Now on to polygamy. (And no, I ain’t kidding.)
— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015
Socially liberal people who recognize the equal dignity of polyamorous relationships need to develop way better anti-polygamy arguments.
— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015
Y’know, fellow left types who say today’s not a good day to start talking polygamy, “slow down” is a derided stance for a reason.
— Freddie (@freddiedeboer) June 26, 2015
I would assuredly hate to run afoul of the Jacobin version of Godwin’s Law, so let me merely say that even in the cutting-edge-fashion-obsessed, social-justice-oversaturated environment of social media, I haven’t seen anyone yelping about monogamous privilege or the stirrings of a burgeoning poly-rights movement, so I suspect Freddie is just bounding excitedly down the trail with the scent of seemingly-inexorable theoretical logic, rather than a practical, felt need, filling his nose. I’m especially amused by the presumptuous, almost confrontational attitude: “Hey society! I’m some asshole with a clever idea, and I say ‘Jump!'” And society’s all like, “LolWUT? You expect us to ask ‘How high?’ Burden of proof’s on YOU, buddy. YOU make the case that there’s an actual pressing need for us to rearrange this particular social institution to suit your specifications. YOU prove to US that this is in OUR interest to consider. Better yet, go spend the next few decades building a poly-rights movement, and if the fad hasn’t fizzled out by then, we’ll talk.”
June 29, 2015 @ 6:19 pm
Awwwww, Damian. Even Freddie is disappointing my favorite budding Oakenshottian conservative?
LOL I kid I kid!
I mean, I guess I see freddie's logic to some degree, but….
Cheers!
June 30, 2015 @ 12:40 am
Plus, I loved my doggies. What if I want to marry my doggies? I hear that intra-species love is common in some (Southern) Republican circles?
June 29, 2015 @ 9:54 pm
Yes, it's very "logical". It still doesn't follow that this is a pressing need rather than a theoretical abstraction being pursued for the sake of it.
Still, I couldn't care less if Freddie or anyone else wants to waste their time tilting at windmills that don't even exist yet. The only real off-pissing thing is the third tweet. 'Slow down' is derided for a reason. Yeah, well, "Let's hurry up and implement abstractions into law just as fast as academic intellectuals can come up with them" is derided for even better reasons. This is the sort of thing that, if directed at Freddie, would result in 2,000 words about how cool kids exert hegemony over the discourse and marginalize dissenting voices with substance-free snark indicating that the dissenter is a crazy nobody who doesn't even deserve to be taken seriously. Maybe we can start snarking like, "Look, everybody! Here's another person with Slow-Down Syndrome! Where's my bingo card?"
June 30, 2015 @ 4:34 pm
Some of the commenters are interesting on the unz.com article by Razib. All over the place, from nasty bigotry to "liberal".
The most amusing part are the several comments (including, sadly, by Razib himself) doing the exact same group-shaming-and-signaling AGAINST SJWs that SJWs themselves do. Amusing!
June 30, 2015 @ 1:10 pm
Razib says:
"Polygamous societies have been around for thousands of years. Almost always polygamous means polygynous, not polyandrous or polyamorous. We know the score. Yes, if you take a narrow liberal and liberal hedonic perspective about individual human flourishing it does seem unjust that those who love more than one individual can’t enter into legally binding relationships with those individuals. But the big picture is not so pretty.
Perhaps this time it will be different. But we have a track record of who enters into polygamous relationships, and who benefits. Polygamy allows extremely powerful and wealthy males to gain access to many women simultaneously. Of course serial monogamy and lack of fidelity show that this isn’t a very tight fix for the perceived problem. But the de jure laws which constrain elite individuals to one official marriage partner serves as a check on this phenomenon. "
June 30, 2015 @ 4:21 pm
My thoughts parallelled Razib's, Damian. For every Jefferson Airplane "Triad" or temporary hippie commune (and how well did they work out, on the whole), there was five Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compounds or a royal harem in one of our allies on the Arabian penninsula.
July 2, 2015 @ 2:57 am
Signaling is about the meta-message. You wear a Walmart wristwatch to keep track of the time. You wear a Rolex to show people "I'm the kind of person who can afford a Rolex", with all the host of associations that has. Saying "Man, I hate SJWs" on your blog is simply a statement, not one necessarily intended to signify anything other than what it says.
Shame isn't inherently evil or anything. Any appeal to conscience involves shame to some degree. "You should feel bad for behaving this way." "You should be disappointed in yourself for not behaving this way." But public shaming that approaches being a popular sport, like the Roman games, where there are added incentives to seek out new victims, where individuals can suddenly find themselves the target of hundreds or thousands of angry strangers looking to mess with their private lives, is another thing altogether.
Boycotting, for example, is an attempt to use an economic embargo to change policies or laws. But the kind of "boycotting" favored by social justards is not disciplined or sustained enough to have any real effect. It dissipates just as quickly as it flares up, and half the people threatening boycotts of, say, Chik-fil-A probably don't eat there to begin with, so it certainly isn't going to affect the company's profits. It's clear, then, that the real purpose of the activity is little more than the online version of plastering bumper stickers all over your car, to show off what you stand for, to indicate who is the saved and who are the damned.
People sort themselves by their interests. As long as they have the freedom to assemble, they inevitably gravitate toward people who are similar in some significant way (they look like me, they pray like me, they think like me). In and of itself, this is unremarkable and inevitable. A blogger tends to attract an audience who generally agree with him, and a stranger who happens by and disagrees might feel uncomfortable about joining in the conversation. There's nothing inherently sinister about Razib and a couple of his readers grousing about SJWs. It just means they share a frame of reference. Three or four people in agreement doesn't necessarily mean it's an echo chamber. The real test would be to see how they react if someone came in and disagreed with them. Would they argue calmly, or would it be a mass pile-on?
In this case specifically, Razib wields a heavy banhammer. He is extremely strict about having what he calls "value-added" comments. He does not want what most people would understand as normal conversation. He wants you to either contribute something worthwhile, to tell him something he doesn't already know, or else keep quiet. This doesn't strike most people as very friendly, but on the other hand, it doesn't really allow the sort of cliquish group dynamics that pervade places like FTB to develop, either. Like you noted, his readers tend to be pretty diverse, because the sort of petty bickering that you see everywhere else would likely result in getting banned there.