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[Neonivek]

Let us use the official definition of Mansplaining for a moment:

Explaining something to a woman, because she is a woman.

You don't need to bring in how it is actually used and just stick to that definition, however in the minority of use it is. Can you see anything wrong with someone who enforces against mansplaining using just that definition?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It is a thought crime: In order to criticize someone for this you essentially claim to know the person's thoughts

This one problem is WHY the perverted version of mansplaining exists. When you can just apply it to everything, the definition stops mattering.

[Virtz]

Personally I find it funny how people supposedly in favour of equality can come up with negative terms that imply being applicable to a single gender (or where they redefine negative terms to be applicable to only one gender). Like isn't that highly sexist in itself? I get the feeling people who use the term unironically are kind of lacking in self-awareness and cannot be rationally argued with.

In before "no such thing as sexism against men".

[Sheb]

Personally I find it funny how people supposedly in favour of equality can come up with negative terms that imply being applicable to a single gender (or where they redefine negative terms to be applicable to only one gender). Like isn't that highly sexist in itself? I get the feeling people who use the term unironically are kind of lacking in self-awareness and cannot be rationally argued with.

In before "no such thing as sexism against men".

Do you want me to discuss, or am I just lacking self-awareness and I'm not worth arguing with?

[wierd]

What I find funny in all this exchange:

An internet feminist of "the mindset" derides men for not calling her on her own misbehavior, namely, femsplaining menstration, and doing it very badly.

Was it a setup? Maybe. Hard to say. Was she being a douchbag? Obviously: she wasted an opportunity to be genuinely educational and to engage in meaningful dialogue, by squandering it in this way so she had a platform to complain.

[Virtz]

Personally I find it funny how people supposedly in favour of equality can come up with negative terms that imply being applicable to a single gender (or where they redefine negative terms to be applicable to only one gender). Like isn't that highly sexist in itself? I get the feeling people who use the term unironically are kind of lacking in self-awareness and cannot be rationally argued with.

In before "no such thing as sexism against men".

Do you want me to discuss, or am I just lacking self-awareness and I'm not worth arguing with?

Yeah, I did go a bit too far there. Sorry. Carry on.

[Loud Whispers]

If this is a culture war, who are the combatants? Of all the critics hitherto brought, they are all liberals, complaining of the actions of progressives. IMO two important shades of political spectrum are being glossed over, which is rather bizarre, as they arguably both represent a far greater contender to progressive power consolidation than liberals do - at least in this current climate of liberal retreat. A lot of focus is placed by Haidt on the loudest voices, of those he suspects as having grown up in sheltered and (fittingly) privileged lives from childhood to adulthood, yet doesn't adequately address the issue of social pressure and the larger bodies of students who remain silent. This conflict between liberals and progressives belies that any right wingers, whether they be as liberal as libertarians or conservatives, objectivists, nationalists and so on, a stunningly absent from University faculty and University student body.

In the UK for example, amusingly while we had a study detailing that though our Professors and Lecturers are 80% left-wing, this has no affect on the ideology of students - despite lecturers being trained in how to deal with "right-wing attitudes" in classes. So one can only roll their eyes when left-wing academics conclude that this has no effect on ideology, least of all when all humanities have it in their mark schemes to be leftist, it really saddened me to find that those who pursued humanities would find being apolitical was not an option, and if one was to score highly in examinations and essays, one would have to take a critical approach. Every critical approach boiled down to marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, or some other leftist school of thought; much depth or appreciation for the humanities is lost when everything is forced through such narrow lenses. To say nothing of the effects of having no comprehension or exposure to such things as diverse views on aesthetics, politics and ideology. One can note in British Unis, no right-wing student organization no matter how mild is present at any fair, because they get no approval from the National Student Union, the only orgs approved being in support of the Greens, Libdems or Labour, i.e. the environmental left-wing, the liberal left-wing and the marxist left-wing (not withstanding, the actual marxist societies).

Which is to bring into the perhaps even greater force than lecturers and institutional favour and curriculum, of peer pressure. If you are a student taking inordinate sums of debt, going alone to a new environment whereupon you are entirely socially isolated but for your peers - with no option for retreat or renewal, with the threat of having your entire future's career be eradicated by one foul controversy, you are going to watch yourself carefully. Keeping in mind that our 2015 Tories were more left-wing than the American Democrat party, and its student voters were too ashamed to admit who they voted for. I saw this firsthand, not just amongst right-wing students, but amongst left-wing students who were too scared during seminars to voice their own ideas, lest they accidentally be controversial - instead preferring to interpret existing academia in lieu of having their own ideas. I had a hearty chuckle when my Prof wondered why people would even want the right to offend someone, whilst arguing that we should curtail free speech - keeping in mind that this had nothing to do with the course, which was on medieval literatures, it was an interesting time.

Thus, if the liberal faction successfully reclaims academia from progressive control, would they then extend the olive branch to the right-wing? For from what I've seen, from Haidt or my good ol' Cleggers, the left-wing liberal factions of the UK and USA are willing to diversify the left-wing to remove marxist or progressive elements, but unwilling to extend any promotion or protection to the any right-wing counterparts under the various guises of crushing populism, extremism and so on. What's worse, is that this is not a top-down imposed consensus, rather it is a consensus reinforced on every level of academia from student to dean, therefore this is not something that can easily be changed - it will continue to be, that on these intellectual grounds a student will be more socially accepted by their peers for coming out as transgender than for coming out as a conservative. One need only look at how statistics for minority groups are uneducated are used to prove grounds of institutional discrimination, yet statistics of how right-wing groups are uneducated is used to prove the right-wing are uneducated plebian masses, which is a saddening state of affairs.

That is of course, with one exception - which I'm not sure has as much influence in the USA, but certainly is of great influence in the UK and European Continent. The USA media often talks about our Islamists as if they are poor disenfranchised refugees, ignoring that they're most often affluent, well-educated and well-integrated citizens^{and imo, a better source}. One of the things that didn't get a lot of American media coverage (mostly down to your election cycle consuming all newstime), but was well documented in the UK's media, were cases like this, wherein it was interesting to see that Islamist militiant groups were staffing their specialist roles with Western born and raised Muslims. Medics, Engineers, Chemical Engineers, Programmers and Film Students, to name a few, were amongst the diverse array of disciplines these militiant groups were able to staff with Western students. What's worse, these soldiers were allowed to return home and form an officer class to recruit, arm and stockpile weapons for the years of attacks that continue to grow in rapidity to this day. The vulnerability for student organizations, this ability for the peer-pressure to radicalize isolated students (and the Universities allowing radical preachers to dominate student societies) formed the nucleus for the young backbone of these future Islamist movements.

This amusing detail from 2005 shows how extremist groups were detected in British Universities:
Birmingham (Islamist); Brunel (BNP, Islamist); Cambridge (BNP); City (Islamist); Coventry (Islamist); Cranford Community College (Islamist); Derby (Islamist); Dundee (Islamist); Durham (Islamist); Greenwich (BNP); Imperial College (Islamist); Kingston (Islamist); Leeds (BNP, Islamist); Leicester (Islamist); LSE (Islamist); Luton (Islamist); Manchester (BNP, Islamist); Manchester Metropolitan (BNP); Newcastle (Islamist); Nottingham (Islamist); Oxford (Animal rights extremists); Reading (Islamist); Salford (BNP); South Bank (Islamist); SOAS (Islamist); Sussex (BNP); Sunderland (BNP, Islamist); Swansea (Islamist); Wolverhampton (Islamist); York (BNP).
23 Islamist groups, 9 BNP groups (for context, they were a far-right group), 1 animal rights extremist group (lel). The BNP were shut down and pursued with the full apparatus of society and state (even when they were investigating the rape gangs, but a different topic), whilst the Islamist groups were left unmolested. What's even worse is that this has caused societal suspicion of extremism to fall upon the larger portion of Europe's Muslims, with the obvious fall in trust and increasingly fractured societies that make everyone salty.

tl;dr:
1. Amidst this culture war is a faction fighting an actual war, pulling triggers behind guns instead of attacking trigger warnings. Is the West powerless to contain this?
2. In the contest between liberals and progressives, where do any of the right wing fare?

imo the conflict between progressive and liberal, left and right, while ruinous - does not compare to the far more pressing issue of our Universities creating a generation of inward-directed soldiers

[Neonivek]

Personally I find it funny how people supposedly in favour of equality can come up with negative terms that imply being applicable to a single gender (or where they redefine negative terms to be applicable to only one gender). Like isn't that highly sexist in itself? I get the feeling people who use the term unironically are kind of lacking in self-awareness and cannot be rationally argued with.

In before "no such thing as sexism against men".

The term originally came up to express the common occurrence of being talked down to because your a woman.

The problem was when the term was appropriated beyond its original intent.

[Cthulhu]

>no no see, you think what you said was right but it's actually wrong due to your gender

Calling a man out for mansplaining is itself mansplaining.

As for LW's post, I bring the much-needed right wing extremist lens to this discussion.  It's a fun but tough place to be.  The advantage of the shutdown effect is that we hear everything the left says but the left never gets to hear what we think.  It reminds me a bit of the whole "atheists know the bible better than christians" thing, where being a humanities-educated right winger means I know left-wing talking points better than a lot of left-wing memers I know. 

As for the islamist thing, ethnocultural conflict is baked into the basic structures of modernity.  If you were alive in Rousseau's day and had a complete enough picture of the world at that historical moment you could've seen this coming even then.  Cities are population burners and rely on drawing population from more fertile agrarian territory in order to sustain themselves.  The end result of this is that we run out of farmland and then start drawing population from other countries.  i.e. mass immigration of non-native populations into areas where the native population is decreasing.

However you yourself parse that phenomenon, you can surely understand how people end up seeing it as an existential threat.  I do, but not in a white genocide kind of way, but more in a "we do not have an infinite supply of people to prop up our fucked up system" kind of way.  Not to mention it engenders the kind of violence we've probably only seen the beginning of.  None of that shit is good for humanity.

[Reelya]

Personally I find it funny how people supposedly in favour of equality can come up with negative terms that imply being applicable to a single gender (or where they redefine negative terms to be applicable to only one gender). Like isn't that highly sexist in itself? I get the feeling people who use the term unironically are kind of lacking in self-awareness and cannot be rationally argued with.

In before "no such thing as sexism against men".

It's actually a good point, it's all good to campaign for the removal of perceived gendered language. e.g. asking for "chairperson" to be used instead of "chairman" is a perfectly reasonable adjustment of language to remove a perception of bias, since the change reflects change we want to see in the community, that anyone can now be that role. Or saying don't use the term "bitch" or "retard" as slurs, even if unintentionally, these do stigmatize the female gender and mentally handicapped people. Those are reasonable objections, whether or not the offense was intentional.

It's purely regressive to start making a bunch of new terms designed intentionally to be gender-based slurs, which is why I'm against neologisms which attach negative traits to people's birth genders, which is something people cannot do anything about, and stereotypes entire groups of people based on behaviors that some do, some of the time, and that the other gender also does.

e.g. the "manterrupting" thing - when the actual data from the studies used as evidence shows that women interrupt other women significantly more often than men interrupt either men or women. Women interrupt each other about 3 times / 3 minutes in the study, men interrupt either men or women about 2 times / 3 minutes (there wasn't actually a big difference in how often men interrupted people by gender). The outlier is that women don't interrupt men as often as they interrupt other women. So in other words, men didn't show much difference in interrupting regardless of who they were talking to, but women did. There's definitely a different phenomena behind those numbers than "manterrupting", which is why gendering language unnecessarily takes you further from the truth, it doesn't expose the truth.

[Loud Whispers]

The term originally came up to express the common occurrence of being talked down to because your a woman.
The problem was when the term was appropriated beyond its original intent.

It is really doubtful that was the original intent, when the word is inherently only focused on men

 
As for the islamist thing, ethnocultural conflict is baked into the basic structures of modernity.  If you were alive in Rousseau's day and had a complete enough picture of the world at that historical moment you could've seen this coming even then.  Cities are population burners and rely on drawing population from more fertile agrarian territory in order to sustain themselves.  The end result of this is that we run out of farmland and then start drawing population from other countries.  i.e. mass immigration of non-native populations into areas where the native population is decreasing.

REMOVE JACOBIN remove jacobin

However you yourself parse that phenomenon, you can surely understand how people end up seeing it as an existential threat.  I do, but not in a white genocide kind of way, but more in a "we do not have an infinite supply of people to prop up our fucked up system" kind of way.  Not to mention it engenders the kind of violence we've probably only seen the beginning of.  None of that shit is good for humanity.

Imo demographic displacement is an issue altogether separate from Islamist academia becoming western academia. We're talking ideas and conversion, proselytizing and preaching. Even if all immigration were to stop overnight, the entrenchment of these organizations would continue, as would the efforts of their more violent organized fellows. I think it's part of the problem that when discussing Islamist extremism, no one seems to be able to grasp that Muslims aren't all one race, belief, ethnicity, sect or piety, being a heterogenous bunch as much as any other community. It ends up with some rather weird situations for example, wherein ex-Muslims who have lost their faith, are nonetheless treated as still belonging in the Islamic community - even if they have been thoroughly cast out and given death threats by it. It also means that the student societies that want to recruit more students for the purpose of waging war on their host societies, are shielded from criticism or attack under the auspices of protecting all Muslims, even if it means protecting fanatics who want dominance over all Muslims and all non-Muslims.

Which doesn't make sense, but that's life in the west

[Cthulhu]

That's basically what I was trying to say with the examples thing.  Allah isn't real so there's no such thing as true islanm.  It needs to be viewed as a collection of more or less disparate worldviews grouped by floating signifiers.

We need to stop equating these different worldviews.  Terrorists and apologists for same are hiding behind the protected status of a vague category when they should be judged by their behavior.

As for colonizing academia, Europe has been a target for conquest since the middle ages.  There are still important people and groups  there that believe in the legitimacy of conquest while we're so far up our modernist asses we can't even conceive of that as a meaningful concept. We're unable to deal with "extremism" in academia because academia is unequipped to grapple with it. 

[Neonivek]

The term originally came up to express the common occurrence of being talked down to because your a woman.
The problem was when the term was appropriated beyond its original intent.

It is really doubtful that was the original intent, when the word is inherently only focused on men

Boyfriends, Fathers, and male friends.

[Virtz]

The term originally came up to express the common occurrence of being talked down to because your a woman.

The problem was when the term was appropriated beyond its original intent.

When has it actually been a common occurrence, though? The word has only really existed since 2008. And the evidence for such an occurrence being "common" or even frequent at all in the West in the last 10-15 years seems to be anecdotal at best. There's like a hundred other factors for why someone might talk down to you. Deciding that some one specific factor (that conveniently holds negative connotations only for the one doing it) was decisive in one's particular case seems like personal bias to me.

And it's still a loaded term in and of itself. Imagine if someone today came up with a word specifically to describe a certain negatively viewed behaviour they attribute to women based on some observation (anecdotal or statistical). Like imagine if we suddenly started talking about "fempologism" or "femblaming". Doesn't that sound sexist?

[Sheb]

"femblaming"? Is that when you *blam* a women with a bolter? :p

More seriously, it is a rather common occurence? I mean, just ask any woman you know I guess?

[wierd]

English pronunciation fail there Sheb.

Single consonant followed by vowel makes prior consonant long when using -ing gerunds.

EG:

Blaming == blaym-ing
Blamming == Blahm-ing

Femblaming uses the former, not the latter. Smacking a bitch up is the latter.

See related: Scar vs scare

scarring == scahring ( getting a blemish from an old wound that has healed poorly)
scaring == scayring (the act of making a person become afraid)

This has been a public service of the Needless Pedant English Diction Correction Agency*.

*NPEDCA will not be held responsible for violent outbursts, migraines, or injury of any kind resulting from the dispensation of corrective advice. NPEDCA is a nonprofit volunteer organization. NPEDCA is not associated with the Opportunistically Obtuse Pedant Society, OOPS, or with the Germaine Renaissance Association for the Mastery of Methodical Articulation and Recitation, (GRAMMAR) or its subordinate chapter, Normative Academic Zenith Initiative (NAZI)