I knew I wasn’t alone in this. The most common dismissive argument I get from the men’s rights crowd gets repeated to me on a daily basis. It’s tired and old and stupid, and is a prime example of projection. Ally Fogg gets the same thing.
So what is this rancid little snotbubble of idiocy? It’s the tedious cliche that says any man who says or writes something which could be perceived to be sympathetic to women or feminism must only be doing so in the hope of getting a shag.
My critics usually follow up with something about how I’m also fat and old and have a beard and am boring and look hideous. Apparently, I’m so desperate because of my appalling unattractiveness that I’ve had to stoop to feminism to try and get laid.
It’s all wrong. Well, not the old homely part, but the rest is stupidly false. I’m not interested in having sex with anyone but my wife — I have, surprisingly, had a few outside invitations which I have politely, respectfully, and with much appreciation turned down. I have a good strong relationship with my wife so such suggestions only make me uncomfortable. It’s like I have been dining every day on gourmet meals prepared by an attentive chef, and someone offers me a delicious pastry on the side…I’m not at all hungry, it’s pretty easy to demur.
But feminism is good for one thing. It may not get you a quicky shag, but it turns out that respecting another human being as a person and treating them as an equal might sometimes get you into a long term mutually happy relationship.
I also like to point out that with 7 billion people on the planet, half of them women, you’re going to have sex with an infinitesimal fraction of them, no matter how much of a Don Juan you are. If you only see people through the lens of your penis, you have lost sight of the overwhelming majority of human possibilities.
Or they’re gay. That’s the other side of “only hoping to get a shag.” MRAs have a very limited repertory when it comes to insulting male feminists.
It doesn’t just get hurled about by MRAs and their like. It’s a common trope from anyone with a ruffled feather.
louis
So…if feminist men are only professing feminism to get laid and it works so well that they do it in such large numbers, why aren’t the PUAs taking a leaf from their book?
Oh, right, because PUAs may be total human garbage, but even they can tell a completely bullshit idea when they see one.
Most MRAs think long-term mutually happy relationships are for the weak….
Amphiox,
Those grapes were probably sour anyway, amirite?.
Miri:
It is amazing, isn’t it, how this strategy, while constantly claimed, is never adopted. Heh.
Amphiox (#4) –
Translation:
MRAs are incapable of having long-term relationships, so they pretend it’s not important.
Nice turn of phrase, buts that’s the last place I would want a lens. Ouch!
Sunday Afternoon:
Yes, well, the rest of us wouldn’t be too happy about it either. It’s bad enough we get to deal daily with men who do view everything and everyone via the happiness of their penis.
In all honesty, it goes together with the general idea that men do everything in order to get laid, including science, and art. Everything is based on our sex drive. Which to me implies a corollary that only women can have pure motivations for science and art. Unless the implication is that women who do science and art have male-style sex drives? Or something?
Look, all this gender essentialist bullshit is arbitrary and strange. I don’t understand how people figure out how it’s supposed to work.
doublereed,
They don’t believe that women do anything of value whatsoever. Not only are their beliefs in direct contradiction with reality, they’re also horribly offensive to both men and women.
Interestingly, women are supposedly only feminist because they can’t get a man to fuck them.
Somehow feminist men and feminist women don’t seem to be communicating well.
Giliell:
I’m pretty sure it’s just ugly women who end up as feminists, y’see, hot women don’t need all that nonsense, why they can wrap dozens of men right around their little finger!
What does PUA mean? Penis über alles? Pick-up artist? Persistently uncouth asshole?
Zeno, PUA = Pick Up Artist. See http://manboobz.com/ for details.
The thing about the “You’re doing X because you’re ugly and can’t get laid!” idea is how obvious it is that it’s bullshit. All you have to do is look at people as you walk down the street to see that ugly people regularly have sex. Of course attractive is entirely a subjective concept.
Though why they should be wrapping all the feminist men around their fingers, I still don’t really get… Something something female helplessness maybe?
That’s an amusing inconsistency.
This seems far more accurate.
@15: Yeah, but Zeno’s other guesses work, too. ;-)
The MRAs are right in one respect. When I was single I treated women like they were human beings, I became friends with them first before I tried to get laid, and I got laid a lot. Often the women would make the initial suggestion about sex. So acting in a feminist way did get shags for me.
@PZ, you don’t have everything in common since his article was also about the TERfs calling him a “tranny chaser” due to his criticism of Brennan et al…. Here is your chance – this petition is off to the SPLC any day now. Nearly 7K signatures, blog about it and get Brennan’s bigoted pals annoyed!
https://www.change.org/petitions/southern-poverty-law-center-monitor-gender-identity-watch-as-a-hate-group-2
Timgueguen @16, where do you live, that you regularly see people having sex in the street?
How does it work for gay men who embrace feminism?
Tony
You’re honourary women?
And this is why they are accurately described as dickheads, although Zeno’s alternate definitions of PUA all work pretty well.
I’d be willing to bet you still do, too :-)
opposablethumbs @25
I try to. I’m still a work in progress.
Al Dente:
As are we all. This is one concept which the MRA/PUA and others simply refuse to grok. If they see a man moving toward feminism, why it *must* be wanting to get laid motivating the change, it’s unthinkable that someone might actually learn, grow and change.
I think I’m approaching asexual orientation from the hetero side. I do get aroused by the female form at times, but not nearly as much as other hetero men seem to. I don’t feel a strong compulsion to go out and get a girlfriend. So the idea that I need to get laid because I get frustrated at something really falls flat with me. Quite often, I’ve seen the meme used to downplay the importance of an issue, acting as if the subject is throwing a tantrum over losing a video game, implying that there’s a different, often conveniently unverifiable or difficult to disprove issue causing an overreaction. It’s a way to deflect and trivialize genuine, focused outrage over specific, important matters.
I find it a little ironic that the idea of Don Juan is appealing.
I thought it was a some kind of ideal to strive for to be thought of as masculine by other men.
Then I saw Don Giovanni by Mozart.
Was Mozart a feminist?
uncle frogy
I’m surprised he didn’t cite the key dismissive phrase that goes with this.
“White Knighting”
The only reason anyone does anything worthwhile in the world apparently, or supports it vocally on the internet.
It’s not strictly speaking an MRA thing either. It has crept into very wide currency in any argument, particularly when it comes to women’s issues, but even anything besides pure nihilism a lot of the time.
It’s a move to make giving a shit politically incorrect.
Another one is the “it’s only a lame joke, no-one will be upset by it,” This after an alert on Democratic Underground
Upon thinking about the whole mess of issues around MRA’s, PUA’s, misogynists and the like, one thing struck me just now: their emphasis on physical attractiveness + their general contempt for the personhood/humanity of “love-object” means, to me, that these people have given up on, and are probably even hostile to the idea and experience of actual love.
I remember at one point looking at the person I loved in the shower. This is a person whose body and whose face would be seen by most to be homely and unattractive, if not actually ugly. A part of my consciousness detached itself and asked the question, “Why am I so deeply, continuously, and without interruption attracted to and made happy by my proximity to this person?” And the answer was simple: that I loved them, and all the physical imperfections (and all the other social imperfections, too), though perfectly visible, were inconsequential compared to the emotional rewards of the relationship. That is, love.
And MRA’s etc. would seem, by their attitudes, to be completely missing out on this profound human experience. It’s the only thought that has made me feel sorry for them.
That relationship of mine ended (long, sad story), but the experience of uninhibited, unbound, uncritical love is one that makes me a better person and sustains me during bad times.
<blockquote.I have a good strong monogamous relationship with my wife so such suggestions only make me uncomfortable.
FIFY.
Agree otherwise. >.>
Someone earlier asked, <’paraphrasing>, “if male feminists are just doing it to get laid, why aren’t PUA’s feminists also?” Clearly, it is PUA’s seeing male feminists as merely competition for all the shag available.
And it ain’t women-who-can’t-get-men who are feminists, but only lezzies; women who don’t want men, who want to keep men down.[according to MRA’s] {that’s also why I have to keep distinguishing male feminists. “feminists” are, by default, lesbianist girls.
re 34:
all hail TYPOS!!
Despite your pretense of being interested in social justice, I can see that you’re just another male. You still think sexual intercourse is morally acceptable, and you still think the favoritism which comes from it is okay.
This is why both males and sexual intercourse must be eliminated through technology. I have already proven that sex is morally wrong on that horrible Zingularity post of a typical male whining about his lack of fucking. I also outlined the plan to produce a perfect world of true equality, but it was completed ignored, because this website only pretend to be interested in a just world. In reality, it’s populated by funfems and male dudebros who believe in self-serving and bourgeois concepts like individuality.
If you don’t want to use genetic and biological technology to eliminate males and produce a species comprised entirely of genetically and environmentally identical individuals as soon as feasibly possible, the you are nothing but a patheic bigot interested in defending the status quo and perpetuating liberalism and pseudo-progressivism. You are either with me or you are part of the problem.
There’s always Hugo Schwyzer. I hear it kind of backfired.
In the past, I used to believe I was a Nice Guy. It’s the kind of ad-hoc explanation that just about sounds true if you don’t notice the false dilemma it presents. The whole thing depends on believing you can either be a hopeless friend shyly pining in silence, or a proactive asshole preying on women’s vulnerabilities.
On the other hand, I never believed I was owed sex (or even dates) for being nice, nor that the entire gender were to blame for my own troubles. Even as both girls and boys banded together to annoy me with fake dates, I never made the mistake of believing my experience was somehow representative of a fundamental truth about men and women. My conclusion was actually that my culture was pretty fucked up about how men and women should behave. Feminism was the movement I found out was actually trying to address the issue (as opposed to shit like “restoring real manhood”, which sounded completely pointless in a culture I could clearly see was already drowning in machismo), so here I am.
I had the benefit of meeting extraordinarily talented women since an early age. Nobody could tell me women couldn’t be good at anything when I could see the girls in my class beating out the guys at studying, sports and artistic activity – often at the same time. I know it’s important to get women up there doing important stuff, because I might be a living example of the beneficial influence it has on the public’s point of view.
Corollary to all this is that I never knew a single feminist personally. All these changes in worldview would be major work just to get some poon. The simpler explanation is that I couldn’t stop seeing women as people, and the rest followed from that.
This is my story, others can tell theirs.
@36 has hit the Poe’s Law threshold.
Mind you, Four Sides, if your interest is equality, why target only males for elimination?
If you’re doing satire, who is it that you’re satirizing anyway?
Nah, Four Sided is just a troll who thinks he is making a point again feminism with a reductio ad absurdum.
Which always backfires, making them look like the absurd one, not feminism.
I am not a feminist, as they are too soft. I am actually rather well-known on certain segments of the internet, and I have advocated these positions for quite a long time. My full name is Four Sided Triangles, and I used to be a rather famous poster on some message boards.
foursided
This is absurd. A human population entirely composed of clones is as good as extinct. It is not possible to eliminate sexual dimorphism, and only a very stupid troll would advocate eliminating males.
This idiot thinks we should eliminate sex too, and equates sex =reproduction.. (zingularity)
I have no idea what funfems are supposed to be. Feminists who are too soft to kill off all males in their immediate vicinity? Just humans, or all male gendered animals and plants? How can I tell which identical insects are the males?
Funfems are non-radicals.
1. If our entire species can only achieve true equality through extinction, I consider that to be a worthwhile sacrifice. Equality is the most important priority. All otherthings must be sacrififced for its sake.
2. I don’t believe that equalitty requires extinction. If genetic changes are needed in order to survive, we can simply modify everyone in an idwntical manner.
3. Ultimately, we must work toward sovial justicewith and within pther species. However, we must clean our own house first. To help others before being morally perfect yourslf is hypocrisy.
4. In many insect species, the females are the dominant oppressors. Social justice would demand ultimate erradication of the females rather than males in that case. Whoever is weakest is the one that deserves salvation. The others must pay in both loss of privilege and often in blood.
Maybe Four Sided should go away to some quiet deserted place and try reach moral perfection. Wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite, helping us before reaching perfection.
I see. In that case what so you do with the simultaneous hermaphrodites such as earthworms, snails, slugs etc?
I am also very curious as to how male insects are socially oppressed , if you would care to elaborate.
Yes they really should. What a tedious little waste of pixels the trollculus is, to be sure.
To the extent that such animals can be said to have sociak strutures, the males clearly take inferior roles. It’s not quite like patriarchy, but arthropods don’t exactly have the language or abstract concepts to grok such a thing. As for bermaphroditic species, that’s a marked improvement, but they still have sex, which is fundamentally oppressive, no matter how small your brain is. That would need to be eliminated eventually if we are to have a truly fair world.
I’m kind of afraid not, actually….
I posted as Four Sided Triangles for an extensive period of time on NationStates, another website filled with pseudo-leftists. There, I advocated for very similar positions as here. I am no troll.
Until your present third party evidence backing up your idiotic non-sequiturs, it is and will be considered trolling by an MRA fuckwit.
Third party evidence of what, exactly? I have made ethical claims, not positive claims. Ethical claims demand rational deductive proof, not empirical evidence.
I recall NationStates as being filled with neonazis, who are not leftists, pseudo or otherwise.
It’s solidly in the feel-good, inoffensive left nowadays. Much like this site, the people there lack the courage of their convictions. Not enough backbone for truly radical activism.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ohhh. You’re quite the idiot, to be sure.
Four Sided
Deductive proof is an oxymoron outside of mathematics and certain types of formal logic. Around these parts, ethical claims require some type of real-world grounding; if nothing else, a realistic estimation of the real-world effects of said ethic, and a determination of the feasibility and desirability of said effects. Your claims are absurd, internally contradictory and thus impossible to implement, and would result in utter catastrophe if anyone tried to follow through on them. Thus, you are rightfully dismissed as a troll, or alternately such a stupendous asshole of such surpassing ignorance that your actual beliefs are indistinguishable from a lesser asshole knowingly bullshitting in order to get a rise out of someone. Either way, you’re constitutionally incapable of contributing meaningfully to this or any conversation, and would do the world a favor by unplugging your computer, locking your door, and refraining from interacting with anyone. There’s a deposit on cans, there’s machines that take ’em and automatic checkout machines now; you could, in theory, live your life without ever inflicting your company on anyone ever again. I recommend it.
You’ve made the assumption of consequentialism. This is not a universal ethical philosophy and, in general is not a philosophy which is compatible with any concept of justice, social or otherwise. Justice is an intrinsically deontological concept, not a consequentialist one.
No, no, of course not, unlike yourself, who does have the spinal fortitude necessary to brag about infesting various fora, and trolling along. Truly radical, that, why you are a Cupcake to be reckoned with, oh my yes!
Hahahahahahahaha. Well, you are at least good for a laugh or three.
Dalillama, SG, beat me to it.
Word salad. Needs more reality.
That requires evidence in the form of a scanned photocopy, I’m afraid.
*in-joke*
Also, where have I engaged in self-contradiction? It is your pragmatic consequentialism which can be much more easilly be accused of inconsistency, as it is rarely derived from a fundamental set of axioms.
Deontology is word salad, apparently. Such a literate audience you’ve got here.
Bullshit. All ethical philosophies are consequentialist in practice. If you dispute this, provide me a rebuttal that does not, even implicitly, appeal to the alleged consequences of adopting consequentialist logic.
On the contrary; consequentialism requires a minimum of ONE axiom to establish “ought” reasoning, on top of those that are necessary to reason intelligently about what IS. Deontology must either be consequentialism in disguise or introduce a new axiom for every assertion.
I would say my commitment to equality for the sake of equality counts. I already said that I would be willing to make our specie go extinct for the sake of equality. I would say anyone who believes in punishment done for the sake of justice rather than for deterrence or rehabilition also counts.
I have one axiom, maximize equality.
Why is equality desirable, and why is what you propose deservingly called “equality?”
This ought to be a reality check, yes.
How does punishment establish justice?
You contradicted yourself one post ago. Also, you haven’t defended the claim that what you propose would serve or establish “equality” in a meaningful sense.
The nym is an homage to Dr. Ray, right?
I have to say that a used to have a friend, a woman, who called any man who didn’t want to “get it on” with her gay. She was the most predatory woman I ever encountered. A couple of the guys (straight, BTW) told me that she was scary.
I think equality is a fairly natural starting point. Almost all natural law is based on some knd of symmetry.
Classical Newtonian physics is based on Galilean invariance, that physical laws are the same in all inertial reference frames.
Special relativity is an extension to Galileann relativity which includes electromagnetic field theory in its set of invariant laws. This makes non-Euclidean but still flat manifold called space-time, which has invariance under a hyperboloid group of rotations known as the Lorentz group, which is just a different real sector of thr complex SO(4) Lie algebra. Combined with the four-dimensional Abelian Lie group, this gives the Poincaré group, the ten dimensional algebra of rotations, boosts, and space-time translations which expresses the full symmetry of flat space-time.
Electromagnetic theory, when expressed in terms of potentials contains ansymmetry known as a gauge invariance, a symmetry which appears due to redundant degrees of freedom.
General relativity contains a much, much larger symmetry than special relativity. In GR, the laws of physics are invariant in ALL referrence frames, not just inertial frames. This means that all physical quantities must be expressed as tensors living in the fiber over space-time. It also means that space-time coordinates exhibit their own MASSIVE gauge symmetry called diffeomorphism invariance.
Quantum theory extends symmetry even further by a unitary deformation of classical Poisson brackets. This means every state of any system with a symmetry must be an element of some unitary representation of the symmetry group.
Quantum field theory and particle physics allow you to pretty much write down the laws of physics (in the form of a Lagrangian density) once you decide which symmetries are exhibitted by the theory. This determines the entire theory up to certain undetermined arbitrary masses and coupling constants, which must be determined experimentally.
String theory, still hypothetical but the most promising theory of quantum gravity by a mile, extends symmetry even further. The worldsheet in bosonic string theory has conformal symmetry in addition to diffeomorphism invariance, leading to the Virasoro algebra and the Super-Virasoro algebra in bosonic and superstring theory, respectively.
As we probe deeper into the fundamental laws of nature (and also probability what witj the principle of indifference), more and more symmetry appears. It is pretty much impossible to overstate the importance of both exact and inexact symmetries when it cones to understanding how nature really works. This being the case, I simply reasoned that symmetry will do for ethics what it also does for physics. It’s a very natural starting point.
Damn touchscreen device makes it hard to type. I apologize for the egregious misspellings and other errors. I’m still waiting for my computer to be fixed and this device is a poor substitute.
Maureen Meyer @ 72:
Okay, so you knew a woman who was a right asshole. What’s the point here? I’m pretty sure that no one here would say that women aren’t capable of being assholes, or predatory, or PUAs.
Carlie:
We had at least better see that mensa card scan, why it means everything! :D
As for being famous, no. I’m well known on a number of DBs (or used to be), but that doesn’t make me famous. Doesn’t make our wishful Cupcake famous either.
Oh, I also made a slight simplification. All symmetries in quantum mechanics must be represented by either unitary or anti-unitary operations. In practice, only time-reversal, an inexact symmetry, has an anti-unitary representation. This is so that the energy spectrum remains bounded from below whem applying the operator.
Four Sided
If you ‘activism’ makes you sound like a genocidal maniac, maybe you are doing it wrong.
But what’s the point then of equality? You have made the concept of equality your god, and are willing to kill every living thing over it.
Citation seriously needed. And that technobabble word-salad that followed this sentence doesn’t count.
Troll or serious, you are one fucked up idiot either way.
Oh hey, we got a celebrity here. *wank wank*
Like in Harrison Bergeron?
Bwahahahaha! Congratulations on being kind of a big deal in your own imagination.
If you’re sincere, you’re sincerely messed up.
That was not tedhnobqbble, nor was it word salad. Everything I stated was factually accurate. Your complete illiteracy on matters of basic physics is not an argument to the contrary.
The Lorentz group is a sector of the complex SO(4) Lie group. So is the rotation group in four dimensions.
Galilean relativity is exhibitted by Newton’s laws of motion.
It is a well known theorem of quantum mechanics that all symmetries must have unitary or anti-unitary representation.
Canonical quantization literally replaces Poisson brackets with commutators and an additional factor of i times h-bar. That is a deformation of Hamilton’s mechanics and it’s one which makes generators Hermitian, which also makes the quantum analogue of canonical transformations unitary, since all unitary operators continuously connected to the identity are equivalent to an exponential of a Hermitian operator, a very well known fact from basic linear algebra.
What exactly did I say which was false?
Again, if you’re in favor of equality, why is your extermination proposal aimed at only men?
Proposing moral action based on technology which does not exist and might not exist ever puts you on the same level of Ayn Rand, that is, bullshit.
If you kill all humans, then there’s nobody else to BE equal. That’s not equality, it’s nihilism. It’s JRPG villain ethics.
You can find electromagnetic gauge invariance in any standard text on electromagnetism such as J.D. Jackson or Landau and Lifschitz.
The stuff about Poisson brackets will be found in any standard book on classical mechanics such as Goldstein.
The stuff I mentioned about unitary and anti-unitary representations is in any decent quantum field theory text. Itzykson Zuber, Weinberg, Peskin and Schroeder, take your pick. Also included in these books is information about more advanced gauge symmetries tha that exhibited by electromagnetism.
This stuff is all readily available.
I only mentioned my status of being known elsewhere so that you would have referrences to site in order to confirm that a Four Sided Triangles existed and that said individual did, in fact, advocate for nearly identical positions to those I advocate for here. It was meerly an attempt to correct mistaken accusations of trolling. I see that it failed to work on the logically deficient.
Good grief, its kooky theory day on pharyngula. Lets put foursided and James Kohl in a room together and have them battle it out for the title of author of the most ridiculous unsupported scientific model ever.
Quantum field theory selected epigenetic effects control species from yeast to humans.
It’s a proposal for focus on future technology. Elimination of males is nowhere near impossible. All it requires is artificial spermatozoa produced from tissue samples. From what I understand, artificial rat sperm has already been produced in the laboratory, though I may be mistaken about that. Nonetheless, this technology is not super advanced. It’s almost certainly coming soon anyway, though it will probably be used so that a lesbian couple may have a child that is biologically the offspring of both women. I’m simply advocating for a different use for this technology as soon as it becomes available.
Quantum field theory has very little to do withgenetics or epigenetics. At the level of chemistry, pretty much every process involves only S-matrix elements of QED, so the whole business with Feynman diagrams and the like can be safely ignored, with the possible exception of explaining a very small subset of mutations due to various forms of radiation.
Four Sided,
You are one hate filled kook. Seriously, you’ve got more hate than Snickers has nuts. On behalf of decent people, allow me to cordially invite you to fuck right off.
I’ve recited rather standard physics. Only my ethical philosophy is unconventional. How am I a kook? I don’t wish to kill males, just to phase them out by no longer making new ones. That’s the most humane form of extinction possible.
Four sided,
If someone wanted to eliminate all people of a certain sexual orientation or all people of a certain color by “extinction” would you be able to recognize that as hate or are you that far gone?
I’m not logically deficient, I just want to laugh at you.
CRANK FIGHT!
The rest of the babbling your doing? Yeah, it’s grade “A” kookiness and nothing more.
Just like your internet fame, your understanding of science and social justice are imaginary.
Rey Fox,
That would make for one funny Epic Rap Battle.
It would depend on the reasoning, and it would depend on how such an extermination was executed.
Would you eliminate all pedophiles if there existed a magic wand that could transform them all into people who had no desire to molest children? I’m sure that most people would. I certainly would. I would actually eliminate all sexual desire period using the same method. In fact, part of my humane path to a just world involves eliminating sexual desire.
He appears to be doing something at the level of paraphrasing Wikipedia articles to try to sound smart.
The physics I’ve recited is grade A kookiness? You really are a bunch of scientific illiterates aren’t you? Do you possess even the slightest understand of physics beyond the kindergarten level? You’ve never heard of Lagrangians? Commutators? Linear operators including unitary and Hermitian operators? Group theory? Pathetic.
I’m in graduate school. This really is basic stuff. If you don’t know it, you are scientifically illiterate.
Men =/= pedophiles.
Seriously, you can’t see what a hateful person you are?
So you hate sex and you’d take it away from people who do not want nor need it taken away and you think that is equality?
Thinking: you’re doing it wrong.
Feeling empathy for others: you aren’t doing it at all.
Some of us have terminal degrees in our fields of science, and years experience dealing with liars and bullshitters like yourself. Stop pretending you are smart. You aren’t.
Four Sided is definitely a kook. For instance check out one of their posts here at Ed’s blog.
Let us count the ways this is wrong. One- homosexuality and/or being asexual is a choice. Two- that any form of sexuality is morally superior. Three- Denial of the best form of pair-bonding for humans for some nonsensical version of equality.
Not all men are pedophiles but nearlya ll pedophiles are men. Nonetheless:
1. It’s called an analogy. Just as you would rid the world of all pedophiles without automtically being hateful, so too would I eliminate all males and all sexuality. Pedophiles can no more help being what they are than males.
2. I thought a basic tenet of social justice was that hatred against the dominant class is significantly more acceptable than hatred against oppressed classes. One tears down the privileged, and the other pushes the oppressed further down.
3. Empathy is overrated. Sociql policies transcend the human capacity for intuitive reasoning, so we must rely on reasoning alone. Empathy will simply cloud our ability to reason by introducing quasi-relevant concerns.
Four sided,
I’ve been around long enough to know that despite what they claim everyone on teh internets does not have a 12 in. cock, 180 IQ, a billionty dollars, a modeling career and a stack of PHDs. Pull the other one dear.
Clearly not terminal degrees in physics if you failed to recignize the things I wrote. Even undergraduates learn about Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, commutators, groups, and sometimes even Poisson brackets, which are often just an application of the chain rule for partial derivatives.
You rewlly should just talk to a physicist. There are at least some if them here, are there not? If you don’t accept my statements and you really don’t know this basic stuff, take it up with them.
Yeah, I’ll get right on taking you seriously. You wait here and hold your breath.
Dear Four Sided,
Empathy is the entire basis for social justice you numpty-headed kook. Your lack of empathy makes you part of the problem that social justice is trying to stop. Your call for the genocide of men makes you an enemy of social justice. As someone who actually has empathy, I wouldn’t even want to kill off pedophiles as I still recognize their humanity. This doesnt mean I think they should be allowed to rape children, just that calls for extermination are the province of tyrants, madmen and psychopaths.
You’re seriously going to dismiss mainstream physics because the person spouting it happens to also hold opinions you find loathsome? Genetic fallacy much?
Four Sided, what is your take on nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled amino acid substitutions?
No, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
I don’t need to talk to a physicist to know that quantum mechanics is not social science, not is it applicable to social science. So foursided can yammer on about their supposed intellectual superiority all ze wants, I will continue to disregard the opinions of anyone who thinks sex is bad and males should be exterminated.
In the context of epigenetics?
Social science is a renormalization of quantum mechanics.
I fully believe four-sided is a grad student. Look at all those misspellings, grammatical errors, and quantum buzzwords! No one but a grad student can type that much bullshit and actually expect anyone to consider it worthwhile.
No, it isn’t.
Sure why not.
Tethys:
You can toss one Danny C into the mix too, a 20 year old maundering on about the moral implications of abortion, the rights of a fetus and so forth. I’m starting to think something got in the water all over, not just West Virginia.
Back on topic, we had a ‘wytch’ something or other here at one time, who linked to a long post about the annihilation of all men.
It’s interesting research, but I fail to see the relevance here.
Oooer, maybe we can go back to discussing the fascinating subject of Quantumn Tomatoes again!
Most of the words the local kook is using actually mean something in physics terminology, yes. However, I’ve seen no evidence they have more than a superficial understanding of them, since all they’re doing is a clumsy sort of name-dropping.
No, it isn’t.
I cannot Crtl+F. Where on that page are quantum tomatoes talked about and just what the hell is a quantum tomato?
Someone’s been hanging out with Deepak Choptra. QUANTUM!
Confession time. This has been a manipulative and ethically questionable social experiment at your expense.
1. Politically, I would describe myself as a libertarian socialist. For you Americans, this has nothing to do with Ayn Rand, Milton Friedmann, or Penn Jillette. It actually means I’m in the anti-authoritarian wing of the left, more Noam Chomsky than Marx.
2. At least, that’s what I would be if I weren’t so cynical. I’m convinced that there’s no hope for any real progress in humanity. The modern left is more interested in the diversification of the ruling class than they are in abolishing any rulers to hegin with. While more black, gay, and female CEO’s is a slight improvement over present conditions, it’s still stuck in the same bullshit system of class hierarchy. I also hate that the left wing is often preoccupied with what I find to be an overly simplistic sociology based on critical theory. Even ‘intersectional’ theories have a semblance of some black and white thinking in them.
3. Due to a combination of compassion fatigue, disillusionment with the modern left, and a consistently shrinking faith in humanity, I’ve become extremeky cynical and nihilistic. I’m much more interested in destroying other people’s naive idealism than I am in actually pushing for progress. I don’t believe real progress is possible and I don’t believe we deserve to experience it even if it is. Fuck us all.
4. I actually am a physicist, and nearly everything I said that was purely physics related was completely correct. I wanted to prove that so callec rationalists would be dismissive and resort to logical fallacies so I deliberately peppered my posts with both completely correct (but extremely dense and hyper-technical) physics and completely absurd nonsensical political theories that don’t actually logically follow from physics at all. I wanted to see if you would dismiss everything I said simply through guilt by association. Congratulations, you failed this little test.
5. The political absurdities I spouted, which make Harrisin Bergeron seem like a sane world, were essentially an absurdlyextreme versio of authoritarian leftism. I percieve this board to be part of the authoritarian left, at least from the perspective of a bitter anarcho-socialist. Thus, I thought it would be funny to take your own logic far beyond the bounds of reason in irder to demonstrate 2 things. First, that Poe’s law is true. No position is so absurd that it couldn’t possibly have any advocates. Two, I wished to see what would happen when someone took standard social justice talking points and juxtaposed them with asinine horseshit. You actually weren’t fooled too much by this. Good job.
6. As one final FYI, I am a gay male. It was fun to argue my superiority over heterosexuals as a kind of self-evidently silly turnabout, but I don’t actuwlly believe any of it. As a gay male, I’m unsure of where I fit in your hierarchy. By intersectionality, I am oppressor and oppressed. Am I good or am I evil?
Oh, and if you don’t appreciate being the victims of my little experiment, feel free to ban me. I doubt you’d get along with the real me any more than the insane charicature. You people still believe in things, so I doubt you’d enjoy the company of a curmudgeonly cynic.
[Happy to oblige. You’re banned. Oh, and by the way, fuck you, asshole. –pzm]
Four Sided has obviously not seen Jurrasic Park.
Oh, and I am normally an excellent typist. However my computer broke down and I have to type on this mobile device. It makes typing very difficult and tedious, and it makes edits for typos and misspellings almost impossible.
You’d create a society where any deviation from the “norm” would be punished by extensive psychological, behavioural, physiological and/or genetic modification. There would be entire classes of individuals who would be systematically discriminated against based on factors often beyond their control. That’s nowhere near “equality”.
In fact, it’s just another version of today’s society, where anyone who deviates from the “norm” (white male heterosexual theist etc etc) suffers discrimination, exploitation and violence.
Last time I looked, Chomsky was strongly anti-genocide. Perhaps you should rethink your intellectual and moral relationship to him.
Damn, we got us a real nihilist here. He’s come to preach the gospel of “I don’t give a fuck and you shouldn’t either” at us.
You forgot a third possibility: “Am I a fuckwit?”
I’m no MRA either. MRA’s are usually sexually frustrared, fat, unnattractive autistic losers with no job, minimal education, and very few future prospects. Because women tend to chose to have sex with better male specimens than fat jobless spergs, the manchildren become sexually frustrated. They take out this sexual frustration on women because they have no other outlet. The only other MRA’s you find are usually bitter divorcees from terrible marriages that have a very biased perspective due to their unusual circumstances. All in all, I’m not interested in joining them, especially since sex with wome really isn’t my thing.
Four Sided
That’s not a ‘social experiment’ that’s ‘trolling’. You may recall that a number of us pointed out initially that you were probably trolling, and you denied it, only to come back later and admit to it. You are correct that we do not like you, because trolling is an asshole thing to do, and you’ve admitted that you’re proud to be an asshole. Your vaunted cynicism will get you nowhere among the devoted curmudgeons of this site (of whom I am one), nor will you impress us by name-dropping a few socialists and anarchists. If you understood even a little bit of the philosophy you now claim, you would recognize that many of us are anarchists, communists, and socialists of long standing (a few even have it in their ‘nyms!) Your pathetic attempt to accuse us of authoritarianism is far from original, and you still haven’t demonstrated any capacity to contribute to a conversation. My previous advice stands.
Four sided,
Go get a fucking hobby you tiresome, lying, troll.
I’m also anti-genocide. It was a joke at your expense because I wanted to prove a few points, mostly to myself.
If you get banned Four Sided it won’t be because you’re a curmudgeonly cynic, there are plenty of those about.
Commenting Rules
Have fun with your vast superiority; may it fill you with joys beyond reckoning.
Critical theory is pretty much inherently authoritarian. Almost all of you heavilly borrow from it. Your claims to be anarchist are questionable, technically possible, but definitely highly questionable.
You assume I care about being banned. I planned this entire thing taking into account that I would almost certainly be banned. I’m an asshole, not a moron.
No, Four Sided, the “joke” was entirely at your expense. The person you made look the fool was you. Now take your jingly hat and rubber chicken and be on your way.
Don’t be modest, Four Sided. You’re both.
Also, who said trolling couldn’t be an experiment? I’ve seen plenty of trolling done to achieve more than lulz.
Fuck off with the ableist slurs.
But by all means, keep on. Your “Banned from Pharyngula.” merit badge is almost within your grasp. I’m sure it will be worth it.
Nobody here dismissed the physics as physics, you narcissistic little fuckwit. They were simply laughing at the feeble attempt to tie the physics to your “political theories.”
Not in evidence.
To the extent that name-dropping can be “correct.”
What you proved was that people with a functioning sense of pattern recognition who’ve been subjected to a history of shit-for-brains attempting to shield themselves from criticizing by pretending to have a higher intelligence or greater learning than those responding to them will respond to the pattern they recognize. This should surprise no one with functional critical thinking skills.
Dear Troll,
I see I was right in my summation. You are a fuckwit. You came here advocating killing half the world’s human population. You tossed scientism jargon at us. Now you’re admitting you were trolling us as a “scientific experiment” after first denying you were a troll. Your last shot was accusing us of being authoritarian because…well, just because. Before you go to bask in the glory you deserve for successfully trolling a blog, I ask you to do us one minor favor. Would you please fuck off.
I have problems with mental illness, including mild autism and a rather heavy case of OCD and generalized anxiety disorder, all of which were clinically diagnosed and all of which are medicicated. I’m on a heavy script of anxiety pills. I call them my ‘crazy pills’ because I can’t control my emotions without them. By your own theories, I can use slurs aginst those groups, just like I can say ‘fag’ and most of you here cannot.
*snicker* what an incompetent troll.
Oh, and sociology better be a renormalization of quantum mechanics on some level, or else it’s bullshit. Anything which is valid at a higher level must somehow flow from a lower level.
This ‘incompetent’ troll is certainly getting a large number of replies, is he not?
The genetic fallacy is okay when we do it because pattern recognition!
Read for comprehension this time.
No, asshole, you cannot use bigoted slurs against anyone, even groups of which you are a member. First of all, since you’re a proven liar then we can doubt whether you’re autistic, gay, or anything else. Second, you haven’t established a rapport with this group which would allow you to be self-depreciating by making slurs. In short, all we know about you is you’re a lying troll. Calling yourself a liar or a troll are not slurs against anyone other than yourself.
I did. You’re so used to bullshit that you automatically assume anything someone says must be wrong or crazy if they happen to espouse certain absurd positions. You’re justifying hair-trigger dismissal becausenactually evaluating each individual claim made by a person is too hard. You know, I admire laziness, but only in people who proudly admit to it.
Jebus. What a flaming ass. Four Sided has been banned.
Having taken a look at what renormalization is, I can confidently say that Four Sided is using it wrong in reference to sociology. Its only application is in quantum field theory.
146
This blog feeds the trolls till they explode or get banhammered. Also that is quite a childish thing to say, “im getting attention, even though it will make me look like a 3 year old and call into question my level of maturity.”
Dammit, refresh before submitting, refresh before submitting. I will remember to do that.
Nobody claimed the physics were wrong. The claim was they were irrelevant.
Then there was the whole “according to your theories I should be able to use slurs against groups to which I belong” despite FossilFishy’s convenient post at #133 with “you will be banned if you use bigoted slurs” clear as day.
Dude wanted SO BADLY to prove his libertarian superiority he just couldn’t read for comprehension.
Oh well. Another day, another douchecake.
That last paragraph bolded itself, I swear.
My favourite part was in #150 where xe derides, er, someone, for automatic assumptions and yet just eleven minutes earlier xe made an automatic assumption about my beliefs. ‘Tis to laugh.
Well.
That was interesting.
(I missed the whole thing)
That was mildly entertaining. Person thinks we are lefto-femino-totalitarians. Tries to bait commenters into agreeing with him. Fails. Tries to get people to agree with him that MRAs are {bunch of bigotry he spewed}. Fails. Claims to have uncovered something.
… what the fuck did I just read?
Stacy
I have had that happen, for reasons I cannot discern.
Jacob:
Did you read this thread for the first time too?
Wow.
That was some weapons grade fuckwittery.
Caine’s right. There’s something in the water tonight.
This was innovative, I have to give him that.
He does lose points for sticking around for so long after making his grand confession. I would possibly even use the word impressive if that had been his last comment.
What the fuck was that all about? o_O
when I was a kid the neighbors had a small poodle that would go nuts every once in awhile and run around and round and bark at nothing for half a day just like that.
uncle frogy
If I ever find myself in the company of Prof. Myers I’m going to interrogate him about this ‘penile lens’, it sounds quite intriguing.
That was strange. I mean, I read a lot of kookery, but this was the first time in a long time I felt like my eyes are going to implode from disbelievent that what they see is real.
I wish to ad, that I find really, really repulsive the idea of “trolling as experiment”. It is not an “experiment” in any meaningfull sense of the word, and certainly not in scientific sense. It is invariably sociopathic messing around and taking perverse pleasure at the created mess.
Second flaming asshole in just a few days. Thy must have a nest somewhere around and maybe this is their breeding season.
PZ needs to market a “Banned from Pharyngula:” button, he’d make a fortune. Not because he’s quick to ban people, but because so many of these idiots have shown up over the years, doing their best to get banned as quickly as possible.
What the fuck?
I…
I’ve got nothing.
Pardon me, I’m going to go sit in the corner, put my underpants on my head, and say “wibble.”
I
In order to show people are vulnerable to guilt by association, you say on-topic things that are true, and associate them with untrue but unrelated statements. Saying complete nonsense about the actual topic of discussion while inserting true but unrelated statements in the middle only shows that people here are unlikely to care about the truth value of non-sequiturs.
Sigh. It still impresses me how some people still think the whole Social Experiment angle is a novel and amazing approach to trollery.
??? Physics non-sequiturs, confessed trolling, eugenics. Ah, some sort of libertarian? It all makes sense.
What was his plan? To show that people get upset when you shit on their floor?
I’m reminded of an old livejournal community that skewered fannish idiocy. There they rankled someone for some reason and that person responded by creating an account called “Thisiswar” explaining that he was totes serious about fighting a war. He explained his terms thusly: Any person who complained had been “Killed in battle” and if he was banned from the community he had “Won the war”. Surprise surprise, going around being intentionally obnoxious and hateful got this person banned. Mission Accomplished! I had never really got what motivated “Thisiswar” or what they intended to accomplish, but it appears from Four-Sided has the same tiny power-trip fantasy.
I get the same feeling here from Four-Sided: They’re “Fighting a battle” or “conducting an experiment” or “testing a theory” where they’ve rigged the results. There was no response that we could contrive that Four-Sided would consider adequate or intelligent or worthy of respect. They rigged this “contest” so that they could be proud of how much smarter they are than us. The whole point I think was just to feel smug, showing up us philistines with their smartyness. Honestly the first thing that comes to me is pity: How sad is it that you have to resort to such distorted, dishonest, and petty means to feel good?
Wow, the thread over at HNPfM is a lot of fun. You have MRAs being idiots, someone called Lucy who, though they have not self-described as such, appears to be a RadFem who subscribes to gender essentialism; and even an MRA suggesting to a self-professed pro-feminist gay man that he is only gay because he spends so much time with feminists. Stupidity abounds.
oolon @ 21:
@PZ, you don’t have everything in common since his article was also about the TERfs calling him a “tranny chaser” due to his criticism of Brennan et al…. Here is your chance – this petition is off to the SPLC any day now. Nearly 7K signatures, blog about it and get Brennan’s bigoted pals annoyed!
I’m not entirely sure that I agree with this petition. It would only further the illusion that the SPLC is a valuable resource in the fight against hate, rather than an organization that does nothing but solicit donations in order to fund their efforts to solicit more donations. It’s basically the biggest direct mail marketing scam in the ‘nonprofit’ sector. This has been known about for quite some time, but still people of goodwill are suckered by their aggressive self-promotion. And on a practical matter, since making money is all that matters to the SPLC hierarchy, they don’t do anything that would jeopardize their cash flow like standing up for a highly marginalized and disliked community like trans people or standing up against the increasing racist tone of political discourse. Instead, they do little that doesn’t require more than turning on their computers and browsing a few well-known hate sites or acting as a filter for government propaganda. Then they write that up into their well-known newsletter and send it out with a message about how only further donations are all that stands between us and the KKK marching in the streets again.
I’d advise everyone to not give them the oxygen of treating them as a credible organization, but if you must do so, don’t pin your hopes on the SPLC daring to take a stand on anything other than a safe issue. And if you want to donate, give it to the Southern Center for Human Rights, which actually does useful things like represent nonwhites in death penalty cases.
Or SONG. They truly rock.
Riffing on Four Sided:
Um, doesn’t that sort of follow from the definition of absurd?
Stupid troll is stupid.
Re: Four-Sided …
As bitter as a new lemon.
That is all.