Donna Zuckerberg: Progressive Women On The Internet Shouldn't Have To Defend Their Ideas From Evil Men Who Are All White Supremacists Anyway Obviously
Look, there are all kinds of people online, and some of them are stupid assholes, and some of those are men. Ok...many. What. Ever.
Zuckerberg is right that some people are unserious pains in the ass. Welcome to the internet.
However...it's important that this looks a lot like the latest contribution (coming hard on the heels of the idiotic Eve Fairbanks piece) to the emerging progressive genre We don't have to defend our ideas / you just need to do what we say / anyone who says different is a white supremacist.
Sometimes progressives come right out and say that they reject the (evil Western male Enlightenment etc.) ideas of truth, reason, and rational inquiry. Other times they don't quite say it, but it's not hard to see where their lines of argument converge if extend just a bit farther [or, y'know...further...]. Anyway, the overall upshot of contemporary progressive left thinking is clear: rational inquiry is bad; just do (and believe) as you're told.
I say again: when one side is afraid of open inquiry and seeks to stifle critical discussion of their views by marshalling nonrational social forces to punish those who disagree...and especially when they've made it clear that their ultimate goal is to harness the coercive power of the state to more effectively crush dissent...well...you can be damn sure that side knows, at some level, that their positions and arguments cannot survive open, rational scrutiny.
A side thought: though dudes may well be more likely to aggressively insist on aggressive debate, women seem more likely to push PC "social justice" madness, and to write pieces like Fairbanks's and Zuckerberg's. Pieces, that is, that advocate far-left foolishness that at least walks right up to the view that truth and reason and civil, critical discussion are somehow arbitrary products of evil whitewesternmen. It's no original observation that men tend to err to the right, women to the left. Though it's worth pointing out that many of the leading lights of the far left are dudes, too--Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest. For whatever that observation is worth.
Of course such general criticisms of women are impermissible, while general criticisms of men are not only permissible but all the rage. I don't much care about it, except insofar as double standards piss me off.
Zuckerberg is right that some people are unserious pains in the ass. Welcome to the internet.
However...it's important that this looks a lot like the latest contribution (coming hard on the heels of the idiotic Eve Fairbanks piece) to the emerging progressive genre We don't have to defend our ideas / you just need to do what we say / anyone who says different is a white supremacist.
Sometimes progressives come right out and say that they reject the (evil Western male Enlightenment etc.) ideas of truth, reason, and rational inquiry. Other times they don't quite say it, but it's not hard to see where their lines of argument converge if extend just a bit farther [or, y'know...further...]. Anyway, the overall upshot of contemporary progressive left thinking is clear: rational inquiry is bad; just do (and believe) as you're told.
I say again: when one side is afraid of open inquiry and seeks to stifle critical discussion of their views by marshalling nonrational social forces to punish those who disagree...and especially when they've made it clear that their ultimate goal is to harness the coercive power of the state to more effectively crush dissent...well...you can be damn sure that side knows, at some level, that their positions and arguments cannot survive open, rational scrutiny.
A side thought: though dudes may well be more likely to aggressively insist on aggressive debate, women seem more likely to push PC "social justice" madness, and to write pieces like Fairbanks's and Zuckerberg's. Pieces, that is, that advocate far-left foolishness that at least walks right up to the view that truth and reason and civil, critical discussion are somehow arbitrary products of evil whitewesternmen. It's no original observation that men tend to err to the right, women to the left. Though it's worth pointing out that many of the leading lights of the far left are dudes, too--Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the rest. For whatever that observation is worth.
Of course such general criticisms of women are impermissible, while general criticisms of men are not only permissible but all the rage. I don't much care about it, except insofar as double standards piss me off.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:28 AM
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