Rationalism: a paper tiger?

He's never struck me as particularly nuanced. He's struck me as a cantankerous old git, and every bit as cynical and relativist as the people that he seems so pissed off about.You know, NJ, I could make an argument about how very suspicious it is for you to keep attacking relativism all the time, how it must indicate that in your heart of hearts you know relativism to be true, etc.But then I'm not you, am I?

The funny thing is, I don't even know anybody who actually calls it "tolerance." They usually call it something like "not being a nosy asshole" or "not butting into other people's business."

What on Earth are you talking about? When people like Mark Foley and Larry Craig were busted for their individual sex problems, didn't you read anything about their voting records? Both of them voted for every single bill that discriminated against gay people, even though they were both gay.These people are driven to suss out other people's sins, H, because they think going on a crusade to punish other people's wickedness absolves them of their own. The idea that they're minding their own business because they're afraid of being found out is nonsense. That's why there's a new conservative caught with his pants down every week. Right - the women conservatives call "murderers" and "sluts."That's the tolerance you're talking about? Except that there's no middle. If you're never sexually available to a man, you're "frigid", "unfriendly". You need to "smile more." The second that you are sexually available to anyone, you're a "slut."It's never about exceeding some range of "parameters." The parameters overlap in the middle. Just ask a woman about it.

It's not a few, though. It's a new one every week. Ted Haggard. Mark Foley. David Vitter. That guy in Florida. That guy who died last month with a buttplug and two wetsuits.It's almost axiomatic, at this point, that the loudest, most visible crusaders against the civil rights of gays and lesbians or the right to private sexual conduct are the ones who, themselves, are gay, lesbian, or into some pretty freaky shit. I don't think there's anything less tolerant than pushing legislation to marginalize specific American citizens, so I simply don't see any comparison between whatever personal distaste a given progressive may have with, say, anal sex and the coordinated, concentrated efforts of the conservative movement to separate "sexual deviants" from their civil rights.I mean, you're looking at two people who are saying:Progressive: I don't like anal sex, and I think it's gross that you do it, but it's not like I'm going to make a law about it or something!Conservative: I don't like anal sex, and I think it's gross that you do it, but I love you as a person; still, though, I'm going to push for legislation to make you a second-class citizen. Nothing personal.And you're telling me the first guy is less tolerant? That doesn't make any sense. No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.team4news.com/Global/story.asp?S=7238816

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AUSTIN (AP) - A federal judge in Austin today ordered 40 years in prison for a man accused of trying to use an explosive at a clinic that does abortions.

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Is this the tolerance you're referring to?Is this? Conservatives. There's no way to win on the "Madonna/Whore" scale, because the purpose of the scale isn't to define an acceptable middle between extreme behaviors; it's to provide a double standard upon which to judge all women and find them wanting. Because conservativism is a misogynistic ideology.If you have sex, you're a slut. If you don't, you're frigid. You can't win for losing if you're a woman. You should ask one about it. I don't know who "rationalists" are supposed to be, either, but the people who are enforcing the Madonna/Whore scale are misogynists, and the point is to provide a basis to condemn all women, because that's how patriarchy is upheld.And it's common. It's common because a lot of progressives do it, too, but it's much more common among conservatives because, there, it's explicitly demanded by religion.

Fair enough. But you should read about Bob Altemeyer's work in The Authoritarians, where he discovered that being conservative (right-wing) wasn't just a political ideology, it was a personality type that inflected every aspect of the subject's thinking and radically re-defined their priorities and their relationship to authority. Right-wing authoritarian personality - WikipediaAltemeyer draws a difference between right-wing authoritarian followers, social dominators, and so-called "double-high" right-wing authoritarians (individuals with high scores on both the authoritarian and social dominator scale.) While he was able to find examples via his testing of hundreds of individuals who were RWA's, no one has ever been able to uncover evidence of left-wing authoritarian followers in the United States.The point is that your characterization of conservatives as people for whom the skeletons in their own closet lead them to acceptance of other people's isn't born out by the evidence, or by anybody else's experience. A lot of this stuff is culture-dependent, though.Do you maybe not live in the United States? Eh, I'm not any more accepting of other people's sexuality than anybody else. People do weird things in bed, things that I wouldn't enjoy or that seem risible to me.I'm just not interested in making laws about it. I'd have a lot more respect for the buttplug guy if he hadn't spent his whole short life making other people feel like second-class citizens, all the while that he had something unique in common with them.Am I abundantly tolerant of other people? No, and that's a flaw. But I'm not trying to marginalize anybody via the law, and that's why I'm more tolerant than conservatives. Nobody's perfect, though. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. Like they say, the personal is political. Who do you think is electing all these conservative asshats? The same conservatives that you're praising for their "tolerance."But how tolerant is it, truly, to vote for people who want to marginalize others? I'm saying that they view all women as "sluts", yes; as not-quite-human beings whose sexuality is, and should be, in the control of other people. In the control of society, in the control of a husband, in the control of her father - it's all the same, just as long as some man, somewhere is there to control her sexual behavior.It's the same in every culture. Honor killings. Widow burning. Arranged marriage. The traditional cultures are invariably the ones where women are kept as sexual chattel; first the property of the father and then of the husband. No. Any woman in our Western culture has invariably felt the simultaneous pressure to be "more engaging to men" - smile more, don't stay at home all by yourself, get out and meet a man - while at the same time "don't be a slut". Don't wear too much makeup. Don't wear "revealing clothes", which are anything but burlap sacks, apparently. Don't act too friendly or you gonna git raped!That ever-present threat of rape is the other side of that coin. You're damned if you act too standoffish - "frigid", "bitchy" - but, of course, the men most likely to rape you are the ones who know you the best. And if they do, it's because of something you did. You were drunk or dressed "provocatively." Enforcing the patriarchy? No, that's misogyny, by definition. But not in equal realms. It's not equal when you say "women get to be head of the household, but men get to be king of the kindgom." The power-sharing is no sharing at all when men still get the "good" powers. Who said anything about hate? It's not about hate, it's about the desire for control, the desire for others to submit to you.And, yes, you do have to want to control someone to have weird expectations about their behavior. Otherwise, why would you even give a damn?

Who specified "gays and homosexuals"? Anybody who deviates from the conservative's idea of sexual "norms" is targeted by these people. Cite your source? I'm all for diversity, but not at the expense of human rights; and moral relativism doesn't mean what you think it means. Nonsense. The "feeling" is that the men like it that way, the women don't, but they don't have the power in society to change it.See? Easy to understand. Why should we do that? In your view, is it even possible for a culture to objectively embrace an injustice against some of its peoples?If we can consider a situation - like slavery - within our own culture to be a great injustice, a moral outrage; why cannot we condemn the same practice in another culture? What prevents me from being opposed to ruthless, senseless barbarity simply because its being perpetrated by people in another country with another language?I'm all for diversity, but not at the expense of human rights. I'm all for keeping an open mind but not so open that my brain falls out. That there may be deep cultural traditions surrounding, say, female genital mutilation in the areas in which it is practiced does not change the fact that it's a brutal practice designed to suborn female sexual agency to male desire. When a 9-year-old girl is being held down and is screaming as she is getting her clitoris amputated with a rusty straight razor and no anesthetic, what "interpretation" do you think is necessary to come to the objective conclusion that this is a barbaric practice? I don't recall making any, but feel free to assume whatever qualifiers are necessary to indicate that I'm talking about the vast majority if not the totality of cases. Right, the flipside of "what about the MENZ!!" where entitled men whine about the diminishing of male privilege and how it's considered bad form to rape women to get what they want. Whatever happened to the good old days when all women were assumed to be prostitutes?Spare us. No, it's not. Genuine concern about the plight of women in our society is nothing at all like the steaming load of Nice Guy entitlement you just dropped in your post. I'm thinking you're referring to "the ones that keep you from getting laid." I get the sense that I'm talking to someone who bought a wife from China on the internet.

From my memory, and I can't look it up because I can't remember the guy's name, I thought he was involved in one or the other various initiatives in southern states to ban sex toys. They do, themselves. In public, anyway. In private, of course, they're as freaky as anybody else, perhaps even more so. Well, then you're just not paying attention to what conservatives are saying. Not only do they want rules about having sex before marriage, they want rules about who you can marry, and what you can do to them in bed, married or no.It wasn't liberals who are responsible for anti-miscegenation laws or anti-sodomy laws. It wasn't liberals who tried to put Genarlow Wilson in prison for a decade for getting an underage BJ when outright coitus with the same girl wouldn't have even violated the law. It's not liberals who are attacking the availability of contraception, so that married people have to choose between yet another child or a life of married celibacy.So, yeah, the idea that conservativism as a movement declares married sex "hands off" simply doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Wow. I have to say - I thought you were Holmes.But that can't be possible. Between this self-serving armchair evo-psych and your previous whining defense of male entitlement, I must have been completely wrong.No, but look. You pretend like physical strength and worldlyness represent the optimum traits for leadership, but that may or may not be true. Certainly physical strength is going to be irrelevant - what's he gonna do, beat up the whole other tribe himself? - and it really sounds like you've described not the qualities the tribe would want in a leader, but the traits most likely to be found in the person who would bully his way into leading.Think about it. A tribe would rather have a leader who could resolve disputes through communication, a leader who could navigate the social interactions of a tribe, and a leader with knowledge about local food sources and crops.A woman, in other words. (Women do the farming in agrarian societies, typically.) The problem here is that you've mistaken the fact that men often do seize leadership for an indication that men are meant to do so. Funny that, for all that anti-feminists like you assert that child-rearing is every bit as important as being President, so few men would rather be stay-at-home dads than President.Why is that? Maybe it's because those two jobs are not equally important? Because having a penis has nothing to do with how well you can lead.

That's just nonsense. People are people, H; biological reality holds sway regardless of culture, and every person in every culture faces the same problems - how am I going to be fed today? How can I be safe? Who can I have sex with?Individual cultures may differ on the details, but every human society seems to solve those problems in roughly the same ways.And every society seems to have roughly similar problems, as though the same pitfalls are a danger to every human society - the creep of authoritarian bullies, patriarchy, etc. I'm simply not willing to accept the subjugation of persons in the name of cultural diversity. It's simply not nearly that important to me. You don't have to be a moral absolutist to believe in right and wrong. As a moral relativist, I accept that "right and wrong" are contingent on the situation at hand.But just because its contingent, doesn't mean I can't perceive it. Doesn't mean I can't come to a conclusion that a situation is wrong when I know all the relevant facts.Like you, I'm against jumping to conclusions before all the facts are known, yes; and I'm not quick to pass judgment on a cultural tradition before I do some research about its context and its perception within the culture.But that doesn't mean I can't ever draw conclusions, and about many cultural traditions, I've done the research and decided for myself. Female genital mutilation is one such situation. Honor killings, widow burning - I've arrived at conclusions from reflection and an understanding of the relevant factors.Cultural diversity is great, particularly in terms of cuisine, but it's not so great a principle that it should prevent us from pursuing justice even across barriers of culture and language. People just aren't that different. I'm opposed to this practice, too, not least of which for being a victim of it. Aside from the fact that, in most cases, sex becomes painful torture? Hey, that's a mature and respectful way to engage with feminism. "Feminists are ugly and fat!"Gosh, and you wonder why women don't take you at all seriously.

There certainly was a great push to defend them, in all the cases where such laws have come up for review. Even in liberal Minnesota, where an anti-sodomy law came under scrutiny and was eventually overturned, the conservative churches and organizations made great efforts to preserve it.Go to a site like Latest Articles and do a search for "Lawrence V. Texas", an anti-sodomy case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. You'll hear the decision loudly opposed by conservatives. There's nothing to slip. I'm a feminist, H, I have no problem admitting it, and I can't imagine why you think it's something I wouldn't be proud to be. Even if that were true, it's still based on the assumption that the males of a tribe would have more interaction out in the world than the women, but there's no reason to believe that's true. The idea that tribal women stay home all day with the children is fantasy, that's not how it works at all.It can't work that way, you can't support the food needs of a collective when half the population isn't doing any work. So males are allotted the esteemed role, and women are allotted the role that isn't that important - and you think that's an egalitarian situation? You're just proving my point. Who was talking about all characteristics? Certainly there's some characteristics that make for better leaders.They just have nothing to do with being male, is all.

I remember a large number of churches supporting historic anti-sodomy laws, where their rationale was that "a married woman might be forced to perform fellatio against her will", which of course is pretty ridiculous, but that was a common refrain.It was not just about gay sex. They were adamant that the rules applied to married people as well, and they thought that was a good thing.Which really speaks against your portrayal of conservatives staying out of the marriage bedroom. There's really no bedroom they won't butt into, in my experience. Women are only pregnant for 9 months, and the ability of other mothers to raise one's child frees a woman to do the same things men can do. There's really no reason to believe that a woman would be any less likely to have traveled than a man.The mental idea of a primitive society where men are out doing things all day while the women stay in huts is a patriarchal fantasy, and it's supported neither by archaeological data nor by anthropological studies of modern pre-agricultural societies. Hunting and gathering. It doesn't produce so much food, as a technique, that a tribe can afford to support 50% of adults sitting around idle all day. Why wouldn't they? Why is it that, as a culture, we don't spare any particular respect for men who stay home and raise children? Why do we, as a society, think of them as less than men, as womanish? As a matter of fact, there are a number of obstacles in society in the way of a female president, as we're seeing in the current primaries. Obama and Guiliani are questioned on their positions, and their policies are the subject of the talk shows.Hillary - and see, she's the one candidate who everybody refers to by her first name - is the subject of "capital fashion" reports where they talk about whether or not she has a pleasing laugh and whether or not her pantsuit shows too much cleavage (that is to say, any, because apparently a president shouldn't have breasts.)That's one major obstacle - a media that doesn't take female candidates seriously.

Sure, but across humanity it's the same cake with different frosting. Different notes but always the same tune. All my moral concepts are mine. That doesn't mean that they're wrong, or that things stop being right or wrong simply because they're not happening to me.It's racist, it seems to me, to assert that the "poor benighted savages just are that way" when the people of another society face injustice. And I think it's a moral outrage to stand idly by when people are oppressed, in the name of "cultural diversity."Diversity is great but it shouldn't result in people getting killed. It shouldn't result in good people doing nothing when faced with evil. You're so wrapped up in the rights of the oppressor you're forgetting about the rights of the oppressed. Oppressed people don't want to live that way. I'm not talking about barging into consensual situations; I'm talking about helping the people who need it, who are begging for it. I'm not saying any moral systems need to change. I can't imagine for the life of me how I might get people to change their moral system. I'm neither wise nor patient enough to make the attempt.But outcomes are objective, and those are what I'm talking about changing. An outcome where young women are being held down and having clitorectomies against their consent is an outcome that needs to be changed, period. The whole world is my community. Why wouldn't it be? Why, in the year 2007, would my obligations to my fellow human being end simply because we don't share a country or a language?That doesn't make any sense. If you accept that I have obligations to other human beings, to protect them and work on their behalf when I can, then it doesn't make any sense to exclude those who are different from myself.How insular and racist to assert that only those who are exactly like myself are deserving of help! Even here in just my house there's two different ways of thinking about the world, two different ways of acting. Two different ways of culture.Why on Earth should a difference in outlook determine whether or not I help someone? How sheltered I would be if someone's different outlook became a reason for me never to render them assistance, aid, or consider myself responsible for their welfare.My wife and I are both white, both American, both from the upper Midwest, both from fairly rural towns (me more than her), both educated, of roughly equal socioeconomic status, and we still have radically divergent outlooks about things. Are you saying that I can't even be responsible for my wife? Why on Earth would that be the case? Watch me, because I'm doing it right now. Female genital mutilation is objectively wrong and its an affront to human rights. I'm a human being who can speak out. That's who I am to tell them. They're a human being who can speak, too, so that's who they are to tell me to butt out, and then it just becomes a function of who wants it more.For a "moral relativist", you certainly appeal to absolute principles quite a bit. Why, you've all but told me I'm objectively wrong for daring to consider FGM a horror, objectively wrong for violating your precious "cultural diversity."Who am I to say? I'm a human being with a mouth. Why do I need any further justification? Who's going to stop me? Why should I stop myself when I perceive injustice? How would they know? Maybe they think sex is supposed to be painful and bloody every time. Dworkin's dead, and maybe what you're thinking of is her frustration with the fact that nearly every discussion of feminism of which a man is a part becomes all about the man's needs, the man's experiences, the man's sexuality. You know, like you tried to make it.Maybe Dworkin was simply tired of men monopolizing the conversation.

Yeah. They're sanctimonious and insufferable.Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of subgroups that are nominally "progressive" that I have my own problems with; my wife, as an agricultural entomologist, gets riled by the organic food nazis who have all kinds of conspiracies about Monsanto and "Big Pharma" and the rest.Of course, then again, around here the proponents of "natural cures" and "organic foods" seem to be the religious conservatives. It's a funny old world, isn't it? But liberals march in lockstep, communally shunning women who've had abortions? Maybe you want to be a little more careful with your on broad brush. Hey, there's plenty that I don't know. But it's pretty easy to make accusations of ignorance. Much harder is not being selfish with one's knowledge. I suspect this parting shot is simply to conceal the fact that you don't have any evidence to contradict me. I'm no Clinton supporter myself, but you don't see any problem with a media that's more concerned with her hemlines than with her party line? Every politician goes on those shows. Why is it only a problem with Clinton does it? Why does she "invite" being treated unseriously when she's only doing exactly what the male politicians do?

Jesus, what is this, your next novel?Are you sure you're not Holmes? A metaphoric one. The metaphor is for the essential, shared nature of humanity - universal across all cultures - that allows us to come to objective conclusions about human rights, even across language or national barriers. Some of them did (in a metaphoric sense.) Some of these cultures have sent emissaries to the West to seek help and aid. Ayaan Hirsi Ali came all the way over from Mogadishu to inform the West about the plight of women in her culture.When she talks about girls in Somalia undergoing brutal mutilation, isn't that enough? When she describes intimate details of the procedure because it happened to her, can we have your permission to do something about it?Or is it not even enough that the people who are being oppressed are asking for help? Is that still not enough for us to conclude that there's a problem there that needs to be fixed? God, doesn't that make the obligation even greater, that we owe them so much? I haven't rescued anybody and I don't think of myself as a knight. Nonetheless, I can't simply turn my back on oppression simply because it's happening to people who aren't like me.That's racist, plain and simple. There's nothing wring with his arguments, that's why they were so successful. There was something very wrong with his facts and motivations, but his arguments were sound, though they were misapplied. We do have a responsibility to rectify what injustice we can, because the whole world is our human community. Nonsense. I was asked, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other women from these cultures who were able to escape. These women who have come to the West to bring the injustice to our attention.Sure, the men who benefit from this practice don't want me poking my nose in, because the scrutiny of the West in regards to this practice is a threat to their privilege. But who cares what they think? The oppressor has no right to oppress. Legitimacy according to whom? From what accrediting body?Why do you claim to be a moral relativist when you keep talking in such absolute terms? Like we need permission from some higher power to go out and "violate the Prime Directive."There is no Prime Directive, because there is nobody to enforce it. So what does it matter if we go against it? What do we gain by following it? What do we gain that is worth the lives of so many? It's a recognition that we're all human beings, and that nobody is going to shape our community except ourselves. But that's nonsense. It's racist. Only helping the people who are just like me? I can't imagine the mindset where that's an appropriate way to live. Oh-ho? Specifically how much travel? Like, in feet. How far do I have to go before I cross that magical line where I'm violating the "Prime Directive" (lol!) not to help people of a different race and culture of myself?I'm not actually from Lincoln, you know. Does that mean I shouldn't have given directions to the guy who was asking for them, this morning? Because he has such a radically different "Lens", apparently, being a Husker fan and all.I mean I guess I should have just given him a funny stare? I mean, maybe in his culture he likes not knowing where the hell the library is? But that's exactly what you've done. You even called it the "Prime Directive." That's pretty absolute language. In the context of Star Trek, after all, it's the one rule that is absolute and can't be violated, ever. (That and the Omega Directive, I guess.)That's some pretty absolute language for a moral relativist. Who, in your view, supposedly enforces this Prime Directive? But that's exactly what you did. You changed the subject from how women face an impossible double standard in society, to a paean about how you can't ever get laid no matter how much cash you blow on women.You made it all about men - all about yourself. Which is what men invariably do when they attack feminism, which you've been doing throughout. Look, we can all go back and read the post. It's still there. Objective and absolute are not the same thing. I wouldn't say that they're universal; they simply apply to all human beings.

I'm glad you approve. Oh, I see. So if a culture isn't asking for help, we can't go over and help; and even if they are asking for help, the people who are asking aren't technically part of that culture any more (because they're asking the West for help) and so it doesn't count?How convenient. Why, you'd never have to get off your butt to help a human being ever! What a savings! I don't recall saying that they are; in fact, FGM is a practice that seems to transcend strictly religious borders. It's not notionally a part of Islam in the first place, but apparently an indigenous practice that got all wrapped up in it. Where Christian religions dominate, FGM is sometimes practiced there, too. What makes you think the "Butt out" camp isn't motivated by self-interest? That they're not also "self-promoters"? That they reject Western interference because they know that it would result in the diminishment of their privilege?Since when do the oppressors have a right to oppress? Oh, but say, when it comes to the possibility that feminism has resulted in your inability to get laid, no matter how much cash you blow, suddenly that's a big deal? Human suffering and barbarity - meh. Silent H not getting laid? Stop the fucking presses!Astounding. Oh. So, in your view, it's ok that we go over and enforce cultural mobility, even if restricted travel of individuals is a part of that culture.What hypocrisy! The things you want to change? Not against your Prime Directive. The things I think are barbaric practices? Suddenly that's a gross violation of the Multi-Culty Bible.Unbelievable. Their community is my community, because it's all one community. The human community. I don't consider another human being beneath my notice or beyond my help simply because I don't share a language or a skin color, because that shit is racist. Flat-out racist. Race, ethnicity, culture - it has everything to do with this. You think that anything that makes someone different than myself obviates me of any responsibility for their welfare.Hey, look!Here's people of a radically different culture than mine - Cajun - and, gosh, it kind of looks like they could use a hand.Oops, better not. I mean they're all so different and all, maybe they like being crammed into a sports arena with no running water, food, or operable toilets. How could I possibly know? I mean I could ask, but I'm sure the people I would talk to are all "self-promoters" anyway, and who knows? Maybe "Get us the fuck out of this hellhole" is their culture's way of saying "Nope, we're doing just fine here, thanks."I mean, how would I know, what with the different lenses and all? Guess we better just leave them there. Do you? If every culture is simply a subculture of human culture, wouldn't that obviate your argument?Where do you draw the line? How far do I have to go before my help isn't wanted? Except that it wasn't a double standard. It was a whining screed about your diminishing male privilege. The hilarious thing is that you can't seem to tell the difference. Objective simply means that all reasonable observers know it when they see it. Absolute means that it is true in every case. For instance an objective situation of theft means that pretty much everybody would recognize it as a theft. An absolute prohibition against theft would mean that stealing is always wrong, even to buy food for a child, etc.I told you what relativism meant, a couple of posts ago. Surely you could have surmised what "absolute" meant by contrast. Oh, it is, is it? In your view, human beings occupy all corners of the universe?

I still can't believe this is Holmes, unless this is Bizzarro Holmes who supports evo-psych and is a sexual prude. Like, what?