Thanks for asking. No, this doesn't quite answer my points.
You made more or less the deflection that I was expecting--that the issue isn't just sexual harassment, but rather that society, in aggregate, empowers men at the expense of women. But see, even there you are committing a fallacy of division, because it doesn't follow that the status quo on every individual issue empowers men at the expense of women. So you can't pull in that overarching narrative of heroic feminists vs. evil misogynists that easily.
The other rhetorical trick feminists use to bully people into not disagreeing so loudly is one you've pulled here--the notion that disagreeing with feminism is equivalent to misogyny. From my perspective, all you're doing is making a fallacious argument that the misogynist power structure has made sexual harassment acceptable in our society, waiting for people to say "no it hasn't", and then turning around and saying "yes it has--just by disagreeing with my argument you are part of the misogynist power structure." This argument isn't in good faith. It's isomorphic to what I call the Ayn Rand fallacy. Ayn Rand's fallacy was: all my beliefs are governed by a philosophical system built on reason, therefore if you disagree with me you are irrational. In Ayn Rand's inner circle, wearing beards or enjoying Mozart were considered irrational because they conflicted with Ayn Rand's tastes. You are making an isomorphic argument: my beliefs are governed by a philosophical system predicated on not hating women, therefore if you disagree with me you hate women. In making this argument, feminists don't reveal their interlocutors as misogynists; they reveal themselves as Ayn Rand--arrogant ideologues with no consideration for the possibility they might be fundamentally mistaken.
Furthermore, you also haven't sufficiently demonstrated your premise that society, in aggregate, empowers men at the expense of women. You say it's "really easy to observe", and it may be through your lens. Through mine, it's clear that in some things, men are indeed empowered at the expense of women, while in other things, women are empowered at the expense of men. I wouldn't be confident in any aggregation of either side's various privileges and oppressions. Neither of us has a perfectly clean lens to start with, and it isn't helpful to exclusively look through the biased lens of a tendentious ideology, either.
Fundamentally, any such aggregation wouldn't be of much use anyway because individual issues should be addressed one at a time, empirically, not through some overarching ideological narrative. It's funny that you mention Marxism, because you seem to share with them the same central error: you have not yet outgrown the naive notion that one overarching philosophical system can solve all problems. Life is more than just some manichean narrative where you can cast yourself on the side of the heroes. It is more complicated than that.
(P.S. If you're interested in continuing this, please feel free to email me. This thread is rapidly growing stale, but this discussion has already helped me to clarify a lot of thoughts I've been having recently, so I do appreciate and value it.)
Would you mind if we continued this here? One of the useful things about it is that it preserves (at least for some period of time) an internet accessible log of the conversation in tree form, which people can (at least in theory) interject into or browse through later.
HN is best suited to short-term, many-to-many conversation. We're rapidly reaching the end of both of those constraints, HN itself has technical measures to discourage deeply nested threads, and I really do prefer email for long, meandering dialogues anyway.
I wouldn't be opposed to either or both of us posting the rest of our dialogue online, in verbatim, once we were finished, but I do think this is an ill-suited forum to actually continue our discussion in.
Okay. Fair enough. I usually wouldn't notice things like the HN slowdown features, as it usually takes me a while to compose a reply - but I don't post here much, so it is possible that this forum's set-up just hasn't had time to annoy me yet. I'll email you my response to your previous post when it is composed.
Comments
Thanks for asking. No, this doesn't quite answer my points.
You made more or less the deflection that I was expecting--that the issue isn't just sexual harassment, but rather that society, in aggregate, empowers men at the expense of women. But see, even there you are committing a fallacy of division, because it doesn't follow that the status quo on every individual issue empowers men at the expense of women. So you can't pull in that overarching narrative of heroic feminists vs. evil misogynists that easily.
The other rhetorical trick feminists use to bully people into not disagreeing so loudly is one you've pulled here--the notion that disagreeing with feminism is equivalent to misogyny. From my perspective, all you're doing is making a fallacious argument that the misogynist power structure has made sexual harassment acceptable in our society, waiting for people to say "no it hasn't", and then turning around and saying "yes it has--just by disagreeing with my argument you are part of the misogynist power structure." This argument isn't in good faith. It's isomorphic to what I call the Ayn Rand fallacy. Ayn Rand's fallacy was: all my beliefs are governed by a philosophical system built on reason, therefore if you disagree with me you are irrational. In Ayn Rand's inner circle, wearing beards or enjoying Mozart were considered irrational because they conflicted with Ayn Rand's tastes. You are making an isomorphic argument: my beliefs are governed by a philosophical system predicated on not hating women, therefore if you disagree with me you hate women. In making this argument, feminists don't reveal their interlocutors as misogynists; they reveal themselves as Ayn Rand--arrogant ideologues with no consideration for the possibility they might be fundamentally mistaken.
Furthermore, you also haven't sufficiently demonstrated your premise that society, in aggregate, empowers men at the expense of women. You say it's "really easy to observe", and it may be through your lens. Through mine, it's clear that in some things, men are indeed empowered at the expense of women, while in other things, women are empowered at the expense of men. I wouldn't be confident in any aggregation of either side's various privileges and oppressions. Neither of us has a perfectly clean lens to start with, and it isn't helpful to exclusively look through the biased lens of a tendentious ideology, either.
Fundamentally, any such aggregation wouldn't be of much use anyway because individual issues should be addressed one at a time, empirically, not through some overarching ideological narrative. It's funny that you mention Marxism, because you seem to share with them the same central error: you have not yet outgrown the naive notion that one overarching philosophical system can solve all problems. Life is more than just some manichean narrative where you can cast yourself on the side of the heroes. It is more complicated than that.
(P.S. If you're interested in continuing this, please feel free to email me. This thread is rapidly growing stale, but this discussion has already helped me to clarify a lot of thoughts I've been having recently, so I do appreciate and value it.)
Would you mind if we continued this here? One of the useful things about it is that it preserves (at least for some period of time) an internet accessible log of the conversation in tree form, which people can (at least in theory) interject into or browse through later.
HN is best suited to short-term, many-to-many conversation. We're rapidly reaching the end of both of those constraints, HN itself has technical measures to discourage deeply nested threads, and I really do prefer email for long, meandering dialogues anyway.
I wouldn't be opposed to either or both of us posting the rest of our dialogue online, in verbatim, once we were finished, but I do think this is an ill-suited forum to actually continue our discussion in.
Okay. Fair enough. I usually wouldn't notice things like the HN slowdown features, as it usually takes me a while to compose a reply - but I don't post here much, so it is possible that this forum's set-up just hasn't had time to annoy me yet. I'll email you my response to your previous post when it is composed.