(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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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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"Wow, these people really really want to get their hands on American currency I'm worried some of them might actually get desperate enough to jump me for it This must be how a hot girl feels when she rolls up to the club and the creeps all swarm on her hoping to touch a boob"
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It's the kind of thing that sounds very empathetic and insightful if you're part of his target audience of privileged dorks who are proud of what dumb "decoupling" shitheads they are
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It only makes sense if you focus COMPLETELY on how his own EXPERIENCE of being a wealthy tourist FEELS to him like being a hot girl LOOKS to him And didn't expend a single watt of brainpower on how the poor beggars or the hot girl's life actually feels most of the time
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That no, not knowing how you're going to pay rent or buy food and water or keep your children safe is NOT, AT ALL, like a lonely techbro's desire to have a girlfriend and get laid except in the barest, most primitive sense that both things are "strong human desires"
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And that no, being sexually attractive IS NOT the same as having monetary wealth, or like having any kind of asset separate from your body and your person that you actually can give to somebody else
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If Scott had, rather than performatively exercising his empathy muscles during his "What I did on my vacation" essay, read a fucking book There have been reams of poetry and literature, both popular and highfalutin, about exactly this
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"If there were a way to give him what he hungrily seeks when I see his eyes meet mine, if there were a way to fill that void inside him so that he could know peace, so I could know peace But it cannot be done It is like trying to empty the sea"
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Or if he, you know, watched TV Wanda Sykes put it pretty bluntly in a comedy special she did around this time "You ever wish you had a detachable pussy? So you could just take it off and be like 'Here, knock yourself out' 'Wash it before you give it back to me'"
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God I'm so fucking mad about this It's not just a bad evil opinion, it's a STUPID bad evil opinion He gets all this credit for being smart and insightful for NOT THINKING OF THINGS and NOT SEEING THINGS his audience would also rather not see
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This inverted incentive structure where if you bury it under enough big words and florid rhetoric you can make ignorance sound like wisdom, if it's something people really want to ignore "Wow, why did *I* never think of just saying 'But what if there is no racism'"
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("Against Murderism" is literally an essay saying at length "Hey what if racism just isn't a thing" "You Are Still Crying Wolf" is an essay SPECIFICALLY saying "Hey can you PROVE that Donald Trump, in particular, is racist" Fucking universe-brain horseshit)
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It's not just that I consider him fundamentally offensive, although I do It's that this shit is fundamentally poison and it's all over the place in the techbro culture that's taking over our world Not just unwillingness but *inability* to fucking *listen* to anyone unlike you
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It is COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE to take seriously this idea well-paid white male cishet software engineers -- who mostly do have active sex lives and brag about it -- are some kind of oppressed class, unless you carefully and deliberately construct this wildly narcissistic worldview
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This contrarian use of rhetoric and analogy to fuck with your basic moral intuitions that were, in fact, correct from the start "Let me explain to you in 20,000 words how rich white men COULD be the same as poor Black women, and make you think it made you smarter not stupider"
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They say he's teaching empathy and insight but he's teaching the exact opposite He's giving you a toolkit to never again have to care about someone other than yourself The Scott-Alexander-tm patented Rhetorical Reversal Device
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"Have you considered feeling bad about the state of the world for people who aren't you Have YOU considered that you didn't even ASK how bad I ALREADY feel about the traumas I have personally endured Have you considered that makes you the real racist"
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Did you know that Scott once wrote a post where he said that he'd heard "nerdy white dudes" as a stock phrase in a negative way from SJW posts so much that he considered it the equivalent of the N-word for Black people He deleted it but I'm sure someone somewhere remembers
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And yeah I'm sure delving into Scottology comes off as "obsessive" and dipshits like Matt Yglesias just want the fun posts about statistics and would like us to treat all the dirty laundry from the past as water under the bridge But Scott hasn't fucking changed
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And I genuinely think Kate Manne got at something really deep and scary with the word "himpathy" This "niceness" and "kindness" and "empathy" shit is really dangerous Who is he asking for empathy for? FROM WHOM is he asking it?
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He's asking privileged white male nerds who just want to <s>grill</s> detachedly talk about statistics while the rest of the world burns to empathize with *themselves* At best he's comforting the comfortable and justifying their self-absorbed navel-gazing inaction
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End of conversation
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