O RALLY:

O Rally: Activism on the Internet and Why It Does Not Work.

Take feminism, for example. A great many of us encountered this, amidst other philosophies, in our early days of surfing chatrooms, often walking straight into a fringe debate between a group of political radicals serving a private purpose and a group of men of early to middle age resisting these notions. Even an adolescent boy can realize quite quickly that there is nothing universally “feminine” about the feminist position; this is rather a reaction to patriarchy, and as a reaction it is also a transparent outgrowth of it. By the time that we graduate high school, we’ve managed without it, since there is little social pressure or historical precedent to embrace it. We have weighed its pros and cons, decided upon the extent to which it affects, and put it to rest. Perhaps we dated a feminist that left a sour taste in our mouths and some emotional scarring whose social and legal ramifications took years to recover from, but as painfully as we learned that misandry exists, we are to that same extent more sympathetic to victims of misogyny, so we do not throw feminism out with our exes. We simply recognize the extent to which an ideology can help to influence worldview and behavior, as well as to facilitate healing, and we choose a stance that behooves us individually, and proceed. Our fathers already taught us the fallacies underlying this ideology, and we know to what extent we wish to be like our fathers, so again: we put the matter to bed, knowing where we stand. Being the chivalrous type goes hand in hand with being a male feminist, and we accept the charges of feeling good about ourselves in this manner to that extent which we can afford it. We don’t march in the streets. Yet we do accept the burden of being the guy who doesn’t laugh immediately at the period joke. And though by that I don’t mean to say “period” as in “period piece”, that secondary meaning also works, since it’s just what life at the start of the millennium was like.

When Emma Watson found feminism, or perhaps feminism found her, it was like the discovery of electricity: profound, life-changing on a global level, and redundant. Feminism had been around for one hundred years, so of course educated people HAD known about it. Some of us had deeply nuanced ideas about why it could not work, alongside many other radical ideologies that appear good on paper. But we had no idea that somehow these views would be dismissed OFF HAND by a mob of social networkers who shared their ideology through memes, tweets, and upvotes. The far left was one monster, but this began to look like FASCISM. Consider the Polish Jew who has devoted his life to studying Nationalism and expounding upon its shortcomings: by the time that he catches wind of the latest Nationalist craze the Gestapo is already at his door, and they are NOT interested in hearing his thesis.

But SURELY it would not come to THAT. NOT in AMERICA.

That first year wasn’t so bad. I was not surprised to find myself surrounded by feminists on the Debate Team, since power is a huge motivator for the POOR debaters. Debate was something divorced from ordinary life, either because it was an attempt to reform life in the image of a better one, or because it was a game to many people. By this point, I had had enough run-ins with the New Left to understand that I was a different kind of liberal. I could also see that this new feminist fad was simply derivative of the older feminism, and if I had to call myself a “non-feminist” or an “anti-feminist” in order to consolidate my stance on certain matters of common sense, then that was totally okay. Perhaps I *would* have called myself a feminist back when I played Braid, though its creator Jonathan Blow denied any sort of feminist message attached to it, dismissing associations between his game and “their own ideologies” as superficial. (Coming from a Berkeley man, that’s quite the moderate statement!!) Yet at that time catcalling was “still a thing” (the first thing I defended, in the spirit of simple transparency and modern solidarity with strangers, wishing not to live in fear and thinking to accrue attention by being generous with it) and abortion was a controversial issue about which I was starting for the first time to think critically and with respect to the intrinsic value of Life and how that plays a role in secular ethics. So no: I could no longer safely say I was a feminist, because I did not wish to  be one of “those” people.

But I had no idea that I was in a dilemma; I could no longer safely say that I was NOT a feminist, either, even if it was true. And this changed everything. For the first time in my life, politics mattered outside of politics.

And one learned what happens when non-politicians try to be politically correct.

The craze, which I tried to the best of my ability to hold back from affecting my life, really hit decisively when Bill Cosby was arrested. Here was a man who not only helped to shape my childhood with his work; in fact, references to his influence upon the childhood of millions became a sort of red herring, a pseudo-Freudian analysis of infantile retention in a society that was progressively [sic] losing its grasp upon what it means to “grow up”. Bill’s work was not a testament to our youth but to his own legacy; his arrest was a testament to a new bureaucracy that threatened to destroy any such legacy. I found myself surrounded by young people who could no longer separate art from artist, though I only knew one man who ever MET Bill Cosby, and I knew no such women.

At first, it all seemed obvious to me: CLEARLY you never KNOW the Artist. The Artist is presented to you through a series of photographs, quotations, and vocal recordings, as well as public records, always filtered through a highly regulated bureaucracy wherein every member’s job is to produce media that appears to “Truthfully represent Reality” whereas every human shortcoming ensures that this amounts to nothing more but “mere media representation”. I did not KNOW the artist; I only knew his work. And while I do not extend this to men like Charles Manson, I had no precedent yet to EQUATE Bill Cosby with Manson. How could I? After all: not only was there no physical evidence presented for foul play, but literally fifty women at the LEAST came forth making the same claims.

I must have laughed. This, I thought, might finally wake people up to how silly the whole craze was. After all: if you have a mob of fifty strangers saying the same thing, CLEARLY they have conspired based upon a common goal, made available to them by the suggestion of the media. No one would POSSIBLY believe them without evidence. We might extend that courtesy to friends, since we stand by our friends no matter what. Without us, our friends might have no one to listen to them, and we would not wish that upon them. Every person deserves to have his or her point of view received, at least by SOMEONE, though it need not be by EVERYONE. And when it’s just one or two people saying it, then do they NEED evidence? What are the odds that they would even FIND it? We don’t HAVE to take their claims into consideration; it’s a fact of life that not all things which happen personally happen LEGALLY. But that’s just part of growing up. A miscarriage of law has one true victim, and that is the Law Itself. If you will pardon the extended metaphor, to hate the law for an injustice in its application (a “miscarriage”) is to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yet if we are GOOD FRIENDS who can ACCOUNT for the CHARACTER of the apparent victim, we might give him or her the benefit of the doubt, since that is not outside of our ability, and neither is it gossip, whose portents always pale by contrast with a firsthand account.

Could an entire generation of young people have forgotten this??

But surely, not THIS generation. After all, we grew up with the INTERNET. A simple Google search and we have access to a treasury of history. We can learn about the Holocaust, the Salem witch trials, and the Inquisition, as well as the popular presumptions that appeared to justify them. A few quick clicks will produce an entire list of formal fallacies on Wikipedia, with the fallacy ad populum right up there, cushioned cozily against the fallacy ad hominem. Rudyard Kipling satirized the mob with his apes saying “we all believe it, so it must be true!!” Surely, in an age saturated with popular science, we are so scientific as to deny any crowd making unwarranted claims. It’s kid’s stuff: the more people that believe something, the more likely it is that at least ONE of them will produce concrete evidence for it. This in itself is not confirmation bias, so it serves as the standard for whether or not the belief is valid. Conversely, if FIFTY people CLAIMING TO BE DIRECT WITNESSES, as VICTIMS, cannot produce a single modicum of evidence, then FIFTY PEOPLE ARE WRONG. We KNOW that. Because we have the Internet, and that means no excuse to ignore the history of popular delusions.

In order for Bill Cosby to have been convicted, not only would we have to warp his words from over ten years ago in order to “sound misogynistic”. We would also have to IGNORE the fact that what APPEARS misogynistic now, ex post facto, would have been normal for any one of us to say back then, and without any reason to presume that we “know better now”, we would have to ignore as well that he made no attempt to HIDE this. We would also have to prioritize the interests of a GROUP of people over the rights of any one individual, meaning that instead of saying “it is better for ten criminals to go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned” we should say “it is better for one man to be presumed guilty than for fifty women to be silenced”. We should have to ignore the entire history of witch hunts, as well as the plaints of one of our father figures who taught us to think critically, reducing our use of the Internet to social networking and skimming only that surface of it which comes up on the headlines of a search engine, which now functions like a monopolized international newspaper that governments are forbidden to unsubscribe from, for fear of appearing tyrannical. Finally, we should have to so reduce intellectual inquiry to repetition and adolescent gossip that it would become indistinguishable from upvotes and likes, giving into the entire force of emotivism and, despite having gone to college, saying things like “all these people can’t be wrong”, thus adding to the same mass of popular consent that we have just arbitrarily enthroned for being so massive. Information, no longer restricted by reason or factuality, would spread literally like a viral video, propagating exponentially, since only its size is required for it to keep growing in approval. Our analyses into the subtleties of intersexual communication and the use of modern chemicals would be reduced to saying “me too!!” like children in a classroom who have yet to learn that reality is not always ABOUT YOU; that’s why it’s called OBJECTIVE. Above all, we would have to so fetishize “consent” that any sort of DISSENT would be sacrilegious.

But we are much too “clever” to do that. RIGHT??

[({Dm.A.A.)}]