Age Of The Straw Person

Do you see what I did there? I just castrated one of modern society's greatest heroes, even if he was made of straw. Using past tense here because the straw man has become the straw person, which might upset the usual suspects...

_{Image by DomenicBlair - source: Pixabay}

The title and intro are jabs at the alt-right and their online spokesmen, who are enraged over "compelled speech", "crazy feminists" and the "social justice warriors" from the political left, who they blame for all that's wrong in the world. In this post I'm going to try to explain two things: 1) what a straw man is, and 2) why this is their age. PragerU, Stefan Molyneux, Steven Crowder and other popular apologists for far right wing ideologies are the usual suspects implicated in the intro; they all display a very steadfast use of straw-manning the left, and I'll illustrate why.

The straw man fallacy is a logical fallacy and a dishonest way of arguing; it is a way of refuting an opponent's argument, or rather giving that impression, by covertly replacing the opponent's argument with something that's similar, but not the same. The replace argument is the straw man. The image of a straw man is used to suggest a human figure made of straw that is easy to knock down or destroy, such as a training dummy or scarecrow. By arguing against the easily refuted straw man and defeating that argument, a smart debater can give the impression of having "destroyed" his or her opponent.

We're living in the age of the straw man because we live in the age of mechanized polarization in online discourse. The popular online platforms make it (far too) easy for us to meet up with like-minded peers; we're "aided" in our quest by the almighty algorithms and "quality of life" improvements like YouTube's auto-play function. That way you can start with listening to a moderate conservative who has something to say about problem's unique to men, like high suicide rates, having a shorter life-span than women and other legitimate points of concern, but end up listening to Sargon of Akkad yelling at crazy feminists, blaming them for the end of the world as we know it... The same algorithms have learned that polarizing titles and topics are preferable because they generate more clicks, so they'll typically lead you to the more extreme opinions, whichever direction you go.

This monetizing of our natural tendency to create in-groups and out-groups has led to a new, digital kind of extreme tribalism. Now, it so happens that grossly exaggerating an opponent's argument is one of the sneaky techniques used to set up a straw man, to easily knock it down with some pointed remarks against the false representation of the original argument. This is, in my estimation, how the algorithmically aided evolution toward ever more extreme "click bait" has landed us in the age of the straw man. And every lecture, speech or debate by the aforementioned usual suspects is using their usual straw men. Like feminism; what actually is the advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes, is painted as a movement with the sole purpose of suppressing men. I don't believe it is a coincidence that much of this anti-feminism started around gamergate controversy, an online space of gamers consisting almost exclusively of young men. Their online "safe space" was attacked by "third wave feminists" who demanded that something be done about the sexualization of female game characters. Game developers who actually responded to that call could count on some heavy verbal attacks on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube, as they showed themselves to be spineless against the "feminoids" that invaded their little tribe...

When PragerU or any of the others argue against feminism, as they so often do, they always use a straw man. Feminists suddenly don't believe in equal rights anymore, that's not enough; now they believe men and women are exactly the same, with no biological differences. And then they go on to ridicule that ridiculous straw man. They do this after ensuring everyone that they do support classical feminism, they do support equal rights. They don't hate women of course. But, so they reason, and there's always a "but", that work is done; women already have equal rights, so feminism isn't needed anymore, the fight is over. This is a claim they use arguing against any of the protected classes; blacks have equal rights, and the law applies to anyone equally. Thereby implying, but never outright saying, that if women or black people still suffer from unequal outcome, it's a result of their individual choices in life. You see where this line of argument is going?

Old habits die hard. Their line of argument leads to a complete denial of the existence of any systemic causes for the unequal outcome suffered by women and African Americans. There is no patriarchy, no white privilege, and no systemic racism present in their premises. The playing field consists of the law and is therefore level. That's why, when confronted with statistics that show clearly that the outcome is worse for women, they solely blame those women's personal choices in life, same with colored people. But old habits die hard. It's not that long ago that black people were seen as property. And women worldwide have been seen as property for hundreds, maybe thousands of years:

The Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest sets of written laws, considered the rape of a virgin as property damage against her father. For a long time, the rape of a woman was considered a property crime against the victim's husband or father. The word itself derives from the Latin word rapere, or "seize". It wasn't until the 11th and 12th centuries that rape began to be considered more as a violent, sexual crime against the victim.
_{source: THE ARKANSAS JOURNAL OF SOCIAL CHANGE AND PUBLIC SERVICE}

In the United States the purely legal battle for some equality of opportunity for blacks and women was finished somewhere in the 1960s; that's only a couple of decades ago, against a history of suppression that lasted for ages. And old habits die hard. But that's not what you hear from our usual suspects. They stuff almost every argument with straw when attacking what they perceive to be "the left" or "the radical left." I still have to meet the first feminist that denies that there are real and big biological differences between men and women. And there's no such thing as "compelled speech" when a bill is accepted that adds gender identity to the list of protected classes, it just means you can't discriminate against them, just like you can't discriminate on race, age, sexual orientation and so on. Peterson is arguing against a straw man when he rages about Bill C16...

This is not to say that there's no straw-manning coming from on the left, and taking an extreme version of an argument certainly isn't the only way to set up a straw man; they are just the most frequently observed in contemporary discourse in my personal estimation, especially online. I'll leave you with one of PragerU's "gems", called "Who Needs Feminism?", narrated by Andrew Klavan, who's literal first words in the 5 minute video are: "I am an anti-feminist." Just to let you know right away that there's no chance to get honest, unbiased information here...

_{Who Needs Feminism?}

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