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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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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I wish I'd saved more receipts from the old days on Scott's blog because they were all over the fucking place 2013/14 Scott, before he really got famous, was much more forthright about his "controversial" takes
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He tried to play the "himpathy" card for *Donald Sterling*, the Clippers owner who was forced by NBA rules to sell his team for being blatantly racist "And I'm sure just because he's a wealthy white man means it's okay for him to lose everything over a private conversation?"
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YES He didn't "lose everything", he got paid MILLIONS OF DOLLARS to get him to retire from a job he was TERRIBLE AT
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A job that has only two responsibilities -- be the public face of the team and make good business decisions -- that he still had after DECADES of being the universally reviled face of the worst-performing team in the NBA
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I'm just remembering all this shit now, and I don't care enough to trawl through archives for receipts, so you can take this as "Arthur making shit up about Scott" if you want and fuck off Did you know he did a post back in the day arguing at length there's no rape culture?
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"Rape is actually treated with far more seriousness than other crimes in our culture You say victim-blaming is a barrier to reporting rape, but my buddy got his bike stolen last year and EVERYONE blamed him for not securing it well enough and NOBODY stood up for him"
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HE SAID THIS ON A PUBLIC POST AND PEOPLE PRAISED HIM FOR IT
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He and his fans think he's a fucking genius because he just DOESN'T THINK ABOUT SHIT that any fucking dumbass on the street KNOWS YOU HAVE TO THINK ABOUT "You just compared being raped to having your bike stolen" "Well that's not relevant to the logic of the analogy"
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"High-decoupling" The two Scotts were OBSESSED with finding other shit to compare rape to, so they could get out of the fucking obvious and intuitive conclusion that women getting raped way more than men means women objectively have it worse than men
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"Isn't it symmetrical, that people fucking you when you don't want them to fuck you is how women are harmed by patriarchy, and people NOT fucking you when you DO want them to fuck you is how men are harmed by it" How do you not punch yourself in the face as soon as you say this
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Scott Aaronson, with his trademark lack of self-awareness, posted his thing comparing incels to beggars dying for lack of food and people being unwilling to give them bread in public But like everything else this is an opinion the other Scott shares, at great length
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Did you know that back in the day before he started Slatestarcodex, Scott Siskind wrote an LJ post about how he "finally understood how women feel about dating" after he'd been on a trip to India? Because women are the equivalent of wealthy Americans and men are beggars?
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Saying that as soon as he walked out of the airport he was surrounded by filthy poors demanding to sell him stuff, do simple tasks for him, show him around, angrily claiming he owed them a dollar just for making eye contact with them And he felt violated and scared
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