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Helen Pluckrose Profile picture
Helen Pluckrose
@HPluckrose
Still just wanting you to value evidence-based epistemology & consistently liberal principles. Contact me at helenpluckrose91@gmail.com
3 subscribers
Nov 17 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
No, Charlotte, when people report on radically reduced murder rates, they are not trying to shame you personally for objecting to having your phone stolen.

In the same way, data on improved cancer prognoses is not an attempt to shame people who feel crappy with flu.
1/ An indicator that you might be becoming an ideologue committed to a political narrative rather than someone dedicated to a cause is if you get resentful whenever there are positive developments in relation to your cause.
2/
Aug 8 • 32 tweets • 5 min read
What we really need in the UK is an organised liberal resistance to denials of free speech that is specifically about free speech & not any specific issue that people want (and should be able) to speak freely about.
1/ We've had people arrested for disbelieving in gender identity, for being critical of immigration, for believing Islam is not the religion of peace, for burning a poppy that they owned & posting it online, calling the PM & home secretary 'coconuts' & more.
Jul 1 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
"Saying Radical Things is Not Doing Things"
And reality is not a story.

New piece below ⬇️ It has become very clear to me that there are a significant number of people, mostly on the postmodern ‘woke’ left and post-truth populist right who mistake radical talk for action and reforming action for talk.

hpluckrose.com/p/saying-radic…
Jun 26 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
"Can One Really Be a Woke Islamist?"
Zohran Mamdani and the need for better arguments if we care about defending liberalism.

New piece below.⬇️ I know very little about Zohran Mamdani personally but it seems implausible that anybody can be both woke and an Islamist. Nevertheless, I am seeing many claims to this effect on social media.

hpluckrose.com/p/can-one-real…
May 15 • 27 tweets • 5 min read
How to Banish the Term "Woke Right"
Stop "woking" while right.

New essay in post below ⬇️ For as long as people see the mentality and epistemology that they have conceptualised as ‘woke’ coming from a faction on the political spectrum that they understand as ‘right’, the term ‘woke right’ will continue to exist.hpluckrose.com/p/how-to-banis…
May 8 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Oh, good grief.

Wokeness now just means criticising power structures using a set of principles? So liberalism is woke when it argues against authoritarianism using the principle of liberty. So it's hypocritical to criticise wokeness when it too criticises power structures?
1/ "Liberalism is now the power structure that is being critiqued with its own tools."

No.

Liberalism did not invent criticising power structures. I suspect humans have been doing that forever. "That's not fair!" is the child's cry that speaks to our innate sense of justice.
2/
Mar 19 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
"Liberalism is Not Wishy-Washy, Fence-Sitting Centrism:
It is strong and consistent opposition to authoritarianism"

New piece in next post. ⬇️ Liberals are not wishy-washy, fence-sitting centrists who always want to find a middle ground and ‘both sides’ everything.
We are not half-measure anti-woke or gender critical activists.
We are full-measure liberals.
hpluckrose.com/p/liberalism-i…
Mar 8 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
My observation is that very many women genuinely do not have an intuitive sense of how much stronger men are than women, because men have not used their strength against them &, when playing, hold back their strength.
1/ Image I do because I worked for many years with adults with 'challenging behaviour' (aggression) due to learning disability, dementia & brain injury. Risk assessments were very carefully done so I was only injured on three occasions. However...
Feb 10 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
"Multiculturalism, Progressivism vs Reactionism, and the Far Right: How Definitions and Dichotomies can cause us to speak past each other."

New piece below:
In her piece on support for the AfD,@MarkerJParker presses & challenges a very socially conservative young woman who supports the party, about whether her views reject multiculturalism & could be considered retrograde & whether she is far-right.hpluckrose.com/p/multicultura…
Feb 5 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
Liberalism is like health. You'll never achieve a perfect, ongoing state of it but things are much better when people are aiming for that than when they are not.

I have not suggested that recognising this makes one illiberal. I say it myself all the time, usually like this: Image What I don't accept is when people say, "We'll never achieve a perfect state of liberalism so let's accept my illiberalism."
Feb 4 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
"What is Going Wrong With the Anti-Woke?"

Part One of Two: We are not a homogenous group.

Link to new piece below: It seems that many people who recognised the extremism, authoritarianism and irrationalism of the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement and supported those of us who criticised it on those grounds are currently feeling quite disillusioned.
hpluckrose.com/p/what-is-goin…
Dec 23, 2024 • 45 tweets • 8 min read
Yes, this is why close reading language devoid of context & the connotations of its usage - deconstructing it - is deliberately missing the point. Because language doesn’t work like that. We are conveying meaning to each other within a context & a shared knowledge of connotations There can be worth in doing this, of course. Digging deeper into language & defamiliarising it can help you to see the context you are operating in more clearly & the significance of the connotations. But you have to be honest that this is what you are doing & why.
Dec 9, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
This is absolutely disgusting behaviour. I have just read "On the possibility of penetrable being" & the 'translation' of it by La Scap as saying precisely the opposite of what it does say &wondered if there was any way this could possibly be an honest misreading. It seems not
1/ It is a highly theoretical paper & would be difficult for many. But as Jane points out in the paper, if your process results in an absurd conclusion (like "JCJ is a rape apologist") something has gone wrong with the way you represented the problem. It seems that was deliberate
2/
Nov 24, 2024 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
Utterly cult-like. Image People, please recognise patterns. When you encounter any group with any leader who claims to have awoken to the true nature of social reality while everybody else is still asleep to it,insists that you must be part of a collective & leaving it is a sign of resistance to truth... Image
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Nov 6, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Interesting point.
"Trump is associated with more existential risks but they have a lower probability; the risks from Harris are not existential but they are much more guaranteed."

Not sure I'd evaluate this specific situation quite the same way, but taking the general point
1/ ..."Risk tolerance" does map onto what I have often referred to as the preference for reform over revolution

When systems & institutions are going off the rails due to the power of a dominant moral orthodoxy like 'woke' the liberal inclination is to fix it & save the systems
...
Nov 2, 2024 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I'm economically left. Some political form of hell freezing over would have to happen before I'd vote Conservative. Kemi Badenoch offers no incentive to do so on that score.
She does understand the significance of the culture war & I'm glad she's Leader of the Opposition.
1/ I'm looking at Conservatives who are unhappy with this development & their reasoning. Some think her conservatism too liberal (meritocracy, freedom, reform over revolution etc.) & some think she's too globalist or not radical enough.
2/ Image
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Oct 13, 2024 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
Oppose spurious trigger warnings consistently. It's insulting to students' competence as adults, contrary to the spirit of intellectual inquiry that universities should foster & enables the abuse of institutional power in the service of ideological bias.
1/ If somebody has trauma related to abuse in the name of Christianity affecting their functioning in the world, it is for their mental health professionals to discuss with them the advisability of studying late medieval literature for them personally, not universities collectively.
Oct 5, 2024 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Some people fail to recognise that liberalism is not a tool to achieving a goal but an end goal in itself. Therefore, they frequently tell people that liberalism is not working & we need to try something else, but because our aim is a liberal society, nothing else will do It'd be like telling a Christian whose aim was to bring as many people to Christ as possible that this wasn't working & was a cop out and that they should try Islam. That won't work because they don't think Islam is true & don't want to live under it.
Oct 3, 2024 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
You do that if you want to! If you teach students or work in academia, you should have to accept that other people will find different things - including science - interesting & you cannot penalise them for that or eject them from academia.
1/ One of my profs bemoaned always getting a dozen dissertations offering a postcolonial reading of LoTR but he did not mark them down because he preferred other kinds of analysis & books himself because “What an individual prof is interested in” is not a valid marking criteria
Oct 2, 2024 • 23 tweets • 7 min read
Was she referring to people making conservative arguments? I was marked down for saying sexual selection is real and produces different criteria for mate selection & informed that evolutionary psychology is conservative. I'm a lifelong Labour voter. (OK, once LibDems).
1/ It's why both my dissertations use Lacanian feminist theory. Using some form of critical theory was required in every essay at undergrad English Lit & I was not going with anything influenced by Foucault. Guess how many critical theories include any conservative thought?
Jul 9, 2024 • 47 tweets • 9 min read
Because my arguments against right-wing illiberalism would be shit.

Much better from your point of view if I just called people fascists rather than pointed out the difference between violent authoritarian ideologies & the viewpoint diverse humans they claim to speak for. Not mindreading. That person is genuinely talking issue with me explaining why violent extremist LGBTQ activist groups can and, in fact, should be distinguished from individual human beings who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or queer.