Context section:
Who are you and why are you posting this here?
First time poster on LessWrong, but I've been in the rationalist world since 2015 or so. Usually just participating in discussions and not writing essays. The people who know me know that this issue isn't the only thing I discuss. In fact, I'd say I bring it up fairly infrequently, although others may disagree depending on their sample size of total conversations with me they've had.
The reason I’m posting this here is because it came up as a topic in the general rationalist discussion-sphere on X. This first essay in the series just deals with my rebuttal to Karella's tweets, who isn't really rat-adjacent as far as I know. But essays two and three in this series are my rebuttal to tweets posted by Mason, who is. Her tweets got enough traction in the rationalist community that I decided it would be worth it to write a full response with my perspective.
Body of essay:
A few days ago a sci-fi author named Karella tweeted this.
It came to my attention because Mason, someone in the rationalist world, retweeted her with further thoughts on the matter, which I’ll get to in a subsequent essay.
The evidence Karella presents to show that the intactivists are weirdos is one self-published comic book from 2011 made by one person which featured a superhero fighting against infant circumcision in various cultures, i.e. medical circumcision, Jewish ritual circumcision, African ritual circumcision, Filipino ritual circumcision, etcetera. There are lots of these not-particularly-high-quality activist publications where a superhero stands up for some cause and the issue at hand is represented by some made-up supervillain. Like Superman vs Nick-O-Tine, for instance. The problem is that in the part of this comic that dealt with ritual Jewish circumcision, the supervillains were visually represented in the form of horrible antisemitic caricatures.
But… this comic was published in 2011. If the test is “has anyone, even a single person, said something racist while advocating for your cause in the past 13 years?” then no cause on Earth could pass that test. To the extent that the existence of this comic book is permanently disgraceful to the entire cause of intactivism, every other cause is way way way more permanently disgraced than this one, by things that happened much more recently.
I would assume that almost every rationalist would be aware of the problems with these sort of dubious guilt-by-association tactics. There have been many essays written about this. Chinese Robber, Isolated Demand for Rigor, etcetera. I’m not going to belabor this point too much, I would imagine that for most people reading this the concept is already intuitive. I’m not crazy about NIMBYism, but it wouldn’t tell me much if a single NIMBY made a racist comic book 13 years ago. I would have the self-restraint not to pretend to myself and to the world like that was a good argument.
The second example of deranged behavior Karella gave is more recent, but in my view even less persuasive.
As an attention-getting method of protest, the Bloodstained Men organization wears clothes with blood on the crotch while carrying signs. But: wearing attention-getting outfits is actually totally commonplace in progressivism activism. It’s not exactly a high level of rhetoric, but there’s nothing inherently crazy about showing up to a protest in Handmaiden’s Tale cosplay. Or, for a more one-to-one comparison, feminist campaigners literally wear the exact same outfit to protest lack of access to menstrual hygiene products.
The implicit message is “this may seem like a preposterous visual to you, but this outfit is a constructed visual representation of what happens when women can’t get these products. We know it’s not good to look at, that’s the point.”
Similarly, the implicit message of the Bloodstained Men outfit is “this may seem like a preposterous visual to you, but this outfit is a constructed visual representation of the reality of parts of babies' genitals being amputated for no sensible reason. We know it’s not good to look at, that’s the point.”
There are probably people reading this who think that Handmaiden’s Tale cosplay, bloodstained costumes protesting lack of access to menstrual pads, and bloodstained costumes to protest infant circumcision are all deeply uncool, or “cringe”. Or maybe they draw the line somewhere else, like they’re okay with the Handmaiden’s Tale cosplay but not the bloodstained outfits.
Even if it doesn’t exactly match with your sense of how a protest ought to be conducted, even if it doesn’t seem like the best way to do it... it’s not deranged behavior, to protest lack of access to menstrual hygiene products in this way. It’s not like only someone undergoing a total psychotic break from reality would think that this is a reasonable way to make an invisible consequence of a policy decision more visible.
Are these constructed visual representations a weak form of argumentation? They may not be on the same level of rhetoric as, to pick an example totally at random, a well thought out blog post, but it’s silly to act like we’re above them as a species. A photo of a child dying of malaria is a reasonable thing to show people, even if it’s not a statistic. A statue of a woman being stoned to death for adultery matters, even if it’s not video footage of the event happening. A short story based on what life might be like for a typical family in Madagascar if humanity fails to sufficiently address climate change is a reasonable thing to publish. Well-researched and properly contextualized statistics are good to have, but one of the things that makes them good to have is that they are a statistic of something. And there does still need to be some connection with the thing that the statistic is about.
It could be that you think that both the women’s hygiene costume and the intactivist costume are counter-productive to their cause. I’m not sure that’s true. I think that if a random person sees someone in a bloodstained costume holding a sign that says “INTACT GENITALS ARE A HUMAN RIGHT” or “GENITALS SHOULD NOT HAVE SCARS”, their reaction would be, a large percentage of the time, “Wow, what a ridiculous costume! Although I guess now that I think about it, it is kind of a strange and gruesome practice…” Different people would react in different ways, but my educated guess would be that these protests are a net positive.
But even if people really were that superficial and uncharitable about how they interpret these things, it doesn’t mean you need to be. You can believe that these protests are net negative and still recognize that in a saner world, people would judge this sort of thing in the sense that it was meant, and it would at worst do no harm to its cause.
If you have anything in your life that you care about that you feel isn’t given enough attention, you can understand the impulse to present people with an image or representation of the issue in question. It’s not an alien concept.
I don’t think that I’m the first to point out that a lot of people have perhaps taken the other route, and have decided that since trying to confront society about anything is so terrifyingly uncool, they’ll just descend into detached irony, or nihilism. This is something that’s come up in the world of AI risk recently.
Some people are saying that they hate how the AI risk community (or AI notkilleveryoneism community, to use a more descriptive term) has gotten less intellectual and less dignified. And those people are being criticized. The criticisms are that there’s actually something to fight for here, and that if all you care about is decorum, maintaining the vibes of the community, and not doing anything that could possibly give anyone a chance to mock you, fairly or unfairly, then you’re probably not going to make sensible tradeoffs about what to stand up for and when. Aside from the decorum thing, there’s also the phenomenon where people go to great lengths to justify inaction for the sake of simple laziness. It’s not the exact mirror of the debate that constitutes the main subject of this essay, but I thought I’d bring it up because it’s something people were discussing recently and there’s some amount of conceptual overlap. Pardon the digression.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it for Karella’s side of things. It seems clear to me that she is holding some to higher standards and others to lower standards. This is I guess the part of the essay where I could ascribe her bias to unhealthy social norms about how men aren’t supposed to suffer or complain, or something. I do feel like Karella is making a pretty striking oversight in her argument, which might be an indicator of something or other, but I don’t really want to accuse her of any specific bias. It could have happened a lot of different ways, some of them not all that sinister. People aren’t always totally fair; it happens. If they were then we wouldn’t need blog posts, and that doesn’t sound so great either.
Next time: me responding to two tweets from Mason with two essays. Hopefully the points I make will feel to others like they were worth making in detail.