OK I hadn’t come across the term “Biological Essentialist” before today either, but I’m pretty sure you just defined it right there. You should probably own it at this point.
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Maybe this was answered - but serious non-snarky question, why is this labeled “The Redpill Right” when the chart they gave shows the groups they are talking about fall mainly on the left?
Though I guess trying to make some thing left or right is sort of potato, potato sometimes.
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I fully agree, and I think confusing the descriptive and the prescriptive dimension is one of the main fallacies that people on the anti-science / “science needs to agree with my politics or else its not science” side exhibit. Science doesn’t have an obligation to produce results that agree with anyone’s chosen prescriptivist ideology.
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Maybe it’s because they think they’re right.
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Oh wow, this is me around the term of the millenium. All into meritocracy on Advogato, and Street Performer Protocols, the bazaar smashing the cathedral, atheism, selfish genes, whuffie. In my defence, some of these ideas which were theoretical and minority views at that time have now had the misfortune of becoming grotesquely real and dominant, and the rest of the world had not yet arrived on the internet.
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And from the comments: “Hi, Cathy Brennan here. The writer, who I have never heard of, misrepresents my views […]”
“In addition to correcting this person’s error, I must also demonstrate his relative insignificance to me.”
OK then.
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My take is that most people that fall under the lens of the author are in fact left-leaning and the author is trying to paint them as right wing in an attempt to discredit their views. It is true that there is a newly emerging right wing (neoreaction / dark enlightenment / nrx) and it is also true that there are plenty of Randian right-wingers among rationalists, yet I feel that important context for the piece are splits within the left. The author isn’t attempting to persuade us that right-wing == bad, we’re already sold on that. What he is trying to do is persuade us that certain ideas are inherently right-wing (e.g., emphasis on evidence-based reasoning rather than emotion, truth-finding rather than politics, personal liberty rather than promoting ‘correct views’), because within leftism, there’s no clear consensus: If a social justice warrior is lying about statistics, should we applaud them for their progressive activism, or should we boo them for obfuscating the truth. What’s more important?
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Try the “Reply as linked Topic” to the right of your comment.
It starts a new thread so no need to worry about derailing, and allows us all to see both sides of the argument 
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This doesn’t answer my question, which I will rephrase and elaborate on in case I was initially unclear: Why does your desire to place limits on the definition of gender outweigh the harm done to people who experience significant psychological harm as a result of those limits? Why is it more important to define “woman” as “a person who was sexed as female at birth” than it is to respect the identity and experiences of someone experiencing gender dysphoria? As someone who has several trans people among my friends and family members, I have seen first-hand the harm caused by denying a person’s gender identity. What is so important that it justifies that harm?
These are not rhetorical questions; I genuinely would like to hear your answers.
No.
No. What does remind me of rape culture is the idea that traditional definitions of gender are more important than a trans person’s right to body integrity and self-expression of their identity.
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I’m not confused. Not one bit.
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If I may intrude here, my take is that the entire “Left/Right” dichotomy is now subject to so many rapidly evolving qualifications that it’s nearly useless except as social signalling (e.g., this article’s headline). It took a century to flip the terminology of the bog-simple “A Republican freed the slaves / TheKu Klux Klan is chock fulll o’ Democrats” dichotomous narrative around. My sense is that only a small and ever-decreasing portion of today’s information rich, parsing-impaired polity can be tossed into those boxes, and the younger the selected portion, the smaller and more numerous their assortment of boxes gets. I mean: have you been to tumblr? There you’ll find earnest bios that begin with “Cis male-presenting female/bisexual/hetero-demiromantic/ADD/INFP…” and that’s before they get into whatever bits-n-bobs of various political theories they’ve adopted for themselves. In my opinion, Jay Allen shoveling this group of folks into a big new box labelled “Redpill Right” isn’t all that meaningful, except as a bit of flag-waving.
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I have only one box as a self-descriptor.
Homo Sapiens.
Sums it all up.
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Have the population of the “redpill” groups grown because its easier to find likeminded-folks on the Internet? What about the level of “radicalization” of the members; is that because we can now shut ourselves off from opposing viewpoints except in rare comment-board skirmishes (where the “enemy” represented is often just as polar extreme)?
Our cultures have shifted significantly over the past 20 years, sometimes jumping in a day what may have taken decades in the past. Hell, I can videochat with a stranger halfway across the world and have Google translate it on the fly, yet I still remember going to the store to buy a directory of shortwave frequencies. We do appear to be losing our shared national cultures: outside of the big tragedies, we don’t have many Moon Landing- or even Who Shot J.R.-sized events that can positively build a culture instead having to unite in grief.
So I have empathy for the folks, especially the younger generation, who want to return to the sepia-tinged monoculture where things appeared to not be as shitty in general as they are now. But they forget that things were never as black and white as Leave it to Beaver and even if they got in the DeLorean and went back to the 50s there’d still be all the groups they dislike just under the blanket. I can only hope that these folks can someday experience how great the rest of the future is if you can accept that there’s enough room for all of us at the table.
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This Jay Allen person sounds like a pretty smart cookie. This is the second Boing Boing post I’ve seen from him and they’ve both been really insightful and informative.
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This is something I wonder about as well. My suspicion is that the population of cranks has stayed fairly stable over time, and the internet just makes them more visible and better-organized, but I don’t have any hard evidence of that.
It’s funny, it never really occurred to me before now, but put that way it really looks like a kind of nostalgia-by-proxy. It’s even easier to forget the problems with the past when you were never there in the first place.
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My point is more complex than that. I’m not saying that the outcomes should be ideologically determined, but that the questions should. The questions we ask condition the answers we get, and the way we frame the question is conditioned by the political biases inherent in all of us. The biases aren’t in science by themselves, they’re an imported from politics. So when we ask empirical questions about racial categorization, we do so in an environment of already existing categories, making framing a valid question very difficult.
Furthermore, putting ideological limits on what to study is widely done anyway, and for good reason. Restrictions on what kinds of human experimentation can be done are a fundamentally political rather than scientific limit, and we commonly put restrictions on animal experimentation as well. The scientific method isn’t designed to answer political or ethical questions, but empirical ones. It can provide invaluable data to inform the answers to political or ethical questions, but it ain’t a hard formula for organizing society.
And finally, I stick with “racial categories are genetically meaningless” because that is what the science says, not just because it is agreeable with my politics. If anything, my (much to the left of liberal) politics are built on that, as I try to keep an empirical foundation for them. Part of the reason you get such a negative reaction to discussing the topic is because of all the historical and existing baggage of racism, and people who are tired of debating the same thing over and over with different people just become frustrated at wasting their time.
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I used to GM Traveller games. We only ever portrayed our 3rd Imperium as being rotten to the core and so a useful place with spaces to generate stories. I’m really surprised anyone sees it as a utopia.
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sure but spend time around any insular group and you get
bigoted, overprivileged, self-absorbed jerks
I met some horrible people when I did feminist philosophy at University, much like you meet some other horrible people if you go to the wrong page on Reddit.
I also met some great people at both places. Prejudice is prejudice.
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See @FoolishOwl’s earlier post for a more concrete definition of left/right than American political parties. The dichotomy is useful so long as we don’t consider mainstream US politics as the boundaries of political discourse.
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