Sister Morphine wrote:I've tried not to jump on the Wong-bashing* bandwagon too enthusiastically, but if he's just going to softball 'em in like that, the bitch in me has to ask: If nasty people are so popular, why he doesn't he have more friends?
To be fair, he does have thousands of fans, which is more than a lot of his readers probably have.
Of course, there's
some irony to be mined from that argument as well.
Also, I can't help but notice that the examples he has given for his cruelty = popularity theory are all fictional characters who, let's face it, act as a sort of wish fulfilment: We enjoy watching them because they say the things we could never get away with. They would all be deeply unpleasant to be around in real life.
Even in their fictional universes, a they are hardly popular. House and Sherlock could probably count the people willing to put up with them for any length of time on one hand. While Stark is at first glance, more popular, most of his so-called "friends" only put up with him because he is filthy, stinking rich.
I call it the Maher-O'Reilly effect: watching someone be an asshole to someone
else can be fun in a schadenfreude-ish sort of way, but it's less amusing when you're on the receiving end. This is why Ted Cruz has several endorsements from state officials and House members, but none from the Senate where people have to work with him.
Personally, I don't think being loved from a distance and hated up close is a great way to live. But some people seem to either not realize that this is the usual result of advanced-level dickotry (or bitchotry if you like), or they realize that but they don't see a better alternative.
Tesseracts wrote:I don't think he is advocating sexism. I think he's fully aware sexism is wrong and bad and he's very much against it. What bothers me is he is constantly preaching feminism despite the fact that he seems to lack empathy for the female point of view. It's irritating to see somebody acting like an authority on a subject they don't understand and it comes across as hypocrisy. Sometimes, the things people are so vehemently against are the faults they have in themselves. For example, my father often complains bitterly about how stupid gambling is and gets upset if I buy a single lottery ticket, but he lacks self control in his own risky investments. Wong insta bans anyone who says anything slightly positive about gamergate and often heaps vitriol on MRAs, yet he wrote a forum post comparing rape to walking on broken glass.
I always felt that the Shadow was one of the more useful ideas that came out of Jungian psychology. Translated from the language of bullshit prescientific psychobabble, the basic idea is that there are certain psychological traits people have that they are not consciously aware of. These traits are usually negative, but can sometimes be positive as well, which is correlated with low self-esteem. Even though those traits are unconscious, they are still a part of the personality, and if anything affect the person's judgment even more thanks to their invisibility. A known flaw can be accounted for and corrected, and a known strength can be recognized and taken advantage of. Neither can happen if the trait is unknown. Negative traits fester in the dark, while positive ones go largely to waste.
One effect of this is that, for reasons they don't understand, the person gravitates toward certain types of people in relationships, whether social relationships like friendship or instrumental relationships like a business partnership. "I'm not like that, so why do I keep running into people like this?", they might wonder. One possible explanation in such situations is that the unconscious preference everyone has for people who are "like me" is attracting such people to them and vice versa, but they don't recognize that this is happening because they don't realize they have that particular trait.
Another effect is that the trait is often exaggerated in their assessments of others. For instance, if I'm an unusually kind, sweet person who doesn't realize that I'm unusually kind and sweet, I'm more likely to interpret people being nice to me as a sign of their inherent kindness, ignoring the effect my own behavior has on them (people tend to reciprocate both good and bad treatment, after all). Likewise, if I'm an abrasive asshole who doesn't realize it, I'm likely to interpret other people's frostiness and hostility as a sign that
they are abrasive assholes, again discounting the effect of my own behavior. Unsurprisingly, outsize emotional reactions to seeing signs of the trait in other people are common.
The point of this isn't to drag his name through the mud or argue he's a bad person. I'm trying to clarify what I find so unconvincing about his perspective. I don't take any issue with people who describe the mind set of a sexist, but I take issue with people who are trying to give me advice about things they don't get. Cracked has devoted a lot of time into 1) assuming that because I'm a cracked reader I'm a sexist male 2) telling me to not be a sexist male.
Oh, I think they know their readers are mostly female and feminist-aligned. They're the ones staring the analytics in the face, after all. I think they've been telling sexist men to stop being sexist for the same reason they published those articles telling rich people to stop being out of touch. They're not talking to the sexist men, just like they weren't talking to the rich folks--Wong even made a couple jokes in his "Things Rich People Need To Stop Saying" article about how nobody that he's ostensibly talking to in the article is probably reading it. What these articles are is validation for their readers, who are generally young female college students with decidedly liberal and anti-establishment politics. Set up a straw man in the shape of the enemy, knock it down, wait for applause.
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn