As paradoxical as it may sound to say this about a 12.5k-word essay, you need to read this, because it sums up what I hate about Scott Alexander much better than I canhttps://twitter.com/ElSandifer/status/1363170201232146433?s=19 …
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Astonishingly awful shit to be putting in the face of a random commenter who's been traumatized by rape, so it can go viral and get you lots of clicks
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Scott Alexander's thing was in the exact same vein of petty narcissism "You want to talk about triggers? Let me start by saying I am MASSIVELY triggered by social justice" And then laying out his sad story about how in college he went viral for telling a racist joke
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Saying this was his first experience with such concentrated aggression, all these strangers *hating* him for something he *didn't mean to do*, this feeling that he *couldn't escape* their image of him as a bad person and going into a mental health spiral over it
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Saying this TO SOMEONE WHO HAS EXPERIENCED PHYSICAL ABUSE AND VIOLENT TRANSPHOBIA Jesus Christ Scott Yeah I'm sure what happened really hurt but grow the fuck up
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And signed off saying "There are plenty of vibrant, respectable, well-trafficked, high-IQ (there's the subtle eugenics again) communities that will give you your safe space But where's mine? Why can't we have just one space to talk the way we want without this kind of fear?"
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(So, yes, seven years before Cade Metz's NYT piece HE USED the "safe space" comparison and nobody gets to complain about it)
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I saw this and I saw red and wrote a long post just screaming at him Then he deleted his original post, and wrote "In Favor of Niceness, Community and Civilization" portraying me as a vicious Social Justice Assassin who jumped on him out of nowhere
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The second post is much less autobiographical and portrays himself as much less of a bitter defensive nerd and much more of a wise compassionate elder humbly seeking truth It went viral, and he got a ton of new subs and praise for his great empathy and you know the rest
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What pisses me off about this is he self-pityingly describes the "callout post" from
@chrysopoetics as sending a chill down his spine and spiking his cortisol "Am I back in college? Is it all happening again? Am I about to be 'canceled'? Will I lose everything and die alone?"Show this thread -
Sure, fine, whatever It's not that I don't believe him It's that
@chrysopoetics himself said HE freaked out and went into a spiral because Scott singled out his random comment and made a whole huge-ass blog post "rebutting" him and treating him as an SJW threat vectorShow this thread -
And while Scott was getting all this applause and engagement and people going "YES RATIONAL KING" and "The great empathetic mind of our generation" at him, NOBODY GAVE A SHIT about how Cyrus reacted to his post, hardly anyone even NOTICED
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If someone among Scott's fans had decided to go after Cyrus in some way, he would've had no visibility and no allies Even I wasn't plugged in enough to notice until months later on Twitter -- it all got lost in the dust of "Scott vs. Arthur" and arguing his shitty points
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The whole thing these rationalist shits like to do -- it's their favorite rhetorical move -- is to try to make things symmetrical "Well, we're ALL traumatized/triggered/in pain" Strip the meanings from words and turn everything fucking meta
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"If you swap 'Nazis' and 'Jews' in that sentence, don't YOU sound like the Nazi?" at endless length And it's such fucking shit Cyrus felt unsafe and triggered by Scott's presence in the community, Scott felt unsafe and triggered by Cyrus' presence in the community
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While Scott was a white male cishet wealthy medical doctor with high-profile friends throughout the Bay Area tech sector and Cyrus was a nobody with no social media followers to speak of who JUST SAID he was queer, trans, and a poor immigrant
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It's ALWAYS like this Everyone is ALWAYS on this imaginary equal plane, EVERY expression of anger or disgust at some privileged-as-fuck motherfucker gets you a rejoinder "Everyone is human and feels pain"
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The whole rationalist terminology of being a "high decoupler", capable of stripping an arbitrary amount of context from a situation until you can treat it as an abstraction Like this is an intellectual SKILL and not a DEFICICIENCY, like it doesn't make you FUCKING STUPID
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NOTHING BAD HAPPENED TO SCOTT ALEXANDER IN COLLEGE He said something that pissed people off, and they said they were pissed off at him -- an expression of free speech His life was not destroyed, everything was not taken from him, he is fucking FINE
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Just like NO ONE DID ANYTHING TO SCOTT AARONSON His lengthy complaint was about people NOT DOING things to him (noticing him, dating him, having sex with him) while admitting that this wasn't even a conscious choice, he was just too shy to ask people out
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And he has the motherfucking GALL to compare this to someone having one of the most blatantly physical things a person can do to someone else done to them Christ How do you even start to engage without screaming
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Kate Manne went viral among the popular press for coining the term "himpathy" for this kind of shit The Scotts are like walking talking posting flesh-and-blood avatars of "himpathy" If she knew who they are she could've given it a different name, like "bescottedness"
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Look Yeah I get that if you really sit down and open a vein you can write not just 20,000 words but 200,000 or two million about all your trauma I could do it too If you gave everyone the tools to do so, EVERYONE could do it
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Everyone has an infinite amount of performance of pain in them if you give them the tools and the motivation to express it It reproduces itself as naturally and instinctively as expressions of triumph and joy Lacan, the discourse of the hysteric, look it up
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At the end of the day, SO THE FUCK WHAT A "rationalist" should understand that all this performance and self-pity and poetry doesn't somehow let you skip the question of WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED I don't care what you FEEL happened, what DID happen
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And you cannot judge pain by the VISIBILITY of pain (as shown in studies that show that with actual doctors evaluating actual physical pain in a clinical setting, the pain of Black people is literally invisible)
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You cannot judge the depth or reality of pain by whether it produced a great work of fucking literature (or even a hacky but popular work of literature like "Untitled" is) That's not determined by anything but the writer's access to education and a well-connected audience
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That's how we ended up with half the history of Western literature being wealthy aristocratic men going around punching down at everyone they see, then writing beautiful poetry whining about their chronically sore knuckles
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And Scott absolutely will not stop with this shit He is absolutely shameless about his endless amounts of empathy for whomever the fuck he naturally feels like empathizing with, and then just deleting the experiences of everyone else from his awareness like he never saw them
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(IIRC this is what happened the time one of his commenters diagnosed him with schizoid personality disorder, this deeply inappropriate reaction to a patient he described where he gets actively angry that "This person's story makes NO SENSE to me, I don't GET IT")
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