Guest post: These are Utopia problems
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Underlined.
Lady Mondegreen #9
I hear this from gender identity activists, but I’ve never seen a single screenshot.
Sorry for sounding like a broken record, but to me this was one of the earlies warning signs that the trans agenda was of a very different nature from the feminist or anti-racist or LGB ones. When I started paying attention to social justice issues (with a special emphasis on feminism) in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti-Harassment Policy Wars, the women being targeted by MRAs never had any problem providing endless specific examples (in the form of direct quotes, screenshots etc.) of obvious, unambiguous cyberbullying, harassment, hatespeech, and threats. My most vivid memory from that time is watching Caroline Criado-Perez’s mentionings on Twitter fill up with the ugliest cyber-bullying I had ever seen quicker than the Twitter feed could load them. I would click “refresh”, and by the time my browser (not a particularly slow one!) was finished loading the tweets, there were already 15 new ones waiting in line. These attacks could go on for hours at a time, every day for months or even years*.
When I started hearing about the diabolical “TERFs” (supposedly at least as bad as the MRAs sending rape and death threats to CCP) it was a very different story indeed. No screenshots, no direct quotes, nothing but the TRA’s own words. One of the most bizarre conversations I’ve had in my life was when a TRA PM’ed me on twitter to interrogate me about why I was following a certain feminist blogger who, by his own admission, had never said anything explicitly transphobic. Apparently it was “implied in very subtle ways” that only trans people could detect, and I was not qualified to question their judgement. It was about time I started to realize that the genocidal “TERFs” I kept hearing about included roughly half the feminists I was following, and once seen the glaring contrast between these women’s actual words and the words put into their mouth by the TRA could not be unseen. There was no going back after that.
In one episode of the original Cosmos series (there is a point to all this, I promise), Carl Sagan talked about how there were at one time people speculating that the surface of Venus was a swamp and maybe even inhabited by dinosaurs. When you looked at Venus through the best telescopes available at the time, it appeared to be completely featureless, so apparently the thinking went something like:
I can’t see a thing on the surface of Venus. Why not? Because it covered in clouds! What are clouds made of? Water! Ok, so there must a lot of water on Venus. Well, if there’s a lot of water on Venus, it’s probably a swamp. And if it’s a swamp there’s A and if there’s A, there is B […], and if there is Z, why not dinosaurs?
I think the way TRAs get from “this feminist said xyz” to “phobias”, “hate”, “denying our right to exist”, ” violence”, “murder”, “genocide” etc. is very similar to the way those people got from “I can’t see a thing” to “Dinosaurs”. As I keep saying it’s never about what the alleged “TERF” actually said. It’s only ever about what the thing she said supposedly implies as seen through the distorting lens of a million unstated premises and only at the other end of a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations (involving word-magic, mindreading etc.). Yet when people like Jones report on the latest internet showtrial against feminist thoughtcriminals, they invariably skip right past the million unstated premises and impossibly sloppy inferences and go straight to the “supposedly implies” part as if it had already been established more firmly the the laws of thermodynamics, such that the only question left to consider is how severe the punishment needs to be. As Not Bruce keeps pointing out, if they had any real examples of feminists spouting “hate”, denying trans people’s “rights” (including the “right to exist”), advocating “violence” and even “genocide”, etc. they would use it for everything it was worth. The reason they keep focusing on – never mind “first world problems”, or even “luxury problems”, these are “Utopia” problems! – like the technically accurate use of pronouns (!) or a popular author of young adult literature writing one of the least hateful things I have ever read*, is because that’s all they have. That’s the nothing that their dinosaurs ultimately boils down to.
* All that effort just to make the point that sexism was a non-issue…
** Certainly orders of magnitude less hateful than anything I have ever read by a TRA.
Bjarte:
How do you be sure it wasn’t a cyber attack by enraged bots? Maybe even Venusian bots.! I mean, Twitter tends to bring out the worst in its human devotees and acolytes (I never go there myself; btter things to do.) So why should Twitter not have the same effect on bots? I mean, if you were a bot, and had spent your whole life to date hanging about in some probably crocodile-infested Venusian swamp, you would probably get pretty cranky and shat-off too. I know I would. And then to find yourself plonked down into that other swamp they call Twitter.! It’s enough to bring on an attack of the horrors, or the screaming habdabs.!
IMHO.
I think you can find a good supply of vicious antitrans stuff out there.
Trouble is, it isn’t coming from women.
Where is the dogpile trolling of deranged Evangelical hate-mongers?
Clouds are made of water…except when they aren’t. Clouds made of methane, for example, aren’t made of water. They look like clouds, they are clouds, but they aren’t water.
Fits nicely with trans ideology.
Women are women…except when they’re not. Such as a man in a dress, which isn’t really a woman. He just tries to look like a woman.
Considering the old ideas about Venus, they were not quite as silly as that.
Back then, scientists believed that outer planets formed earlier than inner planets, so Mars would be older than earth which would be older than Venus. So the idea was that mars was what earth would look like in the future and Venus was similar to earth in the past. And then the clouds were used to argue that it should be a past of the earth where the climate was hot and humid, and that brought up the ideas of dinosaurs. Still far-fetched speculation, sure, but there was at least some basis to the idea.
Omar #1
That may have been a part of it, but it can’t be the whole explanation. For one thing someone had to put down the countless hours of work to create all those memes. Some of these trolls did also respond a little too “specifically” to pushback from other commenters such as myself (one of them even PMed me to ask what my “problem” was). Also, as anyone who followed the backlash to “Elevatorgate” and the push for anti-harassment policies at skeptical conferences will know, it’s not as if there aren’t enough real life people (many of them known by name) holding these attitudes to pull of such an attack. These things are not “fringe”. Indeed experiences like this were one of the reasons I for one was not at all surprised (depressed and disgusted, yes, but not surprised) when Trump was elected. (And, yes I do realize your comment was tongue in cheek.)
John the Drunkard #2
By all means. As I keep saying, if TRAs were a real social justice movement, at least to an excellent first approximation 0% of their time and efforts would be spent fighting feminists and close to 100% would be spent fighting toxic masculinity. Instead close to %100 of their time and effort is spent fighting feminists, and, far from fighting toxic maculinity, they are actively engaging in it. It didn’t have to be that way. There should have been a movement for people genuinely suffering from gender sex dysphoria (the classical “effeminate gay man” type), but that’s not the trans rights movement we have now. What we do have is a social injustice movement of the same kind as MRAs, “Incels”, the pro porn/pro “sex work” crowd (largely made up of the exact same people) etc.
Sonderval #4
There you go, another story commonly retold as fact (guilty as charged!) by “skeptics” that turns out to be apocryphal…
Anyway nothing in my post hinges on the historical accuracy of the story. I just thought it was a nice illustration – true or not – of “a long chain of impossibly sloppy inferences and extrapolations”.
@Bjarte
Of course your point stands regardless of the accuracy of this story, sorry if I gave a different impression.
And the inference from “younger planet” to “dinosaurs” still was very far-fetched.
Anyway the result is a nice little bit of History of Astronomy that I for one didn’t know, so win-win.