Lauren Davis of io9 has a collection of internet comics that, she claims, “shut down terrible internet arguments.” I suppose that depends on your definition of “shutting down.” If that just means “insult and dismiss the person you’re arguing with,” then sure, those comics are very effective. They suggest the superiority of the people who […]
Continue reading →Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz: So: what is the active moral question, here? What is the issue before us that has actual ethical valence? Is it “should there be harassment of people online”? Are there a lot of people who are pro-online harassment? No. Instead, a question of actual moral valence is how to oppose […]
Continue reading →Drew Magary: Now 90 percent of all internet thinkpieces are dedicated to explaining why you should have a problem with something you originally had no problem with. OPEN YOUR EYES, SHEEPLE. Don’t you see that keyboard cat is a way of enforcing traditional heteronormative privilege in America today? The cat is wearing a house robe, […]
Continue reading →Adam Kotsko fears that the Great Lena Dunham Sister’s Vagina Freakout of 2014 may be an irresolvable problem for the left. I have started to notice how often politically-charged online memes open out onto a “no-win vortex.” Take the example of the cat-calling video. On the one hand, it calls attention to street harrassment, which is […]
Continue reading →So it strikes me that these (utterly ridiculous) allegations that Lena Dunham sexually abused her sister are a good example of what I’m talking about when it comes to argumentative incentives. As I said, argumentative behaviors are like all human behaviors in that they are subject to influence through incentives. What types of arguments do […]
Continue reading →I’ve really been genuinely disturbed by #GamerGate. Obviously, some of that is just the threats and harassment of women online. But it’s also disturbing how successful they’ve been in pressuring advertisers, and in getting parts of the media to credulously accept much of their narrative. To me, it’s indicative of the problems that come about […]
Continue reading →Amber A’Lee Frost critiques this (excellent) Jacobin post by Victoria Law about carceral feminism: Here are the interpretations of the term I am able to come up with. a) There is a feminist movement for whom imprisonment is the primary political project or cornerstone policy. I know of no such feminist subculture, and I consider myself pretty well-versed […]
Continue reading →Shikha Dalmia wrote some things about affirmative consent laws. I agree with some of it, some of it I am troubled by. Jezebel and Erin Gloria Ryan responded, in contrast, by sex-shaming her for the crime of having a different opinion about a controversial law. I don’t have any right to dictate what it means to […]
Continue reading →So some people are sending around this interview with Berkeley grad students in their Rhetoric program as they largely avoid the question of what rhetoric is. I agree that it is not very helpful to someone trying to understand what rhetoric is and why people would study it. I would just point out that Berkeley’s […]
Continue reading →I thought that this piece by Mychal Denzel Smith on why feminism shouldn’t make men comfortable was interesting and well-argued, but it has this central problem that is endemic to left-wing writing right now: the men who read and share it will almost universally do so in the spirit of implicating some other men. The […]
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