A Problem With Trivialization And Counterproductivity Arguments

In brief, or I'll never get around to it at all:

   They often accept false/questionable presuppositions of their target and ignore other considerations that are at least as important, and ought to be given at least equal weight/attention.

   For example, I agree that a lot of extremist / gender feminism undermines good / egalitarian / liberal feminism. But problems with the former view go deeper than that. Commonly, the only way to get people on the left to listen to criticisms of feminism is to try to out-feminist them. Title IX insanity on campus treats men unjustly. But people often leap right over that point and go for something like a self-refutation argument: Title IX insanity is bad for women / violates feminist principles by (e.g.) infantilizing women. True enough, says me...but the argument, in a non-trivial sense, accepts the overall flawed framework of illiberal feminism by suggesting that injustice against men doesn't matter. It's consistent with and suggests that the only acceptable type of criticism is a criticism that demonstrates harm to women. Harm to men is irrelevant.

   Similar points can be made about arguments against the PC Words = Violence view. That view does trivialize violence. But here's a very much more important problem with it: words do not equal violence. The thesis is simply false--and not a little bit. It's flat-out crazy. That is the most important point. It's also worth making the trivialization point...but less so. Even if you manage to win that skirmish against the Dark Side, it leaves the general problem in place. It also suggests an acceptance of the PC/pomo thesis that harm matters but truth doesn't. And that's bad.