Helen Pluckrose Profile picture
Still just wanting you to value evidence-based epistemology & consistently liberal principles. Contact me at helenofthetea@gmail.com
Djentleman Scholar 🤘🦊🤘🐸🍵 Profile picture Shah W Profile picture 2 subscribed
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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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
Jun 19, 2023 18 tweets 4 min read
This is not a way to restore confidence in expertise, institutions and the establishment among people who are radically skeptical of all the above, is it? This is another failure of ideological theory of mind. 1/n People who think a system is broken cannot be persuaded that it is not by being told that until they get their ideas about the ways in which the system is broken endorsed by the system they think is broken, they should shut up & accept that the system is not broken.
Jun 18, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
Sunak has said it publicly. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/…

I am suspicious that anybody felt the need to 'leak' a video of Sunak saying privately what is also his public stance.

Usually 'leaked' refers to information that is different or additional to that already stated publicly. 1/ It seems at least possible that when someone 'secretly' films the PM saying in 'private,'
- exactly what he says in public.
-exactly what will appeal most to the people most likely to vote for him
that person may not, in fact, be trying to undermine the Prime Minister.
Jun 18, 2023 25 tweets 6 min read
I see your point & respect your knowledge of the wealth of written records from this era which is much wider & much deeper than mine. I share both your passion for the era & your frustration with people who weave facile & agenda-driven narratives about "Western Civilisation" 1/n I have a different stance on humility in understanding the role of Europe with regards to knowledge production and what we now consider human rights during the Middle Ages & it does include accepting that Europe & particularly England were comparatively dark.
Jun 18, 2023 12 tweets 3 min read
Comparison doesn't work. Gender critical feminists believe that gender is an oppressive social construct so the equivalent would be people who believe race is an oppressive social construct & include critical race theorists.

Video is cut strangely to lose context, though. 1/ His words were "if they do come in and buy a tin of paint AND BEHAVE THAT WAY, they're not welcome in our stores anyway."
People keep leaving out that he spoke of people being unwelcome for behaviour, not beliefs.

But behave what way?
Jun 14, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Apologies. I should have specified that UK conservatives have been taking on a particular American style of patriotic conservatism which holds that wokeness is a product of the decline in Christianity & we should address it by becoming more Christian. 1/2 Also we should wave flags about on days like St George's day & throw typically British self-deprecation out of the window in favour of typically American self-celebration. But we don't have a Christian right to get behind even if we wanted to & also don't like making a scene. 2/3
Jun 14, 2023 44 tweets 10 min read
This is a conflict of definitions which often occurs & makes me almost certain that you are American even though your bio does not tell me. Americans are the only people (as far as I am aware) who frequently refer to leftism (including authoritarian leftism) as 'liberalism.' 1/ I am British where liberalism is not associated with the left but with the position below. It comes from a US website which bases itself on the values of George Washington. Americans who read political philosophy don't confuse leftism & liberalism either. Image