Thank you for this post; I agree with most if not all of it. I recognize there are important practical objections to colour-blindness but 100% think it's an ideal worth striving for:
But... why on earth would you start tweeting, now of all times? I say this not out of political objections to Twitter, but of the bizarre technical decisions that have made the platform far less useful to users of any stripe - it's always seemed to me that Musk is more interested in destroying it than making it a right-wing platform. We have Substack Notes for short bons mots. If you want to be an e-girl where the young people are, shouldn't you be making TikTok videos?
lol - questions I am asking myself today as I feel the "Twitter brain" setting in. I'm only really doing it to try to build an audience so I can promote my blog and podcast
I always find it irritating when people do the "well you're just doing whataboutism and both-sides-ism, and that's not a valid argument" thing.
And what they're really saying is "I demand you have an opinion about this; I demand that you choose sides." To which my answer, of course, is that I've got better things to do than choose sides in zero-sum extremist-versus-extremist cultural warfare. It's just not useful.
As you said, most people are reasonable. Most people are just trying to get by.
I think, at least on the left, a big part of the issue is failing to distinguish between the kind of harms and bad behavior that's appropriate to use social and legal sanction to punish and the kind of behavior that you would complain about to your friends or use as an example with your children about how not to behave.
Our relationship partners have an incredible power to hurt us in very deep ways. People often rank being cheated on or abandoned by their spouse/lover as the most painful experiences of their lives -- and often one party is acting immorally in those situations. And when that happens in our social circle we do gossip and blame the improperly acting party but we tend not to try and invoke legal or coordinated social sanction.
So sure, when a 40 year old man sleeps with an 18 year old woman it's much the same. Occasionally it works out, but, like the woman cheating on her husband, a more morally fastidious person would avoid it out of a desire not to harm the other party.
But it's very difficult for the left to draw a line between cases like an employer who lets his female employees know blowjobs increase the chance of a bonus and a man who lets his wife know that if she doesn't do more to keep him satisfied he's going to go sleep with other younger women or leave her. The right tends to fall back on a negative rights type theory but the left rejects those because they are hard to square with civil rights laws.
At a theoretical level, sure it's all just cost benefit analysis but that isn't helpful at an intuitive lebel. Worse, Twitter blurs the boundary between complaining about what a dick that person is (as you would about the woman who left your friend to raise a kid so she could see the world with a drummer) and calling on people to use coordinated social action to punish.
And the left tends to be very bad at cost/benefit analysis because acknowledging the harms of these rules/laws tend to code as right leaning
<Both sides can claim that their focus on race is mainly reactionary, but either way, both sides end up heavily leaning into racial identity.>
Even if wrong, the identitarian Right thinks of itself as embracing reality, viz. colorblindness is about as realistic as communism. While the woke Left allegedly embraced identitarianism for strategic purposes, to the Right it just illustrates the inevitability of racial Balkanization and can’t be blamed solely on Wokeism.
Another interesting essay. "Both groups pour their time, attention and energy into complaining about the ways in which the interests of men and women sometimes come into conflict." The operative word here is "complaining". Change "complaining about" to "noticing" and it becomes - more or less - a description of my own writing [https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance] as well as many other writers I think well of (including yourself). The difference between the instinct to notice and the instinct to complain is perhaps THE great political-philosophical divide of our times.
Just FYI MGTOW is independent of politics, it's a lifestyle preference choice. It presents a personal preference against hegemonic social trends and a decision of withdrawal and independence. For instance a common stance is just: "I can acknowledge and respect that society insists that men support women's career goals and empowerment as a general social priority, and in the realm of long term relationships, under current social norms, in a relationship men are required to do half the housework and childcare in a household. As a man with a traditionally masculine mentality and interests, neither of these has any appeal to me at all. Society can go along this trajectory, whatever makes it happy, I do not wish to stop anybody, especially not the public at large, from doing what they desire. But given that these are current norms, I will disengage and separate from the institutions of human mating altogether, and such a choice would be a win win for me and society at large"
Granted many MGTOWs come across unhinged on the internet, but I think's that is self selection bias. The process of such "radicalization" is typically emotionally turbulent. On the other side they simply have nothing to talk about. Like atheists after they get past the self righteous Richard Dawkins' writing binge.
On a wide array of topics, two ostensibly opposite side are both wrong. In many such cases, they actually agree on a false underlying premise. And they then argue for two sides of the dilemma.
Logic textbooks say that the solution is to go "through the horns" of the dilemma. Strictly speaking, the rational alternative is not carving out middle ground, but is rejecting the premise of the underlying dilemma.
Though can't say I've more than skimmed the article, but still an important and useful insight which probably ties-in with your sarcastic (?) comments about essentialism. Also somewhat apropos of which, too many "women" have turned the sexes, "female" in particular, into some "mythic essences", and get quite "offended" when one points out that they're just quite transitory "life-history stages".
But something of a false note in your suggestion that "sex" and "gender" are synonymous. You might consider a rather brilliant analogy from the late, great US Justice Anton Scalia:
"sex is to gender as female is to feminine, and as male is to masculine."
Thank you for this post; I agree with most if not all of it. I recognize there are important practical objections to colour-blindness but 100% think it's an ideal worth striving for:
https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2021/05/how-to-reach-a-colour-blind-society/
https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2021/05/i-am-not-my-race/
But... why on earth would you start tweeting, now of all times? I say this not out of political objections to Twitter, but of the bizarre technical decisions that have made the platform far less useful to users of any stripe - it's always seemed to me that Musk is more interested in destroying it than making it a right-wing platform. We have Substack Notes for short bons mots. If you want to be an e-girl where the young people are, shouldn't you be making TikTok videos?
lol - questions I am asking myself today as I feel the "Twitter brain" setting in. I'm only really doing it to try to build an audience so I can promote my blog and podcast
Good luck - I used to be on Twitter for that reason and then gave up.
Makes perfect sense.
I always find it irritating when people do the "well you're just doing whataboutism and both-sides-ism, and that's not a valid argument" thing.
And what they're really saying is "I demand you have an opinion about this; I demand that you choose sides." To which my answer, of course, is that I've got better things to do than choose sides in zero-sum extremist-versus-extremist cultural warfare. It's just not useful.
As you said, most people are reasonable. Most people are just trying to get by.
Mirin' the cartoon redpill guy's biceps
Glad someone noticed his shirt
I think, at least on the left, a big part of the issue is failing to distinguish between the kind of harms and bad behavior that's appropriate to use social and legal sanction to punish and the kind of behavior that you would complain about to your friends or use as an example with your children about how not to behave.
Our relationship partners have an incredible power to hurt us in very deep ways. People often rank being cheated on or abandoned by their spouse/lover as the most painful experiences of their lives -- and often one party is acting immorally in those situations. And when that happens in our social circle we do gossip and blame the improperly acting party but we tend not to try and invoke legal or coordinated social sanction.
So sure, when a 40 year old man sleeps with an 18 year old woman it's much the same. Occasionally it works out, but, like the woman cheating on her husband, a more morally fastidious person would avoid it out of a desire not to harm the other party.
But it's very difficult for the left to draw a line between cases like an employer who lets his female employees know blowjobs increase the chance of a bonus and a man who lets his wife know that if she doesn't do more to keep him satisfied he's going to go sleep with other younger women or leave her. The right tends to fall back on a negative rights type theory but the left rejects those because they are hard to square with civil rights laws.
At a theoretical level, sure it's all just cost benefit analysis but that isn't helpful at an intuitive lebel. Worse, Twitter blurs the boundary between complaining about what a dick that person is (as you would about the woman who left your friend to raise a kid so she could see the world with a drummer) and calling on people to use coordinated social action to punish.
And the left tends to be very bad at cost/benefit analysis because acknowledging the harms of these rules/laws tend to code as right leaning
<Both sides can claim that their focus on race is mainly reactionary, but either way, both sides end up heavily leaning into racial identity.>
Even if wrong, the identitarian Right thinks of itself as embracing reality, viz. colorblindness is about as realistic as communism. While the woke Left allegedly embraced identitarianism for strategic purposes, to the Right it just illustrates the inevitability of racial Balkanization and can’t be blamed solely on Wokeism.
Another interesting essay. "Both groups pour their time, attention and energy into complaining about the ways in which the interests of men and women sometimes come into conflict." The operative word here is "complaining". Change "complaining about" to "noticing" and it becomes - more or less - a description of my own writing [https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance] as well as many other writers I think well of (including yourself). The difference between the instinct to notice and the instinct to complain is perhaps THE great political-philosophical divide of our times.
noooo don't be an e-girl you are a reasonable writer aha
Just FYI MGTOW is independent of politics, it's a lifestyle preference choice. It presents a personal preference against hegemonic social trends and a decision of withdrawal and independence. For instance a common stance is just: "I can acknowledge and respect that society insists that men support women's career goals and empowerment as a general social priority, and in the realm of long term relationships, under current social norms, in a relationship men are required to do half the housework and childcare in a household. As a man with a traditionally masculine mentality and interests, neither of these has any appeal to me at all. Society can go along this trajectory, whatever makes it happy, I do not wish to stop anybody, especially not the public at large, from doing what they desire. But given that these are current norms, I will disengage and separate from the institutions of human mating altogether, and such a choice would be a win win for me and society at large"
Granted many MGTOWs come across unhinged on the internet, but I think's that is self selection bias. The process of such "radicalization" is typically emotionally turbulent. On the other side they simply have nothing to talk about. Like atheists after they get past the self righteous Richard Dawkins' writing binge.
On a wide array of topics, two ostensibly opposite side are both wrong. In many such cases, they actually agree on a false underlying premise. And they then argue for two sides of the dilemma.
Logic textbooks say that the solution is to go "through the horns" of the dilemma. Strictly speaking, the rational alternative is not carving out middle ground, but is rejecting the premise of the underlying dilemma.
As (pretty much) always, an interesting and engaging read. 👍👌 Though not sure about your "poaster" ... 😉🙂
But particularly liked your comments on identity formation. Apropos of which and ICYMI, "Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma":
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242372156_Must_Identity_Movement_Self-Destruct_A_Queer_Dilemma
Though can't say I've more than skimmed the article, but still an important and useful insight which probably ties-in with your sarcastic (?) comments about essentialism. Also somewhat apropos of which, too many "women" have turned the sexes, "female" in particular, into some "mythic essences", and get quite "offended" when one points out that they're just quite transitory "life-history stages".
But something of a false note in your suggestion that "sex" and "gender" are synonymous. You might consider a rather brilliant analogy from the late, great US Justice Anton Scalia:
"sex is to gender as female is to feminine, and as male is to masculine."
Entirely different kettles of fish.