Anti-white rhetorical technique

The claim is sometimes made that it is impossible for black people to be racist, because racism is an exercise of power, and white people have all the power.

This is nonsense, and obviously so. Of course it is possible for a black person to assault a white person for no reason other than his race. Racial bigotry does not have to be complicated.

The specific claim that racism is always an exercise of power is as wrong as the claim that rape is about power (instead of sexual pleasure and the evolutionary imperative towards reproduction). Racism can be simple bigotry.

The specific claim that white people have all the power in a nebulous "structural" way is false. Power is not held by "white people" as a class. One white person can have less power than one black person.

The claim that only whites can be racist is really a rhetorical technique to get white people to shut up and accept racism against them, whether it be personal bigotry and violence, or a political attempt to take money and property from white people as a class, or "positive discrimination" and "affirmative action" against white people.

Publicly identifying it as purely a rhetorical technique and not a serious idea robs it of some of its power.

Anti-men rhetorical technique

The claim is sometimes made that men should not be allowed to speak about women's issues. Only a woman can truly know what it is like to be a woman, because of her lived experience. Knowledge and empathy/imagination are deemed worthless.

The same claim is made regarding race.

One wonders what is the point of women explaining to men what it is like to be a woman, if men will be incapable of understanding, and are not allowed to make any use of such knowledge.

An implication of this is that women should refrain from opining about masculinity and men's issues.

This style of thought is pernicious because anything can be deemed a "woman's issue" and men told to shut up about it, even if it concerns them. For example, whether a woman has an abortion or not concerns and affects the father, who may wish to keep the child, or who may not want to keep and pay for it.

This is really a rhetorical technique, and its aim is to tell white men to shut up. It is an attempt to define the terms of debate to make them completely one-sided. Publicly identifying it as purely a rhetorical technique and not a serious idea robs it of some of its power.

Ignore bad people's emotions

When resolving a dispute, one should not give much weight to someone's expressed emotions. One can pretend to be upset as a way to getting what one wants. Trivers' theory of evolutionary self-deception says that the most effective way to fake being upset is to really be upset. That is the purpose of emotions: a person is motivated by their emotions because those emotions are real.

So a third party mediator should not try to distinguish between a person who is faking an emotion, and someone really experiencing it.

When Larry Summers gave a speech about differences between men and women, an MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins said "I felt I was going to be sick", "my heart was pounding and my breath was shallow", "I just couldn't breathe, because this kind of bias makes me physically ill". She had to leave the room because otherwise "I would've either blacked out or thrown up."

Hopkins was clearly deliberately trying to damage Summers' career, and genuinely experiencing these emotions.

A person claiming to experience these emotions likely really is experiencing them, and that's unfortunate, but such behaviour should not be rewarded and reinforced.

Politicisation and legalisation of manners

Manners are about not making other people feel uncomfortable. The rules of manners are voluntary and negotiated -- maybe you want to make someone feel uncomfortable. Sometimes it might be impossible to avoid making one person uncomfortable without making another person uncomfortable.

There is a trend in political correctness aim to replace voluntary manners with power.

A transexual might make the novel claim that it is bad manners to call a male-to-female transexual "he". Someone who disagrees may refuse. Both parties are free to disassociate from the other. (What if they are not free to disassociate, for example colleagues? Whose rule of manners should be followed? The socially normal one, of course, whichever that is.)

What if someone claims it is bad manners not to remember to use her bizarre pronouns (per, em, xyr, vis)? Clearly this is not reasonable disagreement, but an attempt to impose claims about manners as an exercise of power. The sole purpose of the novel claim about manners is to exercise power.

One could publicly campaign to try to make one's novel claim about manners considered the default, correct choice, in a dispute between colleagues mediated by a Human Resources department. This is the politicisation of manners.

One strategy is to enlist the power of the law: to make it illegal not to obey bizarre whims about pronouns. This is the legalisation of manners: to make what was previously the voluntarily negotiated norms of human interaction, a matter for the law.

It is good manners to refer to a male-to-female transexual as "she", even though "she" is not really a woman. Good manners does not require "she" should be allowed to compete in female sporting events.