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Comment by Shubley | Hacker News Reader

A movement is defined by what it does, not by the image it puts up when people question it.

The trick of throwing up a super-acceptable cover story when questioned, while returning to hate-oriented attack patterns when secure, is called the "motte and bailey doctrine":

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

You can't just believe every movement is what they say. Otherwise we might as well say Kim Jong Un is a champion of economic equality, and Mexican drug cartels are brave militias defending the people.

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Right. And muslims are terrorists.

If you try to tell a decentralized group that you have them figured out based on the data you've collected from your personal surroundings, you're gonna get eye rolls.

I'm a feminist. Care to tell me what my flaws are?

Ah, the old, "We can't say X about this group because doesn't apply to every single member" fallacy?

Of course we know you don't believe that, otherwise you'd be unable to have any opinion about any large social group (which would make it impossible to be a feminist, for example).

I only ask that you apply a single standard to your beliefs, instead of "general trends OK" for things you want to believe, and "one exception disproves any general statement" for things you want to disbelieve.

People are diverse and you are lumping large groups of people based on the actions of the ones _you_ are noticing.

I don't understand what kind of standard you expect to have. Can you please give me an example, and say, how it might have applied to civil rights?

You're treating a movement as a monolithic entity, and then saying it should be represented by its most extreme and vocal advocates, who inevitably make up the vast minority.

No, he's demanding that a movement be represented by the actual actions of its members instead of what they claim to be trying to achieve. He didn't restrict this to its most extreme and vocal members. He doesn't have to, because anyone whose understanding of feminism genuinely doesn't go beyond "equal treatment of the sexes" is not actually considered a feminist by other feminists; there are a whole bunch of other beliefs that feminists are expected to hold, some more important and universal than others, many of which require treating people differently based on their sex/gender. (One of the more common beliefs is that feminism's tactics and beliefs are the only way of achieving equality of the sexes, and that anyone who doesn't support them is therefore opposed to equality. Relying on this argument would, of course, be begging the question.)

It's hard to get far in this conversation, because I say "most feminists believe X", and you say "no most feminists believe Y", and is there any way to find out the truth?

>A movement is defined by what it does

Can we really attribute what a noisy minority does to the movement's actions, though? Even if said minority claims to be part of the movement. At what point do we draw the line?

Most feminists, admittedly talking from experience here, are moderates.

Comparing this to Kim Jong Un's actions isn't fair, as you're comparing the actions of a specific individual to those of a non-representative group of people.

Who says it's a noisy minority? I'm not talking about extremist actions like pulling fire alarms at university talks.

I'm talking about really basic things, like campaigning for more women to enter university (and not more men) despite the fact that women already greatly outnumber men in university. This isn't a fringe thing, it's core mainstream feminism. And it's exactly the opposite of "pushing for equality".

(You're right about Kim. Instead of writing his name, I should've written "North Korean government/society", to clarify that I'm talking about these groups and highlighting the gap between their stated principles and their actual actions.)

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