract if they thought it gave bad outcomes.
“The claim that I am not allowed to drive this car due to metaphysical constraints is a claim that belongs to the category of claims that I will punish according to a legal code that is written beneath the char[5] ‘theft’ “
Incidentally, initializing a fixed-buffer non-w charstring is treason.
(Also there is a real difference between “I am taking this from you because somebody else needs it” and “I am taking this from you, as you have agreed to, so don’t welsh on that agreement.” In tumblr parlance, one of these is gaslighting.)
Citizenship is gaslighting.
The Police is Mobsters.
Following you, @shieldfoss, was the right decision.
There’s a reason for it:
The parallels between libertarian and feminist insights are striking. “The state is male in the feminist sense,” MacKinnon argues, in that “the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women” (MacKinnon 1989, Chapter 8 ¶ 11). The libertarian completion of this thought is that the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women. The ideal of a woman’s willing surrender to a benevolent male protector both feeds and is fed by the ideal of the citizenry’s willing surrender to a benevolent governmental protector. “We are not among wild beasts; from whom, then, does woman need protection? From her protectors,” Ezra Heywood remarked (McElroy 1991, p. 227); in the same way, libertarians have often described the state as an entity that protects people primarily from harms caused or exacerbated by the state in the first place. Just as, under patriarchy, forced sex is not recognized as real or fully serious rape unless the perpetrator is a stranger rather than one’s husband or boyfriend, so, under statism, governmental coercion is not recognized as real or fully serious tyranny unless it happens under a non-democratic government, a “dictatorship.” The marriage vow, as a rape license, has its parallel in the electoral ballot, as a tyranny license. Those who seek to withhold consent from their country’s governmental apparatus altogether get asked the same question that battered women get asked: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you leave?” — the man’s rightful jurisdiction over the home, and the state’s over the country, being taken for granted. It’s always the woman, not the abusive man, who needs to vacate the home (to go where?); it’s likewise the citizen, not the abusive state, that needs to vacate the territory (to go where?).
Despite these parallels, however, many libertarians — libertarian feminists definitely included — seems surprisingly unsympathetic to most of what feminists have to say. (…)
Libertarians are often unimpressed by feminist worries about social norms that disable anything a woman says from counting as declining consent to sexual access, but they are indignant at theories of tacit or hypothetical consent that disable anything a citizen says from counting as declining consent to governmental authority.1 Libertarians often conclude that gender roles must not be oppressive since many women accept them; but they do not analogously treat the fact that most citizens accept the legitimacy of governmental compulsion as a reason to question its oppressive character; on the contrary, they see their task as one of consciousness-raising and demystification, or, in the Marxian phrase, plucking the flowers from the chains to expose their character as chains.
When radical feminists say that male supremacy rests in large part on the fact of rape—as when Susan Brownmiller characterizes rape as “a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (Against Our Will, p. 15)—libertarians often dismiss this on the grounds that not all men are literal rapists and not all women are literally raped. But when their own Ludwig von Mises says that “government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action,” that it rests “in the last resort” on “the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen,” and that its “essential feature” is “the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning” [HA VI.27.2], libertarians applaud this as a welcome demystification of the state. Libertarians rightly recognize that legally enacted violence is the means by which all rulers keep all citizens in a state of fear, even though not all government functionaries personally beat, kill, or imprison anybody, and even though not all citizens are beaten, killed, or imprisoned; the same interpretive charity towards the radical feminist analysis of rape is not too much to ask.
http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/
(via mhd-hbd)
1 month ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #rape cw #steel feminism · 133 notes · source: shieldfoss · .permalink