I’ve been largely silent on this topic, but I decided to respond to this particular one. Why? Because it’s neatly organized and kind of civil, but most importantly the problem with it is that it almost sounds legit. Why is that a problem? Because apolitical youth of our age tends to agree with walls of text, if it sounds reactionary with a sliver of legitness. (I know, I’ve been there.) See how it all breaks down in the face of truth.

You have no quantifiable metrics for injustice, so you have no victory conditions.

In real life, it’s pretty hard to find quests and objectives and a pretty text telling you you have won the game. You have to observe and think to see if you got there. Did another black man killed by police this week? We’re not there. Did another woman harassed disproportionately compared to a man with the same opinion, same tone? We’re not even close. Yes, it’ll be hard to say when we’re really close, but right now we don’t have this problem.

You don’t seek converts, you seek to punish and bully

I’m sorry but this is simply wrong. From your perspective it may seem like people get off by criticizing toxic behaviour, but people with real names and faces rarely do that. It’s pretty hard to find converts, but I don’t know of a single example where one sincerely apologized and wasn’t welcomed. Comment if you can show me an example.

Your treatment of women and minority dissenters is appalling

No, it’s not. If an oppressed party doesn’t think they’re oppressed, they are left alone. Kim Kardashian decides to show off her butt, or Sarah Palin says something dumb about women and it’s their choice. Sure, they’re criticized for it, and it’s healthy. I believe if they weren’t criticized, people would use is as an argument to show they’re shielded from criticism. It’s better this way.

You strawman your opponents

Criticizing a woman is not misogyny. Harassing and bullying just because they’re women is. You can usually see this with disproportionate amount of harassment they endure. Your claim that people are called misogynists just because they criticized women is the only strawman I can see here.

You group them with the worst

We don’t. Hashtags do. If someone follows, retweets, glorifies known misogynists, it’s natural they’re grouped together. If you fight under the same banner, pushing the No true Scotsman fallacy, get ready to take some blame for it. This is a whole big topic one can’t refute in a single paragraph, I’ll probably write more on it in a later post.

When confronted with your own flaws, you restate them less threateningly

I don’t know any example for this, it started to sound like listing bad stuff you can come up on the top of your head. But let’s assume it has a kernel of truth, is it really so bad that one changes their stance when they’re confronted and they admit they were wrong? Do you want the opposite, where they don’t care about criticism? Or do you think one mistake renders the whole argument wrong? But if you assume their argument is shit, you wouldn’t accept even if it were most civil one on earth. This is the same attitude you criticized above; you don’t want them to fix their reasoning, you want them to keep being flawed so you can attack them easily, or you want them just gone.

You phrase all your arguments as Kafkatraps

Again, disagreeing is not the problem. If you actually try to harm your opponents, and the reason for this is their gender/orientation/skin color, yes, this is a problem.

You publish manipulated and misleading statistics

You’ve gone on for a while blaming without any proof whatsoever and I was okay with that, but this really needs proof to elaborate. Just one thing, statistics do lie and they act a lot like the Mirror of Erised; everyone can see what they want to. But some statistics are common sense, like women are more likely to get targeted than men on the internet. If your questioning about it is something that doesn’t change what data shows, you won’t get taken seriously.

You insist on vigilante justice

Nope. Never been the case. Giving low scores to someone’s game because you don’t like with them is vigilante justice. Sending mail to the advertisers of a website you don’t agree with is vigilante justice. Criticizing someone is neither vigilantism nor justice. It’s the right thing to do. If it turns into harassment, it’s wrong too. (The act of harassment, to be precise, not the reason.)

Whew, it’s been tiresome but fruitful. I’ll end this post here since I don’t think anyone would read it if I did the whole thing, but I’ll complete it in two more pushes. I think part 3 will be my favorite, because third post is short but it features a view that is so toxic I need to rant on it particularly.