The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
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The realm that I most notice this happening every day is "political correctness". My Facebook feed is dominated by people tripping over themselves to attack racists, sexists, religious bigots, etc. Great. But many times they go way too far IMO and crucify innocents. However, there's no way I care enough to stake my reputation on defending innocent strangers. So they continue to rack up positive feedback on their campaigns.
For example, this article is popular right now: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/top-10-most-sexist-thing...
Most of those remarks are totally fine in my book and are only sexist by willful misinterpretation. For example, how is it not newsworthy that a recent mom is competing? Even the article calls it "an incredible feat!" Then Ledecky, who "swims like a man" because she is strong enough to use the traditionally male stroke, unlike all of the other women. Girls "standing around as if they're at the mall" was just an old commentator picking the most casual place he could think of. And when he tried to defend himself by pointing out the Cherry-Picking Fallacy (he has covered women's sports for many years, so they picked one sentence online that might be misconstrued as sexist to crucify him online when his body of work is totally fine) they actually cropped his defense and cherry-picked from it as well.
Anyways. Things like that annoy me because I can't say them with my name attached or I'll end up cast aside. Nobody is interested in rational discussion, the Most Intolerant does always win.
http://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2016/08/12/cogdell-unrein-twit...
The Chicago-based newspaper was trying to emphasize her connection to Chicago (she's from Alaska) and overdid it. Then apologized. Woo, makes sense, no harm no foul.
When the captain of the Australian cricket team was going out with a famous Australian model, that was news. Even though she was overall a bit less less famous than him.
Had she being going out with some otherwise unknown olympian, that also would have been news -- especially if the dude won a medal.
Men just have on average a higher natural supply of anabolic steroids.
> Clearly can democracy –by definition the majority — tolerate enemies? The question is as follows: “ Would you agree to deny the freedom of speech to every political party that has in its charter the banning the freedom of speech?” Let’s go one step further, “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”
So clearly, political correctness has a role to play. The question is, what is PC? The author explicitly suggests that freedom of speech should not apply to adherents of Salafi Islam.
So how do we work with this? We have to talk about it, we have to recognize when people are being bigoted or sexist. Yes, enforcing social norms means innocent people may be harmed. But failing to enforce social norms also harms innocent people.
I do think the author places undue focus on Islam - the West has bigger internal problems. Christian analogues of Salafism are more likely to get in a position to impose forcible conversion of Muslims than the reverse (as they have in the past.)
But people like these NBC commentators are going to permanently have their names associated with "sexist" as result #1 in Google. And if I ever tried to rationally discuss one of these topics with someone on Facebook, I would 100% be brigaded. Whereas in a group of live people, it's much easier to get to the root of an issue and find common ground.
By the way, polite reminder from the HN guidelines:
> Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
And if they apologize for it, people will see they're mature enough to recognize when they've hurt someone and correct it.
It can be hard to avoid eating Halal meat, because there is no requirement that Halal meat is labeled as such. Meat from Halal slaughter ends up in the regular supply chain. The vast majority of New Zealand lamb, for example, is Halal - but isn't typically labeled as such.
https://www.rspca.org.uk/ImageLocator/LocateAsset?asset=docu...
I suspect much of the EU works in this way.
Of course, that is too expensive, so now there is a recording of an islamic prayer over a loudspeaker.
Which is also the problem I had with the article: his rule only works when complying with the minority is cheap (playing a recording), if a halal chicken also had to have decent living standards making it 4 times as expensive, there would be a lot fewer halal chickens.
We've been removing any reference to Christianity in state-related documents - which is fine but let's see some examples: Christmas holidays are renamed "End-of-year Holidays", just like Easter holidays are now "Spring holidays", and we're removing Christian days off here and there. Street names are renamed, churches aren't always maintained by Christian-adverse mayors.
On the other side, every vegetable mix is now a "tajin", often halal, the state is funding Mosques, and our streets fill up with women with the foulard (that thing to hide hair), our beaches with women in burkini, and males have Arabic dresses and beards. When there is some sand on the floor, you'd believe you were on the other side of the Mediterranean. Upon football matches, they burn the French flag.
Most leftish people insist that we should encourage this because "tolerance" (Fraternité). At the same time when they're introduced to a Christian they go on and on about priests raping kids and the Spanish inquisition. Ok, I get it, as a Christian I'm a murderer, and television headline news enjoy a lot conveying arguments against Christian representants.
I have the feeling that tolerance, mutual understanding and equality of chances only goes towards the 7% Muslims.
Same goes for women. Someone else in the thread pointed to a link which "10 sexist things", saying they didn't see them as sexist. I don't know, if there are fewer women in IT, it could also be that programming is hard and few people can live the life of a good programmer. Meanwhile all girls of my Engineering school were promoted way before men, and get a better salary than men I know, while having usually less technical knowledge. It doesn't match the usual message that feminists tell, but stats aren't built to find such results. Once again equality only strikes one way and women don't have to work as hard as men to succeed.
So how can we stop harassing the white, the Christian, the male, the hard workers? Do I really have to vote for that extremist party, or could women and Muslims have a bit of tolerance and check we still have an equality of work/results ratio even though we're white?
Goes back to running my own company, because I was never promoted while employed
For non-French readers, it should be mentioned that the degree of political-correctness in France often exceeds that of the united states, especially in the capital.
It's quite hard to imagine for those who haven't encountered it.
Regarding feminism, I think the problem is that internet-feminism (and indeed, most forms of feminism you see in the media) represent a very specific and strange brand thereof. Namely, it's a very vocal sliver of 3rd-wave American feminism, which appart from it's mind-boggling ethnocentricity, has it's roots in a very misandrous circle of American lesbian thinkers (or rabble-rousers, depending on your perspective). I should, of course, mention that I have no quarrel with the bulk of lesbians, American or otherwise.
In particular, this group is characterized by the ascetic rejection of biology as an explanatory factor for ... well... anything related to observed sex differences. Otherwise stated, they assume that all observed differences between men and women must stem from social injustice -- biology can have no role whatsoever, here. To claim otherwise is quickly met with accusations of essentialism, or worse.
As an interesting aside, I'm "surprised" they haven't taken up the cause of getting more men into nursing...
Lest this be interpreted as a rant, my point is twofold:
- The climate of political correctness in France is increasingly suffocating to the majority, and this in a climate of repeated bloodshed perpetrated by "a certain group that must not be named". The tension is palpable, and the majority (it seems to me) feels increasingly alienated, if not outright invaded. I'm not saying it's a fair assessment, but rather that the phenomenon exists, and will likely inform some very concrete changes in policy.
- Feminism is not fundamentally insane and I think sexism does exist. I also think its effects are vastly overstated by the profoundly anti-intellectual demagogues that have hijacked the feminist movement. By and large, I find the intellectual and moral substance of mainstream American feminism to be appallingly weak, and frighteningly zealous.
"Internet feminism" represents pretty much the entire range of feminism; if you disproportionately perceive some particular segment, its probably because you have a disproportionate reaction to it.
> As an interesting aside, I'm "surprised" they haven't taken up the cause of getting more men into nursing...
I'm surprised you think that they haven't taken up the issue of men in nursing , since its been a fairly common theme in feminist circles (including on the internet) for quite a number of years, including especially the idea that the lack of men in the field is directly tied to the same gender stereotyping that leads to disrespect for the field as "women's work". (And, frequently, this discussion also treats it as a failing of early waves of feminism that this issue was neglected in the past.)
See, among others:
http://feminismnursing.blogspot.com/
http://minoritynurse.com/rethinking-gender-stereotypes-in-nu...
Please stop playing with words, and please stop the thinly-veiled accusations.
Yes, the full range of feminism is represented on the internet, but far from proportionally. Some groups are distinctly louder, more zealous, and receive more "air-time" than others.
>I'm surprised you think that they haven't taken up the issue of men in nursing , since its been a fairly common theme in feminist circles (including on the internet) for quite a number of years
Indeed, though not in third-wave revolutionary circles that are the object of my criticism.
Please understand you're conversing with a feminist, and please understand that most people would be surprised by the (very valid) examples you bring up. This speaks to my original point: a very thin and radical sliver of feminism is over-represented on the internet and in the media, which in turn hurts our cause.
I'm not playing with words, and the accusation was direct and not veiled at all. Your description that internet feminism represents only the particular narrow subset that you claim is ridiculously unconnected with reality and only explainable by either a complete ignorance of the domain (which you deny, and I believe you), outright dishonesty (which I don't suspect, and, as the least-charitable interpretation, I wouldn't suggest even if I had suspicions in that direction), or the common human trait of magnifying the significance of things to which one has a particularly strong negative reaction.
They haven't, and here's the demonstration that absolutely no section of feminism is fighting for men. Try it yourself: http://femmes.gouv.fr and http://hommes.gouv.fr - It's outright blatant sexism, and the whole stack of society is just the same, full of advantages for women, €30,000 loans and €6,000 gifts for women entrepreneurs, BECAUSE OF THEIR SEX, along with many women-only benefits. The difference between men and women is that when a group or an advantage is male-only, it's not by design or by law, it's by mistake and we recognize it and work in fixing it - whereas women don't hesitate to seize the law to make some advantages based on sex, which makes them immutable once the advantage isn't necessary anymore. Women use the law to assign sex-based privileges against men, men don't do that.
Every single woman is persuaded they're victims of the males. Those who say the opposite ("I'm a feminist but not extremist, I'm all for equality") are usually still persuaded salaries are higher for men anyway, which is still up for scientific debate (I'll leave the demonstration for another comment). So basically any woman is ready to vote for more action against men than we already have.
If you look at the political party programs, at the line "Equality":
- PS (left wing): "More rights for the women! More benefits! More for females and children victims of rapists!" I like how they don't tell the sex of rapists, but they only fight for female victims. Absolutely no note of men's equality in PS's party program.
- LR (right wing): "More rights for the women in companies! Quotas for female board members! More Girls In Tech sexist groups!" Absolutely no mention of men.
- FN (extreme right): "Keep the same advantages we already have for women" (That's it, no proposal)
I've decided to choose my vote based on which party promises to NOT give more advantages to women than they already have. That party is FN, and I've started to consider that if they're right about women, they must have something right about Muslims too. And if anyone wants me to vote for a milder line, please start a #SheForHe twitter thread...
This has been tried during the French Revolution, one of its slogans being "pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté" (no freedom for the enemies of freedom).
It led to Terror and mass executions, so I'm really not sure it's the right path.
French revolution aside (the Terror was, indeed, a dark period I would not like to see repeated), there is an argument to be made for:
- the lesser of two evils
- the necessity of cracking eggs to make an omelet
He's signaling something, but I am too much of a plebe to know what:
"a glass of that type of yellow sugared water with citric acid people sometimes call lemonade"
This reverses his majority/minority argument:
"Let us apply the rule to domains where it can get entertaining:
"An honest person will never commit criminal acts but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts."
This argument is pretty nonsensical; if the majority is flexible, then in what sense does it make sense to say "submit"?
"...then the (flexible) majority will have to submit to the minority rule."
Taleb seems to need to work on his cut-n-paste skills:
"Note that these slaughter rules [for halal/kosher meat] are skin-in-the-game driven, inherited from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean [discussed in Chapter] Greek and Semitic practice to only worship the gods if one has skin in the game, sacrifice meat to the divinity, and eat what’s left."
I'll just note this in passing:
"In promoting genetically modified food via all manner of lobbying, purchasing of congressmen, and overt scientific propaganda (with smear campaigns against such persons as yours truly), the big agricultural companies foolishly believed that all they needed was to win the majority. No, you idiots. As I said, your snap “scientific” judgment is too naive in these type of decisions...It is strange, once again, to see Big Ag who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on research cum smear campaigns, with hundreds of these scientists who think of themselves as more intelligent than the rest of the population, miss such an elementary point about asymmetric choices."
Could someone run through this with the math? This is not a use of renormalization I am familiar with.
"The method of analysis employed here is called renormalization group, a powerful apparatus in mathematical physics that allows us to see how things scale up (or down). Let us examine it next –without mathematics."
Signaling again: "flâneur".
Are we talking about the same French language?
"...the prestige of France or the efforts of their civil servants in promoting their more or less beautiful Latinized and logically spelled language over the orthographically confusing one of trans-Channel meat-pie eaters."
As to the last point French is a bit more logically spelled than English - even if it is still horrendous.
Also, you shouldn't use "i.e." to equate those who are LGBT to those who support their being accepted into society and legally recognized despite not being LGBT themselves.
Preprints https://arxiv.org/a/taleb_n_1.html
And did you check the end? I think he decided that it didn't feel good enough.
I'm guessing the [dupe] tag is a mistake.
I feel like this is an elaborate joke.
Well then.
It's very easy to advertise what's not in food if it never had it anyway. This is just good marketing. Many foods are kosher or halal or vegan or whatever because as far as the majority is concerned it's a checkbox feature that doesn't affect you and maybe even works as a signal of quality. I'm having a hard time seeing the issue.
On the other hand it seems like nearly everything having to do with nuts is labelled as processed on machines that also process peanuts so apparently economics wins much of the time.
It's actually an excerpt from his book.