Nate Cox

Unless you’re on a vpn, in which case the whole site is restricted unless you sign in.

There was a point in martial arts training when I started to be the upper belt to my partners more frequently, and for the first time I started to be the one answering questions rather than asking them.

The best lesson I learned from this is that I usually learned more while I was teaching. People would ask me “why do we do X” and even though I basically knew the answer I wouldn’t be able to articulate it, and the quest for that articulation would force me to really think about the answer in ways that I hadn’t before.

Long story short there: I learned that there is always an opportunity to learn, and that I never knew as much as I thought I did. These were so damn useful to me in not being that second kind of person. I wish everyone could have that experience.

Literally half my phone screen is an ad over the main content. Fandom is indeed garbage.

Listen I get that these people have never taken a science class, but I damn well know at least some of them watched Jurassic Park.

You fire off the sandwich using the strings like a bow and arrow, loony tunes style.

The rosin is a bit of an acquired taste; I prefer the dark rosin.

So long as there are absolutely no follow up questions: yes, it is.

Do these designers not have children? Wiping pee off the seat is like an every time thing; seems silly not to just use a bit of toilet paper.

Even I have to clean up when I miss; which happens max, max, 95% of the time.

The cross section of companies willing to pay poverty wages and companies ok with/happy to make your life suck all day is depressing but not surprising.

I mean, the answer is agency. You enjoy doing things that you choose to do—which you choose to do because you enjoy them, it’s just a tad selective and cyclic there.

Most people don’t choose to work because they enjoy it; they work to survive, doing what the market will support.

Some few very very lucky people get to do work they would otherwise choose to do anyways.

This is what keeps me from being a pc gamer.

I very much want things to get better, I suspect we just have different ideological definitions of “better”.

My version of better is a world where women don’t have to worry about every interaction that they are going to have with men, where they feel safe and secure and no woman ever gets trod upon so often that they feel compelled to lash out. We do this by lifting people up and empathizing with their frustrations, and calling out shitty behavior where we see it.

It sounds like your version of better is where we pretend that everything is ok and carry on like normal, condemning those who make any attempt to empathize as agitators.

Feel free to cite where I have strawman’d you, because I’m only inferring from what you have presented.

Your argument sounds suspiciously like someone looking to justify shitty behavior.

“You can’t acknowledge an extremely well documented culture of hate because that’s reverse sexism/racism”

“You can’t say men are bad because some men are good and if you don’t give them special attention for being good they might start being bad.”

“Some men have it hard too so power imbalance doesn’t exist and you can’t use it to explain why some women are mistrustful of men in general”.

“We need to leave the status quo because if we don’t maybe the others will get control and then they’ll treat us like we treat them now”

All of the above are shitty arguments.

Yes. Understanding why is an important part of avoiding bigotry.

You seem to be implying that I would never come to the conclusion that the why is unjustified, which is a silly conclusion to draw.

Those statements are very much equivalent in this context, the confusion you have is rooted in a false conclusion. You assert one statement is true, and the other is false. The reality is that both statements are false.

If you have a history of dealing with shitty landlords you may draw a conclusion that every landlord must be shitty. That is objectively false—there are many many landlords from all backgrounds and cultures who will behave differently from each other in virtually every way—but it’s an understandable emotional reaction to your personal experiences.

If you have a history of dealing with shitty women you may draw a conclusion that every woman must be shitty. That is objectively false—there are many many women from all backgrounds and cultures who will behave differently from each other in virtually every way—but it’s an understandable emotional reaction to your personal experiences.

Calling all women parasites is indeed sexist bullshit, but calling all landlords parasites isn’t fundamentally better. Generalizing people trends towards nonsense in most cases.

I’m pretty sure any time you put two multi-syllable words next to each other it is by default a scathing burn. You don’t actually need to know what those words mean, in fact not knowing makes the burn so much more savage.

I really think you should go read the comment feed from the original twitter post. Don’t pretend to do it, actually go read it. Then read the rest of his posts. Then read the comments from many, many other men on his posts.

Then come back and tell me you genuinely do not understand the complaints being made about men.

If you read all that and still just can’t understand why so many women don’t trust men and generalize about them, well, I don’t think there’s any point in continuing this thread anyways.

Well, I fundamentally agree that it sucks to call all men scum or trash or whatever. Generalizing tends towards sucking as a whole, and as the target demographic being called scum it doesn’t feel great.

I just try to step back and understand the why. I genuinely do not think most people saying “all men are trash” actually believe that, but they’ve been radicalized by pretty understandable circumstances to feel the need to lash out. It really, really sucks that we have prime examples like the original twitter poster demonstrating exactly where that emotion comes from.

It’s always amusing to me to watch someone like the person you’re responding to try to browbeat an argument into submission by referencing pedantic technicalities and yet be so fundamentally wrong about what those technicalities actually mean.

Although on the topic of being pedantic, I kinda miss when whataboutism was called tu quoque. Really made the logical fallacy guys at least sound eloquent.

Cherry picking out parts to remove context is a pretty lame way to “win” an argument bro.

Here’s that segment which doesn’t intentionally remove relevant context:

… which understandably has led to the assumption that as a man I’m probably an asshole too.

Which is—fairly clearly—saying that I understand why others might make an assumption about me.

You can go ahead and cite your source for me saying I’m an asshole. I’ll wait.