The most ridiculous part of Scott's post in this regard is the following:
>I have had this argument before enough times to know people always try to weasel out of it. Some people insist that every single lonely person in the world deserves it, because loneliness is a 100% reliable signal of being a misogynist who hates women - (What about lonely women? Probably racist.) Other people say that if these people just used better deodorant and learned social skills, they would all get partners, so it’s their own fault for not trying (much like how if poor people just worked hard and learned to code, they would all be millionaires). Still other people say that sex and relationships aren’t a human right (but a First World lifestyle with free college education and public transport and high-tech health care is, that’s just what God decided when He granted us inalienable rights, I don’t make the rules) and nothing that isn’t about a human right can be unjust or unfairly distributed. I reject all of these as weaselly.
For some reason, Scott has forgotten to apply the principle of charity. The first objection he brings up is an obvious strawman, while the second one *is* something that people say, but usually with respect to individual cases.
The third is the closest to making an actual point, but Scott refuses to think about it for more than 5 seconds. Why would people advocate for free universal healthcare but not . . . free universal sexual relationships? Oh, right, because the latter is a barely coherent concept!
Why would people think that only *rights* related issues can be unjust? Consider other examples of unfairness that are not related to human rights. I think you will understand very quickly that just because something is unfair, there doesn't need to be a society-wide campaign for the redistribution of it.
Peterson and Siskind were always after the same market of confused and resentful dumbasses, but no matter how many times "people not having sex with ME is a CRIME" talk comes up it's just that much more vile than the last.
Neither gives a single shit about women except in the most theoretical terms, as a resource they don't have as much access to as they'd like.
>Why would people advocate for free universal healthcare but not . . . free universal sexual relationships? Oh, right, because the latter is a barely coherent concept!
>
>Why would people think that only rights related issues can be unjust? I think you will understand very quickly that just because something is unfair, there doesn't need to be a society-wide campaign for the redistribution of it.
This is a bit incoherent as a sneer, tbh, and if this were debate club, I'd be awarding Scott the point.
Just because Scott may ignore the principle of charity doesn't mean we can too. How we have come to decide what is and isn't a right, and at what point does unfairness become injustice, are **the very questions he's asking**. The response of "pshaw, of course the things I intuitively think are rights, really are, and of course the things I can't comprehend, aren't rights at all, and of course there is a distinction between unfairness and injustice but I won't explain why or what it is" are really all just refusals to engage in the question, not a refutation of them.
Now then, to put this sneer on firmer footing:
Every right is an obligation. The right to life is the obligation not to kill; the right to liberty is the obligation not to enslave, the right to food, housing, education, health care, etc. is the obligation of all of us to pay taxes to fund those things for those who lack it. If we don't fulfill these obligations voluntarily, too bad: we'll be made to fulfill them with or without our consent.
So then, the right to love and sex is ... the obligation for someone else to provide it. With or without their consent.
And gosh, I know that taxation is theft and all, but at least it isn't *rape.* I feel like that's an obvious difference that anyone could have pointed out.
And again to be fair -- Scott himself does just that a few paragraphs later:
>It’s hard to think of a way to help him that doesn’t impinge on important freedoms in some way. Either the government would have to use force to coerce people to have sex with him, or use force to coerce people to give him their money so he could pay others to have sex. Both of these solutions seem to have enough ethical downsides not to be worth it.
Scott is obviously not saying we should do this -- rather, he's using it to illustrate his point that injustice is **more** than just unfairness.
I suspect you and he are actually in violent agreement.
I am violating my self-imposed rule to never argue seriously on this sub and suggest you to read [philosphy bear's rebuttal](https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/economic-justice-and-climate-justice?s=r). It makes very synthetically the case for the fact that yours (and Siskind's) central argument, "people are conflating justice with fairness", is completely moot.
TLDR of the post: Both enforcing property rights and polluting means inflicting harm on others, no differently than shooting them does. Exactly like we have a discussion on when, for what purpose, and by who shooting somebody is warranted (criminal justice), we have a discussion on when, to which extent, and in favor of who it is warranted to violently enforce property rights (economic justice) and a discussion of when and for which purpose it is warranted to release cancerous chemicals or make climate more deadly (environmental justice). There is no meaningful difference between these discussions, and (my addendum to the post) they often overlap: in many jurisdicition defending your property rights with disproportionate violence (eg shooting a fleeing burglar), or to the point that it has lethal effects (eg denying shelter during a strom) is a crime. Similarly, the most egregious, directly deleterious to health, and likely deliberate acts of pollutions are a crime (think of what would happen if you sprayed your field with DDT and your neighbors were hospitalized because of it). SO, both on the conceptual and empirical planes, it is quite blatant that nobody is conflating anything, and that fairness is not necessary at all for the argument.
Now, Siskind's argument is quite clearly shattered once one he is disabused of the notion that his opponents are actually talking about fairness, or distributive justice. His opponents are talking about the morality of inflicting active harm, not about the morality of a certain distribution, so as much as incels might be deprived of something, they are a false analogy because nobody is doing them active harm.
I think you simply did not know of what I wrote (mainly, quoted) above, but Siskind for sure does, because *he linked the post.* Now, the fact that he went on with his original strawman after being corrected means that either
* He did not bother to read any contradictory-looking reply, because he was not interested in actual discussion of the topic but just in reaffiring his thesis (and probably in gaining some edgelords points by whining about incels)
* He read it, saw it as (quite predictably) stronger than the strawman he construed, and so did not engage with it at all
Either way, you can draw your conclusions about his intellectual honesty.
>99% of people aren't gonna say "duh I mean the right to influence rights to property ownership", they will say "I'm talking about adjusting the distribution of wealth in society
Which is *exactly the same thing*. Like, do you think that the current distribution of wealth in society is anything but the distribution of resources enforced (with a great deal of harm) by the state? Also, about letting out stuff, I gather that you concede on environmental justice given that you let it out?
On the incel stuff, first, yuck. Secondly, the morality and legality of non-consensual sex *was* discussed and rediscussed many times (or do you think that our legal system and our culture always punished sex without ongoing enthusiastic consent as harshly as now?), and it was always a matter of criminal, guess what.. justice. The conclusion was of course that it should be a crime, but the discussion was there, and nobody thought it was about anthing else but a subspecies of justice. Seems that your great gotcha boils down to "if we started using the term "economic justice", it would be consistent with how we used the word *justice* so far". SAD, looks like r/slatestarcodex is not sending their best.
>if this were debate club, I'd be awarding Scott the point.
Well, good thing it's not, then!
I understand the value of making coherent sneers, but comments like "Just because Scott may ignore the principle of charity doesn't mean we can too" fundamentally miss the point of this subreddit imo.
The principle of charity isn't something you *owe* people you disagree with, it's something you only practice if you want to genuinely engage with their positions; and I've read enough of Scott to know that it's certainly not worth the effort in his case.
As for your actual objection:
>How we have come to decide what is and isn't a right, and at what point does unfairness become injustice, are the very questions he's asking.
They're not! If they were, he'd spend more than a cursory amount of time addressing them. The concept of 'right' is not interrogated at all in his post, and he doesn't define 'justice' or 'fairness' or even bother wondering whether the two are different.
If a person says 'well I think healthcare is a right but sexual relationships are not a right' then it's reasonable to ask them *why* they think that, but Scott's not interested in the answer. He's just saying 'heh well you don't have a clear reason for thinking this therefore your argument is bad'.
The argument, of course, being a total strawman that Scott has presented to the reader. If you think people saying "pshaw, of course the things I intuitively think are rights, really are . . . etc." are a real problem, then you're buying into his framing of the issue.
The reason why I *refuse to engage with the question*, as you put it, is not because I genuinely couldn't come up with the objection 'obligation to sex violates people's consent in a way that obligation to healthcare does not', but because I thought it was so blatantly obvious that any right-minded person could work it out themselves!
The sneer, in this case, should be directed at how warped the minds of the people making this comparison are that they never once consider the agency of whoever it is that would have to *provide* the sex. In my view explicitly spelling it out would just distract from the point.
That's why when I actually addressed Scott's argument in the second comment, I deliberately avoided some strain of 'well they're obviously different because I say so'. I simply pointed out failures on his part to consider possible reasons why his comparison doesn't work.
I didn't feel like I needed to actually go through the reasons why 'free universal sexual relationships' wouldn't work or potential examples of things that are *unfair* but not considered *unjust*, because again, I think anyone reading should have the capacity to do so themselves.
. . . and now I've spent much more time thinking about Scott's nonsense than is at all useful.
>they never once consider the agency of whoever it is that would have to provide the sex
To be even more clear, the guys complaining about not getting to have sex with women are mad about it because of the implications of status and access to another person's body.
Like that's the issue, in full and unabridged. They think women should be sexually available to them, especially beautiful ones, and the fact they aren't wounds their pride. How women feel about it does not matter to them and never will.
>The principle of charity isn't something you *owe* people you disagree with, it's something you only practice if you want to genuinely engage with their positions; and I've read enough of Scott to know that it's certainly not worth the effort in his case.
Yes and no ... I mean, you shouldn't *bend over backwards* to try to read sense into what he's writing, or to add clarity to otherwise beige prose.
But I do think the first part about writing a good sneer is *understanding what you're sneering at*. Which requires some modicum of charity.
Because it falls flat to say he "never once consider the agency of whoever it is that would have to provide the sex" when he obviously, explicitly does bring that up. It falls flat to complain about his wooly tangents and then ding him on not beginning with a treatise on the nature, origin, and philosophical history of 'rights' as a concept when it's otherwise unnecessary.
And it *especially* falls flat to say he "doesn't even bother wondering whether the two are different" when THE WHOLE PIECE is about WHY unfairness does not equal justice, and in fact why he objects to "unfairness" as a frame for "injustice" as opposed to care/harm.
> But I do think the first part about writing a good sneer is understanding what you're sneering at. Which requires some modicum of charity.
I do agree with this point, although I will reserve the right to be flagrantly uncharitable to Scott if I think it's funny. Not that I was trying to do so in this case.
>Because it falls flat to say he "never once consider the agency of whoever it is that would have to provide the sex" when he obviously, explicitly does bring that up.
This is a fair criticism. He does indeed bring it up, and I would have noticed as much if I was trying to look at the post as a whole instead of the specific part I took issue with. I think this sneer holds in regards to Hanson and the other people who like to peddle the 'sex inequality = income inequality' comparison, but in this specific case it does not, so that's fair.
However, if I were to correct myself, I would still accuse Scott of sympathising far more with the incel's view than the view of the woman who chooses not to date him. It's a problem with this line of questioning as a whole that can't really be solved by adding one paragraph where he goes 'well, the *usual* objections to this are on ethical grounds . . .'
The fact that my language was stronger than was warranted is true, but like . . . not a big deal?
>It falls flat to complain about his wooly tangents and then ding him on not beginning with a treatise on the nature, origin, and philosophical history of 'rights' as a concept when it's otherwise unnecessary.
Now you're being uncharitable to me! I don't want Scott to give me a treatise on the philosophical history of 'rights', I want him to engage with the questions that seem to be at the heart of this discussion. You mentioned them yourself in your previous comment: stuff like 'Can we only talk about justice with regards to rights-based issues?' He himself said that people object to the comparison on these grounds, but he doesn't bother to elaborate on whether or not they're valid.
It's not an unnecessary tangent at all - if you read carefully, his whole point hinges on dismissing these criticisms as 'weaselly'. If those criticisms were sound then the whole 'incel welfare' comparison collapses and he's no longer making a relevant point about justice.
I also think, if written well, it's a substantially more interesting topic than the one he presents here.
>And it especially falls flat to say he "doesn't even bother wondering whether the two are different" when THE WHOLE PIECE is about WHY unfairness does not equal justice, and in fact why he objects to "unfairness" as a frame for "injustice" as opposed to care/harm.
He doesn't even mention unfairness in the original piece! The concept barely comes up, because in Scott's attempt to deliberately misunderstand the thing he's criticising, 'justice' becomes not something you do in order to distribute outcomes evenly, but to take revenge against a villain.
In this comment response it features as a result of someone bringing up Haidt, but this doesn't result in Scott trying to determine whether fairness is a different thing from justice - he actually ends up conflating them.
The specific line I was thinking about, there, was:
>Still other people say that sex and relationships aren’t a human right (but a First World lifestyle with free college education and public transport and high-tech health care is, that’s just what God decided when He granted us inalienable rights, I don’t make the rules) and nothing that isn’t about a human right can be unjust or unfairly distributed.
Note how he says "nothing that isn't about a human right can be *unjust or unfairly distributed*." Wouldn't it serve his argument here to disentangle the two? Why would someone who's apparently concerned about the difference lump them into the same category so lazily?
Talking about justice, to Scott, is a consequence of thinking about things in terms of unfairness. It's not that he thinks some things are unfair but not unjust, but rather that he struggles to think about things in those terms at all.
Ironically, I think you're the one misreading his post when you say that he objects to "unfairness as a frame for injustice" when in fact the implication is that he wants people to stop talking about justice entirely, and return to a care/harm framework.
I don't really enjoy defending Scott and I'd rather spend more time sneering at him. I just kinda feel a bit blue-balled whenever someone comes along with "a really juicy dunk" and then I read the source material and ... he's not really what he was saying at all.
I think this happens a lot to Scott because he's a very rambly writer who likes to drunkenly stumble around in cultural minefields. Whenever he writes something, it's often not immediately clear that he's relating his own thoughts, or paraphrasing someone else's thoughts, or setting up a strawman to beat down, or what. He probably does it on purpose, I think.
Like when you say "nothing that isn't about a human right can be unjust or unfairly distributed". That's not his own words. That's him putting the words into the mouth of someone else, so he can call them "weasely".
I really didn't read Justice Creep, other than to get overall gist that the word "justice", to Scott, carries a heavy connotation of "crime and punishment", and so he objects to using the word in any other context. I'm not going to comment too much on that because honestly I don't much care. It's just a semantic, culture warish argument and I don't see the point in getting so bogged down into "what we call the thing" that we lose focus of "the thing itself".
I don't have the time to do another long rebuttal, so suffice it to say that it's very funny that you seem to have misread my comment in order to get the impression that I misread Scott.
> obviously, explicitly does bring that up
He brings it up as a superficial sop to the obvious objection. You really should read up on his decade+ habit of breaking into hysterical screeds about females and the insane evil Voldemortist ideology that is the vehicle of their liberation before giving him the benefit of the doubt.
I suspect Scott doesn't actually have a problem with using the government to force women into prostitution. He won't say it (yet), he would never put it in those terms (he'd go with, say, disincentivizing not participating in legalized sex work by withholding unemployment bennies from women who don't take the opportunity) but- well, he's weasely and does not consider women to be human.
>and does not consider women to be human
I'm obviously not familiar with the entirety of his immense online ouvere, but I've not once ever read anything that gave me the impression that he was OK with sexual slavery or would consider women "subhuman". Feel free to share if you have links. Probably he believes in some HBD differences between the sexes but to say that women don't deserve basic human rights is not a level of misogyny I've seen from him.
Have you read Untitled? There is something in him that is *broken* when it comes to the f of the s.
Also: I might be bad at rotating shapes in my smaller by x ounces brain, but don't think I don't know what you're smuggling under the mildly, civilly stated *HBD differences between the sexes*.
Are you sure you're in the right sub? I don't want to waste time.
>Are you sure you're in the right sub? I don't want to waste time.
[Pretty](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/rc96xs/what_is_this_subreddit/hnthe7x/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) [sure](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/tfb7et/comment/i0uxs6l/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) [that](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/sf3i8s/i_need_some_help_to_clean_my_mind_from_the_grip/hunhcg2/?context=3) [I](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/rveaor/roko_tries_and_fails_at_economics/hr5e7ye/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) [am](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/so0kh0/the_rationalist_can_be_replaced_with_vacuous/hw6381a/?context=3).
But I'm also pretty sure that "Lazy sneers aren't funny" and "Scott is many things, but a monster is not one of them" are also perfectly acceptable opinions to have here.
I think that "considering women subhuman" and "being OK with sexual slavery" are pretty monstrous opinions. Not *Hitler* monstrous, sure, but pretty monstrous.
I don't see him defending either one of these views in *Untitled* though. There's plenty of objectionable content, but not "monsterous" to the same degree as what you said earlier.
Like I said before, I'd rather spend my time sneering at Scott than defending him, just that when the sneers get *really* over-the-top I feel it's necessary to reel them in a bit.
I cannot believe I have to explain this, but 1) he thinks feminism is evil and insane; 2) "feminism is the radical notion that women are human" is an extremely famous quote that i really feel like someone defending the dude who strawmans "state sanctioned rape is bad actually" ought to recognize if they want to be taken seriously.
Your unsneers are bad.
I cannot believe I have to explain this, but "therefore, Scott must believe that women are not human" does not logically follow from those two premises, since Scott would not agree that that is an accurate characterization of feminism, and, in practice, entails a lot more than simply acknowledging the humanness of women.
> Scott would not agree that that is an accurate characterization of feminism
And he is wrong. And you are wrong for trying to smuggle in his "HBD differences between the sexes" as somehow not being extremely misogynistic and dehumanizing or *not* being "monstrous," the word you insist upon using as though misogyny is somehow abnormal and uncommon instead of *the default*. And you are wrong for not understanding why
>
> [I have had this argument before enough times to know people always try to weasel out of it. Some people insist that every single lonely person in the world deserves it, because loneliness is a 100% reliable signal of being a misogynist who hates women - (What about lonely women? Probably racist.) Other people say that if these people just used better deodorant and learned social skills, they would all get partners, so it’s their own fault for not trying (much like how if poor people just worked hard and learned to code, they would all be millionaires). Still other people say that sex and relationships aren’t a human right (but a First World lifestyle with free college education and public transport and high-tech health care is, that’s just what God decided when He granted us inalienable rights, I don’t make the rules) and nothing that isn’t about a human right can be unjust or unfairly distributed. I reject all of these as weaselly.]
Is misogynistic drivel that deserves all the sneers.
So that I'm clear what your view is:
>"Women can't rotate shapes in their head as well as men can"
is just as monstrous and dehumanising a viewpoint as:
>"Women are subhuman and sexual slavery should be legal"
If so, I respectfully disagree. I don't agree with either statement, but IMO it's ludicrous to say there is some sort of moral equality between them.
Regarding the section you excerpt, Scott is **obviously** not defending any of those opinions -- that's **why** he calls them weaselly. They are all transparently bad arguments he has heard from people trying to escape the conclusion that "if inequality and injustice are synonymous, then sexual justice is just as a valid a concept as economic justice". He's trying to get you to reject the former (that equality and justice are the same thing), not trying to convince you to accept the latter! (that not forcing women into sexual slavery is injustice)
Look, I know he's a terrible writer, but it doesn't take a huge amount of reading comprehension to grasp this.
Do you not understand what the function of saying "women can't rotate shapes in their head as well as men can" *is*? Do you not understand what the function of saying "white people are more likely to be able to digest lactose" *is*? Do you not get why HBD exists as an ideology???
> Scott is obviously not defending any of those opinions -- that's why he calls them weaselly.
Oh my God, yes, I KNOW. They **are not** weasely, he is fucking making shit up about the people who say that "sexual justice" is incoherent gibberish because he is a sexist prick. **He is strawmanning the belief that women have the absolute right to say no to sex.** Who has the right to such bodily autonomy? Humans, or people you consider to be *real* people. Come on, you seem to be thinking that just because he wouldn't (unlike some of his followers we've highlighted here before) stand in the public square and say "Females (never trans women!) are p-zombies," that he doesn't believe in and advocate for policies that dehumanize us, which is flatly silly.
>he is a sexist prick
This and the racism and the classism does sum up old Sandy Siskind pretty well.
It's not exactly a mystery why he does what he does and says what he says.
>Do you not get why HBD exists as an ideology?
I think you are asking, "do I know why for some people, it is SOOO important to them to prove there are biological differences between races and sexes?"
I think I do. From the extensive research I'm pulling out of my ass right now, 80% of them, I'd say, is because they were already racist or misogynistic, and latch on to anything that confirms their priors. And for this group, the *function* of repeating those beliefs is often to justify neglect or mistreatment of women and minorities.
I don't think it's 100%. I think there is some, not-tiny fraction that are genuinely interested in the question and think that's where the science leads.
Moreover, I think Scott's in that fraction. I'd be anyway hesitant to assume someone's motivations without individualized evidence, but honestly -- from what I've read, I see real animus towards *feminism*, but not animus against *women in general* (in the same way, I have animus towards "rationalism", but no one should assume I reject *reason*). I think it makes sense, as a psychologist it would only be natural for him to be interested in the question of how much of human behavior is nature, and how much is nurture.
Of course this latter group can later lead into real prejudice, but it need not.
>He is strawmanning the belief that women have the absolute right to say no to sex.
I don't think you understand what a "strawman" is.
A strawman is when you take someone's view and try to make it sound as silly as possible, so that you can trivially knock it over and declare it to be false.
So to "strawman the belief that women have the absolute right to say no to sex", you would have to take someone who genuinely believes rape is bad (hopefully that's all of us), and then put silly words in their mouth, and then afterwards knock it over with a rhetorical flourish and announce, "see, people who believe in consent are STUPID".
He's not doing that here. Nowhere in his article does he conclude (or even suggest) that sex and relationships *really are* a fundamental right. Judging from the dripping sarcasm around "a First World lifestyle", he clearly doesn't even believe free education and health care are rights, so why would he say that sex IS also a right?
When he finally does knock over the strawman, in the next two paragraphs, it's to crow victory over the argument that "if there’s inequality caused by human choices then that’s unjust by definition".
It's not at all what you you're saying it is.
Again, the argument he is making is "if inequality and injustice are synonymous, then sexual justice is just as a valid a concept as economic justice". **He is not trying to prove the second half of that sentence** \-- it's obviously false! He's trying to use its falsity to undermine the first half of the sentence.
> I think you are asking, "do I know why for some people, it is SOOO important to them to prove there are biological differences between races and sexes?"
That is *not* what I am asking. I am asking the question I asked.
And yes: I know what a strawman is. His stupid post would not exist if he seriously considered the difference between "education is a right" and "sex is a right," and so he has to strawman arguments against the latter so he can do the rest of the post. Those strawmen caricature people who believe in female autonomy, i.e. that women are human.
>I think there is some, not-tiny fraction that are genuinely interested in the question and think that's where the science leads
0 is not a small fraction, you got that right.
Al is big-time for sterilizing the unfit and a self-confessed fascist sympathizer. There's no "well, he's not *that* bad" option with him, even taking only his own literal words into account.
I don't think he would be OK with sexual slavery.
For a fairly narrow definition of "sexua slavery", I suspect he would be fine with it *so long as it was not phrased like that and the coercion was indirect rather than direct*.
He's always been visibly melting at the edges when it comes to women - every single person who's ever claimed he's "nice" or "good" is a man for a reason - but when he talks about incels he just loses his head completely.
Ironically, if he spent time on femcel fora he'd suddenly understand why *incels* (as opposed to sad permabachelors) are bad *real* fuckin fast.
> every single person who's ever claimed he's "nice" or "good" is a man for a reason
Trans woman here: I've met him personally, and he seemed nice enough. Terribly awkward, but to be fair he was also at the time cornered by someone trying to get him to introduce them to Andreessen Horowitz who was, uh, persistent and needed to stfu.
If anything, I think his fault is kind of on the other side of the coin. He's a compassionate guy who, because of that compassion, takes the distress of people around him very seriously. And because the people around him are mostly upper-class awkward techy guys with a somewhat reactionary bent, he lends a lot of weight to the problems of upper-class awkward techy guys with a somewhat reactionary bent **as portrayed by themselves while complaining about their problems**. Which leads to a lot of "I was just hypothetically talking about why slavery might be a good idea and then people were mean to me and called me a racist", even if we ignore the Steve Sailers of the world being way more manipulative.
I don't think he is a compassionate person at all. Read his blog posts about *his patients*, his contempt is...notable.
I'm thinking in particular of a couple he was providing therapy for; one of the two wanted to do BDSM and the other didn't. Faced with this refusal, the one who did suggested a "poly" relationship on, scare quotes because it was obviously not ethical, and the other declined. The post was about how stupid and unenlightened the vanilla monogamous patient was.
Compare this post, compare Untitled: he is not compassionate unless you redefine it as only extending empathy to people you already like and identify with.
I do not think this is a fair read on your part. He is not simply being manipulated by his milieu or his soft squishy feelings for his milieu. Read his leaked emails.
> He is not simply being manipulated by his milieu or his soft squishy feelings for his milieu. Read his leaked emails.
I don't think "Scott is falling into biases driven by his desire to believe what people he likes tell him" and "Scott is pretty fucking racist" are mutually exclusive.
For one, those emails came out after a decade or so of the process I'm describing playing out (remember, the community long predates the rise of SSC; Scott's been around since the web 1.0 days with Yud). And for another, he clearly finds the "cancel culture gone mad" narrative pretty appealing in a way that explains his desire to listen to reactionaries (which, to be clear, he shouldn't) in the first place. The whole point of the "THE WOKE MOB IS CANCELLING ME!!!11!1!" approach is to appeal to that kind of weakness, *especially* in people whose already-problematic opinions have gotten *them* into trouble that *they* don't feel like *they* deserved so that it passes the smell test. It's part of why the "moderate to anti-SJ-alt-right" pipeline is so successful, I think. (This isn't a criticism of the left - I'm not saying we should cater to this psychology so much as that I think that's what the psychology *is*.)
The process is basically:
* Alice expresses a view that is like 1 out of 10 problematic. Enough that someone more sensitive calls them out on it, which stings Alice.
* Bob expresses a 10 out of 10 problematic view.
* Bob gets cancelled.
* Bob goes OH WOE IS ME I AM BEING CANCELLED FOR A TOTALLY REASONABLE 1 OUT OF 10 VIEW
* Alice believes Bob, adjusts her opinion of SJ down and anti-SJ up, reads more crazy reactionaries, and ends up at 2-out-of-10 problematic.
* Repeat x 100
I would have more sympathy for his inability -- and realistically, it's an unwillingness -- to model women's minds if he didn't practice psychiatry and also claim to speak as some sort of authority.
Well, maybe. But I do think there's a difference between "nice" and "good". His beliefs are clearly bad, but that doesn't make him - in a narrow interpersonal sense - a jerk in his social interactions.
Scooter try not to be individualistic challenge (impossible)
“…climate justice involves summing up a bunch of things which are not
themselves unsympathetic yet happen to have bad consequences. Economic
justice is the same way - I spend my money on things I want and find
useful, you spend your money on things you want and find useful, and at
the end we find that Jeff Bezos has 00 billion and a Somali orphan has
/bin/sh. It doesn’t seem intuitively bad to play computer games or to
spend your money on things you want and find useful.”
It’s almost as if… maybe… the system in which we’re spending money
and playing computer games is organized in such a way that will
systematically lead to unjust outcomes? It’s also telling when the incel
conversation accepts their sex-obesssed framework, when if you talk
about lookism, fatphobia, racism etc (systemic issues about more than
just “why wont ppl have sex with me”), you’ll actually find some
progressives agreeing? Like I’m not going to pretend these ideas are
100% mainstream, but they’re at least taken seriously.
Reading the comments on the previous post by yourself would be so much better, too, since you wouldn't be treated to his inane discussion of the incel comparison.
Not just that but also other stuff like the boomer level argument about voters.
Sure Americans if you want Bezos to not abuse the tax haven status of The Netherlands, who should you vote for? Dem or Repub.
Who should I as a dutch person vote for to stop the Americans helping to keep the war in Yemen going? SP, GL, VVD?
His whole incel take is also bad (apart from the obvious) as it somehow confuses having sex with having a partner. It really is basic thinking here. Doesnt go much further than any sad black piller.
Once bigotry or self-loathing permeate a given community, it is only
a matter of time before deep metaphysical significance is assigned to
the shape of human skulls.
My god that is stupid in more ways than I can count.
Wanted to point out one specific one though, because it’s easy to
miss: the discussion about incels assumes that inequality is the default
state of mankind and its only those moronic SJWs who want to equalize
everybody. In fact, most human societies have been pretty egalitarian
hunter-gatherer type cultures. The extreme social stratification of our
world got its start with agriculture and civilization, and of course the
history of that strafication is ongoing and subject to change.
To a libertarianish type like Scoot, competition and radical
inequality are just natural things that we have to accept, so talk of
social justice is just naive, as absurd as declaring yourself to be
opposed to gravity. But to someone without those ideology-goggles,
cooperation and egalitarianism are just as natural, and in fact have
excellent consequences for human flourishing and so should not be
rejected out of hand by people who claim to be utilitarians.
> In fact, most human societies have been pretty egalitarian hunter-gatherer type cultures
Ehh... that line of arguments tends to be pretty suspect to me, largely because it takes "number of societies" as some kind of weird argument. (which... like how do you even define that?) you could just as well counter wtih the ide athat most human lives have been lived in stratified societies, and that despite their relatively newness on a "human time" level, they make up for the vast majority of human lived-years because of population stuff. (and there's also a tendency to use "hunter-gatherer" wrong of course)
And well, to quote Terry Pratchett: "Freedom may be the natural state of mankind, but so is living in a tree and eating your dinner while it is still wriggling."
Generalizing the majority of human societies as "egalitarian hunter-gatherer types" is false as well as the notion that agriculture and civilization ignited the "stratification" that is ongoing. Check out The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow- it demolishes these naive backwards projections. Your point that cooperation and egalitarianism are just as natural as competition and inequality is true, but we can't pretend that "pre-civilization societies" were all or even mostly egalitarian hunter-gatherer types. Pre-agricultural societies were, just like we are now, composed of thoughtful people reflecting on the best way to live- sometimes this demanded egalitarianism, sometimes it demanded severe inequality.
We’ve seen this sort of point from Hanson as well, and every time
it’s brought up people raise the counter point that creating a male
right to a certain ration of sex requires basically creating legalized
rape. That’s the most obvious objection, and it’s always good to bring
it up.
But I think leaving it at that kind of buys into the incel image of
themselves as super-rational testosterone bots with no emotions beyond
lust and anger, and sex as a purely biological requirement. At least
some of these guys are really mad that the greater female sexual choice
that has come with modernity has revealed that they aren’t that
attractive to women. And there’s nothing that even an amoral government
could do about that, beyond forcing women to pretend.
>At least some of these guys are really mad that the greater female sexual choice that has come with modernity has revealed that they aren't that attractive to women
Maybe not every guy who can't get any, but definitely all the ones that get really mad about it or make up elaborate hypotheticals to blame it on women being mean.
What if you blame yourself and recognize that your autism, creepy behavior and lack of time (mom making me go home every weekend) all contributed to that and you are lucky to ever talk to any non-coworker woman who has graduated college (your only friend) and you hate yourself every day
Nah, just legalize sex work and issue vouchers or something, let the market set prices. Like Obamacare provides health care without enslaving doctors, this get incels the sex they so desperately need with a minimum of coercion.
To repay his incel base, Trump will push congress to enact The Unblock the Cock Act of 2025 and there will be government-run knocking shops set up in every state.
I'm not serious but I can guarantee that most SSC readers have something like this in the back of their minds.
The obvous thing is that *they don't want sex*. Like, that's not what they want/need. They want/need the status of having a woman (and attractive one) serving their needs. Paying a prostitute doesen't fulfill that.
I think that's right but they might not know it; the idea that every value can be reduced to a single metric like cash or utility is pretty foundational.
The weird beliefs of rationalists aside – if you really care about status equality, for sexual or other purposes, the best thing you could do is enforce economic equality by means like heavy taxation of the rich and redistributive social programs. Our current unequal economic system produces lots of losers, and who wants to fuck a loser? But if being a normal working stiff doesn't make you a loser of a human being, then you might find it easier to get laid.
IOW you can't redistribute sex, but you can redistribute money, and that might just lead to a more equitable distribution of other things. Too bad that sounds like socialism and social justice, they'd never go for it.
I always find reading Scott posts annoying because he’s rarely
consistent in his own post (let alone across posts) and so I find it
hard to figure out what his argument even is.
Like, in this post he seems to on the one hand say a problem with the
justice viewpoint is that it encourages one to have the government
coerce people into certain actions (have sex or take money), but he
states that his ideal world will be one with a UBI.
So I’m left wondering
does he think that:
the government
won’t coerce people into paying for the UBI? If so, how?
won’t provide the UBI. If so, who will?
his objections are reasons to oppose justice:
if
all three obtain
each is effectively weighted and summed, with the decision of
rejection dependent on the sum
but are merely illustrative, not exhaustive, and thus can be
dispensed with for other more decisive arguments
that he forgot he made that argument in the first place?
Like, I know this is a super minor point. I’m pretty sure it’s my 1.2
or my 2. But it’s still frustrating, because, I want him to clearly
state his position, rather than leave his reader to guess at his
meaning.
Also, it’d be nice if he actually quoted people who have made the
arguments he attributes to them!
Also people can be too busy to pursue relationships even if they want
to, so unless he wants to force women back into the home and the
attendant social relations..
I absolutely do not understand how sex could be conceived of as an
unmet basic human need in the way I’ve seen it framed in this post and
elsewhere.
If I’m unhoused and can’t address that on my own, then that’s an
unmet need which has moral implications. If I really want someone to
high five me but nobody will, that’s just a bummer, and not a serious
moral consideration. Even a hardcore dust-speck utilitarian, who would
argue that the difference is one of degree rather than kind, would have
to admit that the gulf between them is pretty vast. It seems to me that
“I want to have sex but can’t because nobody is interested in having sex
with me” is much closer to the latter than the former, isn’t it?
This has always been a stumper to me. Is sex a basic human need in
some way that will be fundamentally incomprehensible to me because I’m
asexual, and I’m just failing to empathize with the allosexual majority
of humans? Or is that framing just bullshit employed to prop up
manosphere ideologies like incel, redpill, etc?
I think the most charitable interpretation of the "pre-incel" (sad permabachelor without the downward spiral of misery and misogyny) mindset is that to many friendless young men any possibility of emotional connection and affection seems gated behind romantic relationship, but you can't say that out loud because that's gay and unmanly, so what's left is sex and sex alone. Add to this frustration of being percieved as lesser due to being a virgin among peers who do fuck, and et voilà.
> This has always been a stumper to me. Is sex a basic human need in some way that will be fundamentally incomprehensible to me because I'm asexual, and I'm just failing to empathize with the allosexual majority of humans? Or is that framing just bullshit employed to prop up manosphere ideologies like incel, redpill, etc?
Scott himself identifies as asexual, interestingly enough.
I really like the framing you used here, and I agree (though I'm demi, so maybe I'm equally ill-equipped to understand the issue.) That said, I've personally never wanted sex so badly that I would want the government to force somebody into it -- and I've had a testosterone-driven sex drive before, so although evo psych folks will insist that (cis) women can't "get it," that excuse rings untrue to me.
I *have* seen incels argue for that sort of thing, and that seems to be the only logical solution to the problem, "why won't women sleep with me". Either that or brothel vouchers. Oh, Scooter, how far you've fallen.
>This has always been a stumper to me. Is sex a basic human need in some way that will be fundamentally incomprehensible to me because I'm asexual, and I'm just failing to empathize with the allosexual majority of humans?
I think this is actually the case. Sex is one of the very few behaviors every one of your millions of human ancestors performed. Outside of the behaviors that are absolutely necessary to sustain an organism's survival, is there any behavior that comes so close to being universal? I would consider it a far more grievous violation of human rights if a government made it illegal for certain groups to have sex, than if it made it illegal for certain groups to play video games, or some comparable pleasure-seeking activity.
> I think this is actually the case.
This is helpful to hear. Honestly, if sex is really a "basic need" for most (or even some) people, aside from its reproductive function, then I will probably always be completely out of my depth on this topic.
Most society's make it more difficult to have sex by outlawing prostitution, teaching concepts that it is sinful, forcing people to wear clothing, arresting people who do sex in public, etc.
Seems if it was really this fundamental human need we'd have governments and religions a lot closer to what incels would establish if they ruled the world.
Access to housing was given as an example of a need, yet governments place all kinds of conditions and restrictions on who can be housed where, and how. Sometimes people meet their needs despite these conditions, other times they are serious impediments to meeting the need.
Comparing sex to housing has funny implications.
Parents who don't provide a house for their fifteen year old kids get the kids taken away or the government provides low income housing vouchers. Probably because housing is a fundemental need.
If you were correct that sex was a fundemental need you would expect to see doctors prescribing sex for post pubescent fifteen year olds and parents charged with child abuse for preventing teens from having sex, or the government providing free prostitution coupons for the post pubescent children of low income parents.
But since humans don't do such things I have to assume sex isn't very much like housing in terms of being a fundamental need.
I really don't share your reasoning that if something is a fundamental need, then obviously society or governments would agree to provide it. There are all kinds of constraints on what society is able or willing to provide beyond whether people "need it".
It gets even weirder, according to some old mentions, Scott is somewhere on the asexuality spectrum as well (iirc it was described as ahedonic in regards to sex), not sure on that btw, and he clearly isnt aromantic.
(I recall this because anti sneerclubbers were using that against us in a 'they say he is a rapist but they dont even know he is sexually ahedonic' way).
We as a society get to choose which needs are societally important to
be met and which are not and pursue justice based on those ideas. Am I
missing some sort of point beyond this?
taking a page out of Robin Hanson’s book I see
It’s incredibly strange that people can’t seem to figure out the difference between these things
[deleted]
Scooter try not to be individualistic challenge (impossible)
“…climate justice involves summing up a bunch of things which are not themselves unsympathetic yet happen to have bad consequences. Economic justice is the same way - I spend my money on things I want and find useful, you spend your money on things you want and find useful, and at the end we find that Jeff Bezos has 00 billion and a Somali orphan has /bin/sh. It doesn’t seem intuitively bad to play computer games or to spend your money on things you want and find useful.”
It’s almost as if… maybe… the system in which we’re spending money and playing computer games is organized in such a way that will systematically lead to unjust outcomes? It’s also telling when the incel conversation accepts their sex-obesssed framework, when if you talk about lookism, fatphobia, racism etc (systemic issues about more than just “why wont ppl have sex with me”), you’ll actually find some progressives agreeing? Like I’m not going to pretend these ideas are 100% mainstream, but they’re at least taken seriously.
Lol people are now paying Scott to show them the comments under the previous post and his reactions.
Distributed networks are so confusing for so many people.
~ Contrapoints
My god that is stupid in more ways than I can count.
Wanted to point out one specific one though, because it’s easy to miss: the discussion about incels assumes that inequality is the default state of mankind and its only those moronic SJWs who want to equalize everybody. In fact, most human societies have been pretty egalitarian hunter-gatherer type cultures. The extreme social stratification of our world got its start with agriculture and civilization, and of course the history of that strafication is ongoing and subject to change.
To a libertarianish type like Scoot, competition and radical inequality are just natural things that we have to accept, so talk of social justice is just naive, as absurd as declaring yourself to be opposed to gravity. But to someone without those ideology-goggles, cooperation and egalitarianism are just as natural, and in fact have excellent consequences for human flourishing and so should not be rejected out of hand by people who claim to be utilitarians.
We’ve seen this sort of point from Hanson as well, and every time it’s brought up people raise the counter point that creating a male right to a certain ration of sex requires basically creating legalized rape. That’s the most obvious objection, and it’s always good to bring it up.
But I think leaving it at that kind of buys into the incel image of themselves as super-rational testosterone bots with no emotions beyond lust and anger, and sex as a purely biological requirement. At least some of these guys are really mad that the greater female sexual choice that has come with modernity has revealed that they aren’t that attractive to women. And there’s nothing that even an amoral government could do about that, beyond forcing women to pretend.
I always find reading Scott posts annoying because he’s rarely consistent in his own post (let alone across posts) and so I find it hard to figure out what his argument even is.
Like, in this post he seems to on the one hand say a problem with the justice viewpoint is that it encourages one to have the government coerce people into certain actions (have sex or take money), but he states that his ideal world will be one with a UBI.
So I’m left wondering
Like, I know this is a super minor point. I’m pretty sure it’s my 1.2 or my 2. But it’s still frustrating, because, I want him to clearly state his position, rather than leave his reader to guess at his meaning.
Also, it’d be nice if he actually quoted people who have made the arguments he attributes to them!
Also people can be too busy to pursue relationships even if they want to, so unless he wants to force women back into the home and the attendant social relations..
I absolutely do not understand how sex could be conceived of as an unmet basic human need in the way I’ve seen it framed in this post and elsewhere.
If I’m unhoused and can’t address that on my own, then that’s an unmet need which has moral implications. If I really want someone to high five me but nobody will, that’s just a bummer, and not a serious moral consideration. Even a hardcore dust-speck utilitarian, who would argue that the difference is one of degree rather than kind, would have to admit that the gulf between them is pretty vast. It seems to me that “I want to have sex but can’t because nobody is interested in having sex with me” is much closer to the latter than the former, isn’t it?
This has always been a stumper to me. Is sex a basic human need in some way that will be fundamentally incomprehensible to me because I’m asexual, and I’m just failing to empathize with the allosexual majority of humans? Or is that framing just bullshit employed to prop up manosphere ideologies like incel, redpill, etc?
We as a society get to choose which needs are societally important to be met and which are not and pursue justice based on those ideas. Am I missing some sort of point beyond this?
archive: https://archive.ph/EehZp