Category Archives: social justice meta

Fuck Your Theory

In principle, in a free market, hiring discrimination should not happen. (Barring certain odd circumstances– for instance, if white people prefer to have other white people as waiters, and people of color don’t care, then restaurants would rationally hire only white waiters.) If everyone discriminates against people of color, then the business that hires people of color will get talent for cheaper and outcompete everyone.

In practice, hiring discrimination does happen. Like. There are studies.

An absurd number of people seem to believe that “in theory, hiring discrimination shouldn’t happen” is a valid objection to “hiring discrimination happens.” It’s not. Facts beat theories. If your theory says something shouldn’t happen, and it happens, your theory is wrong.

Now I’m not saying there are no plausible objections to studies of hiring discrimination. But the objections are all fact-level, not theory-level. You can criticize study methodology all you like; you can propose an alternate theory that explains the data; but you cannot say “my theory says this data is wrong, therefore it is.”

This happens all the time. For instance, a very common objection to utilitarianism is that it is in principle impossible to compare utility between one person and another. On the other hand, yesterday I let my housemate have the last cookie because I was full and she’d missed lunch, and therefore she’d get more utility from it than I would. Seriously, I decide “this thing would make you happier than me” all the time, which is basically what utility comparison is.* Therefore, although they seem convincing, I am quite confident that the philosophical arguments which suggest that this is impossible are mistaken somehow. If you have an airtight proof that something is impossible, and I keep doing it, it’s not actually impossible.

You also see this a lot in Bad Social Justice. If you have responded to “men experience more violent crimes than women do” with “but men can’t experience sexism, this is a patriarchy,” your feminism is bad and you should feel bad.

I feel like I should wrap this up by pointing out a time that I did it and saying “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” because I try not to criticize other people’s bad logic unless I can show that I’ve done it too. I actually can’t think of a time I did. But if I do it in the future smack me upside the head, kay?

*Preference utilitarians, feel free to sulk at me in the comments.

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Intent Is, In Fact, Fucking Magic

A common slogan in the social justice community is that intent is not fucking magic. Usually, people say that when someone does something oppressive, someone else calls them out on it, and the first person says “well, I didn’t mean to.” Intent is not fucking magic! If you hurt people, then they’re hurt, regardless of why!

…Except that intent kind of is fucking magic.

For instance, let’s say someone refers to me with female pronouns. Regardless, I’m misgendered, and I get that twinge of oh fuck oh fuck wrong pronoun. (It feels like being stabbed in the gut with an icicle.) But it is different if the context is:

  • My boyfriend, who knew me as “she” for a year and previously had pronouns in read-only memory;
  • A friend who is trying but still sees me as a girl;
  • A random person on the Internet who assumes I’m female because I talk about gender;
  • Someone who hates me and is deliberately misgendering me as a sign of disrespect. 

The primary difference in these situations is intent. The difference in intent between “fuck, I’m used to your old pronouns” and “okay, but you’re a girl REALLY” and “I didn’t know” and “I want to hurt you.” It is reasonable for me to get more upset at someone wanting to hurt me than I am at someone making a mistake.

And you know what? If it’s an ambiguous situation, and it’s possible that they misgendered me to insult me and possible they misgendered me because they thought I was a chick, I would really appreciate it if they would clear the matter up. This is not just about their culpability, although that matters. It’s about my ability to assess how safe that person is and how much I should trust them. If you think intent shouldn’t matter, you are making it more difficult for oppressed people to distinguish people who will hurt them from people who won’t. That is the exact opposite of social justice.

Of course, I think most of the time “intent is not fucking magic!” is used when someone does a shitty thing over and over again and says “I didn’t mean to!” as if that makes it better. But you know what? If you make a sexist joke, and someone explains why that’s bad, and you make another sexist joke and then defend it with “I didn’t mean to be sexist!”, your intent was not good. If you mean well, you will act the way a well-meaning person acts.

How do well-meaning people act?

1) Apology. A real one.
2) Try to understand why the people believe that that thing was wrong.
3) Take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.
3a) If you disagree that a thing was wrong, take reasonable steps to avoid doing that thing in front of people who are bothered by it.
3b) Or admit that, in fact, you DO intend to make sexist jokes and upset feminists, which at least has the virtue of being honest.

Don’t Call People Anti-Choice

And now I’m going to talk about a specific example of what I talked about in my last post.

Every time you call a pro-life person anti-choice, I cringe. Every time you say the reason that people are pro-life is misogyny, I cringe really fucking hard. (Saying that the pro-life position is misogynistic is allowed, just like saying that three strikes laws are racist is allowed even if some people support them because they  think the laws will reduce the crime rate and not because they hate black people.)

Look, people. I went to Catholic school. I spent a lot of time around pro-life people. I took classes from a guy who was arrested for chaining himself in front of the abortion clinic. I know the pro-life mindset from the inside. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, when people are pro-life, it is not because they hate women and want them to go through forced pregnancy, or because they want to punish irresponsible sluts by forcing them to have kids, or because they don’t want people to have sex.

It is because they believe that fetuses are people and that killing them is murder. You know. Like they keep shouting while waving around those horrible gory pictures. They say it enough, you’d think people would pick up on it.

Yes, abortion clinic protestors are assholes. On the other hand, if you think about it, their response is remarkably restrained given that they think what’s going on inside is literally murder. Like, at that point, yelling “you don’t have to do this! Your baby has a heartbeat!” sounds almost compassionate.

Also: pro-life people are not campaigning for waiting periods because they think women are too dumb to make up their own minds about abortion, they’re imposing waiting periods because they want to make abortion hard to access so people have fewer of them. The former is their paper-thin rationalization. I thought that was obvious to everyone but apparently it’s not.

The anti-contraceptive position is more difficult. Most of the pro-life people I know are pro-contraception because contraception reduces abortion rates, although some of them support a religious exemption so that people don’t have to pay for things they find immoral. (I wish I didn’t have to pay for government programs I found immoral.) The Catholic Church has its teleological justification for not using birth control, but I don’t know why some Protestants don’t like it. And, yeah, you are free to call anyone who doesn’t support birth control because they think Sandra Fluke is a slut a misogynist, with my blessing.

On Believing Things About Your Political Enemies

My brain is continually surprised when anti-feminists are people.

Because, you know, they’re my political enemies. Clearly when people are political enemies, it means that they go around cackling and wearing all black and burning kittens. So when it turns out that, in fact, anti-feminists are mostly just people who think sex differences are substantially larger than I do and that this fact justifies the existence of patriarchy, my brain gets really confused. “You’re… a nice person? And you make jokes? You have interesting thoughts about Lord of the Rings? DOES NOT COMPUTE.”

And I feel like this is a really common thing that people do. I mean, my brain assumes that anti-feminists advocate anti-feminism because they’re evil and want to hurt people. Other people might assume that other people advocate their political opinions because they’re too stupid to realize how bad it is, or because they’re literally just insane.

(Obvious Disclaimer: I feel like there are inevitably going to be a bunch of people in the comments going “but I don’t want to understand antifeminists as people! They’re horrible and hurt people! It is not the responsibility of the oppressed group to understand the oppressor!” Let me be clear: I’m not saying that you have to make the effort to understand the oppressor. The rest of this blog post will be working off the assumption that you do want to, and that everyone who doesn’t want to stopped reading and went off to play Parcheesi.)

(Second Obvious Disclaimer: everyone understands that “this political position is horrible and will hurt people” and “the advocates of this political position are people” can both be true statements at the same time, right?)

One time, when I was much younger, a friend gave me a piece of writing advice. “The trick to writing villains,” she said, “is that every villain is the hero of their own story.”

And I think that’s also the key to understanding people you disagree with. No one has a narrative of their lives in which they say “I’m stupid and crazy and also evil! Muahahahahaha! Let me kick a puppy!” No one wakes up in the morning and says to themselves “I’m going to support gun rights because I’m so insecure in my masculinity that I need a giant phallic object. Also, I like watching kids die.” Or “I’m going to oppose Plan B being available over-the-counter because I like it when fifteen-year-olds get pregnant.” Or “the reason some atheists criticize Islam more than other faiths is because they’re political cowards afraid to pick fights with people closer to home.”

Just like no feminist supports feminism because they want to fuck jerks and then force nice guys to pay for the baby, or as a desperate attempt to delude themselves about their attractiveness, or because we enjoy accusing innocent men of rape.

Of course you do get into a problem here, because sometimes people do believe things for irrational reasons, and it is fair to point out when people are being irrational. So I would like to present the following as heuristics for explaining why people you disagree with believe the things they do:

1) Only use explanations that you are willing to accept as explanations of your own beliefs. For instance: I value people being able to do things that make them happy and I think marriage makes people happy, so I support same-sex marriage. Joe Fundamentalist values people not doing things his church says is sinful and his church believes two women getting married is sinful, so he doesn’t support same sex marriage. In both cases, we believe something because it is in accordance with our deeply held values. (It helps that I think moral values are a sort of arbitrary preference.)

To pick examples with less sunny views of human nature: I often do things that are ethically dubious because it’s in my self-interest to do so, so “Monsanto is trying to get a monopoly on food because they will make lots of money if they do so” is an acceptable explanation. I sometimes oppose things that don’t hurt anyone because they gross me out, so “some people don’t support gay people having relationships because gay sex grosses them out” is acceptable. I feel like everyone would be bisexual if they just saw a sufficient number of appropriately-gendered hot people, so “some people oppose poly because they are monogamous and they think that everyone else must work the same way they do” is acceptable.

I like this principle because it accommodates multiple views of human nature. If you think people basically just believe things as an elaborate status game, you are welcome to, as long as you don’t think that your beliefs are magically the result of objective non-status-influenced reason. 

2) Try to come up with the explanation that makes the people you disagree with look most heroic. For instance, I could explain Monsanto’s actions as an attempt to earn money. On the other hand, I could be like “Monsanto put a lot of research money into developing these genetically modified organisms; if they let people grow the seeds that blow into their fields or the seeds the plants the people bought produced, no one will pay for their product and then they’ll go out of business and people will lose their jobs and no corporation will make GMOs anymore, even the really good ones that have increased nutritional value or survive drought and frost better or increase yield and thus prevent famines and world hunger and malnutrition and other bad shit.”

On the other hand, despite my best efforts, I can’t find an explanation for why fundamentalist Christians talk about same-sex marriage so much more than other sins, other than them thinking gay sex is really really gross. So I am willing to accept that as an explanation.

This strategy has two advantages. First, if it turns out your opponent actually has a good point, then you’re more likely to find out about it and find a way to ameliorate it. (In my case, I might support increased government or nonprofit funding of GMO research so we can still develop awesome famine-preventing seeds.) Second, people tend to go for the explanation of their behavior that makes them look best, so you’re being psychologically realistic. You’re more likely to have an explanation of why other people believe things that’s close to why they believe they believe it.

(I am not sure how I can modify this rule for people who have less sunny views of human nature than me. Maybe “you should not be significantly more charitable to people you agree with than people you disagree with”?)

Prudes’ Progress: Intro to Radical Feminism

Lisa Millbank is a blogger I really respect, because she’s really smart about gender and even when I disagree with her ideas I always have to question my beliefs. Recently, she finished a series called The Prudes’ Progress, which is about developing a radical feminist concept of sexuality and has induced Many of the Thinky Thoughts on my part. So I’ve decided to write a bunch of blog posts responding to it, or talking about the ideas that are more-or-less related to her thoughts. This is the introduction to the series!

First: Millbank is a radical feminist. Most people I know tend to use “radical feminist” as either a synonym for “extreme feminist” or a synonym for “transphobic whorephobic kinkphobic feminist,” neither of which are actually correct. Radical feminism is a distinct theoretical perspective on feminism (which, yes, often happens to be extreme and transphobic/whorephobic/kinkphobic).

Radical feminists believe that gender is a social construct, not a biological reality, formed out of patriarchy. Patriarchy, they believe, is a social structure in which men dominate and oppress women; it seeps into every aspect of our lives, including such apparently apolitical things as appearance and one’s sex life. Radical feminists believe that gender, structures of domination, and patriarchy are bad for women and should be eliminated. (For the curious, I disagree with #1 (gender is both a social construct and a biological reality), agree with #2, and agree with #3 except for the gender bit with caveats.)

In particular, since I’m going to be talking about radical feminist views of sexuality a lot, I should talk about what they are. If patriarchy seeps into every aspect of life, it also seeps into sex; since patriarchy is bad, this leads to sex that hurts one or more of the people involved. How so? Well, obviously sexual violence. But beyond that an ideology of beliefs that wind up promoting sexual violence (the famous “rape culture”)– the treatment of one person as active, powerful, the subject, the one who wants, and another as passive, subordinate, the object, the one who is wanted and does what the subject wants. Through sexuality, patriarchy eroticizes and actively maintains this difference. Lisa Millbank calls patriarchal sex “instrumental sexuality,” which is a phrase I’m going to use.

Radical feminism was originally opposed to liberal feminism, which was the feminism that mostly dealt with legal inequality and job discrimination and reproductive rights. Very few people identify as a liberal feminist anymore because the abortion thing is basically the only part of liberal feminism that’s remotely controversial and if you like abortion rights you can just call yourself pro-choice.

Around about the time liberal feminism became incredibly uncontroversial, feminism decided to have something called the Feminist Sex Wars (not kidding). Radical feminists tended to believe that porn, BDSM, and sex work perpetuate social structures of domination and were violence against women. Sex-positive feminists, on the other hand, were like “wait, no, I get to do what I want with my own vagina, stop telling me what to do.”

(Also in this period huge swathes of radical feminism inexplicably decided that trans people were Public Enemy #1. Which, okay, if you think gender is a product of the patriarchy then trans people probably won’t exist in the post-patriarchy, but I fail to understand how that turns harassing trans women into a feminist practice.)

(Yes I do. The answer is transmisogyny.)

A huge amount of theory that even sex-positive and trans feminists use was developed by radical feminists. The concept of “patriarchy”? Radical feminists. “Rape culture”? Radical feminists. “The personal is political”? Radical feminists. Consciousness-raising groups and their descendant the feminist blog? Radical feminists. I am really sad that radical feminism has all too often devolved into woman-hate, because there are so many radical feminist authors I respect and who have deeply affected my feminism and challenged my thought on gender. Part of the reason I like Millbank’s work a lot is that she’s a modern radical feminist who gives my brain the same workout as, say, Dworkin.

Another reason I particularly like The Prudes’ Progress is that a lot of people, having proved to their satisfaction that such-and-such sexual practice is inherently oppressive, consider their work done. To pick on a non-radical-feminist example… let’s say it’s oppressive to consider trans, disabled, and fat people inherently unattractive, both because it’s a product of a culture that considers trans, disabled, and fat people unattractive, and because it’s shitty to be considered ugly because you’re part of whatever marginalized group. Okay, great. What do you do with that? If you’re someone who’s only attracted to cis, abled, thin people, do you… have sex with trans, disabled, and fat people anyway for anti-oppression points? Self-flagellate about  your oppressive boner? What? Identifying a problem is not the same thing as offering a solution.

Millbank has written an entire really long series of articles about how, if you accept radical feminist beliefs about sexuality, to make your sexuality less patriarchal. I approve of this and wish more people who want to critique sexuality would do similar things.

Obvious Disclaimer: all of this is personal piety, not basic morality. Your moral obligation sexually is discharged by not being an asshole. (You know: don’t rape people, don’t call people ugly because they don’t give you a boner, don’t lie to your sexual partners about how many people you’re fucking or whether you have an STI, use contraception unless you’re prepared to have offspring, that sort of thing.) If you don’t accept radical feminist beliefs about sexuality (which I do with some caveats), you might be able to get something out of The Prudes’ Progress, but it’s primarily targeted at a different audience. If you’re in a place where working on your sexuality is not healthy or fulfilling or the optimal choice for you right now, great! Go build houses for Habitat for Humanity or something. If your feminism involves hating on women who aren’t hurting anyone for being insufficiently feminist, you are bad at feminism.

Further Obvious Disclaimer: The Prudes’ Progress is mostly written for women in erotic relationships with other women. I am a nonbinary but female-presenting person primarily in erotic relationships with men (although I have been in erotic relationships with women in the past). I expect this is going to affect my reactions to shit she talks about.

Probably Non-Obvious Disclaimer: Most of my planned blog posts range from “inspired by The Prudes’ Progress” to “completely unrelated to it but thrown in as an appendix because why not,” so you do not have to read The Prudes’ Progress in order to understand the series.

The Problem of Self-Identification

[Clarification, since people in the comments seem to have misunderstood: this is not about literally every identity ever. This is about identities that people have because they self-identify as them, and how they can still totally have a definition.]

A lot of people tend to say things of the form “if you identify as an X you’re an X.” If you say you’re a man, you’re a man; if you say you’re a woman, you’re a woman. If you say you’re a geek, you’re a geek. If you say you’re a feminist, then you’re a feminist. The problem with this is that it makes the word ultimately meaningless: if “geek” only means “the set of people who say that they’re geeks,” then “geek” doesn’t mean anything at all. You might as well say “fleegash means people who say that they’re fleegash.”

So let’s not talk about gender or subculture. Let’s talk about Hogwarts houses.

Unfortunately the real world lacks a Sorting Hat, so we can’t say for sure what someone’s Hogwarts house is. The ultimate authority about whether someone’s a Ravenclaw is their own word that they’re a Ravenclaw. (You could say that Pottermore tells you “canonically” what your house is, I guess. If this really bothers you, you can pretend that I’m solely talking about pre-Pottermore fandom.)

If someone loves reading, knowledge, and being snotty about how much smarter they are than everyone else, and identifies as a Gryffindor, they’re probably a damn Gryffindor. I mean, to you they look like a Ravenclaw, but they have privileged information here. They know about the time they fought off bullies in fifth grade and how they’re only learning things in preparation to become a Warrior of Light. Unless they tell you literally every damn thing that happened in their lives, they know more about themselves than you do. And that kind of information is important for a situation as full of nuance and shades of grey and judgment calls as fitting your entire personality into one of four arbitrary boxes– Hero, Villain, NPC, or Other NPC.

Yes, it will occasionally happen that someone is mistaken about what house they’re in. But from the outside you can’t tell apart “mistaken” and “knows more about themselves than you do.” And since people are only sometimes mistaken and always know more about themselves than you do, and since being like “no, you are CLEARLY A RAVENCLAW!” is generally a poor method of convincing them that they’re mistaken, you should err on the side of respecting what people say. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? Your clubhouse gets invaded?

So, yes, you’re a Ravenclaw if you identify as a Ravenclaw. And yet the Houses have clearly defined traits: Ravenclaws are smart, Slytherins are the villains, Gryffindors rush in where fools fear to tread, and Hufflepuff… is near the kitchens. Both of these things can be true at the same time! And the same thing is true of feminist, geek, man, woman, nonbinary, and anything else people say “if you identify as an X you’re an X” about.

People Are People Regardless of Political Affiliation

I tend to read AlterNet a lot, mostly because I am highly amused about articles with titles like “Shocking Top Nine Republican Lies: The Disastrous Menace of Rampant Vampire Capitalism!” You know where you stand with articles like that. They lay their bias right out front. (Also I totally wrote for them a couple times and I’m generally fond of anyone who gives me money.)

Unfortunately, they believe a lot of things about Republicans that… really, really aren’t true.

The Republican Party accurately reflects the views of its constituents. See, there’s this recurring leftist meme (I remember seeing it when Clinton was president and when the Democrats took the house in 2006 and it happens a lot with Obama) about how the Democratic Party is totally weak! It won’t go after the big banks! Why is it giving in to the Republicans? Obama likes consensus too much! The Republicans are successful and getting everything they want and we get nothing! NOTHING!!!

The problem is that if you go look at conservative websites Obama’s bullies are getting everything they want and are, like, five seconds from taking away your guns and putting everyone into FEMA camps. The Republicans aren’t holding strong on anything– not abortion, not gay marriage, not the deficit, anything! Why do they keep giving into Obama?

I think the actual problem is that both Democrats and Republicans have to appeal to the center and to large donors, so they’re not going to do everything their base wants. Since the base is usually surrounded by other members of the base and thus overestimates the prevalence of its ideas, from the base’s perspective, it looks like the other side is getting everything it wants and our side is inexplicably weak.

Some random idiot reflects the beliefs of the Republican Party. Literally every five minutes on Twitter some idiot Republican says something dumb about abortion or rape or birth control and then we all have to hear about What This Means For The Republican Party, which apparently all secretly believes that you can’t get pregnant from rape and when you use birth control your uterus fills with little crystallized fetuses. Of course, if you go on Breitbart.com (I went on Breitbart.com to research this, I need a shower now), you’ll find out all about how Democrats believe Chavez was a good leader who understood the needs of the poor, rape victims shouldn’t be allowed to defend themselves, the sequester cuts should be as painful as possible, etc.

Okay, so none of those are quite as good examples as Mr. Akin. In my defense, I’ve been part of Leftist Internet for years and I could only bear to be on Breitbart.com for five minutes before I wanted to vomit, so my Leftist Internet sample is way better.

Note that I’m not saying that Republicans as a group don’t believe dumb things. They do (“evolution isn’t true!”). Just that you cannot take any random thing some random vaguely famous Republican says, possibly in context and possibly not, and claim that this is what Republicans as a group believe. (It’s possible that the Republican Party has a higher percentage of people that say really dumb shit? But again lefty media don’t tend to trumpet the liberals who say dumb shit, so I don’t know.)

Republicans are a totally united front. Guys, no. The Republican Party has libertarians and conservative Christians in it. I’m amazed they manage to get them to vote for the same people at all, given that in a sensible universe the libertarians and the conservative Christians would have literally opposite opinions about everything. That is some fucking amazing coalition-building there guys good job. The sex-positive vs. radical feminist war suddenly seems way less daunting.

Death threats. A few years back, when Men Call Me Things happened, I saw a lot of arguments that getting death or rape threats was uniquely a result of being a feminist blogger and proved how much anti-feminists hate us. That… kind of fell apart when feminists started sending death threats to Laci Green.

And the thing is… I only know about that because Laci Green is also a feminist. I don’t read conservative blogs; if conservatives got death threats, I would have no fucking idea. I mean. Maybe someone’s going to comment here and be like “actually I am a conservative blogger and there are none of the death threats!” in which case I’ll revise this, but my null hypothesis is that there are horrible people on all sides and sometimes horrible people send people death threats. (Anyway, a cursory Google suggests that lefty people have threatened death against Mitt Romney, Scott Fitzgerald, and Rush Limbaugh, so clearly some of us are willing to.) 

Let me be clear: women are far more likely to get death and rape threats, as well as other kinds of horrific insults, online. (Just ask anyone semi-Internet-famous who switched from a male/gender-neutral to a female name, or vice versa.) That is an important conversation to have and one that I’m glad Men Call Me Things kicked off. The conversation about how leftists are uniquely victimized because only we get death threats? Nope.

In Defense of Stereotypes

If you ask a random person on the street what social justice is (once you explained to them that “social justice is that thing where people complain about sexism and racism and homophobia a lot’), they would probably say that social justice is about “not stereotyping people.” You shouldn’t think people are all the same just because they’re black! Or women! Or gay!

I disagree. I think that it is possible to identify traits that people who are members of certain groups share and that, in fact, it is quite impossible to do social justice without doing so. I mean, imagine if you took it literally. “You shouldn’t say women have body issues, lots of women don’t have body issues, that’s SEXIST! You shouldn’t stereotype people of color as being poor, lots of people of color aren’t poor, that’s RACIST!” If you want to talk about how marginalization affects a group of people, you have to talk about traits and experiences that members of that group tend to have– that is, you have to stereotype. The entire concept of “the [insert marginalized group here] experience” is a way of stereotyping!

For that matter, social justice advocates often defend stereotyping: just look at Schrodinger’s Rapist. It is perhaps unfair to some random dude who just wants to talk to a woman on the bus that many women will assume that he’s creepy, disrespectful of boundaries and possibly dangerous, but a sufficient number of random dudes on buses are creepy and disrespectful of boundaries that this is a reasonable stereotype to have.

Instead, I would like to propose three kinds of stereotypes that are bad:

1) Stereotypes that don’t acknowledge you can be a member of a group and differ from the stereotype. No duh, this is bad, because it is incredibly inaccurate! Of course, I think it’s more common as a way of strawmanning other people’s stereotypes than it is as an actual belief. If you interpret someone saying “men talk less than women” as saying that every man talks more than every woman all you have to do is find one laconic woman to disprove it; if you interpret them as saying “on average men talk less than women” (which is, you know, what people who say that are usually actually saying) then you actually have to do science to prove it’s not true and science is, like, hard. (It’s not true, by the way.)

2) Stereotypes that are factually incorrect. If most Muslims were terrorists, you’d be perfectly justified in being suspicious of the Muslims who moved in down the street. Given that most Muslims do not support terrorism, much less actually commit suicide bombings, you’re being an asshole. Similarly, since most depressed people are not lazy bums who are just making a big deal about being sad, and most self-injurers are not emo kids doing it for attention, and most people with ADD are not faking it, those stereotypes are wrong– not morally, just factually.

The problem with believing wrong things about people is that you will act in wrong ways towards them. The correct way to act if someone is lazy is not the correct way to act if someone is suffering from a neurological condition that makes doing things hard if not impossible. The correct way to act if someone is probably a terrorist is not the correct way to act if someone is not a terrorist and just happens to worship Allah.

3) Stereotypes that are not actually stereotypes, they’re norms. “Women should reclaim their femininity!” is not actually a stereotype of women, it’s a norm about what women should be like. A stereotype is an “is” statement– this is what this group is like; a norm is an “ought” statement– this is what this group should be like. It is perfectly possible to have a stereotype without having a norm; the social justice community does it all the time. I can believe women tend to have body image issues without believing a woman who’s comfortable in her body is a failure as a woman; I can believe people of color tend to be poor without believing that people of color should be poor. I talk here about why (a lot of) norms are bad.

In Which Ozy Gratuitously Rips Off John Stuart Mill

My primary problem with libertarianism is that it does not go far enough.

I am suspicious of governments exercising power over people, sure. But I am also and equally suspicious of corporations, non-governmental organizations, unions, and other people exercising power over people. My suspicion is not of governments; it’s of power. I believe that humans should have the absolute maximum freedom possible, given resource constraints and other practical problems, without interfering with the ability of other people to exercise that freedom.

(Note: some people will say “then why aren’t you an anarchist?” Because observably whenever one gets rid of a government one does not get rid of power relations; one just makes it so that the most powerful person in the area is whoever has the most weaponry and willingness to kill, and without the safeguards a government offers about use of force. This, needless to say, does not maximize freedom.)

A lot of people tend to justify limiting freedom by pointing out that it’s for the people’s own good. People are, in general, fairly dumb. We get tricked by pseudoscience and date people who are bad for us and refuse to exercise and say “yes, the last five years I didn’t do my New Year’s Resolution but this year will be different!” By any measure, humans are really bad at decision-making. Surely it makes sense to have someone smart constrain people’s choices so they have to do what makes them happy?

The problem lies in “someone smart.” As of yet, we have not invented any hyperintelligent computers; therefore, anyone who exercises power is going to be  a person, and therefore dumb. Our ability to identify non-dumb is fairly low: fifty percent of Harvard students cannot correctly answer the question “if a bat and a ball cost $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?” (Try that question at home!) In fact, I discover as I read that article I just Googled as a citation for the Harvard thing, more cognitively sophisticated people may be more prone to cognitive biases, which is an absolutely terrifying result that gives me nightmares.

(Of course, there are a lot of cognitive biases and forms of self-delusion that people are less susceptible to in other people’s cases than they are in their own– for instance, you’re more likely to correctly guess how long it’ll take someone else to do something than how long it’ll take you. My intuition is that this is not a major factor a lot of the time, but I could be wrong, in which case I’d have to change about half of the things I believe. Anyway, “people are consistently dumb about this and we can nudge them into making correct decisions” is a sufficient justification for constraining people’s choices on a case-by-case basis. Thus, opt-out of organ donation, not opt-in.)

Given that humans are dumb, the average person is much better at seeking their own happiness than they are anyone else’s. If you’re trying to seek someone else’s happiness, you have divided loyalties: the other person’s happiness and your own. If you’re an elected official, then you want what’s best for your country but also you want to get re-elected and make lots of money; naturally, these will sometimes conflict. If, however, your primary job is seeking your own happiness, then divided loyalties are not an issue.  

If you limit people’s freedom, you end up treating different people the same way. (No duh.) An individual can choose to work midnight to eight am if that’s when they do their best work, but a business has to make everyone work from nine to five.* A social norm has to say “everyone is only allowed to have one partner,” but an individual can choose to honestly and openly date multiple people. Given that people are diverse, a “people freely choose things” plan allows more scope for different people being happy in different ways than a “people follow these rules” plan.

In short: I think you should not constrain people’s choices without a Damn Good Reason. “It interferes with other people’s freedom”? Good reason. “It hurts other people in ways they would not like”? Good reason. “We can’t actually afford to pay everyone an infinite amount of money without the economy falling apart”? Good reason. “…because?” Not a good reason. If you do limit people’s freedom, limit it as little as possible– don’t pass a law when a social norm will do, don’t force people into organ donation when defaulting to organ donation will do.

Tomorrow: how this all relates to social justice!

*Obviously, there are sometimes good reasons for the “everyone works nine to five” rule, such as people having to communicate with each other.

In Praise of Reformism

A lot of social justice type people really like the idea of The Revolution. Someday, they say, we will smash white supremacy/capitalism/patriarchy/the state! And then everything will be perfect and rainbows and sunshine and Kumbaya!

Fortunately, this never really gets beyond reblogging “If I Had A Hammer I’d Smash The Patriarchy” pictures, but nevertheless I feel like this is an extremely destructive tendency that needs to be nipped in the bud before people start building barricades.

Imagine that social justice is like climbing mountains. You want to walk to the top of the tallest mountain because… I don’t know, it’s there. But, instead of a normal human, you are a video game character with two powers: Walk and Jump.

If you use Walk, you move to the next square on the board. It’s pretty easy to get to the top of a mountain that way: all you have to do is keep going up. Even if you make a mistake, it’s easy to move back to where you were. Unfortunately, the mountain you’re trying to climb on might not be the tallest mountain in the mountain range.

On the other hand, you can use Jump. If you use Jump, you land on literally any other square on the board. Jump has a chance of putting you in a better position. Of course, a lot of squares are lower than where you started out, especially if you’re pretty high up the mountain already. Even worse, sometimes when you Jump you break your legs and then you can’t move at all.

Trying to reform the system– starting a women’s shelter, agitating for better food stamps laws, educating your friends about racism, whatever– is using Walk. A world without a woman’s shelter is worse than a world with a women’s shelter. It’s still horrible; if it wasn’t horrible, we wouldn’t need a woman’s shelter. But it’s a little better.

Revolutions use Jump. Sometimes revolutions are awesome and you end up with the United States and a democracy instead of a king! But a lot of the time revolutions end up as Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China, or the Khmer Rouge. I mean, sure, you don’t think that your plan to smash the state will lead to mass starvation and murder, but neither did the people who supported Stalin. He did not get into power because he promised to put dissidents into gulags.

I’ll take “guaranteed to be a little better” over “chance that it’s way better, chance of gulags” any day.

The other problem with revolutionary thinking is that it tends to blind people to the stuff that can improve the world right now. A lot of revolutionaries nowadays don’t really have a plan for how the revolution is going to come about, except “everybody talk about revolutionary theory a lot.” To be fair, this is a much better plan than “let’s accidentally make Stalinist Russia,” since discussing revolutionary theory is an entertaining hobby that is unlikely to hurt anyone. But it doesn’t help people either.

One more rape crisis center or one more person educated about good consent and respecting boundaries seems like such a small victory when compared to a world without rape. But we know how to achieve the former and have no idea how to achieve the latter (except that it possibly involves dancing). Energy directed towards “let’s make a world without rape!” is wasted unless it causes actual changes in the actual world that we live in.