Comments on The Boyfriend's Introduction to Feminism

[Elliot]

@anonymous45

Labeling lab leak advocates as conspiracy theorist nutjobs, suppressing dissent, forced vaccinations that had known quality issues, lying about possible treatment options, cancelling medical licenses, refusing care, denying that symptoms even existed or were meaningful or associated or debilitating… are you seriously unaware that all this happened?

I think your adversarial-sounding question is uncalled for or may be related to misreading something. Where did a105 claim that none of those things happened? (Also your phrasing is problematic because you ask if he’s unaware that “all” of it happened, so if he denies even one thing then he would be unaware.)

@anonymous45

@anonymous105

Couldn’t you take the principled position that racists with a bad understanding of biology are like… maybe not the best people to trust when it comes to other arguments about biology? That could apply to people on the right and the left, couldn’t it?

That’s reasonable but doesn’t seem very principled (because the conclusion is in the premise). I assume you didn’t quite say what you meant.

If you mean that racists typically don’t understand biology much (and are thus untrustworthy on such matters), I mean sure that sounds reasonable, unless of course the biology comes first (dismissing it then on principle would be anti-science).

I think you misread and it may partly be a grammar parsing issue. a105 commented on a subset of racists (the ones that don’t understand biology much). That is not a claim about how many racists are in the subset.

“racists with a bad understanding of biology” is a noun (racists) followed by a qualifier which limits who/what he’s talking about to only be commenting on some racists, like “cars with air conditioning” is only talking about some cars.

The point/relevance is that hoe_math is in the subset.

@anonymous45

@anonymous105

I don’t really think I’ve advocated for a specific principle. Not sure we’ve gotten that far yet.

If you’re not, how do I learn anything meaningful and enduring from this?

Did you miss the “yet”? And the “gotten that far”? a105 seems to be saying he would do that later in the conversation. But it’s hard to get that far when you afk for weeks or bring up controversial asides like about covid politics.

@anonymous45

@anonymous105

I am not sure what exactly you think the scientists did that was worse than saying all Indian DNA should be eliminated, black people are hardwired to be violent rapists, etc.

FWIW I think that if a similar thing (an open letter in nature and subsequent decentralized suppression/smear/psyop campaign) happened but the content was hoe_maths’s tweets, that would be way worse. But it seems obvious to me that some anonymous guy on twitter/tiktok saying some racist stuff is essentially harmless by comparison to the covid-Nature thing. The difference in scale dominates the other factors.

It’s not really a fair comparison to compare the effects of one racist to many scientists. I imagine a105 assumed, as I did, that we would compare one to one. Like compare one typical scientist to hoe_math. Or if you want to look at aggregates, then we should include the harm from many other racists in the comparison.

Abstractly, many people being mildly bad is often worse than one person being awful. But awful is also worse than mildly bad, which is the more usual comparison. Saying that mildly bad is worse than awful, without clearly specifying that you’re talking about aggregate consequences due to a larger number of people being involved, is misleading/confusing. And there actually are more racists than bad scientists, numerically, so your point seems to be comparing one racist to many scientists, which seems strange and biased.

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I see here multiple potential reading/parsing/communication type errors (plus you self-corrected a cite error). Are you perhaps reading and writing while tilted which is leading to errors?