HERE is an article that was linked from one of the G+ pages that I follow.
Predictably, most of the comments were leftist in character. Opposing views were absent.
This article is very typical of the sort of thinking that I find coming from the left in general and intersectional thinkers in particular. It is, in my opinion, a typically poorly thought out line of reasoning. I will accept that it is an opinion piece, and as such not really meant to engage any but the echo chamber, but that is exactly the problem. The author, Jennifer Wright levels charges at Steven Crowder, but entirely fails to address anything that he argues. She justifies this by noting that he does not really want his mind changed, but seems to be oblivious to her own apparent disinterest in having her mind changed. So we have a zero sum game in which it seems that she suggests that dialogue is pointless and nihilistically concedes the day to intellectual and ultimately political tribalism.
This is my take on her article.
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It is always easier to hate people you cannot and will not understand, and to invent caricatures of them that say what you want them to say than it is to apply the mind to the hard task of thinking and understanding.
Do we owe anyone else the effort to think and understand them? Maybe not. But in a free republic, comfortable echo chambers lead to tribal mobs, and mobs are easy pickings for tyrants. Of course maybe, just maybe, the answer is yes if we value human persons over ideologies, for it is ideologies that destroy humanity when we no longer accept the humanity of those with whom we disagree.
So here are some thoughts for the thoughtful... and a waste of time for the smugly self-righteous...
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It has taken me 31 years of life as a woman on this planet, but I’ve reached a point where I no longer feel I owe badly-intentioned men a debate.
Ms. Wright is a citizen in a republic, as is Steven Crowder whom she is arguing against. Republics, in order to survive, demand the inconvenient necessity of civil debate about ideas, some of which we are not comfortable. Failure to engage is to cede responsibility to others who do, and to cede a legitimate right to demand our view be endorsed when we did not defend it. That is how repubics work. Ms. Wright is welcome to participate, or to be quiet, or to go become a citizen of a non-republic where her right to shape policy with ideas she supports do not exist. As a matter of fact, as a journalist in a republic with freedom of speech and press, she IS engaging. So is Mr. Crowder.
The difference seems to be that he is not afraid to have his case challenged directly because he is confident in his logic and his facts (whether they stand or not is to be proven in an arena of ideas). Ms. Wright does not seem to be willing to engage directly, and offers as reasoning many assertions with less than clear reasoning or fact upon which to base her case. She further attacks Mr. Crowder's character, but offers no evidence to support the legitimacy of her attack beyond that "she saw pictures". That is bald-faced prejudice: irrational and negative judgement against another. Because she demonstrates a clear support for the intersectional worldview throughout her article, and because prejudice is one of the evils that intersectionalism claims to oppose, she says more about herself and her own intentions in her attack than she does about Mr. Crowder.
In a republic, are we to take seriously the notion that just because one is beyond a certain age or of a particular sex, one no longer has a responsibility to challenge and be challenged in their ideas? Is not one of the founding principles of a republic that there must not be classes of people who were not answerable to the rest? If we accept that some protected classes are enshrined with the privilege not to be challenged, then we trade a republic of imperfect people who are given the power to check and balance each other for some kind of authoritarian tyrrany. Surely this is not what Ms. Wright wants?
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...I would patiently sit with a man like that, explaining the ways we have, for instance, never had a female president or vice president, and also why American women keep dying in childbirth...
Ms. Wright offers this as evidence for why Mr. Crowder is wrong in his proposition that male privilege is a myth. If this is the sort of evidence she is accustomed to giving, she should re-examine her facts and logic. The fact that presidents and vice presidents in the current era have not been women is not because women don't have the opportunity. The ones who have, have been found wanting as individuals with policy positions that the electorate did not like. Mere assertions are not proof, though the fact that millions of voting women voted for men is strong evidence to the contrary. Is Ms. Wright going to seriously disqualify millions of women merely becasue they disagree with her? That is not very intersectional.
And her suggestion that American women still sometimes die in childbirth is evidence of male privilege is simply specious. Women don't suffer erectile disfunction or prostate problems, nor do they on average, die as early; does that make them privileged? Men and women are different, and have different biological problems. Does Ms. Wright have good or bad intentions in trying to shoehorn those particular facts into her argument? That these are argument for something is beyond question; they just don't deal with the question she is claiming to answer.
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And to every younger version of me out there, I thought: run.
Like, literally, go for a run. A run will raise your heart rate and be healthy for you. Or eat a bag of potato chips. They’re delicious. Or read any book in the world. Twilight, Being and Nothingness, whatever, any book.
Anything would be more productive than trying to engage a man who is cheerfully demanding that you “change his mind” in debate.
Does Ms. Wright expect to be taken seriously when she advocates for avoiding challenging ideas or being challenged? That is intellectually lazy. And if her cause is a moral imperative, then it is morally lazy as well, for it abets an ongoing problem. Furthermore, does she actually think reading any book would be more productive? Would she advocate for reading the misogynistic pornographic Fifty Shades of Grey as better than addressing Mr. Crowder in a discussion of facts? Perhaps she thinks that reading the Qaran which states that the word of two women must be sought to equal one statement by a man, would be more productive than presenting the strength of her argument in public before others that might be swayed by Crowder?
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Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions.
What responsibility is Ms. Wright evading by not confronting what she perceives to be an injustice? If she sees something wrong and says nothing, then is she not complicit in allowing it by intersectional logic?
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But I have never seen it result in anything but a miserable game of Calvinball wherein the rules are constantly changed by the person who thinks it would be fun to make you try to change their mind.
Rules constantly changing is something that discourse based on facts tends to mitigate. That is the sort of discourse Ms. Wright is evading in favor of complaining by whatever standards she finds convenient.
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I have rarely seen anyone’s mind be changed by even the most well-intentioned arguments. Because, let me assure you, men who sit down and issue these glib challenges in the name of debate do not actually want their minds changed. They want to argue with someone, because they think that arguing is fun.
To them, a debate about whether women can have abortions or whether guns should be allowed to be owned by domestic abusers is no more high stakes for them than a debate about whether Batman is better than Superman, or what vegetables would be best to grow on Mars (potatoes, obviously).
This statement is incredibly dishonest. Steven Crowder is a commedian as well as an internet podcaster. As such, much like Bill Mahr, Noah Trevor, or Jamie Oliver, he is indeed sometimes glib, sometimes prickly, and sometimes provocative in what he presents. I cannot defend everything he does. However, Ms. Wright's statement makes me highly suspicious as to whether she actually has seen more than a picture of Crowder in any of his appearances to "change my mind".
In those cases, as well as on his podcast when he does interviews with people that diagree with him, he is remarkably civil, and on college campuses, often far more civil than his opponents who routinely insult him, curse at him, and try to shout him down. Furthermore, he sometimes is more thourogh with his facts than they are. This is not surprising, since intersectional theory denies the scientific method and common logic as tools of the patriarchy which is frankly so unhinged as to be laughable. Whether Ms. Wright goes that far or not, I don't know, but she most definitely does not characterize Crowder in his appearances.
Nor does she accurately characterize the stakes that he seeks to defend. While his methods may be more or less provocative, it is simply spurious to suggest that he does not take ideas seriously. He understands very well that ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have bad consequences. Surely Ms. Wright would agree? The question then is why Ms. Wright is so averse to either challenging Crowder's ideas or being challenged? If she thinks she is right and has a rational case, she should present it in good faith. Just like Crowder does.
By the way, she seems woefully clueless as to Crowder's position about abortion or the conditions under which one should own a gun. She notes the importance of people getting information; perhaps this applies to her as well?
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While they can play devil’s advocate and toss around hypotheticals that are utterly disconnected from their reality and then opt out at the end, for women these discussions require revelation and vulnerability; they are a sharing of our actual lived experience.
If Ms. Wright believes that Crowder is utterly disconnected from reality, she is inexcusably ignorant. Crowder, while sometimes uses hyperbole for effect, he does not confuse this for reality. He does in fact resort to objective facts and deductive and inductive reasoning to support his arguments. Ms. Wright, at best, has so far painted little more than a caricature that does not reflect reality. Is she exempt from the rules she demands of others?
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You know what people who are generally interested in having their minds changed do? They pick up a book. They go to the library and they read a book on the topic written by an expert who has opposing views. They read a newspaper article.
Ms. Wright, following the caricature that she has invented, either ignores or is ignorant of the fact that Mr. Crowder is actually well informed on the issues that he raises, and in some cases, knows more than the people who oppose him on college campuses. We might accuse him of punching below his weight class by talking to college students, though I would suggest that it is actually more accurate that he is not opposing the students so much as he is opposing the leftist professors that are indoctrinating the students, and is thus in good faith attempting to challenge the students thinking by presenting an alternative viewpiont. This is very consistent with what a classic liberal education has done in the west. Does Ms. Wright think that an education exposing students to a broad array of ideas and allowing them to think for themselves is a good idea? Or does she think that it is preferable to leave students to an increasingly constricted, closed minded, and highly politically partisan acadamy? Crowder believes that a free people ought to grapple with difficult ideas because he does care about the consequences of ideas, and happens to believe that the leftist political philosophy of intersectionalism is logically compromised. He actually seems to have a more sober view of the importance of the ideas than Ms. Wright, even if his method is one she does not like.
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Or post pictures declaring “I’ve never met a 'peaceful' feminist who wasn’t a raging man hating demon. Prove me wrong?”
I admit, as a raging man-hating demon, I cannot. Though if I were to try, I would employ this approach.
The superficial resemblance to Crowder is once again to conflate him with the caricature that she has invented. Crowder has not done this in his campus appearances. He has been far more civil.
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But it is almost impossible to argue against someone who admits no validity whatsoever to your fundamental truths. And it can be detrimental.
Does Ms. Wright count herself within the scope of this charge?
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The Guardian describes an instance where, "in 1994 when Irving gatecrashes one of her university lectures, [he] waves $1,000 in the air and says he’ll give it to anyone who can produce written evidence that Hitler ordered the final solution. He then calls her a coward for refusing to debate."
Again, caricturizing Mr. Crowder. She conflates him with a Holocaust denier to bolster her ongoing character attacks on him. Crowder, for the record, is not a Holocaust denier as he actually does read, and does lean on facts available when preparing for a debate. Ms. Wright has still failed to marshal any relevant facts to address the argument Crowder is making, and instead attacks the straw man Crowder that she has constructed.
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If you engage people who genuinely believe that feminists are demons in debate, then you’re admitting that there are just two different, equally valid opinions on that topic. The demon side and the not demon side.
There aren’t.
Again, Ms. Wright with the straw man. Did she actually bother to research and view Crowder's appearance to debate the issue that she is criticising? She is attacking him for something that someone else did. Does she not understand the logical problem or does she just not care? She began with a critique of Crowder that became a continuous attack and finally morphed into a generalized attack. And still, not a single argument that challenges the simple proposition that he made.
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That’s especially important to remember in a “post-truth” age when asking anyone to read a book, or anything longer than a tweet, is seen as a sign that you’re some sort of high-minded, out of touch elite.
I wonder what Ms. Wright thinks "truth" actually means? Does she believe that it is a thing that is objective to all human beings across all times and places? Or does she have a post-modern view of truth in which truth is relative and subjective? She certainly seems to argue consistently with the second view, which is also provides the philosophic framework for intersectional theory which is riddled through and through with relativism's cancer. I do know that Mr. Crowder believes that truth is transcendent and objective whether he likes it or not. It is upon this foundation that he builds his arguments and justifies his genuine concern that ideas matter because they build up or tear down human societies and human persons when you act upon them. Does Ms. Wright think the same?
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The people who are responsible for changing these men’s minds on an issue are not women who will walk them through issues in gentle baby steps.
Would she find it patronizing and dare I say, sexist, if one were to suggest that it might take baby steps to explain to her the problems that she seems to miss in her article? It seems that femsplaining is perfectly OK, where "mansplaining" is not.
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It might, again, take actually reading a few books on the topic they claim to be interested in.
It seems fairly obvious, that Ms. Wright is as closed minded as she accuses Steven Crowder of being.
Why bother reading what the other side has to say if it challenges your view? Much easier to run away, eat some potato chips, and read only books that tell you what you already believe...
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