Comments on The Boyfriend's Introduction to Feminism

[anonymous45]

@anonymous116

@anonymous45

at worst it’s an attempt (perhaps subconscious) to equate western men with nonwestern genocidal men

I’m not sure what you mean here. Are you trying to imply that genocide is nonwestern?

I wasn’t trying to imply that, but I do want to answer you more fully so I’m going to answer the question is genocide nonwestern? too.

Since ‘western’ is an overloaded term I’ll answer twice for two meanings. I think both are reasonable within CF and that my statement was simple enough to work with both.

1. intended and common meaning: western just meaning UK/US/EU/CA/AU/NZ (not sure if I’ve forgotten any that ppl would commonly consider western. Israel? but that’s maybe contentious and I wasn’t thinking of them anyway).
2. western in the sense of western values and the enlightenment: the specific values responsible for our current golden age (as BoI puts it). I think I got this from BoI but it seems like the idea that western culture is special is more widespread albeit less philosophical.

In answering your question:

1. No, for the common meaning of ‘western’, claiming genocide is wholly nonwestern would contradict nazi death camps. I would not be surprised if there are other historical examples of large-scale organized state backed genoicide from countries part of ‘the west’. I’m not aware of any current examples (unless you listen to TRAs’ claims about being genocided.) FWIW I have visited Auschwitz and I think that anyone visiting the EU close enough to Krakow should make the effort. It is not pleasant but it is important and I still think about it many years later.
2. Yes, genocide contradicts ‘western values’ as I understand it and how I remember it being described in BoI.

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My actual point was picked up by my own ‘ask claude’ experiment, so I’ll just show you both at once (via screenshots rather than sharing the chatlog b/c anon):

My Prompt

Claude's answer

Quote of claude’s answer:

@Claude Opus 4.7 web interface

The “equate western men with nonwestern genocidal men” line is the anon’s complaint about the generalization in step 3. Doug is presumably not just making a claim about Rwanda — he’s using it as evidence for a broader thesis (something like “male leadership tends to be worse / more violent / more harmful than female leadership”). To get from “Hutu men in 1994 Rwanda did this terrible thing” to “men in general lead worse than women,” you have to treat the Rwandan case as representative of men-in-leadership generally. The anon’s point is that this lumps together categories that are wildly different — a 21st-century Norwegian prime minister and a Hutu Power militia leader — under the single label “men,” which is the move they find objectionable (and possibly subconscious on Doug’s part, i.e. baked into the rhetorical structure rather than explicitly asserted).

The “perhaps subconscious” hedge is doing real work: the anon isn’t accusing Doug of deliberately saying western men are like génocidaires. They’re saying that’s what the argument implies if you take it seriously as a generalization, even if Doug would deny endorsing that conclusion when stated baldly.

@anonymous116

I’m not sure what exactly you want shared, or why. Claude will say different things when you ask it the same question. This is normal and expected behavior.

shared: Same thing as me: full prompt and full response. Mostly I’m curious. I think you shared that or close to but haven’t looked closely.

I have not observed LLMs saying wildly different things from the same prompt (I understand that temperature is usually set to like 0.6-0.7 on chat interfaces so not maxed out but reasonably high).

FWIW these days I think you’d get a lot more of a difference from memories, thinking, model choice, and settings like personality and writing style.

I noticed Holodomor and will say briefly: yes genocide, but I don’t count russia as western (maybe I should?)