Service Dog wrote:- Straughan is stil incapable of applying some basic scepticism to her own positions.
Ok... so you've chosen 'basic scepticism' to measure Karen Straughan. That includes eschewing strawman arguments & assertions without evidence, right? Well, your own post doesn't meet your own standard, friend.
- The first question should be, by what method can gender warriors of any stripe demonstrate oppression of their gender.
One fair method is to generously allow your opponent to choose whatever measuring device they prefer, then abide by the results. Feminism excels at calling attention to all sorts of things which they say hurt women... which demonstrably hurt men to an equal or greater degree. "Women have always been the primary victims of war." -- Hillary Clinton " But mass incarceration's impact on women and their families has been particularly acute....we need to be deliberate about understanding the different paths that can land women in prison, be more attentive to women's unique needs while they are incarcerated, and do more to support women and their families once they are released. I will institute gender-responsive policies in the federal prison system and encourage states to do the same.... every part of the justice system, from sentencing to the conditions of confinement to re-entry services, should reflect women's unique needs." --Hillary Clinton
- If you take society and history as a whole you can mix and match, cherrypick and confirmation bias each other until the end of times.
As I have done so far here, Karen Straughan generally lets the feminists cherrypick the battles-- largely confining herself to reacting to feminists' propositions.
For one, I'm not sure what's with Clinton. I also disagree with your premise that somebody only has to rebut a position presented to them. It's also one of the things that irks me for a while with internet atheists and skeptics who mistake discourse for a game where you have to win by some imaginary rules. “Burden of proof” is not winning some kind of game, but a generally plausible reason to not accept any random proposal that flies in your direction. It could still be true, you just have a plausible excuse to not commit to something if you have no good reason for it. That's all. It's primarily a time-saver and to keep some mental hygiene. You don't win anything, especially if other people have reasons for their beliefs. You can deny that the Middle Ages existed, say, because you have not personally seen enough evidence, but how successful do you think you are with that strategy? And of course, by denying they existed you do tacitly endorse some revisionist history even if you don't formulate your views. Creationists deny evolution, and they also somehow think that by remaining unconvinced that their alternative theory is true. It doesn't quite work that way.
This also taps into my view that
strict dictionary atheism is a nonsense position, and stems from the same faulty reasoning. Atheism works because the atheist corner accepts naturalism and evolution (etc), hence they aren't strict “just” nonbelievers. Of course, an atheist position does not rest on some specific political ideology. You do not have to subscribe to intersectionality, as PZ Myers demands for example. In summary for this part, you cannot dispute what's known about history (e.g. patriarchal attitudes across history and cultures) without also proposing at least implicitly some fringe or revisionist ideas.
Now, as I understand the situation, Straughan and the likes are MRAs and they are not mere critics. They have their own counter-theory. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't she deny patriarchal structures in history and cultures and asserts like (apparently) many MRAs that women had it better? I am not going to watch her video again, but I got the impression she either thinks that, or at least is mealy-mouthed and super reluctant to admit female subjugation in history. I am confident that this is generally the tune that oozes out from that corner.
I had some answers to your frisking points later on, but basically this is a recurring theme. MRA deny this in my impression, and confuse a potential good life with principles such as freedom, emancipation, maturity to reason, making own decisions as it runs through the Enlightenment tradition.
Service Dog wrote:- The next problem is that each gender warrior team selectively forgets tendencies, distributions whenever it suits them. The anti-feminist team will point at relative upper body strenght, or body heigth to show that tendencies in a population are possible without saying that each and every individual is taller or stronger than every individual of the opposite group.
This assertion looks like a strawman, unless you provide evidence that Karen Straughan has made any-such claim. In the video you critique, she specifically acknowledges distributions in male & female brain traits as NOT applying to "every individual" of each group.
- But when feminist bring up "privileges" that men have, the same faction has suddenly amnesia and their example is a homeless man.
Is it 'the same faction' you set-out to critique here, or Karen Straughan? I thought you named -her- as 'incapable' of basic scepticism? But she doesn't claim all-men-are homeless/ none privileged. Rather, she applies the 'apex fallacy' critique-- that the lavish privilege enjoyed by one warlord-- doesn't necessarily trickle-down to benefit the other men he enslaves. That's the tack she took when she debated Cenk Ugyer on The Young Turks. In this very video, she uses the example of male judges whose apex privilege does not benefit the males those judges sentence.
I was trying to point out doublestandards and inconsistencies that I see in the both warring gender warrior camps, where each side understands distributions and tendencies, but each forgets to apply it to some area. Typically, SJW think that “white males” are privileged. The opponents deny this, and share pictures around where posh girls walk past homeless men. You've seen those. But if I share a picture of tall women walking past midget men they would not accept it, and insist that they mean bimodal distribution, namely that in tendency, women are shorter than men, but that it was still possible to find an individual woman who is taller than a specific man. Of course! But when that it such obvious, why do homeless men invalidate the claim that white men are privileged? Because it doesn't.
In reality, the situation is much more complicated than that, to a degree where the whole gender-angle is pretty much useless. So far from me endorsing "privilege theory", my position always has been that the whole identitarian gender lens is mostly useles or at best part of the picture.
But if you insist at looking at things through gender-glasses, women are less privileged in relation to their male counterpart. Again, in tendency (as with height situation). But it's not a good way of looking at it, because it's very uneven and lumpy and the world-wide-history spanning fraternity or sorority are illusions. A middle class female student in Sweden has very little to do with a wife in rural Pakistan. Little is generalisable or transferable, and that's even true between the Purity Movement daughter in the Midwest and the Islamic daughter in Yemen. It is ahistorical, too, to treat isolated "patriarchies" as if this was some world-wide conspiracy. What is generalizable is trivially true and immediately obvious. My criticism is typically that postmodern infused feminism is over-theorizing and builds a whole tower of rubbish over some trivial true insights. Shared are Abrahmitic traditions, biological factors for excample. The whole idea that humans are Blank Slates, and somehow the male population is uniformly socialized in the same way (and women the other way) is preposterous nonsense.
To give another example. People living at the sea have things in common. They might rely on fishing, for example. There are some things that are of concern to all, like ocean pollution and such things. Trivially true. But there is little else that makes the fisherman in Frisia a brother of the fisherman in Japan. It's an illusion to treat them as if they were somehow in the same boat. Say, Frisian fishermen have rivals in local farmers. Let's say the same is true in Japan. Does it mean that farmers are in some sort of worldwide conspiracy against fishers? No, you might want to look deeper into factors, perhaps economic circumstances that produce similar symptoms. But even this kind of sameness is not really the exact same referent in reality. The fishers in Japan can suggest how to catch more fish to the fishers in Frisia and such things, but again, none of this requires a big theory.
More on the other things tomorrow or so.
