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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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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