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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
fche Profile picture Djentleman Scholar 🤘🦊🤘🐸🍵 Profile picture SW_72 Profile picture 3 subscribed
Jun 21 • 24 tweets • 6 min read
OK, I am going to explain how the Labour Party works in very broad brushstroke terms as people seem to having a fundamental misconception here & perceiving it as a person with a single brain rather than...a party.

1/
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Image There is not a confusion or dishonesty over what a woman is in the Labour Party. There is a conflict between different factions of it.
People speak as though the Labour Party is Starmer. He took leadership & now his views define the Labour Party in which case he is confused.
Jun 12 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Ah, @NickCohen4 has been being right again. When I need to refresh my brain after reading too much CSJ theory or start to utterly despair for the British liberal left, he & @kenanmalik are my first go to sources

Yes. Yes, you can, and we must.

1/
nickcohen.substack.com/p/can-you-figh…
Image This is a vital point that we cannot overemphasise. We now have alleged leftists enabling & spurring big corporations to pay profoundly unethical DEI trainers eye-watering sums of money to impose beliefs on workers that could be used to pay the lowest earners enough to live on.
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Jun 1 • 34 tweets • 8 min read
Ah, yes. This I agree with. I had this argument with my father a lot. He believed that because he'd worked his way up from a poor background, leaving school at 15, doing O levels & A levels & then professional qualifications at night school.... ...became the youngest ever insurance broking fellow, built a successful company, retired at 47 & then continued to make money investing in the stock market, everybody can be successful if they work hard enough

I don't believe that. I don't think much of that came down to choice
May 17 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
In which I argue that the marketplace of ideas will always exist (because having ideas, buying into ideas, trying to sell others on ideas is what humans do)

The only choice we have is how to work with this reality (trying to stop ideas by banning them will never work)

1/ Do we strive for a free market of ideas in which none are illegal & try to keep as many commonly held views in the mainstream as we can (including those we think really bad) so we can test them against each other?

I argue strongly for yes.
2/
May 16 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Currently watching a fundamentalist type try to get her head round the concept of liberalism, fail miserably & produce conspiracy theories. I do not know whether to be more amused or despairing about this. OK, I do. It's despairing. 🧵 I and various other people are apparently trying to consolidate social media power to control the narrative around autogynephilia & various sexual fetishes and paraphilias to further the acceptance of them.
May 4 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
OK, I'll suggest one way to test whether women are in fact safer around bears than men except that I don't think any ethics board would allow it. A controlled experiment. Two typical days in the life of a woman and in one bears are substituted for men.
1/ She wakes up next to a bear. She showers, dresses, walks to the station passing a dozen bears, gets on the train with about 30 bears, arrives at work where she spends 8 hours in a room with several bears.The train again. Cuddles up on the sofa with a bear watching TV.
Feb 11 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
Good question. That's the chapter I am finishing up now. Firstly, "Pushing back" ranges from firing authoritarians to putting in place policies to stop them being authoritarian.
But "Why don't we just remove them all?"

I'll tell you. Employers whom I help with policies overwhelmingly don't want to fire all their "woke" or "woke adjacent" employees because they are good at their job & also not all manipulative political activists. Some of them are just young university graduates.
Jan 24 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
It looks as though I am going to talk to a gender critical feminist who disagrees with me very strongly indeed but is also showing evidence of being committed to addressing what I actually believe in an intellectually honest way. This is the perfect combination for me. This is much better than having fragmented conversations with many different feminists on Twitter, many of whom were responding to equally fragmented snapshots of my positions, some of which were downright misleading.
Jan 17 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
Exactly. Liberalism is a higher order system of conflict resolution and ideological capture avoidance, not a belief system in itself. People who commit to it could have a wide variety of positive belief systems, but they commit to leaving others alone & not harming them.
1/
Image Let's extend this playground analogy to gender critical feminists & trans activists. For some time, trans activists have been trying to make everybody play their game & that game results in physical harm to young people, & safety & fairness problems for women.
Jan 10 • 16 tweets • 3 min read
I watched “Barbie” on the plane. The flavour of its activism is, I’m afraid, liberal feminism. Also called “pop feminism” disparagingly and “white feminism” even more disparagingly. We can’t really blame the radicals or the woke for this one.
(Cont) This is the feminism of the Sarkeesian, Valenti kind. It’s not radical because it wants to reform existing structures & accepts that men can be feminists & has a distinctly neo-liberal flavour & does not at all seem to want to abolish the concept of gender.
Jan 3 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
FFS, people.

1)Somebody can secretly do a bad thing.
2)The discovery of the bad thing can be motivated by political animus.

The bad thing is no less bad if the motivation for discovering it is hostile.

The motivation is no less hostile if the bad thing is genuinely bad. Claudine Gay almost certainly does have some enemies simply because she is black because racist wankstains exist & seem to be on the rise.

However, in this case, the political animus against her is clearly because she is woke
Dec 27, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
This state of confusion about what free speech is and is not is both profound & widespread. I can sometimes get through to the terminally confused by equating it to freedom of religion which is more widely recognised to include freedom from religion.

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Image It is precisely my commitment to freedom of speech that leads me to take responsibility for which speech I choose to listen to or not to listen to rather than making it the responsibility of society to ensure that others cannot say anything or listen to anything I don't like.
Dec 12, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
It's because you're asking the wrong question. "Name one institution that has been measurably improved by increased female leadership" requires standpoint epistemology to be real when it isn't.
Men and women don't have different & distinct knowledges, qualities & values. Certain psychological traits differ between the sexes on average to a significant enough extent for us to see decided trends which include which kind of work men & women go into, what kind of work/life balance they want & how likely they are to want leadership positions.
Nov 15, 2023 • 41 tweets • 8 min read
@AlottaMalotta @msediewyatt @femmehonnete1 @ChanLPfa I have started an essay pertaining to this. It argues that radicals are distinctly different to wokeists and this is best understood by the meaning of the word. Root. Radicals have one root which gives them a simple oppressed/oppressor concept which they read everything through. @AlottaMalotta @msediewyatt @femmehonnete1 @ChanLPfa So, for the Marxists, it is capitalism & class structures. For radical feminists, it is patriarchy. Every problem they see they read through patriarchy, so even though trans activism is opposed to patriarchy & more women accept gender identity than men...
Nov 8, 2023 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
The time to fight hardest for liberal values to win is when anti-liberal ones are winning.
Any plan to defeat bad ideas has to begin with the same first step:
Getting enough people to agree with you to stand a chance of enacting that plan.
1 Liberals on both left & right, postliberals on both left & right, social and/or religious conservatives, Marxists/ socialists & more have all been trying to do this, because CSJ is anti a lot more things than liberalism.
Oct 28, 2023 • 44 tweets • 7 min read
Antisemitism on the left is undergirded by ideas within postcolonial theory & contemporary critical theories of race which I will explain.
However, the acceptance of that paper which included an adapted section of Mein Kampf does not indicate antisemitism as I shall also explain All the papers were written using a process in which we decided on an untrue/unethical conclusion first and then used Critical Social Justice theories to reach it. Motivated reasoning essentially. This is what the 'scholarship' we criticise does & that isn't scholarship.
Sep 28, 2023 • 32 tweets • 10 min read
Reading @Yascha_Mounk's The Identity Trap. Shall report back. So far, I am in full agreement. Image Yes, yes, yes! Image
Sep 16, 2023 • 32 tweets • 7 min read
"It seems to appear to many that it is virtuous to pledge one’s allegiance to a certain truth claim as a matter of principle and/or tribal allegiance regardless of what evidence there is for that specific claim"
open.substack.com/pub/helenpluck…
Image I was not very impressed by the Dispatches investigation. It was disorganised & scattered and seemed to be formed around the theme of Russell Brand's sexually disrespectful attitude towards women & conflated a lot of behaviours from alleged rape to vulgar jokes.
Jul 5, 2023 • 35 tweets • 8 min read
"Being kind to children who are different" is not an accurate description of the book. Whatever your position on which books should be in schools. it is important to be able to distinguish the universalist 'be kind' from ideologically specific beliefs.

1/ https://t.co/iqNmndN7mv
You cannot go wrong with "Be kind & don't bully people" in a kid's book as this value is found in every mainstream belief system. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, humanists, socially conservative, socially liberal, fiscally left or right all value kindness.
Jun 19, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Why am I having to explain the difference between credentials and evidence to a scientist? My credentials tell you I have a Masters in Early Modern Literature. 1/n The evidence of whether your interpretation of a neutral statement as an appeal to credentialism & academia is likely to be correct is not only to be found at the top of the thread where I point out the problem with someone appealing to credentialism and academia...
Jun 19, 2023 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Indeed. I would not criticise someone for citing their own expertise in a field. Only the flaws in the reasoning behind telling someone who thinks a system is broken & not receptive to the truth to publish what they think is true within that system. 1/n I do not think that epidemiology is broken. It looks to me as though it is still working the way science works which is necessarily imperfect (the acceptance of knowledge as provisional & subject to revision on new evidence is central to the system) but the best we have Image