SJA #23 - 12 November 2018 - HADers and The Three Pillars

AIDS/HIV Denial
Sooooo, next up on the skepdocket is AIDS/HIV Denialism, or, more popular, HIV/AIDS denial, or HAD. And that means we get to call the deniers HADers! Yay for fun with acronyms!

HAD can take a number of forms, like denying that AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) even exists, that HIV (the Human Immunodeficiency Virus) exists, denying that HIV causes AIDS, that HIV tests are reliable, and that antiretroviral medicines help AIDS patients. Really, this shit is all over the place.

First, AIDS doesn’t exist, wtf? For this bit of whackadoodle, the claim is that AIDS isn’t a disease or a syndrome, but a catch-all for a bunch of similar looking conditions. They say that what we call AIDS is just the result of malnutrition and recreational drug use taking its toll on the body, or even that it’s caused by the medicines used to treat AIDS. How would the antiretroviral drugs used to treat AIDS cause AIDS before the patient was taking the medicine? Don’t ask! We’re in denial territory, where reality isn’t real but money aplenty to be made!

So, yeah, AIDS does exist. It was first documented in the early 1980s when outbreaks of certain very rare conditions started cropping up. These diseases were only associated with severely compromised immune systems and these patients were adults without a history of immune disorders. The CDC organized a task force to investigate these outbreaks. At first the illness was referred to by several different names related to, for example, the various rare illnesses that occurred in the victims, or the common characteristics of the victims.

The press, of course, came up with an incredibly helpful method for referring to the disease that made things better for everyone and didn’t cause any problems at all: GRID, the Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.

And there we have one of the big reasons why HAD has been so popular for so long. People have come a long way in the last thirty years. In 1981, when they were still calling it GRID, gay folks weren’t simply fighting for their lives; gay marriage wasn’t even a distant dream. You could lose your job for being gay, your landlord could evict you, your family could (and probably would) disown you, you’d face hostility and discrimination in public, you’d very likely face violence in public, and when you did you wouldn’t dare call the police because they might well decide to go ahead and finish the job of beating the gay out of you.

So AIDS was associated strongly with the gay community from the very first, and the public for a long time assumed that having AIDS meant you were gay and that being gay meant you would get AIDS. And, of course, the fundagelicals leapt all over it, claiming AIDS was god’s punishment on the homosexuals.

To their credit, the CDC quickly realized that AIDS is not intrinsically related to being gay, and had coined the term AIDS by the summer of 1982, a year after the syndrome was discovered. The revelation that the epidemic wasn’t confined to the gay community didn’t calm people’s fears, obviously. It helped turn things into a different kind of panic, and birthed a lot of conspiracy theories, fear, and hatred directed at the gay community. As recently as 2013, televangelist and human skin factory Pat Robertson was claiming that gay people were using sharpened rings to cut people during handshakes so as to spread AIDS.

In 1982, that sort of thinking was everywhere, especially since the disease was spreading without apparent cause and popping up in major cities without showing up in intervening locations. Perhaps you’ve heard of “Patient Zero”? That actually comes from the epidemiological tracking as they tried to understand the disease, how it spread and developed, and how they could treat it. They asked for, and got, a surprising amount of information from infected gay men about their previous sexual partners. The coding for this information would identify partners by where they were from, and a person from out of town would be marked with an “O”.

And there was one particular out of towner… he was a flight attendant for an airline with a knack for picking men up in the cities he flew in and out of. And that’s one of the ways the disease spread so quickly, and why it showed up in major airport hubs first.

The Reagan White House didn’t help any of what was going on, not with treating the disease, nor quelling the public’s fears about this unknown plague, nor with the hatred being aimed at gay people. The White House Press Secretary spent a lot of time cracking jokes with the press corp at the gay community’s expense. It’s rather horrific.

Anyway, we now know that AIDS is caused by the HIV, and that HIV is a mutated form of a related virus, SIV, the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. I ask you to imagine how much fun it was for the black community when it was discovered that a sexually transmitted disease had its origin in African chimpanzees. As one who was alive and marginally aware when that little tidbit was discovered, yes, people were incredibly racist about it. Just so you know, it comes from the habit of some poverty-stricken people of killing and eating chimpanzees, aka “bushmeat”.

At any rate, the disease spread out of Africa thanks to the Congo achieving independence in 1960. When Belgium left, they didn’t leave any experienced administrators behind and the international community reached out for help. A large number of Haitians answered the call and it appears some caught the disease at that time, taking it back to Haiti with them. This explains one of the CDC’s early attempted names for AIDS, the 4H disease: for Heroin users, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, and Haitians, the four most common victims of the disease. We now know that the disease is transmitted by exchange of bodily fluids, such as during sex or blood transfusion.

The significant number of Haitians who helped the Congo transition to independence brought the illness back to Haiti with them in the mid 1960s. It then appears to have been transferred to the mainland US in the late 60s or early 70s, when it established a foothold. It of course takes time for the disease to progress to the point where the immune system has become so weak that other, opportunistic diseases can infect the patient, hence why AIDS didn’t start appearing until 1981.

So we’ve already got a lot of homophobia and a healthy current of racism, can we get any other bigotries in there? Of course we can! Anti Semitism! Plenty of conspiracy theories running around out there about the origins of AIDS being a Jewish plot to something something white people something something black people something something gay people.

But despite the various conspiracy theories and despite the wide variety of nonsense the denialists throw out there, the overwhelming majority of HAD came from homophobia, at least for a long time. HAD appears to have declined somewhat, becoming a weird culty thing powered not only by homophobia and a soupçon of racism, but also with a healthy fear of any large group of experts, like doctors and pharmacists and other… well, let’s be honest, that’s where some anti-semitism comes into the equation. Conspiracy theorists love to hate on the Jews.

But there’s a weird little strain of HAD that you might not see coming. It’s chiropractors. Now, I’ll be ranting in detail about chiropractic once we get to the Cs, but let’s leave it for now that the core of chiropractic is the belief that all illness, all illness, is caused by so-called subluxations, or malformations of the spinal column. These subluxations prevent God’s Energy from up in Heaven being transmitted to all your organs by the spinal column (Heaven’s above us, right? And the energy comes in through your head and goes to your body via the spine, because logic).

To be fair, some chiropractors mix the core chiropractic bullshit with other forms of complete bullshit, and some even try to practice something approaching medicine. However, the fact remains that chiropractic is built on a foundation of manure, and that it includes the belief that the Germ Theory of Disease is wrong, and that all doctors are either ignorant quacks or paid shills.

Your life has to be pretty goddamn sad if you’re on the same side as neonazis, the KKK, and Pat Robertson and you look like the weird one because “No no no, it’s not about the Jews, it’s just that your spine is kinda bendy so God’s Magic Energy is having trouble getting to your pancreas!”

I want to go ahead and throw a lot of shade at religion here, too. One highly effective method for preventing the spread of HIV is wearing condoms, and a large number of very well funded and very politically active churches are against condoms because baby Jesus is allergic to latex or some shit. The Catholic Church naturally bears a huge chunk of blame, because they’ve always been against any kind of birth control or family planning, thus making them just a little bit genocidal because people are dying by the millions from this shit in countries where the Catholic Church has massive influence.

However, the Proddies aren’t getting off scot-free. Being in favor of birth control and abortion used to be a protestant thing, a way of distinguishing yourself from the hated Kathalicks, but that changed with the birth of the so-called Moral Majority. In response to blacks and gays and Jews suddenly becoming “people”, the fundagelicals decided to freak the fuck out and launch a moral crusade. They wanted to get the Catholics on their side, so they adopted birth control and abortion as pet issues. Little did they know that those would rapidly consume most of their energy… and not get the Catholics on their side.

Still, they’re highly energized and well funded, and they like to evangelize and try to get laws passed. We’ve been seeing the fruits of their efforts here in the US, of course, but they also do this shit overseas. Uganda, for example, has passed a number of evangelical-backed anti-gay laws. The fundagelicals are pushing as hard as the Catholics to make birth control and abortion illegal wherever they can, and their disproportionate influence in the US government increases their power, because they then wield the twin cudgels of foreign aid and military intervention to push foreign governments in the direction they want.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate religion? Because I really hate religion.

In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, the HIV infection rate stands at roughly 8.8 percent of the population, and that rate is increasing. Tens of millions of people are dying of an illness that does not need to spread.

That’s not strictly a consequence of HIV/AIDS Denialism, but HADers have good friends in the church and the Thuglican party. Hell, some of them are prominent members of both. And the fact that HAD is wrapped up in homophobia and racism just lets it get more deeply embedded, running under the surface.

The Three Pillars
The three pillars of white supremacy, as outlined by Andrea Smith, are slavery/capitalism (the interaction of white supremacy with Africa), genocide/colonialism (white supremacy in the Americas), and orientalism/war (white supremacy in Asia).

Before we continue, some controversy. Andrea Smith is, as best I can tell, fairly well respected as an activist for women generally and women of color in particular as well as an academic working on related topics. Unfortunately, she has maintained that she is Cherokee since at least 1991 (and said that her identification as such was part of the reason she was denied tenure at the University of Michigan in 2008). However, she has no connection with any tribe and a tribal genealogist has said that she hired him twice and he found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry either time.

Many Cherokee scholars and activists have criticized or condemned her for this, saying her actions hurt the Cherokee people and Native Americans more broadly. Her response has been to continue to claim Cherokee ancestry and identity, rejecting the need to be officially affiliated with a tribe.

So, yeah, on that front, Andrea Smith is a douche. On a side note, this offers the chance to reflect on Elizabeth Warren’s related claims and position. As I understand it, Warren once identified as a Native American on a form in law school, thanks to a long-standing family belief that one of her ancestors was Cherokee. That appears to be the only way in which her story is similar to Smith’s, because she never otherwise claimed Cherokee heritage, never identified as Cherokee, and never used it to advance her career. Instead, Harvard claimed it on her behalf to defend itself against accusations that it didn’t have professors of color.

When she went on to enter politics, Warren continued to not claim Cherokee ancestry, heritage, or identity. She didn’t run on it, didn’t include it in campaign materials or ads. It wasn’t until Trump started talking politics that, once again, other people dug it up to use it for their own purposes. She has continued to maintain, and a DNA test appears to support her, that she has native ancestry, but has never claimed tribal affiliation or identity.

Anyway, Smith’s three pillars. Smith edited an anthology published in 2006, “The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology”. One of the articles was her own work, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing”. It’s a six page article that, implicitly and explicitly, criticizes the “oppression olympics” thinking that crops in activism and organizing. The article doesn’t mention intersectionality, but looking over it, seems to respond to and criticize it. I also see a lot of bell hooks in the article, though I confess I’ve not read hooks. In short, what I see here is like that surprisingly old criticism: there is much here that is good and original; however, what is original isn’t good and what is good isn’t original. (that criticism dates back at least to 1781!) So let’s look at what Smith says here (remember, it’s only a six page article, link in the thingy, so you can easily go read it yourself).

After her introduction criticizing “oppression olympics” for stymying organizing, Smith says that white supremacy rests on three pillars, three logics, three methods of interacting with non-white populations.

• slavery/capitalism
• genocide/colonialism
• orientalism/war

She then follows that with a discussion of the implications for organizing, talk about heteropatriarchy and US Empire, and her conclusion.

To start, I don’t disagree with her three categories. When Europeans exploded onto the rest of the world, they encountered different regions, with different human populations, with different cultures and technologies, and European actions against to those populations differed accordingly. However, and this critique may be unfair, their actions weren’t so easily disentangled as she seems to posit.

This critique may be unfair because this is a very brief article by Smith, not a full academic treatment. Capitalism can’t be easily linked only to slavery, genocide wasn’t limited to the Americas, Orientalism didn’t only manifest in war, and she seems to ignore Australia entirely.

White supremacy and, yes, heteropatriarchy, manifested themselves differently on the different continents not because they embodied different logics, but because the same logic (us = good, you = bad) was responding to different situations. White Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchal Imperialism (WhiSCHI) operated via near absolute genocide in the Americas and not in Asia nor Africa not because Europeans didn’t want to enslave and profit from Native American bodies, but because European diseases repeatedly decimated native populations, beginning and enabling that genocide. By contrast, African and Asian populations had resistances to those same diseases and Europeans simply couldn’t commit those genocides.

Likewise, WhiSCHI manifested differently in Asia than it did in Africa. Africa presented an entirely different landscape of diseases and crops that Europeans had difficulty penetrating, Asia had cultures, traditions and civilizations that Europeans recognized and respected. In Africa, Europeans kidnapped individuals into slavery because they had so much difficulty controlling the landscape and surviving the climate. In Asia, they dominated politically through warfare because the path of Asian civilization had led to hierarchies that could be exploited in that fashion, which path African civilizations hadn’t taken.

In all three cases, European imperialists transformed the native population into an exotic other to be dominated, exploited, and killed as necessary. They were to be brought into the existing hierarchy as less than Europeans, which led to the invention both of whiteness and the other races/racisms that WhiSCHI exploited. Capitalism encouraged this through profit motive, racism through emotional means. Genocide, war, and slavery were all tools through which the logic of WhiSCHI operated.

European invaders didn’t develop a different perspective on Native Americans completely independent from their attitudes toward Asians. Instead, they held a single viewpoint, that they and their civilization were the peak of all humanity, and that others were lesser beings there to be used. Africans and Native Americans thus became “unintelligent savages” who were “incapable of civilization”; Africans were distinguished from Native Americans as “violent brutes” to justify holding them violently in bondage, as a way to control them. By contrast, Native Americans were denigrated as being unforgivably weak so as to justify not holding them in bondage, and instead merely driving them to extinction and taking their land.

Asian civilization couldn’t be ignored, so it had to be worked around, and the result was that WhiSCHI developed orientalism, a confusing morass of conflicting beliefs that at once praise Asian people for the unignorable facts of their long history, their historical developments, their art, culture, and science, their basic humanity while at the same time rendering them inferior, barbarian, effeminate, weak, and deserving of European domination.

Australian natives were treated in their own way, another combination of the attacks on other peoples. They were enslaved and subjected to genocide. They were kidnapped, owned, murdered, raped, “re-educated”, had their lands stolen… Their experience was different from all the others, but built on the same foundation. Perhaps the fact that their situation contains elements of both African and American colonization, preventing them from fitting neatly into her three pillars, is why Smith excluded them from her analysis. Or perhaps, like many people, she just forgot them.

In any event, no, it’s not different logics, different pillars. It’s one logic; the fascist logic of hierarchy, of believing that some people are possessed of some “essence” that renders them superior, and that this applies not only to individuals, but to whole populations and “races”. So long as they were confined to Europe, European fascist hierarchism confined itself to identifying different European populations as superior or inferior, different European individuals. When, through historical accident, Europeans burst out and began attacking the rest of the world, that same fascist hierarchical thinking was applied, repeatedly and in different directions, to the rest of the world.

And I want to stress that that fascist hierarchical thinking is not and has never been limited to Europe. That form of thinking has always been part of humanity. Wherever humans had the good luck to discover writing and wherever we have the good luck for that writing to survive to the present, we discover the same variations in human thought. All humans and all human populations have fascist tendencies, with some feeling more strongly than others the emotions that drive toward fascism.

Had historical and geographical accident driving things differently, a Chinese global empire would have exercised the same logic, intersectional thinking would instead be operating to undermine Han Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchal Imperialism. Perhaps the Queen of Sheba would have implemented a heteromatriarchy.

Like I said, I’m seeing a lot in this article that owes a great deal to intersectional thinking and perhaps bell hooks. I’m not excessively impressed by Smith’s analysis, and I have to roll my eyes at her apparently complete lack of self-awareness in writing about white people appropriating native identity during the section on genocide and native erasure. She builds on marxist critique, on intersectional critique, on the work of actual women of color, but doesn’t appear to add anything new.

On the other hand, maybe my perspective is too limited, too distant, too ill-informed. I could easily be biased in that I’m an outsider who really only knows about the best, strongest, most useful portions of critical race theory, of intersectionality that are filtering out to the broader population. Smith’s article is more than a decade old, and I have the advantage of not being down in the weeds with the real intellectuals. I could easily be treating Smith unfairly.

Anywho, links in the thingy; lemme know what you think about Smith and about my reading of her work.

Links

• HIV/AIDS Denialism at the Skeptic's Online Dictionary
• HIV/AIDS Denialism at Wikipedia
• Andrea Smith's article, Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing
• bell hooks at Wikipedia
• What is Orientalism and How is it also Racism? at Jenn Fang's Reappropriate blog.

SJA #22 - 5 November 2018 - Agnosticism, TERFs, & SWERFs

Agnosticism - @00:30 YouTube, and Podcast
I’m not a fan of agnosticism, at least not as it’s popularly used.

The term originated back in the 19th century with Aldous Huxley, in order to talk about things we don’t know and can’t know. Huxley was known as Darwin’s bulldog, a fierce advocate for science generally and the scientific theory of evolution in particular.

He coined “agnostic” and “agnosticism” in reference to a collection of religions and religious practices that were popular in the early centuries BC and AD, the gnostics. They were mystics who believed that the way to enlightenment and perfection is through seeking out and learning various secret teachings. There is the evil, material world and the perfect divine world, and by various mystical practices they could get access to the divine and thus achieve perfect knowledge of secret things.

There’s a lot more to gnosticism, of course, but the core of the term comes from the Greek “gnosis”, knowledge. You can also find it in the Latin phrase “nosce te ipsum”, “know thyself”. So Huxley reached back through the centuries (the gnostics were brutally suppressed by the churches in the west, though mystical tendencies and “heresies” naturally pop up everywhere, more so since the Reformation) to take the term, discard the baggage, and talk about something completely new.

“Gnosis” means “knowledge”, “gnostic” means “one with knowledge”. “Agnosis” means “lack of knowledge” and “agnostic” means “one without knowledge”. Huxley meant it to describe his position in philosophy, probably with respect to metaphysics, the study of the nature of reality. He seems to have come to the conclusion that the various philosophers in his day studying metaphysics were coming to unsupportable conclusions.

“They were quite sure that they had attained a certain "gnosis" -- had more or less successfully solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.”

The term, at least in my experience, is not much used today to describe a philosophical position with respect to any or all knowledge. Instead, it refers to the position one takes on the existence of a god or gods. The common understanding is that if you are certain there is a god, you are a theist; if you are certain there is no god, you are an atheist; if you are not certain either way, you are an agnostic.

That is, those who call themselves agnostic sometimes (not always) position themselves as morally or intellectually more honest than all of those “dogmatic believers” (whether theist or atheist) who claim certainty about something where there can be no certainty. There’s at least one amusing quip out there: “Militant Agnostic: I don’t know and neither do you.”

However, there are many more agnostics, and I think they’re probably the majority, who just think of agnostic as meaning “I don’t know” and are less strong about “I can’t know”. Rather than having a strong conviction that knowledge on the subject is impossible, it seems that they’re just avoiding confrontation and the uncomfortable label of “atheist” by saying “I’m not convinced there is a god, but I’m not convinced there is no god”.

Unfortunately for them, that makes them atheists. If you believe there is a god, if you are convinced for any reason, good or bad (and they’re all bad) that some god exists, then you are a theist. If you are not convinced, if you don’t believe, then you are an atheist. You don’t have to be convinced that there is no god to be an atheist.

A lot of atheists like to draw the distinction between being a hard atheist vs a soft atheist, or strong and weak, or positive and negative. Either way, the difference lies in which of these two statements you agree with.

1. I do not believe that there is a god.
2. I believe that there is no god.

If you agree with both statements, you are a strong, positive, or hard atheist. You have been convinced, for whatever reason or reasons, that the proposition “some god exists” is false. If you only agree with the first question, you are a soft, weak, or negative atheist. You have lost, or simply never had, the conviction that some god exists, but you have not been convinced in the other direction.

Obviously, you can’t agree with the second statement without agreeing to the first. If you don’t agree with the first, that means that you do believe that there is a god, and cannot then go on to agree with the second and affirm that you do believe that there is no god.

That, by the way, is why they’re called “positive” vs “negative” or “strong” vs “weak”. The second statement is a positive statement, an affirmation, you’re declaring that you do have a belief, that there is no god. The first statement is negative, a rejection of a claim, simply the declaration that you lack a belief.

But even a negative atheist lacks that belief. If you do believe, then you are a theist; if you don’t, you are a-theist, an atheist.

Many skeptics, atheists, and science advocates today bend over backward to cede as much ground as possible to religion, so as to render his own position that much more defensible. “We don’t know; we can’t know; your claims to knowledge are false not because your claims are false, but because you claim to know. I’m not denying your claims, I’m simply not accepting them.” They’re staking a position in negative atheism and then rejecting the label of atheist.

As with last week’s discussion of skepticism and the failure to address popular religious topics, this is understandable but not particularly noble. “It’s a matter of picking your battles” vs “you just don’t want the negative attention”. I get it, though I don’t like it.

I also don’t think it’s correct. I don’t think the reasons given are any good. The only reason to bend over backwards for religion is because we’re afraid of its political, social, and economic power.

Okay, those are big reasons. Still. I’m a cis-gender heterosexual able-bodied white man in his mid-thirties from a wealthy family; I can do whatever I want! I fear not the overwhelming power of the bronze-age bigoted blowhards that control 75% of our civilization!

Anyway, the stated reasons for giving religion every conceivable benefit of the doubt are garbage because they’re wrong. Every religion ever has made definite claims not about things that exist beyond this reality and have absolutely no impact on this reality, but about things that exist in this reality and/or have an impact on this reality. Every religious believer is running around claiming to be a “little god detector”, in the words of Matt Dillahunty. They all claim that some version of a soul exists and is responsible for a person’s actions. They all claim that multiple gods in various versions and varieties exist and actually do things in the world.

Okay, that last one might get a few people to raise an objection. “Christianity is a monotheism! It only believes in one god! Same for Islam! They don’t believe in multiple gods!” Check your definitions. What’s the difference between a minor deity like Aeolus, keeper of the winds and ruler of a mythical floating island in Greek mythology, or Babi, Egyptian god of baboons, and the Archangels Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel, who stand at the four corners of the Earth (because early Christians were incredibly ignorant and believed in a flat earth hundreds of years after it was demonstrated to be spherical) and hold back the “four winds”?

Catholic saints, muslim djinn, and angels and demons in both. Monotheisms these religions are not. Islam is a little less polytheistic, what with not having that nonsensical trinitarian three things that are one thing but are still three completely different things… but whatever, not really relevant.

Anyway, all religions make claims about things actually acting in the world. If it has some sort of impact, we can measure that. If we look at a person’s behavior, thought processes, the actual way their physiology works, we absolutely should see the time and place where the soul intervenes. We should be able to detect the effect of some sort of god or demigod or spirit interacting with objects or brains or the body.

No matter what, nothing is a one-way street. Going back to Newton, anything that is acted upon by a force responds with an equal and opposite reaction force. If the soul acts on the body, then the body acts on the soul.

Unless the religious want to posit some sort of entirely new branch of physics. Gotta be honest, I’ve never seen any of them try that. However, we know that trying to put any sort of 1-way street into your system causes it to break. If you want to have some class of items, S, that can interact with another class, P, but where class P can’t interact with S… you’re rapidly going to run into contradictions and inconsistencies. Basically, trying to build physics without Newton’s third law is going to create a physical system that simply doesn’t work.

In other words, the religious conception of reality a) cannot be studied only because the things they believe in never interact in any way with anything in this universe, b) cannot even exist because what they’re proposing is fundamentally broken, or c) can be studied because they don’t want to pretend that they’ve invented a new kind of physics that no one has been able to figure out (even though they’ve tried; that’s what theoretical physics is, imagining wildly different physical laws and seeing what would happen). So let’s go through those in order.

A religious order that can’t be studied because the items or beings involved never interact with reality. Okay, gotta be honest, that’s an incredibly boring “belief” system (heavy scare quotes, there). What kind of jackass would argue for that kind of religion?

Well, the sort of jackass who was afraid of being murdered by religious assholes, for one. It’s called deism and was quite popular in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries among educated individuals. Reject everything about religion except the absolute bare minimum. Just enough to get people to leave you alone. There are probably people who argue on behalf of some form of deism today, particularly in places where apostasy or atheism can be dangerous to your health. But, really, it’s not an interesting position. There’s nothing to grab hold of. Nothing to argue for or against. It’s a vacuous proposition.

And, let’s be honest, anyone arguing on behalf of deism probably isn’t arguing on behalf of the kind of hateful, hurtful bullshit you get out of people like “white evangelicals” (aka the KKK) or wahhabists.

Anyone else will probably equivocate between the remaining two possibilities as needed. “Yes, it has a real effect, no you can’t study it. What do you mean, ‘why not’? Screw you! Because! BECAUSE. SHUT UP.” What I mean is that a lot of them (most? Nearly all?) probably haven’t put much thought into it and never considered that any phenomenon that impinges on reality can necessarily be studied, but quickly retreat to the position that they have a special kind of magical physics that you can’t study because shut up.

But it should be hammered home: they have a massive, uphill battle to demonstrate that their position is defensible. They either have to show that the phenomenon they’re describing (gods, angels, demons, ghosts, souls) exists and can be studied, or they have to show that the phenomenon they’re describing exists but can’t be studied because of a physics system wildly different from the one we know exists. On the one hand they must then provide the evidence to support the system. On the other, they have demonstrate that said new physics exists (which holy shit).

No matter what we’re talking about, the propositions of religion are necessarily subject to scientific investigation, because they’re making claims about the nature of reality and the existence of things within it. The position of hard agnosticism, that it’s impossible to study the claims of religion, is simply false. The so-called “supernatural”, as something separate from nature and completely immune to investigation, is an incoherent concept. There is no way to have something completely separate from nature that can still interact with nature. Not even if it obeys some new set of physical laws, because those physical laws are still part of reality, still part of nature.

Lemme just repeat that: the concept of the “supernatural” is incoherent. There is no “supernatural”. There is only the natural, be it ever so unfamiliar.

Another concept attached to agnosticism I want to discuss is the distinction between belief and knowledge. For a while there I agreed with the view held, as I vaguely recall, by Matt Dillahunty of The Atheist Experience. I used to watch/listen to the show (a live call-in youtube channel that takes questions/debates from atheists or theists), but … See, thing is, believers don’t have new arguments. They’ve never had good arguments, and the well for new arguments dried up pretty much as soon as people started coming up with arguments.

What I’m saying is that the calls got repetitive and I stopped watching. The show’s a very valuable resource for new non-believers; it provides a deep well for answering the apologetics (good or bad) offered by the callers. It also provides a window into a community of non-believers for people who might feel very, very lonely in their non-belief.

And Dillahunty’s one of the regular hosts of the show, and the conversations on the show frequently turned to knowledge versus belief, because a common religious tactic is to try and argue that:

1. you don’t know for absolutely certain there is no god
2. therefore you don’t know either way
3. therefore you’re not really an atheist
4. therefore … somehow you have to admit that I’m right?
5. I dunno, it falls apart
6. they’re just trying to prove atheists aren’t real for some reason

Anyway Dillahunty used to have a position I that I used to agree with, though he may have changed it since then, that knowledge is a form of belief; knowledge being verifiable, true belief. What changed my mind about this is the inclusion of “true”. How can you determine if something is true? Well, it has to be verifiable. That’s what verifiable means, that we can determine it is true. But tagging “true” on there in addition to verifiable is only meaningful if we have some special way to find out it’s true, from “outside”, as it were.

So discard “true” and we’re left with “verifiable”. No one thinks their beliefs are unjustified, unverifiable. Every person is convinced of the things they believe, for whatever reason, or they wouldn’t believe it. Even beliefs held on faith; the faithful think those are justifiable, verifiable, true beliefs. They’re wrong, but they still believe. Many of them even call those beliefs “knowledge”.

Even if you only have very little justification for your belief, very little evidence or confidence, even if you only call it a “suspicion” or a “hunch” or something, you still have some justification or rationalization, you still have, or believe you have, good reason for that. And it will still be in some way verifiable, even if you’re not willing to go to the effort or expense of verifying it yourself.

So my position has changed. I no longer think that knowledge is belief + truth. I now think that knowledge is belief + confidence. What a person considers “knowledge” rather than mere “belief” is a matter of emotional conviction, and isn’t based on some sort of systematic classification using evidence, reason, verification, or “truth”.

And that’s my more … philosophical rejection of agnosticism. My more emotional attack is that it smacks of cowardice (or prudence, if you’re being kind) and isn’t based on a conviction that knowledge is unavailable. This attack is just that knowledge isn’t really a thing; we just have beliefs, some of which are more or better justified. Distinguishing knowledge from belief is what is impossible, because they’re the same thing. And that’s why I reject the category of “agnostic”. You can’t say “I don’t know, but I believe” and call it a separate category. It’s just admitting a lack of confidence in your belief.

And saying you don’t think others can know is saying you don’t think others can have good justifications for their beliefs, which means you don’t believe. You might not be a strong or positive atheist, but you’re still an atheist.

TERFs & SWERFs - @18:58 YouTube, 17:10 Podcast

• TERF - Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism
• SWERF - Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism

Although douchebags on the right call every feminist “radical”, being a radical feminist places you within a specific branch of feminism that arose back during the second wave, in the 60s and 70s. The first wave of feminism was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and secured the right to vote, the second wave was in the 60s and 70s and brought women into the workplace, and the third wave is attempting to secure social equality and integrate it into the broader context of social justice right now.

“Radical” isn’t just a term from California surfer culture. I was always much more familiar with it as a term within chemistry, where it refers to an atom or compound with an unpaired (and thus highly reactive) electron. In other contexts, “radical” comes from Latin “radix”, “root”, and anything “radical” is attacking or identifying the root cause of something.

Radical feminists, therefore, identified themselves as such in order to distinguish themselves from other feminist movements. They identify the root cause of women’s oppression as arising from the gendered expectations of patriarchal social structures rather than in government (liberal feminism) or economic class (Marxist feminism).

Radfems claim that society as a whole is organized for the benefit of men and to the detriment of women, that men as a whole oppress and subjugate women. In broad strokes, this is true, as are the claims of liberal feminism that government institutions act to give men advantages over women and those of marxist or socialist feminism that capitalist institutions give men advantages over women.

However, radical feminists claim that the social patriarchal structures are the fundamental root, the true origin, and that government and economic structures arise from that basic attack on women’s dignity. Since socialist and liberal feminists agree with one another that both government and economic institutions contribute to women’s oppression, but differ on which is more important, radical feminists called themselves that to state that they were declaring social norms the real problem.

I want to note that radfems aren’t wrong to attack patriarchy and social institutions. The gendered and regressive expectations placed on women give them severe disadvantages and force them to struggle their entire lives and generally to experience worse outcomes in all their endeavours. However, government and economics are culture. These systems are all integrated in different ways, and attacking one is attacking all… and radfems usually do so. From what little I’ve pieced together (and please note I’m not a feminist scholar nor a historian of feminism), radfems usually hold a number of mainstream feminist views, such as wanting to expand reproductive rights and to improve women’s equality generally.

However, some radfems are weird, blaming women’s oppression not just on a larger culture that advantages men at the expense of women, but blaming individual men. Some radfems take ordinary feminist discourse in weird directions or to extreme conclusions.

For example, more typical feminist discourse will note that video porn is largely produced by men for men and thus focuses on male pleasure and the pleasure of the male viewing experience, reducing women to objects serving the male gaze. The feminist response will include condemning mainstream porn for excluding and degrading women, and can then go on to either condemn porn in and of itself. Or it can advocate a broader, more inclusive, and healthier form of pornography, where women aren’t merely bodies present for the pleasure of men, but are active and pleased participants themselves, where women aren’t just participants in the production, but are part of the intended audience, and so on.

Radfems, meanwhile, will usually take the first route: condemning pornography. But a number of them take it even further. Not only do they attack pornography as objectifying and degrading women and leading to violence against them, they likewise attack marriage as doing the same. Don’t get me wrong, many feminists dislike marriage as practiced in the United States as constrictive, restrictive, and unhealthy, especially for women. As that “especially” notes, they’ll point out that it’s also constrictive, restrictive, and unhealthy for men. (noting that men are restricted and isolated by patriarchy, and forced into unhealthy roles that harm them as well as women is one of the things that makes feminism awesome and always has done)

Some radfems will then go on to say that all heterosexual sex is patriarchal and benefits men at women’s expense. Others view sex mainly in terms of its utility for reproduction and the role sexual reproduction plays in forcing women into certain social roles (mothers) and out of the workforce, limiting their freedom and making them into servants of men specifically and society more broadly.

Either way, you get some weird radfems who insist that all heterosexual sex is sexual violence against women, that it isn’t possible to have an uncoercive heterosexual relationship, that any sex between a man and a woman is rape. You can even get a branch of radfems who so remove themselves from men that they embrace radical political lesbianism: the idea that sexual orientation is a choice and women should become lesbians until they achieve true equality. Some will even argue that the use of a dildo is sexual violence, because it recreates the norms and expectations of the patriarchy and turns one of the women into a pseudo-man raping the other. Other radfems just argue for celibacy and say that abandoning heterosexuality is an unfortunate necessity.

This is, at least in part, the origin of SWERFs, Sex-Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists. In theory, radfems are opposed to prostitution, cam-work, and porn because it recreates oppressive social institutions that hurt women. In practice, at least some radfems today often target sex workers for harassment, abuse, or even assaults or threats of the same.

By contrast, a large segment of third wave feminism is dedicated to supporting sex workers, eliminating oppressive and harmful practices. They recognize that sex is awesome and sex work is at the very least just another job, or could even be a really awesome thing that improves society (see for example the powerful economic or even religious positions sex workers have held in the distant past).

Radfems also take positions on gender and being trans. They’re as divided here as they are elsewhere, with some radfems being open and inclusive, others being bigoted and exclusive. Hence TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism. Just FYI, very, very few people actually claim the titles of TERF or SWERF; most view those as slurs and try to report people who use them as abusers or bigots themselves on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter. They are, however, fairly straightforward descriptive labels applying to people for their expressed ideologies (radical feminism and bigotry against trans people and sex workers) and for their openly claimed titles (radical feminism again).

TERFs assert that gender is purely a function of biology, that you are the plumbing you were born with, that social roles are social roles, but there's still something fundamental about biology. Like conservative Christian bigots, you are born an XY male with male dangles or an XX female with a female dimple. They claim that, having been born male and having lived male, trans women have lived with male privilege and cannot actually understand what it is to be a woman. That claim, depending on how it is expressed, can be at least modified to fit within trans-inclusive feminism: no, trans women haven’t lived as women their whole lives, they don’t know what it is to be born, raised, and live fully as cis women, but they do have the experience of being a trans woman living as a man, being a trans woman living in transition, or a trans woman living as a woman.

But TERFs reject the notion that gender is separate from plumbing, but still biological or something, that the human brain is a very complex organ. There is no “internal female identity” or “female essence” or “female brain”, there is only chromosomes and genitalia. They call themselves "gender essentialists" rather than TERFs. They go on to claim that trans women are men attempting to invade female space, to steal and degrade the concept and experience of female oppression (thus weakening the feminist argument… somehow), and possibly to assault and rape “real” women. TERFs are fucking assholes, full stop.

These last few paragraphs have focused largely on TERFs and their bigotry toward trans women. As with the broader culture here in the US, the TERF conversation around trans people tends to focus on trans women. Just as Christian bigots focus on trans women going into women’s spaces in order to attack and degrade women (bathroom bills), TERFs focus on trans women coming into feminist spaces to do the same. The hypothesis or model among gender theorists, as I understand (again, not an expert) is that bigots fully understand the desire of a “woman” to “call herself a man”, but a “man” trying to “call himself a woman” triggers cognitive dissonance.

That is, trans men are easy for bigots to understand because men are seen as better or of higher status than women. They don’t actually understand trans men, because trans men aren’t trying to achieve higher social, political, or economic status; they’re just trying to live their fullest, happiest, best, most honest lives as who they truly are. But for the bigots, trans women are moving down the ladder, seeking a lower status in society. Once you understand that this is something trans women have to do because it is who they truly are, it’s not a problem.

But for the bigots, it’s a huge brainfuck. They have this rigid, hierarchical worldview that they refuse to modify (hey, sociologists/neurologists, is this a brain thing, or can we actually improve society so that this sort of person doesn’t happen any more?), and can only support that view by coming to the conclusion that trans women are men who are trying to get some sort of advantage. Since women are lower status, it can’t be an advantage in the broader culture (except insofar as right wing bigots believe that “claiming victim status” lets you get away with stuff), so they must be trying to attack women.

You’ve almost certainly noticed that I’ve talked about right wingers, conservatives, and Christians a few times here and there. TERFs and SWERFs on the one hand, Republicans on the other, are natural allies on a lot of issues. In fact, I have heard that a significant fraction of early radfems were Catholic nuns, of all things. Now, I heard this several years ago, and my google-fu has completely failed to turn up anything relevant, so this might have been a single author’s opinion or it might just have been part of Pope Francis’s attack on Catholic nuns from a few years back.

What I recall, though, was that Catholic nuns wanted a piece of the feminist pie. The Catholic church has always been ridiculously misogynistic and nuns, like most Catholic women, want a large voice and place in the hierarchy. Not all forms of feminism are a natural fit but, somehow, apparently, radical feminism worked. Maybe because of its change in emphasis from political and economic institutions over to culture?

In any event, this would help inform the strand of right wing bigotry that has woven itself into parts of radical feminism. The Catholic hierarchy is very gender essentialist; male and female made he them, woman as helpmeet to man, etc. There is a brand of Christianity more generally that calls itself “complimentarian”, where women and men are “separate but equal”, having completely different roles. Radical Feminism rejects the idea of different roles, but accepts the idea of women and men as different. TERFs have found a middle ground there, working with Christian bigots to attack trans folk.

There’s also a group of right wing bigots who style themselves as “second wave feminists”, who like to talk about how feminism used to be okay, but now it’s all about claiming victim-hood and attacking men and blah blah blah. They’re not feminists. Some are just parroting old feminist talking points in order to distort them and attack feminism on behalf of a right wing agenda (see, for example: Christina Hoff Sommers, a far right wing bigot employed by the Koch Brothers through the American Enterprise Institute). Others are ignorant little shits who don’t even realize how much feminism has done for them, who accept a large amount of feminist thought without noticing that it deeply conflicts with their far-right-wing bigotry (such as racist terrorist Lauren Southern).

In any event, TERFs and SWERFs are happy to work with right wing bigots because their own bigotry, at least in the areas of trans politics and sex politics, so often match. TERFs hate trans women, Republicans hate trans women, and they cooperate to put together laws to discriminate against trans women. The TERFs provide the Republicans with cover because they get to say they talked to feminists who helped them write the bills! And the Republicans provide the TERFs with money. Lots and lots of money. Republicans are really good at getting rich people to foot the bill for bigoted mouthpieces, because that’s how Republican fascism works.

1. promise rich people that they’ll get more rich
1. rich people give Republicans money
2. promise poor people that the people they hate will get punished
1. rich people pay a few bigots to spread lies and propaganda talking to poor bigots
2. poor bigots vote Republican
3. Republicans pass laws:
1. always - laws that give money to the rich
2. sometimes - laws that punish the targets of bigotry

If not for their alliance with the fascist Republican party, the absolutely minuscule movement that is bigoted radical feminism would have died out long ago, because they are minuscule. By far the majority of feminists aren’t TERFs or SWERFs. The portions of radical feminism that were correct have largely migrated into mainstream feminism, leaving bigotry, attacks on individual men, and the like out in the cold.

Again, this is all the understanding of a dude who hasn’t dedicated years to gender studies and hasn’t done a survey of the field to find the size of various groups within it. I have links in the thingy for those who want to learn more, and I do encourage you to do a lot of reading, because feminism is a large and diverse movement with lots of focuses and lots of different analyses and forms of analysis.

Either way, fuck TERFs, fuck SWERFs. They’re assholes. They make life a living hell for people. They love to target people for harassment and abuse. And if you see anything like that, I encourage you to find some way to stop it. If it’s in meat space, just go ahead and get in their way, physically step in front of them, stop them from attacking whoever they’re attacking. If it’s online, report their harassment and abuse. It won’t do much good, but you can try.


Links

• Agnosticism
• Agnosticism at the Skeptic's Online Dictionary
• Agnosticism at the Rational Wiki
• Agnosticism at the mainstream dudebro wiki
• The Atheist Experience webpage... Okay, I'm not a web genius, but that site looks pretty rough.
• TERFs & SWERFs
• TERFs at the Social Justice Wiki
• SWERFs at the Social Justice Wiki
• Third Wave Feminism at the Social Justice Wiki
• Radical Feminism at the Dudebro Wiki
• Radical Feminism at the Rational Wiki
• TERFs & SWERFs at the Rational Wiki
• Trans Info and Resources at GLAAD

SJA #21 - 29 October 2018 - The Afterlife, Intersectionality, and Republican Violence

Afterlife
This skeptical topic isn’t in the skeptic’s dictionary, oddly enough. I mean, it’s one of the most popular woo beliefs in the world; why wouldn’t they cover it? A lot of skeptics restrict themselves to “non-religious woo”. Things like obvious pseudoscience, pseudohistory, so-called “alternative medicine”, ghosts, aliens… those are all fair game. Anything that’s “supernatural”, or “ spiritual” or New Age, but not mainstream religion. They do have Christian ultrafundamentalism (or CUF). I haven’t read that yet, but, judging by the name, it’s restricted to the extreme fringes of Christianity.

This fear of discussing popular religion and religious beliefs is common in skeptic movements. They’ll go after ghosthunters and cryptozoologists, chiropractors and homeopaths, but not preachers or prayers. Faith healing is a popular target, faith itself is not.

There’s probably a complex interplay of reasons for this. Among them, I suspect it’s… prudence. Discretion. Rank cowardice. The majority of the public will leave you alone if you’re only attacking the fringes of society, but if you turn your skepticism on the popular beliefs of the majority, they’ll turn their rage on you. So, an instinct for self-preservation will probably drive most skeptical organizations to refrain from attacking religion. It will limit conflict (conflict will of course be unavoidable).

Another major reason, I think, is that a lot of skeptics are going to be religious. That’s inconsistent; if you seek to apply skepticism to your beliefs, then you should end up rejecting religion. However, expecting complete consistency in people’s beliefs is expecting a bit too much. I think it may even be impossible. The human brain isn’t a homogeneous entity, but a collection of regions with different functions, that are interconnected and communicating in various ways. And those regions, having different functions, will often be in conflict. We should expect people not to be consistent in their desires and beliefs.

So all of this is to say that, yes, the afterlife and all associated concepts are fully deserving of skeptical analysis.

What is the afterlife? People believe (or want to believe) that, after a person dies, some “essence” of the person continues to exist in another form. This essence can be more or less coherent, more or less related to the person who died. For example, here in the US, we’re most familiar with the protestant and Catholic Christian belief that a human being has a soul that, after death, will have all of that person’s memories and beliefs, and which will be punished or rewarded for the person’s actions in life.

South Asian beliefs such as Buddhism and Hinduism can be very similar in their belief in reincarnation. Though Buddhism states that a person is in a constant state of growth and development, always changing, and that this process of change continues after death so that the person at reincarnation is different from the person who died, there is nevertheless a thread of continuity that can be traced from one to the other.

You can also get a New Age belief in spiritual energy that returns to the universe as a whole. When a person is born, they get some portion of this energy that returns after death. It plays on the theme of reincarnation, in that a person can be reborn with spirit energy from someone else, but, like pouring water into the ocean and scooping water back out, you’re simply not going to get all of the same spirit energy from a person who has died.

Note my use of the word “energy” right there. That’s not limited to discussing New Age beliefs. It’s incredibly popular with them, as it’s a cultural movement that arose in the west in the wake of the development of mass media and popular awareness of physics. “Energy” is a term that is vital for understanding physics, chemistry… any kind of physical science. However, it’s also a slippery concept, difficult to understand, and thus is subject to abuse by mystics who want scientistic support for their beliefs.

However, it absolutely is not limited to New Age hippies. Anyone who wants to argue in favor of the soul is perfectly free to adopt the term, and they frequently do. Whether you’re talking to Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Buddhists, it is likely that they’ll at some point say, “Energy is neither created nor destroyed; where does a person’s energy go when they die?”

The first part of that, the statement, is true. That’s the first law of thermodynamics. To the best of our ability to determine, the energy of the universe is constant, it can never be created nor destroyed, but can only change forms.

The second part is a lie.

It’s a lie because it assumes that there is some energy that has gone somewhere. It can more charitably be called a fallacy of equivocation, where a term is introduced using one definition, but is then used to make or support an argument under a different definition. “Energy” is introduced into the argument by noting what is clearly true, that people are made of matter and that every process of the human body is driven by chemical energy derived from the food we eat.

However, the equivocation arises when they start talking about a soul or spirit as some form of energy and saying it has gone somewhere. This introduces two new assumptions that have not been granted, but are instead the subject of discussion. The soul, whether physical or supernatural or “some kind of energy” has not been demonstrated to even exist. The other assumption is that some energy was present in the body which is now absent.

Physicist Sean M. Carroll (to more clearly differentiate him from the biologist Sean B. Carroll) once, while discussing this subject, brought up something like a Zen Koan “Where does the flame go when the candle is out?”.

The answer is that it doesn’t. It doesn’t go anywhere. It isn’t a thing and doesn’t do anything.

A candle’s flame, like a human being, is a process and the result of a process. Heat melts the wax, draws it up the candle’s wick, boils it, and ignites it. The burning of the wax releases more heat, which melts more wax. The heat of the burning wax also causes the resulting gases to move outward and upward, away from the source of the heat, while the pressure from the cold air around the candle pushes it inward, producing the characteristic shape of the flame. The heat also strips electrons away from the gases, producing a translucent plasma, which releases light in its efforts to return to a stable, low-energy state. All of this is the candle’s flame.

When you extinguish the candle, you have ended the process. The candle’s flame is no more. The flame itself was an illusion. It was an illusion in the same way that all objects are illusions. Every physical “thing” you see is a collection of atoms and molecules, held together by forces that can be overcome by outside intervention. Every object, no matter how stable, is only temporary. The candle’s flame is exceptional only in that the temporary and conditional nature of its existence is so obvious.
When you extinguish the flame, nothing has gone anywhere. The matter of the candle is still there. The chemical energy stored in the wax is still there. You can easily re-ignite the candle, restart the process. The potential for the flame exists within the candle, the flame is produced by the candle, the flame is not a thing that exists.

You are likewise an illusion. You are a process and the result of a process. The many, many complex processes that produce that process likewise produce the “you” that we all acknowledge. Every cell within you is a city, every organ a nation, you are an ecosystem. When you die, the process stops, the processes stop, the ecosystem is shattered. The matter is still there, the energy is still there, but the illusion of “you” is no longer being sustained.

A candle can be reignited. Sometimes a person can as well. If knowledgeable people with the right equipment can get to the body in time, the process can be restarted. The window for that is very short, because the processes that make up a human being are magnitudes more complex than a candle.

A candle in its entirety can be described in a few words. The process of the candle likewise. The systems that make up a living being cannot. We have dedicated centuries to the study of life and have come to understand much. What we know can fill books, does fill books. What we don’t yet know will fill many more.

One of the things we know is that there is no soul. The energy that would have been used for the process of the human being is still there after the process has stopped. Nothing has gone anywhere. The reason you have only a short window to reignite the person is because the matter and energy will very quickly be used by other processes. By the many organisms that live in your body that do not share your DNA, and that, at best, only incidentally help to keep you alive.

As soon as a person dies, they will begin to transform the matter and energy of that body into matter and energy for their own lives, their own processes. When the process that is a person stops, the flesh immediately becomes food, and starts turning into bacteria shit.

There is no afterlife, because there is no soul. You will not continue to exist after your death except in the memories of those who loved you. You will not be punished, you will not be rewarded. You will not know or experience anything, because there will be no you. Like the candle’s flame, your body’s life will cease, and the illusion will end.

If any of that is upsetting to you, then I’m not sure what to tell you. If you demand reward and punishment, you will have to work to create that here and now. If you demand an afterlife, you will have to take copious notes here and now. Here and now is all you have. Here and now is what matters.

Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a concept that is often misunderstood, often deliberately distorted and misused. Since it’s central to the modern struggle for social justice in the US, I think it’d be a good thing for people to understand, generally.

The term originates with Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate, leading scholar of critical race theory, and professor at the UCLA and Columbia schools of law. It appears that she was the first person to use the term in the context of social justice back in 1989, in a paper titled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”, published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

In the paper, she discussed a legal case brought against General Motors in the mid-70s, suing the company for not hiring black women. The company argued in court, and the courts agreed, that they weren’t racist and they weren’t sexist. Their evidence that they weren’t racist was that they had hired black employees, and their evidence that they weren’t sexist was that they had hired female employees. The problem with theirs and the court’s analysis was that they failed to note that the company had only hired black men and white women.

In her discussion, Crenshaw stated that the experiences of black women cannot be understood simply as the experience of blackness and the experience of femaleness. That is to say, they are not just black in a white world and women in a man’s world. They experience racism, and they experience sexism, and they experience the world as black women. The combination of blackness and womanness creates new situations, new obstacles for them to navigate, experiences that neither black men nor white women will ever face.

For example, women have always been sexualized and treated as objects and black people have always been hypersexualized and treated as objects. However, black women experience the combination of these objectifications in a fashion that is different, sometimes horrifyingly so, from black men and white women.

The hypersexualization and objectification of black men has, since the 1600s, positioned them as an imminent threat, as violent beasts always one wrong move away from breaking free and injuring white people, specifically white women. The racist propaganda of black men as violent rapists is thus a century older than even the United States. It was used to justify slavery and to fight against abolition, and the end of Jim Crow, and the end of the War on Drugs.

The objectification of white women sees them as objects, as property to be transferred from the control of their fathers to the control of their husbands. They are thus subject to sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault as a normal part of their everyday lives. Some men are simply convinced that women are available for all of those things at all times, and that they have no right to object because they’re not fully human.

Black women meanwhile are subject to the objectification of black people as being hypersexual and naturally violent and to the objectification of women as being always available for the sexual use of men, particularly of white men. Because of the white supremacist belief that black people always want sex, it was simply a fact of law that black women could not be raped. The courts believed that black women always wanted sex, and that saying no was just playing, and fighting back was just their natural violence.

Whereas if a white woman accused a black man of rape it was automatically believed and the man immediately murdered, a black woman accusing a black man of rape was greeted with a shrug because they were both believed to be violent animals, and she really wanted it anyway. Her accusation of rape was transformed in white eyes as just another expression of black violence.

And if her rapist was white? Fighting back probably wasn’t even an option. A white man could kill her and walk away with the public having no doubt that he had done so. Women, in the face of present violent assault, always face the difficulty of knowing that fighting back could get them killed and not fighting back means their later claim of rape won’t be believed. Black women face the certainty that both options are dialed up to 11 because of racial stereotypes.

Thus the world a black woman interacts with is racialized in a way white women don’t experience and sexualized in a way black men don’t experience. Racism alters the misogyny they face, and misogyny alters the racism they face. Neither one can be studied in isolation.

All of this is to say that the world is a complicated place, and culture creates a difficult interaction of different forms of oppression and bigotry. A disabled black woman’s experience of oppression simply cannot be compared to the experiences of a gay white woman.

Which brings us to the myth of the oppression olympics. Right wing douches love to claim that you can only participate in a discussion about oppression if you are yourself oppressed in some way (thus straight white men are ignored… and oppressed!!), and the more oppressed you are, the more social justice cachet you have. According to assholes like Paul Joseph Watson and Ben Shapiro, the god of social justice is a gay black muslim jew native american left-handed red-headed immigrant transwoman victim of rape in a wheelchair.

Nope.

Oppression olympics was first brought up by Social Justice Warriors, noting the importance of not trying to rank oppression. My suffering isn’t greater or less than yours, it’s different. Trying to compare oppression, to compete over who has it worse would only be a distraction from the end goal of trying to end suffering and oppression.

It’s not that white men have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, the problem is that they don’t have the lived experience of most forms of oppression. They don’t have the native understanding of racism or sexism. Straight people don’t live every day with homophobia, nor cis people with transphobia, nor abled people with ablism.

A straight white man can indeed have knowledge of and insight into the oppression experienced by queer folk or black folk or women, but it’s something that has to come with study and effort on his part, and that’s the kind of thing that needs to be actively demonstrated, not assumed. And even the most knowledgeable, caring, and dedicated ally can put their foot in their mouth, talk over someone, or take offense where it’s neither intended, needed, nor helpful. When you’re talking about oppression you don’t experience, you’re always going to be speaking in a foreign language, and there’s always going to be mistakes and misunderstandings… and a lot of disingenuous assholes take advantage of that to abuse oppressed people.

Trolls and abusers abound, and any oppressed person who takes an active role in the fight against it suffers from those assholes constantly. Anyone who’s on the privileged side of multiple axes will always, necessarily, be viewed with some suspicion, because there are just so damned many neonazis, sealions, and Fox News dipshits of every stripe just aching derail every conversation and attack decent social justice warriors.

Anywho, that’s oppression and that’s why you need to be calm and respectful in a conversation that isn’t about you. Also, don’t make the conversation about you.