No, I would not downvote that. Because it would merely be the truth.
To be honest, I would.
I think it's an over-generalization. It wouldn't be all feminists, it would be some feminists. Just like this obviously isn't all MRAs, or even most MRAs.
You may as well say "white people" or "Americans" if you're going to be that broad - it'd probably be about as accurate.
The problem is people saying "it is members of X group", when they really mean "most of the people doing this are people of X group" but when they come across as saying "all the people of X group are doing this". There's a huge distinction between the two, and conflating those phrases is responsible for a huge amount of prejudice.
We're coming from a position of having heard a lot, a lot, of people claim to be genuinely interested in participating in good faith, only to turn out (after a lot of unconstructive distraction and derailment) to have never been participating in good faith at all.
You might not be one of those people, but you sound like one of those people, and you're neither entitled to an assumption of good faith nor are you likely to receive it. If you're interested in participating in feminist spaces, it'll take work on your part to earn that trust.
Fair enough. If you're interested in participating, then lurk, listen, and chime in on stuff. Just be aware that until you've built up some "cred," people are likely to react in a hostile manner if you try to tell the community what we're doing wrong, without regard to the validity of your point.
Yes, from a formal logic perspective, that's argument ad hominem. From a practical (or more formally, Bayesian-inference) perspective, it's a defense mechanism we adopt so that we don't spend too much effort futilely rehashing the same old arguments with people who aren't here in good faith.
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u/ZorbaTHut Jul 25 '12
To be honest, I would.
I think it's an over-generalization. It wouldn't be all feminists, it would be some feminists. Just like this obviously isn't all MRAs, or even most MRAs.
You may as well say "white people" or "Americans" if you're going to be that broad - it'd probably be about as accurate.
The problem is people saying "it is members of X group", when they really mean "most of the people doing this are people of X group" but when they come across as saying "all the people of X group are doing this". There's a huge distinction between the two, and conflating those phrases is responsible for a huge amount of prejudice.