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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I will go ahead and be the only person to honestly engage with the terms of your question.

    There is a movement that started a long time ago and continues today to “domesticate” boys. Boys are invariably more disobedient in controlled classrooms and group activities and so they need to be “broken in” and taught how to conform to the requirements of modern life and education. Girls tend to fit into this structure more easily as can be attested by the higher educational outcomes among women in countries that allow them to achieve it.

    With this in mind there is a lot of resentment against this “breaking in” process. This metastasizes when boys hear all about how “toxic” they are by virtue of how they were born, how much more trouble they are to deal with etc. The emotional response is to resist all attempts to demasculinize them, even in the case of something as inconsequential as bathroom etiquette.

    This is an honest representation of the perspective in question. Don’t get all passed off at me for being capable of presenting it.






  • Thus is a holdover from half remembered lessons on Plato I guess. Socrates is contrasted with the rhetoricians as seeking Truth, a noumenal thing beyond us that we discover (or recall as Socrates would put it). The rhetoricians representative Gorgias has his argument famously summed up as “man is the measure of all things”, that is to say that nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

    Rhetoricians famously taught people how to convince others of their point of view, essentially modern debate technique. Socrates undermined this practice by pointing out that the skills employed (tone of voice, rhythm, eloquence) had nothing to do with determining truth.

    With this argument in mind we can see why “rhetoric” is now used as a shorthand for emotional appeals, or style over substance. Rhetoric is what you rely on when you cannot make a structured and logical argument, while in theory the truth is the truth even if delivered in a dull monotone of limited vocabulary.