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nuclearspaceheater

nuclearspaceheater:

ozymandias271:

people who are very angry about the phrase “toxic masculinity”: what does the phrase “toxic masculinity” mean to you?

(I would very much appreciate not being super angry/offended in your answer, because the reason I’m confused is that a lot of the times when you guys talk about it I get that you’re really mad but it’s hard to understand why)

Toxic masculinity can be divided into two distinct things:

If you bite a guy and you die, that’s poisonous masculinity.

If a guy bites you and you die, that’s venomous masculinity.

I wouldn’t say I’m very angry, but it annoys me.

I understand it as meaning “being violent, being macho, having an honor culture where you have to avenge slights, being protective/jealous about women, thinking being a sissy is the worst thing in the world, etc”

A small part of my objection is that it can have a bailey of “in various ways that stereotypically-masculine behaviors/norms differ from stereotypically-feminine behaviors/norms, the stereotypically masculine ones are toxic and the stereotypically feminine ones are good.” It seems to me that there are dichotomies like individualism rather than communalism, stoicism rather than emotion, nonconformism rather than conformism, assertiveness rather than submissiveness, dignity rather than not-caring-about-dignity, a feeling of responsibility to protect others versus looking out for yourself - that it would be really easy to map onto toxic masculinity if you wanted. I’m not saying that if I phrase it as “assertiveness rather than submissiveness” anyone would read that phrase and so “oh, that’s bad, it’s toxic masculinity”. I’m saying that in real life there are ambiguous behaviors which, if you’re being assertive when someone else wants you to be submissive, they can round it off to “macho aggressiveness” and accuse you of toxic masculinity, and so have a social superweapon behind them..

But a bigger part is just that the whole phrase seems calculated to maximally offend and marginalize men. Imagine that everyone used the phrase “toxic femininity” to refer to causing drama, being overly emotional, gossiping, being weak, insisting other people take care of you, and other stereotypically feminine-coded bad behaviors - but there was no such phrase as “toxic masculinity” and people would get horribly offended if you tried to invent it. To me this would seem obviously calculated to pathologize women and identify the whole essence of being feminine with extreme versions of negative stereotypes. Well….

nuclearspaceheater Source: ozymandias271

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Future anthropologist: “In the early 21st century, there was a superstition against writing your True Email explicitly. You had to write it obliquely, like ‘scott at symbol shireroth dot org’. They believed that if anyone wrote their email out explicitly, it would draw the attention of hostile spirits, and the person would never again know peace.”

More Wikipedia:

Pope Benedict IX, born Theophylactus of Tusculum in Rome, was Pope on three occasions between October 1032 and July 1048.

Aged approximately 20 at his first election, he is one of the youngest popes in history. He is the only man to have been Pope on more than one occasion and the only man ever to have sold the papacy.

I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.

I’m really curious what I’m unintentionally selecting for here.

What do people think of the “Trump Humiliated By Health Care Failure” and “Health Care Rejection Shows Trump Is Already Lame Duck” and “Paul Ryan: Worst Speaker Of All Time?” discourse?

Most people I trust seem to think the health care bill was crap. Blaming people for writing a crappy health care bill seems fair enough.

But there seems to be more of an element of picking on them for being too weak to pass the bill, as if now they’re losers and we can never respect them again.

Can we just say something like “Elected officials should propose bills that they and their constituents want, give the rest of the country a chance to weigh in, and if the rest of the country says no, that means democracy is working and they should come back with something better”?

Like, this is complicated because I don’t want Republicans to pass a health care bill right now. But if this were actually important legislation, I would want the government to say “Good thing the American people made their voices heard,” roll up their sleeves, and then write a better bill.

Whereas now it seems like the incentive is to never propose anything that doesn’t have a 100% chance of getting passed the first time. And the other incentive is to desperately try to steamroll your legislation over everyone’s opposition and never admit you’re wrong, because if it fails (even for good reason) everyone will make fun of you.

Or am I missing something important here?

My latest post was linked from a couple of big blogs and news sources, apparently copying from each other, with the quote/summary:

Slate Star Codex: “The problem is that there’s some weird tribe of fact-immune troglodytes out there, going around refusing vaccines and voting for Brexit, and the rest of us have to figure out what to do about them.“

(example)

That’s the opposite of my argument. I’m using it as a straw man in order to knock it down. I don’t understand how people could quote that and then attribute it to me with no further explanation. This happens every time I try to deal with a controversy responsibly. People take the most inflammatory thing in the post, even if it’s the opposite of what I believe, and try to convince everyone it’s my opinion. I don’t know if this is some sort of passive-aggressive campaign against me, or some sort of terrible law of media dynamics, but it’s so annoying.

don't reblog

Maybe this is completely obvious to everyone else and I’m totally crazy, but a question:

William Blake in one of his letters described the sun as appearing about the size of “a guinea”. From this description I assumed a guinea was about the size of a quarter - and checking Wikipedia, I was right. The sun just objectively appears quarter-sized. If someone asked me to draw the sun exactly the size it appeared on a piece of paper, I would draw a circle about the size of a quarter. And if I heard someone say the sun looked the size of a pinhead, or the sun looked the size of one of those really big Eisenhower dollars, or the sun looked the size of one of those circular coasters you get for drinks at a restaurant, I would assume they were aliens talking about a different sun.

I don’t understand this. We’re obviously not talking about its real size, since that’s hundreds of thousands of miles across. But what does it mean for its apparent size to be the size of a quarter? A quarter has a different apparent size if it’s held right up to your eyes versus seen on a table all the way across the room. A quarter X feet away from me is the same apparent size as an Eisenhower dollar Y feet away from (where Y is further than X). So how is the sun’s apparent size equal to one, but not the other?

Remember that post discussing signs that Trump might be a time traveler?

A few days ago: Trump said we needed to be more concerned about Muslim immigrants because of “what’s happening in Sweden right now”. Everyone made fun of him because nothing was, in fact, happening in Sweden at the time.

Today: Muslim immigrants riot in Stockholm, set cars on fire.

The moral of the story is: if you value your life, get out of Bowling Green, Kentucky right now.

kontextmaschine

kontextmaschine:

I mean hashtag everyone I know on tumblr and especially all the atheists I respect have started casually/competitively invoking Christian and Jewish mythology like the Renaissance did Greek and Roman, that’s interesting

Interesting observation in context of this from Robin Hanson yesterday:

Religions often expose children to a mass of details, as in religious stories. Smart children can be especially engaged by these details because they like to show off their ability to remember and understand detail. Later on, such people can show off their ability to interpret these details in many ways, and to identify awkward and conflicting elements.

Even if the conflicts they find are so severe as to reasonably call into question the entire thing, by that time such people have invested so much in learning details of their religion that they’d lose a lot of ability to show off if they just left and never talked about it again. Some become vocally against their old religion, which lets them keep talking and showing off about it. But even in opposition, they are still then mostly defined by that religion.

kontextmaschine
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