Burned out on Gender Wars?

I guess I'm not completely burned out on politics. I probably am burned out on gender wars. I had a thought on that after watching the latest Survivor Finale, but I am not sure I'll post about that. I've really stopped looking at all of the "feminist" blogs. They all seem rather repetitive to me now. They say the same thing over and over and nitpick. I mean, I'm sure you will be able to find sexism if you look for it. It isn't hard to find. So what? There are also plenty of people who are NOT sexist. Why not spend time with those people? It seems like a lot of feminst blogs are more about bashing than doing anything useful. They bash, they abuse those who dare to disagree with them on even the smallest of points, and they are generally sexist against men, which makes them look like big fat hypocrites. But the main reason I think I stopped reading them is that, well, I had less time, and it was frankly getting boring - all part of that repetitiveness.

I'm sure most of the feminists would now label me as "privileged" for not having to think about their problems and listen to their whining all of the time. I won't even go back into all of that nonsense. It gets terribly tiresome to express an opinion, then be told that your opinion doesn't matter or is wrong because you're a [insert race] [insert gender]. And again, it sounds rather hypocritical to complain about racism or sexism then to respond to someone by dismissing their opinion based primarily on their race or gender. (Or both). It can get almost comical to watch on feminist sites as a new poster who's views don't seem to sychophantically mesh with the dominant views on the board is then disected and "accused" of being a man, because, well, then the rest of the regular readers can bash with impunity.

I think it is ideas that matter, not who says them. If an idea is true, it can stand on its own merits, no matter who says it. And if it is false, it should fall, based again on the merits of the idea and not on who is criticising it.

Echo chambers (as I've discussed before) don't evaluate ideas on the merits. You just get insanity that way. That's how we get such garbage as "standpoint theory" - there's an interesting germ of a concept there, but then it gets taken way too far, to the point where I think it is more about revenge than it is about anything real. What revenge am I referring to? I'm talking about the perception, probably accurate, that historically, white men's ideas were taken more seriously than that of women or minorities, at least in this country. The whole "dead white male" view of history. So now it is time for revenge - invent a whole new way of looking at the world to codify the concept that now it is everyone except white males who need to be taken seriously and we can just ignore the white males as being wrong, by definition. Thus, you have revenge for all of the non-white or non-males whose ideas were slighted in the past. And you even have a nice false stamp of approval of a scientific sounding name and university departments to back it up. Which is all well and good, but doesn't change the fact that it is nonsense. Certainly, it is true, that our perceptions are colored by who we are, but that can only go so far. Water still boils at 100 C at sea level regardless of your race or your gender. Certainly it is useful to take into consideration the differing experiences of different people. But once you start elevating someone's experiences based on race or gender, you are back to square one - you are a racist or a sexist. You are not judging an idea on the merits, you are judging it based on who said it, and that is just wrong and also will likely lead to the wrong answer.