Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
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
Dec 9 • 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 • 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
Image
Image
Nov 6 • 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 • 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
Image
Oct 13 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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.
Jul 6 • 73 tweets • 14 min read
Yes, but what this means in reality is that some women would choose single sex competitions & some would choose mixed sex ones.

So when it comes to professional darts with governing bodies that decide the rules of fair competition, justification of those rules is needed.
1/ Of course, on a personal level, as in the case of sex, neither women nor men have to justify who they play a game of darts with. No-one can reasonably complain that Sarah and I have chosen not to include Jeff in our casual game of darts at the pub. Jeff can find his own friends.
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/
Image
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 13 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
I suspect the reason that more people who believe in spiritual & mystic woo like astrology & mediums are women while more people who believe in conspiratorial woo like alien abduction, 9/11 truthers are men is related to relational vs knowledge possession sex differences
1 Women, on average, are more interested in communication & the psychological & relational, while men, on average, are more interested in possessing knowledge about things & systems & how they work.
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.
Image
Image
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.