Mirror neurons

From SlateStarCodex, a thoughtful article about trying to look at things from both sides, sometimes irritating but worth reading if only for the following:
Microagressions. Nanoagressions. Picoagressions. The Planck Hostility.
And perhaps for this conclusion: "If we can get to a point where we don’t feel like requests are part of a giant conspiracy to discredit and silence us, people are sometimes willing to listen." But if you take my advice you'll stay away from the comments.

2 comments:

Grim said...

My advice for people on the anti-social justice side – I don’t expect giving the SJ people advice would go very well – is that it’s time to stop talking about how social justice activism is necessarily a plot to get more political power, or steal resources, or silence dissenting views. Like everything else in the world it can certainly turn into that, but I think our own experience gives us a lot of reasons to believe they’re exactly as terrified as they say, and that we can’t expect them to accept “you have no provable objective right to be terrified” any more than our lizard brains would accept it of us. I think it’s time to stop believing that they censor and doxx and fire their opponents out of some innate inability to understand liberalism, and admit that they probably censor and doxx and fire their opponents because they’re as scared as we are and feel a need to strike back.

I like this author, but there's an interesting thing going on here. They're just like you, and you should recognize their valid emotional state because it's just like yours: which is why I can address you with this advice, but "I don't imagine it would go over very well" to offer the same advice to them.

That suggests that -- the commentary aside -- he really believes that there are differences in the phenomena. I've read enough of him to know that he identifies with the 'grays' over the 'blues,' so maybe he's confessing a semi-alliance with the people he thinks of as thoughtless and needlessly hostile. But that seems like a strange sort of confession to make.

More and more, I wonder if the right response to all this worry isn't the advice from Grosse Pointe Blank: "Oh, what the hell, let's get drunk and forget the whole g*****n thing."

RonF said...

We have a new term for this, from Christina Hoff Sommers: "Fainting Couch Feminists".