A beginner's guide to the Redpill Right

Perhaps social liberalism?

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But that’s only a problem if neither side is right.

Maybe you’re right and I’m overly defensive, but I feel that the author should do a better job at targeting his critique. Imagine someone were to write an article harping on how feminists are man-hating bigots who couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag. Surely, these people exist, but they’re hardly representative of the whole, and to imply that they are is politically questionable.

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Dude, HBD is race science rebranded with a nicer sounding name. It isn’t a serious field of scientific study, it’s a fringe view held by people primarily on the far right. It is a distinctly anti-science position because it puts political outcomes over scientific truth.

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Well, they usually argue that biology and/or socialization matters, while subjective experience doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t influence policy because it can’t be checked by outsiders. And, they sometimes seem to shift the goalposts when we note differences between our biologies and/or socializations and cis men’s biologies and/or socializations.

As regards extermination, the Gorgons tried to assassinate Sandy Stone, and others such as Jan Raymond supported policies which deny transition medicine, survivors’ support services, etc. to trans womyn. Add in the rhetoric about how by transitioning “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies,” etc.

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I think the author lost me when the term “scientism” was used. That’s an utterly meaningless term that the religious right and postmodernists like to throw around. By definition the scientific approach is the best for solving any problem because if there was evidence that a better approach existed, that would be the new scientific approach. The trick is that you have to understand that science is more than what goes on in a lab For example, historians are scientists in a broader sense because they know they need historical data for their conclusions rather than relying on their own subjective opinions.

The “Redpill Right” are wrong not because of their endorsement of the need for evidence but rather that the “evidence” that they provide is isn’t supported in most cases.

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The debate, such as it was, was mostly in the 1920s, before the fascists had accumulated enough power to carry out these atrocities. Partly, there was the simple problem of describing a new political form. Fascism was a new and distinct form of reaction; fascists weren’t monarchists, for instance. Part of it was that there were a few more-or-less left groups that were short on theoretical clarity and long on opportunism, so a few such groups initially expressed admiration for some aspects of fascism, before they realized they were near the top of the “kill” list. Also, then as now, there were also those who insisted that socialism simply meant state control of the economy, without regard to who controlled the state and how.

Partly, this gets into how one defines “left” and “right”. If you think “left” means favoring the redistribution of power to the disenfranchised to achieve social equity, and “right” means favoring the concentration of power in an elite, then clearly fascists are on the right. If think that “left” means concentration of power in the state, then you can see why someone might think fascists are “left”. And, if you think “left” means opposition to tradition, and “right” means reinforcing tradition, then fascists are damned confusing.

Historically, I think the first definition is the one with the strongest grounding and the most continuity and consistency. But it is, after all, a metaphor.

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Regarding A) It’s complicated and I’m not sure I’m a good person to explain it. Cultural marxism is mainly a label used by critics, people don’t typically self-identify as culturally marxist. The Frankfurt school was a group of Marxist thinkers that were (broadly speaking) critical of science and individual rationality. They saw the role of theory not as a means to find models to predict reality, but rather as a tool to shape the political landscape. They invented critical theory and strongly shaped (as far as I know) fields such as sociology and anthropology and the ideas of the New Left that came about in the 70s.

B) There’s a lot I could link you to, but I would specifically recommend the writings on SJ on slatestarcodex. You could start with this piece, which talks about some of Arthur Chu’s views on why it’s ok to lie, cheat and steal if your goals are good. Arthur Chu is linked in the main BoingBoing article as further reading and is referred to in the slatestarcodex article as Andrew Cord. If you want more than that piece, I recommend you find other pieces on the same blog tagged with social justice.

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This is very true, however white men in america tend have far more privilege, and in my experience they tend to be far less aware of that privilege.
And it goes back to meritocracy/social darwinism, the “people get to privileged positions by being better than everyone else, and since I’m in a privileged position then by extension I must be better than everyone else” mindset, which is a direct result of being born fairly high up on the ladder and never having experienced the difficulties that people in other situations have in advancing themselves.

That being said, you may be right about me hanging around the wrong places ^-^

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I see it as like a Jedi/Sith thing where the outcome depends on which side recruits them first, except instead of having magic powers they have the power to whine about not getting what they thought was coming to them.

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I think scientism is a perfectly fine term for people who like to use the trappings of science (citing papers, appealing to scientific authorities) without regard for the substance of science (whether the findings of the papers they cite are supported by a larger body of evidence, whether the “scientific authorities” are people who actually know what they’re talking about and can provide evidence to support their positions). For a good definition of scientism for people who value actual science, see here.

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Funnily enough, all those “Dark Enlightenment” dorks often refer to themselves as Sith.

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I guess that hurt, reading a post that hits so close to home?

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Again, I think you’re being a little short-sighted there.
The “I must be better than everyone else” mindset is prevalent in places like India with the caste system, in the Middle-East with the Shia/Sunni divide, in North Korea and any other place where there are divisions. Sometimes it’s racial, sometimes religious, sometimes political.
I fully get what you’re saying about assholes, but singling out one group tends to be a little disingenuous.
We all do it though, as we tend to become wrapped up in our particular locales.

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I’m not sure about the label HBD, and you may be right that it is used mainly by people who are politically motivated. Studying differences between ‘races’ (or whatever you want to call groups of people with common ancestry) is not anti-science of politically motivated in itself though. Specifically, I think that the leftist notion that “racial categories are genetically meaningless” is false. But I don’t want to have that whole discussion again.

Well played.

Your eloquence nicely matches your brilliance.

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So when you are interacting with people in your daily life and want to know what gender they are, which do you check? Their DNA or their genitals?

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Right, and I’m not trying to discount that, but in America (and Britain and Australia and Canada) it’s white men with the privilege, and this discussion is about politics among internet users in English-speaking first world countries, is it not? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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God created humanity with fifteen genders, but for a joke told us that there were only two.

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Yeah. Few people willingly enter a discussion debate that they’re sure to lose.

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