Dan Fincke shared this article (not as an endorsement by him) and I found it both interesting and troubling.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/ (TW: contains some examples of racism and slurs against women. Also, I quote some of these below.)
You should give it a read because it's long and I'm going to try to be a little sparing with the quotes. There are also some good points in there (at the beginning, mostly.)
(You do not need to read but he also links to this old Livejournal post, The Sixth Meditation on Superweapons which makes it clear that this "superweapon" concept is something he's been working with for a while. It seems that not all of those posts are available publicly right now, but you can find what he has on LJ with this quick google. Eighth and Ninth mediations are here. The thing most glaring to me about these posts is that he doesn't grok feminism and it seems like that's what this whole superweapons thing is really motivated by. I will try to focus on the main post, but I think the subtext here is "Not All Men Are Like That, generalized and in 1000 words or more", so I'm going to address that as well.)
The author, Alexander, breaks his piece down into sections. I don't yet have much to say about section I. It's an example of people talking past each other in an argument that is related to group identity.
In section II, Alexander talks about the weak-man fallacy (similar to straw-man) which he defines as:
"The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat."
Love it. Great definition, and a real problem that is prevalent in many conversations. Alexander then goes on to describe criticisms which, at least at a literal level, are only attacking the people who actually hold the minority (weak-man) position being criticized, but which are written to imply that there is a problem with the entire group, and not just the sub-group being specifically criticized. Things like:
“I hate atheists who think morality is relative, and that this gives
them the right to murder however many people stand between them and a
world where no one is allowed to believe in God”.
In section III he talks about how these statements "re-center" a category. I like this, too.
Section IV goes on to talk about how this re-centering causes the group to be less trusted and may "inoculate" the listener against trusting that group so that the listener cannot seriously and fairly consider the defamed group's more defensible positions. That's all good, too. At the end of section IV he says this:
"Likewise, when a religious person attacks atheists who are moral
relativists, or communists, or murderers, then all atheists have to band
together to stop it somehow or they will have successfully poisoned
people against atheism."
That sound you hear is mental tires screeching. I'm just going to leave aside the complexity of moral relativism or communism and address the murderers, because his point is not about the specific problems. It's about circling the wagons to defend people who share a group identity with you
no matter what they have done wrong.
1) Defending murder or other unethical behavior in an attempt to protect a group identity is wrong.
2) Defending murder or other unethical behavior because of a shared identity with the perpetrator actually hurts the image of the group rather than helps it.
3) His framing implies a false choice between defending the larger group or not defending the larger group. The correct response is to condemn the murderer and if someone is unfairly linking murderous behavior to the group identity of atheism, address that fallacious link directly. Alexander's framing will exclude the possibility of this 3rd option over and over, and I won't beat it to death each time.
In section V, Alexander uses a story about a hypothetical future czarist Russia to show how a lot of literally correct criticisms like those in section II can be part of a campaign to marginalize a group: Jews, in this example. I think the important thing to notice here is that sometimes an otherwise fair criticism calls attention to group identity or makes it prominent in such a way as to make that a slander against the group as a whole. This is really obvious in:
"The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy."
because the real problem is greedy bankers, regardless of their religious group identity. This statement carries an implied "...and this is reason number N why you should hate Jewish people." This is discernible to most of us, I think.
It may be less obvious in:
"A Jew killed a Christian kid today."
until you realize that there are lots of ways to communicate the event without choosing religious identity as noteworthy. "Child murdered." "8-year old killed by complete stranger." "Teacher murders student." The original sentence carries an implication that these religious identities are important enough to take up valuable space in the event summary, that perhaps the child was killed because she was Christian, and that the murderer did it because she was Jewish. The in-group listener is intended to hear "You should be afraid of those out-group people murdering your children." If the group identities are not actually relevant then the implication is deeply unfair, and becomes an implied attack on the Jewish group identity.
So:
1) Alexander seems to be arguing that statements which are not individually problematic enough to challenge lead to a "memeplex" that is a serious threat to a particular group. I think the individual statements used in this example (and his others) are indeed problematic enough to criticize. He seems to have noticed this in section II:
"What are the chances a black guy reads that and says “Well, good thing I’m not a thug who robs people, he’ll probably love me”?
but does not seem to have identified the problem with the statements with enough clarity to move from simply being uncomfortable to pointing at why there is cause for concern. I hope this helps him clarify that. (Sincerely, I do. I think this alone untangles much of what he is getting wrong here.) Major points of the post rest on the false equivalence between criticisms that have this problem and criticisms that do not.
2) In the example he gives, the Jews are a vulnerable minority with something to fear from a majority that is clearly racist against them. This power dynamic is critical to why the example is so chilling, and is one of the main reasons why some of the comparisons Alexander is about to make will not be valid. They are living in a system that has it out for them. They are oppressed. Another group has disproportionate power over their group, over their safety, over their well-being.
Section VI. He applies this to feminism, and seems to draw an equivalence between what feminists say and what MRAs say. I will return to this last because I think criticizing the arguments of feminism is his real point.
Section VII is an example of someone who is personally persecuted by Westboro Baptist Church and saying:
"People! We really need to do something about this Westboro Baptist Church! They’re horrible people!"
and then religious people shout this person down by saying they don't want to be lumped in with WBC. This is intended to represent the other balancing concern, that people with real things to criticize may be silenced by a group that feels attacked. Notably, the criticism in this example doesn't generalize at all so it's just bizarro land that these fictional religious folks are so offended by the criticism of WBC.
"Atheists who talk about the Westboro Baptist Church may be genuinely
concerned about the Westboro Baptist Church. Or they may be unfairly
trying to tar all religious people with that brush."
And you can tell which by reading what they wrote and checking it for unfair implications against all religious people. This isn't going to be on the next episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
"Religious people have to fight back, even though the Westboro Baptists
don’t deserve their support, because otherwise the atheists will have a
superweapon against them. Thus, a stupid fight between atheists who
don’t care about Westboro and religious people who don’t support them."
I'm not going to beat that dead horse. I swear I'm not.
In section VIII the dead horse continues unbeaten. Alexander talks about group identity and then brings us back to the example in section I. Most notably:
"Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused
Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw
no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful
self-diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along."
This is the concluding paragraph, and I think it's worrisome that Alexander ends on this note. No solution is actually proposed for the general case. Should we not criticize anything that isn't a group-wide problem? Are we supposed to pretend that groups do not exist? Should we all just pick a group, circle the wagons, and see who is left standing? When the dust settles and our group is victorious, what shall we do with all the awful people in our group identity that we "had to defend"?
As best as I can tell, and I am basing this in part on his other LJ posts on the topic, Alexander's real point here is that feminism should not be criticizing men who do X because that is a weak-man argument and a Very Unfair Superweapon. So basically, this seems to be a very elaborate Not All Men. I won't untangle that here, it's been done elsewhere.
Notably some criticisms such as "Sure, white men–you were brought up to
feel entitled to anything you wanted..." are fairly assigned to a group
identity. That behavior is a direct result of how white men are
socialized, and there is no effective way to talk about the problem
without talking about the group identity that it is fairly associated
with. The greedy Jewish banker is probably still greedy if you remove
the Jewish identity, but the entitled man is probably not still acting
entitled in those ways if you remove the male identity. Mentioning the
group identity is not an attempt at defamation here as it was in "Jew murders Christian child.", it is pointing at a
relevant or central detail.
I don't even know where to start
with his point that some MRAs being willing to acknowledge that not all
women are "skanks, attention whores or predators." This isn't an
example of someone noticing that a truth about members of a group is not
true about all members of the group. It is a slur used to injure
members of the group that they do not approve of, and to threaten the
rest if they step out of line.
I also want to talk about why men are not Jews living under hypothetical future czarist Russia.
In the general case of men being criticized for X by feminism:
1) Men are in a position of power and privilege in our society (I am speaking as an American here.)
2) Men are not an oppressed, vulnerable group.
3) Usually, X is not being criticized in an attempt to defame men, as it was in the Jewish example, it is being criticized in an attempt to address an injustice, as it was in the WBC example. There do exist feminists who speak about men in general in unfair and malicious ways, but I am not going to allow the conversation to re-center feminism around them because that is not the norm.
4) Men often feel defensive when they hear these criticisms. (And please note that I didn't need to say "some men" but you still probably understood that it was implied.) I certainly did for a long time, and then I realized that it wasn't useful or justified. I started really listening and figured out that my feelings were being hurt by things that
hadn't actually been said or implied. And I was doing this because I had pre-conceived notions that feminism was going to be hostile to me as a man. Apprehension was overriding comprehension. Here is a quote from his Sixth Meditation:
"Sometimes I read feminist blogs. A common experience is that by the end
of the article I am enraged and want to make a snarky comment, so I
re-read the essay to pick out the juiciest quotes to tear apart. I
re-read it and I re-read it again and eventually I find that everything
it says is both factually true and morally unobjectionable. They very
rarely say anything silly like "And therefore all men, even the ones who
aren't actively committing this offense I'm arguing against, are evil",
and it's usually not even particularly implied. I feel like the Jew in
the story above, who admits that it's really bad the Jewish guy killed
the Christian child, and would hate to say, like a jerk, that Christians
aren't allowed to talk about it."
If it's factually true, morally unobjectionable, and doesn't contain unfair implications, then maybe your feeling of defensiveness is unjustified. The comparison to the Jew in your parable is false, because the evilness
of the Jewish identity in that parable was strongly implied and you've acknowledged that this wasn't the case here.
Maybe, just maybe, you're experiencing an inoculation effect against feminism. I certainly was. But yeah, weak-man arguments negatively re-center perception of a group, and this is bad.
