Factions, inequality, and social justice

Do you have any links? None of the first few Google hits for "gender egalitarianism", at a first glance, look like that.

I'd go with “anti-sexism”. No, wait... That might sound like I'm in favour of sexual abstinence. “Anti-genderism”?

(Belated edit: looks like the word we're looking for is “sex-blindness”.)

What was the proportion of sane feminists in those days when the feminism was new?

I am not asking how many sane women agreed with the proposed women rights, but what kind of women was the first to publicly self-identify with the label, and do something that drew attention to them.

Looking at the Wikipedia article on "Suffragette", I read about "setting fire to mailbox contents, smashing windows and occasionally detonating bombs". Imagine what would be the public opinion about MRA movement if the first MRAs did this, if merely expressing their opinions impolitely on internet is enough to label them as insane.

Most sane men do not join MRA movement because, honestly, most men don't give a shit about other men in general. We often see each other as competitors, and we focus on our jobs and families, and a few friends. A man usually becomes a MRA activist when something bad happens to him personally. Now of course such person is extremely prone to mindkilling; that should not be surprising.

There were feminists who said that all men are rapists, or that in a perfect world 90% of men would disappear from the planet... and they are still considered a legitimate part of the movement which is supposedly not against men, but for fairness, equality, and everything good. And if you see something suspicious about this, and you have a penis, then your opinion is irrelevant, because you have this brain disorder called "privilege" which makes everything you say automatically wrong.

To avoid misunderstanding: I think that many things said by many MRAs are stupid, and I disagree with them. I just disagree that it makes MRA movement worse than a feminist movement, because the feminist movement also contains different opinions and crazy people. New movement is more attractive for extreme people, later it becomes more known and accepted by moderate people, and I think this is enough to explain the higher ratio of crazy people in the MRA movement today.

nd that that might have contributed to people misunderstanding what (‘sane’) feminists are about.

That and sane people in general speaking less hysterically and drawing less attention than insane people.

Yeah. That place just went to hell (although it seems like everybody I consider an ally is Not Daring To Urge Constraint).

I spoke too soon. I've been seeing plenty of mind-killed people on the GMP lately.

I just looked at a few comments on the two sites you linked (never having visited either before) and I couldn't tell the difference. I'm not sure what you intended to say by comparing them.

Since when are "No Seriously, What About teh Menz?", and "The Good Men Project" MRA sites?

I believe those are the sites where I learned about men's rights issues such as male rape, child custody, etc, so I put them under the MRA umbrella, though they may not identify themselves that way (probably due to not wanting to be tarred with the same brush as the insanity)

If you DON'T think that those sites are MRA, then I would update towards ALL MRA to be of the insane kind, since those sites are the only ones I've seen on that side that I consider to be sane. (Though I welcome links to the contrary)

That was my first thought as well. I like both projects a lot, but I wouldn't have placed them in the MRA sphere.

In my view, these are not MRA issues. These are feminist issues. There doesn't need to be a "Men's Rights Movement"; because men's rights should be an inherent component of the feminist perspective, which is that femininity should be nurtured and encouraged instead of being stamped out. Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.

Personally, I think the idea that being nurturing, compassionate, and socially conscious, are inherently feminine and thus the natural province of feminism, is just as unreasonable and offensive as saying that courage and proactiveness are inherently masculine and therefore causes like getting more women involved in the military or police work are naturally not the province of feminism.

I would agree that there was no need for a Men's Rights Movement if there were a Gender Egalitarianism Movement that reliably functioned as such, but feminists do not reliably support addressing all issues of gender inequality. I think most people would agree that women are, on net, more societally disadvantaged than men, but from this, many feminists conclude "therefore, bias and discrimination faced by men is not an important problem to deal with now," whereas I think that a more appropriate Gender Egalitarianism Movement would take the position "we should address issues of bias and discrimination in order of the importance of the specific issues and the return on the investment in addressing them, not on the basis of which gender is more disadvantaged."

I may identify myself as a Feminist rather than a Gender Egalitarian depending on what connotations I feel will be advantageous in a particular discussion, but I'd sooner get behind an argument that with a proper Gender Egalitarian Movement, there is no need for Feminism, than one that with a proper Feminist Movement, there's no need for a Men's Rights Movement.

Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.

I can see where you're coming from here, but I think that the work should instead be put into broadening masculinity. To make a loaded analogy, saying "it's okay for boys to act feminine" when they want to do something traditionally female is like saying "it's okay for black people to act white" when they want to do something traditionally european. You can define the words so that the sentence parses, but you can't remove the additional meaning to make the sentence a good idea.

Besides, it's fine to use different words to describe people focused on different things, even if they use the same toolbox.

Once you describe "feminine" as "nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious" and define feminism as a movement to protect all things feminine, I think you have gone far beyond what most people mean by either word.

Using feminism to refer to issue's of men's rights is like using the phrase white power to refer to issue's about african american rights. Whatever argument you then make about broadening the meaning of the term is obviously and instantly undermined by the linguistic problems present.

Also: a LOT of people use feminism to mean "more rights for women and who cares about men?". Your more broad species of feminism is inclusive almost to the point of being meaningless. It's like using the word feminism to mean "good".

The validity of the argument depends on context. Sometimes it is: "sorry, I can't help you now, because all my resources go to higher-priority cases". Sometimes it is: "meh, I don't care... but I can use a comparison with this other case (that I am not really contributing to) to make you seem pathetic".

In other words, if someone says: "I don't care about your problems, the children in Africa have it worse", and the person does contribute to a charity for African children, then the response is valid (although we could discuss the optimum way to say the same message).

If someone says: "I don't care about your problems, the children in Africa have it worse", and the person does nothing to help children in Africa (or anyone else), then it's just a convenient excuse and a move to gain relative status at the other person's expense.

Forgive me, but I actually think there's a somewhat valid argument to be made along these lines.

Of course it is. But so is "children in Africa have it really bad, so why are you bothering to buy Christmas presents instead of helping them?"

Unfortunately, past a certain point it just comes down to "hey, can we try being less of a dick to each other all the time?", which everyone can agree with but which no one actually seems to be able to resolve into actual strategy.

Another option for A, if they have superhuman levels of compassion and understanding, would be to say something to C and D along the lines of "yeah, that sucks too. Is there anything I can do to help you with that?"

Sure, but when A is expressing frustration specifically because they're feeling their compassion and understanding breaking down, what then? We're all human, and we all need help and forgiveness sometimes.

The initial framing might also be a target: for example, A could give a specific story about a time they felt their desires and feelings weren't being respected and focus on how much it sucks rather than getting others to change right off the bat. (Hopefully triggering empathetic cooperative behavior rather than zero-sum resource scrambling. Might require superhuman patience and restraint.)

It often does, especially when A is describing processes that lead B, C and D to consider A as socially worthless. That's a big part of the problem - we tend to not even bother thinking about whether A has a point if we don't like A or need something from A to begin with.

Regarding derailing and misery poker being deliberate: I'd be interested to hear what you think of Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?.

I think it's an incredibly accurate assessment of the situation, which just redoubles the tragedy. Even people who deliberately play misery poker and who deliberately derail aren't doing it out of abject evil, they're doing it because they're part of a process that finds their actions advantageous.

I have a hard time calling people 'evil' simply because I tend to not see people as experiencing much agency in their lives.

Political empathy is hard, and the principles motivating a particular ideology - especially if the LW consensus that we underestimate individual variance in thinking styles is correct - can be frequently nonobvious. Factors exacerbating this include that persuasion of the uncommitted often proceeds "cynically," along appeal to values held by centers rather than tails, and that people seem predisposed to constructing the image of the enemy as a photo negative of themselves (or elsewise just incoherent and insane.)

Oftentimes, sea shifts in social values are driven by (as a necessary but insufficient condition) a disciplined ideological core with a coherent set of principles - consider feminism or what would be called neoliberalism. When successful such movements tend to be much more successful at popularizing object-level intuitions (even when grouped under vague headers like "freedom") than the framework that motivates them.

I suppose this is a bit of a sideline, but I was only able to identify Harrison Bergeron (the book; I haven't seen the movie) as satire by placing it in the context of Kurt Vonnegut's other works. It can be read as sincere on its own, if more than a bit heavy-handed.

Why should height not fall into a socially contestible form of power?

Well, there haven't been many situations where one's height was used as a basis for oppression. There may be some positive discrimination around height, inasmuch as height often correlates with other benefits -- but it's difficult to separate out all the confounds, and the biggest negative factor influencing it is simply health and adequate nutrition during childhood, which is so important that average adult height is used to calibrate standard-of-living and quality-of-life estimates. (While genetics can have major influence on height for individuals, it's also subject to regression toward the mean, resulting in it being a minor influence when taken statistically -- hormones are the other major, contributing biological factor). Basically, things have to be pretty bad somewhere, for populations to get strongly sorted out from each other by height. If you're on the negative end of an ingroup/outgroup height gap, you probably have bigger problems.

Put another way: nobody decided your name sounded too tall and refused to call you back for an interview, or invaded your country intending to civilize the shorties, because the variance on height is pretty continuous in most populations and the positive discrimination associated it does not form a clear signal disentangled from other life factors.

then the continuous nature of traits like height shouldn't be much of a barrier to being concerned about it.

Indeed. Parts of the internet divide people (at least men) by height with words like "manlet", and specific numbers for the cutoff.

I'm not sure if this goes for or against the hypothesis though.

I was thinking further on this topic after reading your post, and I noticed something about the main post that I wanted to consider.

There are complaints like "Those people don't add any value, and they can still get money! I have to WORK for a living!" That richer people will throw at poorer people, (Because they are able to live on government subsidies.) and that poorer people throw at richer people (Because they are able to live on the wealth of their investments.)

It seems like a lot of the phrasing for acceptable wealth or income (in)equality arguments relies on being able to cast your opponents as being lazy. The rhetoric that I have heard doesn't usually include complaints about the people who work 80 hour days, whether those people hold 3 minimum wage jobs, or whether they work long hours at a business making millions.

If you do think "Well, Bob works just as hard as I do at his middle class job, but Bob has a Mercedes. Fucking Bob. I want his Mercedes!" That seems to be portrayed much less acceptably.

This makes me wonder if I should try to say something about "Effort inequality."(?) Except I'm not sure where to start or even if it really relates to the other inequalities.

the paper bag test

A test that I would likely pass in February but not in September. (Also, what part of your skin do they compare with the bag? The back of my hand is darker than the palm...

Not suggesting, just asking. I'm actually somewhat confused by their wording, reading it out of context.

Peasant revolts were actually pretty rare. The only reason it seems otherwise, is that lists like the one you linked to compress centuries of the history of all of Europe into a few lines.

Also, like Desrtopa said until the 17th century, if not later, peasants revolts were about specific grievances rather than an abstract concept of inequality.

I think one could make a case that peasant revolts were generally more about fighting specific cases of victimization; being overworked, overtaxed, underfed, etc. rather than trying to obtain equal social status to the nobility. So in that case peasant revolts would be more like worker's union strikes.

I don't consider myself informed enough to take a stand on either position; the French and Russian revolutions at least certainly were strongly motivated by a drive to equalize social status.

Good point. Although I suspect it's still true that most inter-factional conflict was not about (in)equality.

They had an oral culture, much of which was eventually written down.

Oops, I actually wasn't aware of that.

Okay, this is a bit of complicated topic. First of all we live in a world now where people are supposed to live for their own purposes. This is called freedom, and an equalization of chances to achieve them is called equality and these two are the defining features of modernity. But it all boils down to individualism, of individual goals and choices. When people are denied parts of it, that is defined as oppression.

But it was not so in the past. People did not live for self-actualization but for more socially prescribed roles, which ultimately came from competition for scarce resources and for group level status ("glory"). It can be demonstrated that gender roles boil down to war. Slavery and racism are the the end of the day are how more technologically developed people used other people in their system of production who were weaker in this sense. Grow cotton, make uniforms, go to war. Disability has a lot to do with people's actual utility for social purposes. If you see a society as something like a war machine with everybody being some sort of a cog in the machine the whole thing begins to make sense.

Then with the Enlightenment, all this "live for your own goals" thing was invented. However it started at the highest ranking members of society and moved slowly down on the ladder, with all kinds of fights.

We still don't see the end of this process. I am fairly pessimistic / conservative about it . Perhaps if one day really everybody lives for doing what they like, no social coercion to fill predetermined roles, things will stop working. Because, I guess, we still need a machine even if it is perpetual peace. We see the reproduction part breaking down. If for example having to work for a living will also been seen oppressive things may grind to a halt.

Multidimensional notions of oppression are easier to defend intellectually, but poorly optimized for politics. Politically, you need to be able to say that your group has all the oppression so Utilitarianism gets all the spare resources,

I don't like the idea of being labeled a "political blogger" (I don't think I wrote anything about the election or its run-up), but it's hard to deny that politics is discussed a lot at my blog and I don't really have any other forte I could claim to displace it. I could defend myself by linking to Razib Khan on how many of the "science" blogs on his old blogroll spend most of their time discussing politics (generally, politically inflected atheism), but for one who accepts "politics is the mind-killer" that's just a "but they do it too". The post you link to could be construed as "sociological" rather than "political" and would be relevant in an alternate universe without politics.

The argument reminded me of a line I heard:

Communist: Capitalism is alienating! Isn't this a crime! Libertarian: Capitalism is alienating! Isn't this great!

Robin was one of the people initially impressed with Ryan & Jetha, later persuaded by Saxon in "Dusk".

I personally recommend Azar Gat's "War in Human Civilization" as much more sweeping than Keeley's book. Despite the title, it's range precedes civilization, and even the emergence of humanity (although those are smaller portions of the book near the beginning). My posts about it are here. At any rate, there seems to be substantial evidence for warfare (or at least something analogous to "gang war" given their social scale) among hunter-gatherers, even if not to the extent of primitive agriculturalists like the Yanomamo or New Guineans.