More talking points
The one with Andy Lewis and Aaron Rabinowitz.
I’ve watched only a clip so far, in which Helen asks Aaron if he thinks Lia Thomas has a right to be in the women’s changing room and Aaron says yes.
One way of looking at it is that critics of trans ideology are obsessed with the subject [and by implication kind of weird and crazy for being so obsessed].
Maybe, but on the other hand, maybe they have interests at stake, aka genuine concerns, and thus know more about it than you do, and thus just possibly are right while you – knowing less about it – are wrong. It may be that they think more about it than you do and care more about it than you do, and thus just possibly get it mostly right while you get it mostly wrong. Or not. Caring can of course distort too, but I don’t think Aaron should just ignore the knowing more=getting it right possibility.
To paraphrase a classic George Carlin bit: everyone who is less informed than me on a particular subject is ignorant and unqualified, everyone who is more informed than me is obsessed.
That episode was a disaster. We intended to step back and let Andy and Aaron do al the talking, and we tried to be courteous to Aaron, but the minute he came onscreen he announced that we’re all a bunch of antisemites, and pandemonium ensued. It was a learning experience, though. I had forgotten how smug and insufferable many SkepticBros can be.
Hi, Arty,
‘Insufferable’ is right. Aaron didn’t conduct himself well in the letter exchange with Andy and he was dishonest, evasive and smug in the podcast. He used the standard tactic of making outrageous claims and then backing away from them, knowing that the mud would stick. He can claim with dubiously plausible deniability that he didn’t call you (and all GC people!) a bunch of anti-semites… but that’s the part people will remember and the part that TAs will clip out of context.
A few other ‘highlights’:
* Answering the Staniland Question with a clear, unambiguous “yes” and then immediately denying he’d done it.
* Repeatedly using the phrase “thought-terminating cliché” as a thought-terminating cliché.
* Making it absolutely clear that he believes that the consent of women is not the most important factor in deciding whether men should allowed in women’s spaces.
You all held your temper a lot better than I likely would have.
If nothing else, the episode was instructive. Aaron was there to present the very best arguments for gender critical beliefs being a moral panic… And that’s what you got.
It also instructed me never to watch anything else he’s on: he’s loathsome.
Arty – didn’t he though. I’ve just watched up to 48 minutes (will watch rest later, then watch whole thing again) and I let out such a yell when he said that I could barely hear the three of you yelling. Godalmighty.
He just gives no thought to women at all that I can see. Maybe he does better starting at 49 minutes.
Jesus, what a smarmy prick. He opens with an incendiary accusation, and then gets defensive at being called on that accusation. “I’m just trying to answer your question!” he says, while throwing various backhanded and direct insults which understandably provoke peevish responses.
I was most annoyed that he answered every question with some variant of “That’s an interesting question that’s worth discussing.” Like, no shit. We’re here, now, to have that discussion. So let’s have it. We venture to answer the tough questions, we put our cards on the table, and he attacks us for our answers, all the while refusing to dare to lay out his own position. Really insufferable. I find this typical of the kinds of men (almost always men) who see debating as a kind of game, rather than an exercise that seeks to uncover truth. I think this is why I’ve always hated the debate format. I much prefer frank, plainspoken arguments over debates and their punctilious rules and decorum which just distracts from the truth.
…not that this was at all a formal debate! But his letterwiki thing was a lot like a formal debate and he seems like the kind of guy who would have been in his high school debating club.
Does anyone else pronounce “gallop” with the stress on the second syllable? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.
Hahahaha “Ga-LOP.”
Actually, I’ve heard it pronounced that way before and I’ve always wondered why. I’m glad to know I’m not the one who has been pronouncing it incorrectly all these years ;)
I’d never heard it pronounced that way before. I thought at first he was joking. Then I was impressed that none of you pointed and laughed.
I’ll have to watch it, and Arty I agree with regard to debates. It’s mostly scoring points is what it is. I would rather people argue and call each other dimwits than listen to a scored debate.
He seems to be very post-modern, doesn’t he? Favoring the Humpty Dumpty approach of using words to mean “precisely what I say they mean, nothing more and nothing less.”
I was thinking perhaps he was Frenchifying it, so I checked the etymology and it is indeed borrowed from French (though it’s one of those French words that was originally Germanic, related to “wallop”). But then I looked up its pronunciation, and it turns out that even in French the stress is on the first syllable.
In my lexicon ‘galop’ with emphasis on the second syllable (and only one l) denotes a Victorian ballroom dance.
What guest said. I have heard a fair number of musical works with that title pronounced that way.
I watched it late last night and couldn’t keep my eyes open afterwards, so I closed the laptop and didn’t even read the comments here, let alone make my own. Fortunately, in the third comment, latsot has made almost all the points I was going to make anyway.
Right from the beginning, Aaron was interrupting people and accusing them of interrupting him. He also seemed entirely incapable of being consistent (not surprising, really, given the glaring inconsistencies in the pro-‘trans’ position).
He utterly failed to support his claim that being against the medical and surgical abuse of children is a position of ‘moral panic’, refusing to answer the reasonable question why someone quoting from someone who quoted from someone who later made a remark which could, at a stretch, be regarded as anti-semitic, tars the entire gender-critical movement. And yet he seems convinced that convicted sexual predators claiming to be women in order to get into women’s spaces does not reflect badly on his side, and that self-ID isn’t a problem, but concedes that there should be some kind of gatekeeping – thus TERFing himself without realising it.
I was also furious at his blasé attitude to the abuse of children, seeming to see this entire situation as purely an intellectual exercise rather than an absolutely horrific one. His attitude was ‘we’ll see which side is right in a few years when there may or may not be a lot of people regretting being ‘transitioned’ in childhood and going to court’, ignoring the fact that we’re seeing that right now, and these are people’s actual lives being utterly ruined, not some theoretical position being taken by debaters in order to be contrary.
I give him points for turning up at all, when most on his side refuse; but if that’s the best he’s got, it’s pretty weak. Of course, he’ll say he won. That sort always do. Egos the size of barrage balloons, as my Dad used to say.
Well, what a – what shall I call it? There is Aaron Rabinowitz clearly convinced of his intellectual & moral superiority to everybody else, and expressing little more than that conviction, chiefly by the indirect and dishonest means of repeating that ethical dilemmas are so extraordinarily complicated and rarefied that they really can’t be talked about in the presence of such ill-educated and moronic, not to mention anti-Semitic, members of the hoi polloi with whom he has condescended, after a lot of arm-twisting, to have a discussion. That little smile whenever he was challenged was telling. He couldn’t take anyone else seriously, so he didn’t need to address what they said, but could just drift way into the shallows of his own self-esteem and what he considers to be his intellect. And, yes, as tigger-the-wing points out, for all his talk about ethics, there is not an ethical bone in his body. there is only an interest in indulging in petty little intellectual exercises with the petty end of looking as though he has won. What a contemptible individual.
Regarding ‘galloping’ & its pronunciation, here are the opening lines of Robert Browning’s ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’:
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three…
I should hate to hear Aaron Rabonwitz recite it, and his assertions (I shouldn’t call them arguments) why they should be read in that way, and everybody else is too ignorant to bloody understand what he is doing:
I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I gallOPT, Dirck gallOPT, we gallOPT all three…
His is not a Gish gallOP. but it is just as a craven a way of evading challenges.
Interesting about the dance. Most of the modern sources I found have it as a homonym with “gallop”, but I did find a source from 1910 Twelve Thousand Word Often Mispronounced; I have to get my hands on a copy) that puts the stress on the second syllable (but with a silent “p”).
So perhaps we’ve been wrong all this time, and it’s really a Gish galop.
@tigger #17
That’s about as far as I could get in this. He’s got that smarmy “I’m right and you’re all wrong” attitude about him. And while I’m aware that Jennifer Bilek has been accused of anti-semitic with her 11th hour blog, I’ve not seen a direct connection to her blaming international Jewish conspirators for the the state we’re in. But, I’m not Jewish, and so I may be missing something. It’s great case of poisoning the well, though, isn’t it?
He recently tweeted this:
https://twitter.com/ETVPod/status/1494663354773913611
“If we define “woman” as “adult human female”, does that mean that underaged girls shouldn’t be allowed in women’s changing rooms? Or do we allow some non women into women only spaces? (Sorry for all the trans content just spiraling trying to get inside the GC viewpoint)”
So his capacity for intellectual honesty is in question.
Michael Haubrich, that is breathtakingly stupid, even from someone who thinks that women should have no boundaries. If you aren’t an adult human female, you are only allowed into women’s spaces with the consent of women. Women rarely refuse entry to young children of either sex, let alone adolescent girls because they pose no threat. A man, however, does pose a threat to women; especially a man who has already shown his eagerness to cross women’s boundaries, by claiming to be one.
I just realised that I wasn’t clear – I meant that Aaron was being stupid in that tweet, of course. Michael is as far from stupid as it is possible to get!
:) – same to you!
D’awwwwww… =^.^=
Holms #6
“He opens with an incendiary accusation, and then gets defensive at being called on that accusation.”
Does that count as a variant of this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
I’m no expert, but I don’t think so. The motte-and-bailey is based on switching between two interpretations of a claim, one blandly agreeable and one contentious. The person makes the bold claim, then retreats to the mild one by saying “All I meant by that is…” or similar. This is just a guy insulting people and then pretending he doesn’t understand the uproar.
I’ve yet to see Aaron actually address, let alone critically question, any of the fundamental claims made by trans activists.
He’s skilled at putting the burden of proof on his opponents. He’s good at well-poisoning. He’s not so good at clearly and succinctly stating what he thinks.
He preemptively dismisses gender critical views. Opening with Aren’t you terfs disturbed that so many on your side have shared links to this dodgy individual?* He goes on to proclaim that the Staniland question is a thought terminating cliche. Meanwhile central questions like “What is a woman?” are apparently too complicated for him to address concisely.
This is not a man arguing in good faith. We can trade tu quoques about bad thinking and unsavory individuals on each other’s side, or we can steelman each other’s best arguments and evaluate them. Aaron’s made his choice.
* As a matter of fact, I am, but that’s another subject. It’s ridiculous to think that everyone who links to Bilek agrees with her overarching claims.