I blame Steven Pinker.

So I loved his book The Language Instinct, and when I learned of the existence of The Blank Slate, I thought "Politics...? Oh well, he's such an amazing writer, I'll try it." So I bought a copy, read it, and was forever doomed to be one of those unfortunate people who knows, rather than suspects, that academic feminism is full of shit.

Mercifully, my major AND minor was totally free of any dogmatic Critical, Postmodern or Marxist dogma. Any Marxism I absorbed was through my personal reading, and my understanding of Marxist thought took decades because I was depending on second-hand sources to tell me what the hell the guy was saying. I have always been allergic to shitty writing, and I can only do it when forced by circumstances. I can produce terrible prose, but I can't read it.

I found written transcripts of interviews with Noam Chomsky wonderful, and of course great to listen to. Like Marx, his prose work could have been written in Chinese, for all that I could stomach it.

I was reading Marx and Chomsky for pretty much the same as reason as anyone else. From the moment I had a vague concept of what the economy is, I knew I was profoundly and forever on the left. Still do. And for a concrete specific reason: grotesque inequality and offensive maldistribution of life-support resources. That deep rage that comes on you when you remember that almost everybody in India and Africa has a smartphone, but almost none of those people have access to indoor plumbing, with all the health disasters that inevitably follow.

Solve that problem without using gulags, and you have my vote. It didn't take me long to see that the neoliberals' solution only worked in a handful of places and I concluded that they were as worthless as Stalin and Mao. My intuition was that whatever the solution is, it's going to involve some significant amount of socialism. And though my economic thought is more sophisticated now, that intuition still holds up well.

So back to Blank Slate. Before then, I had been exposed to enough regressive feminists to be alarmed, but I had just figured "these people are rape victims, probably, so it makes sense they say insane stuff. You have to just pity them, and support the equality movement."

But I still had access to a college library, so I could check dozens of Pinker's citations and confirm he was reporting the claims accurately. I could also confirm that these insane ideas were often being heavily consumed. Often the most foul examples came from books that the library had dozens of copies of, which were frequently being read.

So here's this guy, who I already know to be a genius-level thinker (because I had a pretty OK grasp of linguistics for an undergrad) telling me that whole college departments are completely insane. And I'm lucky or unlucky enough to be in a position to check it out and learn that he's definitely calling it right.

The internet exists, and I talk politics on lefty spaces. I keep getting banned from site after site, or just getting forever spammed with gay porn in the few spaces where the moderators tolerate my trying to repeat the facts Pinker uses, along with quotes from the feminist source material that I had carefully xeroxed from the library.

I slowly realize: if I want to talk with other human beings about the fact that an entire chunk of the developed world's academia is promoting insane sexist trash, I absolutely can't do that in the same place where everybody agrees with my take on economics and human rights.

But I can't ignore it because it's very obviously a big deal. Billions of taxpayer dollars that could be feeding third world war orphans is being wasted teaching sexist lies to credulous, impressionable kids, who often go on to become teachers themselves! And nobody with any intellectual status anywhere is discussing it seriously except Pinker.

Centrist spaces don't care, because they just associate all academic feminist stuff with barefoot stinky hippies and don't give it another thought. I had basically given up on the right, of course. I assumed they would just blame the feminists for not going to church and ignore the theoretical complexities.

It causes a huge internal pressure to build up. When I talk about concepts, whether online or in person, I find I understand them better. While I'm structuring a sentence in my head, suddenly I understand a nuance that I had previously missed. It hurts to have no place to talk about this with a person who is also interested in ideas.

Of course, I was never completely alone. Every once in a hundred times, a fellow lefty would confide in me saying "yeah, Pinker's called it right, but what you gonna do?"

So when reddit comes into my life I figure "well, there's millions of users on this site, mostly left-leaning on econ and human rights. Pro-choice, pro-gay marriage yada yada. So surely the tiny percentage of us who know what a shitshow gender studies is will naturally gravitate together, and we can finally talk it out!"

But I joined reddit long before 7/9/2019. And I realized the problem with the other internet lefty spaces refusing to hear criticism of gender studies was still absolute on reddit. Any subreddit with fellow Chomsky fans was invariably 0% tolerant of questioning the orthodoxy.

I kept searching for "criticism of feminism/gender studies" and finding zilch except feminist echo chambers repeating laughably easy-to-debunk claims about Pinker or instead focusing on religious conservatives. And of course they'd ban me within a microsecond of posting a disagreement with evidence.

Worse, a while later I actually found some hits, where people were quoting Pinker and making some cogent arguments along the same lines. Why isn't this good news? They were pick-up artists, with a fucking batshit ideology called the red pill. I was astute enough in psychology to know what kind of people these guys were: True Believers. Like a mirror image of the crazy feminists, just male and right-wing, and seriously spergy.

But like I said, I really needed to talk about this shit. It was literally the only consequential idea that I had ever pondered that I was completely unable to converse with other humans about. If you are like me, not being able to talk about an idea is pain.

So, I circled these guys carefully. Their thought leader, Rollo Tomassi, has some obviously deep trauma around sex and women, but like the typical Intersectional Feminist, he's got a form of strict, rigid logic. Providing you don't disagree with one of their fundamental dogmas, an Intersectional Feminist or a Red Piller is happy to follow a chain of logical argumentation. Many fundamentalist religious people are like this, many fascists. They can digest a complicated idea and say something intelligent about it, within certain boundaries. If you can avoid touching the third rail, you can genuinely learn something factual. Because on some topics, the smartest ones can be ahead of the curve, even though they're insane individuals, when viewed as a whole.

I figured: I can talk to the smarter of these guys, and they're good enough at logic to call me out when I make an error, even though they need immediate therapy. I was right about that.

I was wrong that I could sneakily try to persuade them to think again about Leftism. I thought I could do it under the radar, but these are deeply paranoid men, so I got ejected from yet another community for trying to inject a little bit of reality.

So at last, my last ember of faith in reddit humanity is dead. The idea lodges itself in my brain that every last redditor who has anything to say about gender is probably a piece of shit. I find a subreddit called the Purple Pill for feminists (labeled Blue Pillers) and Red Pillers to talk past each other. There is some argumentation, some logic, but not a shred of good faith.

When you're dying of thirst in a desert, you'll eagerly drink a glass of warm horse piss, and at this time the purple pill subreddit is literally the only community on the entire internet where it's possible to discuss this subject with someone who might give you a considered answer.

But it's basically impossible to take part in that subreddit without becoming a complete troll, unless you're a saint or extreme masochist. I hate the red side because they're bigoted misogynists who won't question their base assumptions, and I hate the blue side for tainting leftism with the sexist slurry that is Gender Studies.

This is almost universal for users of that subreddit. To try to keep discussions productive, the moderators enforce intolerable, hair-splitting, micro-managing, controlling rules, which do nothing to solve the bad faith problem. Everyone just uses the rules as an excuse to find new ways to jam needles into the foreskin of the other side, whom they fundamentally see as subhuman. Every couple months the shitty bad faith gets so bad that the moderators declare "Purge week!" where all rules are abandoned, and people just say the nastiest shit they can, or spew weak absurdist humor.

Also, you have to formulate every discussion on the Purple Pill about "dating strategy" if it's not a purge week.

So I joined in. If somebody on the blue team was shitty to me, I'd wait until I found some viewpoint that really upset them, and I'd steelman that viewpoint and try to corner them into agreeing with it or accepting that it was inconsistent with another claim they had made. I got good at it, and I didn't feel guilty because that was what the both side were doing to me. Of course, I maintained perfect equidistance between the two sides. Shitting on the reds for their misogyny and dogmatism, shitting on the blues for their contradictory thinking and usually (though less often over time) their adherence to false Gender Studies mantras.

At a deep level, I always knew the blues were "us" as opposed to the reds being "them". Ultimately I only disagree with the blues on one specific thing, while the reds are trapped in hatred of half the planet's population. So of course I burned out. I got tired of pretending to argue for reformulated versions of delusional redpill, incel or libertarian ideas, just to land a rhetorical haymaker on some random snarky blue, or prove that he had made a rookie error when forming his/her idea at 4am. and eventually did the slow fade from that shithole. The reds are less fun to fight with because they're more resilient. They're more resilient because their minds are shut tighter than Fort Knox.

And around that time, this place comes on my radar. The exact thing I have been looking for, for the last two decades. I don't have to shoehorn my thoughts into something to do with fucking dating strategy. That alone is worth the price of admission. There's hardly any trolls.

So hi, nice to meet y'all. Really.