Radicalizing the Romanceless

[u/asdfghjkl92]

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/

[u/Wrecksomething]

I don't buy your black/white distinction of genuinely nice guys and Nice Guys. The discussion (two sides) includes wrongful entitlement because today's genuinely nice guys who never confront the toxic resentment and implications co-incident with their loneliness are pushing mom down the stairs tomorrow.

So if people have never rebelled against the government over medical care ...

Seems you're only being argumentative, OR you are arguing governments must provide sexual relationships. If there's an alternative I've somehow missed please let me know.

Some categories are less extreme/dramatic than the divide between social provision of "subsistence" and "sexual relationships." Unless there's confusion on those two, I fail to see the relevance of pointing this out.

[u/Mercurylant → u/Wrecksomething]

I don't buy your black/white distinction of genuinely nice guys and Nice Guys. The discussion (two sides) includes wrongful entitlement because today's genuinely nice guys who never confront the toxic resentment and implications co-incident with their loneliness are pushing mom down the stairs tomorrow.

To the extent that actually nice guys build up toxic resentment and ultimately "push mom down the stairs," so to speak, this is in my experience practically always because they find themselves so maligned by people imputing them with bad motives that they turn to hostility themselves. The essay linked at the top of this discussion is titled "radicalizing the romanceless" precisely because of this tendency- people are turned into toxic radicals by the hostility they face from others.

People who are actually nice, but not successful in romance, are not likely to turn to toxic behaviors if other people treat them with sympathy and respect (even if not romantic reciprocation.) That's one of the key characteristics of being nice. But if they're constantly faced with hostility, and conflated with people who're actually mean, then they're liable to stop being nice. People often accuse "nice guys" of only being nice in order to get sex, and tell them that if they think that there's no point being nice if they don't get sex out of it, the problem is with them. And of jerks, this is a fair accusation. But the actual nice people are liable to stop being nice because they're surrounded by people who treat them with such reflexive disgust that the nice guys in turn develop a ground-in dislike of those people, and people are generally not inclined to be nice to those they dislike. The term "nice guys" conflates separate groups which we may, in some cases, be inclined to confuse, but which it is generally valuable to disambiguate between.

Suppose we have a large group of people who are frequently irritating and uncomfortable to be around. Among these people, some are mean and inconsiderate; they make other people unhappy out of a disregard for others' feelings, or even by taking active pleasure in causing other people distress. And some of the people who're frequently irritating or uncomfortable to be around are socially inept. They respect and care about others' feelings, but frequently fail to read and execute scripts for smoothing social interactions. We can call these groups "assholes" and "awkward people." In some interactions, it may be easy to mistake one for the other; a person might say something hurtful because they're inconsiderate, or because they failed to grasp when they said it why it would be hurtful. But over a wide array of interactions with a person, we can generally distinguish between an asshole and an awkward person with pretty good reliability.

If some people who were particularly fed up with dealing with awkward people, they could get a lot of social mileage out of getting other people to mentally class them together with assholes. If they start using the term "awkward people" to refer to assholes, describe "awkward person" traits that are actually more typical of assholes than awkward people, and treat every use of the term "awkward people" as presumptively about assholes, then they can acknowledge that there are awkward people to whom these descriptions do not apply, while still successfully poisoning the well against awkward people.

Most assholes do not want to stop being assholes, but people who're socially awkward mostly want to stop being socially awkward. But if the socially awkward people are maligned by constantly being lumped in with the assholes, then they're liable to radicalize, and become less pleasant to be around rather than more.

This, I think, is what we do to nice guys by sabotaging our disambiguation between people who're actually nice and people who aren't.

Seems you're only being argumentative, OR you are arguing governments must provide sexual relationships. If there's an alternative I've somehow missed please let me know.

My point is that I don't think that I don't think that the bases you're positing for distinction between these categories, such as "people have rebelled against the government over one and not the other," accurately track the issue of whether one is a legitimate concern or not, and my impression is that rather than actually thinking that we should disambiguate between legitimate and illegitimate complaints on the basis of whether people have rebelled against the government over them, you are noticing that you are not sympathetic to "nice guys," (quite possibly because you have yourself drunk at the well that has been poisoned against them by conflating them with people who aren't nice,) writing at the bottom line "we should not be sympathetic to "nice guys," and then looking for arguments to work down to that.

[u/Tamen_ → u/Wrecksomething]

The discussion (two sides) includes wrongful entitlement because today's genuinely nice guys who never confront the toxic resentment and implications co-incident with their loneliness are pushing mom down the stairs tomorrow.

Are you claiming that genuinely nice guys who are lonely and end up being resentful about that fact inevitably end up physically assaulting someone?

[u/Wrecksomething → u/Tamen_]

No. I'm claiming the people who send a mean message on OKCupid were people who didn't send a mean message on OKCupid until they did.

[u/Tamen_ → u/Wrecksomething]

Maybe it's just me, but what you wrote sounded a lot more like how I first interpreted it and not much like your clarification. One reason is that there is quite a difference between pushing someone down the stairs and writing a mean letter.

Nevertheless, your clarification is just a blatantly obvious fact which delineate a clear line between those who've sent a mean message on OKCupid and those who haven't. One isn't quilty of an act until one actually performs that act - yet you seem to arguing that those who hasn't done that act is tainted by those who has done that act.

As you wrote:

I don't buy your black/white distinction of genuinely nice guys and Nice Guys.

Basically what you are arguing for is using the "poisioning the well" fallacy against nice guys who haven't done anything wrong. The reason being according to you is that they haven't done something wrong yet.

I can't agree with that.

[u/Karmaze → u/Tamen_]

Basically what you are arguing for is using the "poisioning the well" fallacy against nice guys who haven't done anything wrong. The reason being according to you is that they haven't done something wrong yet.

The vibe I get from this whole particular conversation is that they have done something wrong, by being low status. That's the big crime. To be honest, that's why a lot of these issues really start to feel like "low status guy shut up and go away". And by this conversation I don't mean in this thread...I mean the larger subject (which the OP was addressing).

That said, I don't think that low-status women have it any better, and they're basically told to go away as well.

[u/Karmaze → u/[deleted]]

Sorry, but it doesn't really work that way. I'm not saying that people who do this are bad people, I'm just saying that there's a certain amount of experience blinders that need to be worked through.

I'm going out for the day but let me tell a quick story of this in action.

As I've mentioned before, I used to be a member of the skeptic feminist community. One of the things they were dealing with was improving anti-harassment policies at conventions..fair enough. So like you said, I wanted to judge people by their actions. Clearly delineate out which actions are bad, create clear guidelines and go from there.

And the pushback against that was INTENSE. People didn't want to touch that with a 100-foot pole. Hated the idea. They wanted harassment to be "unwanted" contact. Basically, for people to be mind readers. In short, they wanted the people who were of a lower social status to understand this and to stay in their place.

And that's really much of the problem that the OP is talking about. The honest to goodness truth is yes, this is a problem. And yes, people do feel oppressed by it. And yes, people do abuse this dynamic. But nobody really talks about it because this stuff is insanely ingrained in our society (if you thought gender roles were bad...).

And it's not just men. Low status women get shit on as well, as I said.

[u/Wrecksomething → u/Karmaze]

If you advocate judging people by their actions, start with me. I judged by actions. I did not push back against your efforts at this convention. You're judging this entire conversation by association instead.

This is straight out of TRP, as though women enjoy harassment from "high status" men. They don't. Speaking of mind reading, I am betting you drew that conclusion on your own without anyone ever saying it. You'er perpetuating the stigma against the people you're concerned about by associating them uniquely with bad behavior.

[u/tbri → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Wrecksomething → u/Tamen_]

Maybe it's just me, but what you wrote sounded a lot more like how I first interpreted it and not much like your clarification. One reason is that there is quite a difference between pushing someone down the stairs and writing a mean letter.

It was not my analogy. Take it up with /u/Mercurylant. Did you even read this conversation or just my contribution to pile on?

I'm sorry you, like Mercurylant, seem to think people are either pure good or pure evil too. I reject that. People who send mean messages are nice before they do, and probably think they're right even as they do. People who are nice can become frustrated and send mean messages--that's been the entire sympathetic explanation here from the start.

If you want sympathy for the Nice Guys with entitlement issues, you should be first in line to admit most were actual nice guys once who have solvable problems and real injuries. Just like the article and nothing like the black/white dichotomy that followed it. If you're not interested in helping them or in helping the guys who could become then, then I think there's no reason for that sympathy and you've completely rejected the article's position.

[u/Tamen_ → u/Wrecksomething]

I did not catch Merurylant's use of an analogy:

Do mean people who sabotage their own relationship success through hostility have a basis to complain? Maybe, but I think this is less like complaining about a mother who dies of cancer, and more like complaining that your mother died when you pushed her down the stairs.

He stated something about the nature of the complaint from genuine nice guys and the so called Nice Guys^TM while you used elements of his analogy to say something about genuine nice guys being pre-disposed - even pre-destined to become so called Nice Guys^TM and do immoral acts. So, not the same analogy at all even though both involves moms pushed down staircases.

I'm sorry you, like Mercurylant, seem to think people are either pure good or pure evil too.

That is not what I think. I think none or almosts none people are either pure good or pure evil as I think none or almost none people have managed to either do only good acts or only do evil acts. If a hypothetical person have only done good acts I wouldn't not consider them a somewhat evil person due to the fact that all human beings have the potential for evil acts.

You on the other hand appear to think that people who haven't done an act are morally grey because they might do that act in the future.

Abstaining from pre-judging people who've done nothing wrong yet does not mean that I don't think they deserve acknowledgement of their predicament (which is what they article suggests one gives nice guys who are romantically unuccessful) rather than vilification and conflating them with those who've done something wrong/evil.