[Epistemic status: idea for one’s toolbox of ideas; not to be followed off a cliff]
I.
Commenters on this blog have sometimes tried to shame or attack other commenters for perceived misdeeds like sexual promiscuity. They tell people to their faces that they’re bad people and try to humiliate them.
When this happens, I ban the commenters involved.
And I get protests – what about free speech? What about the marketplace of ideas? Isn’t shaming sometimes a useful social mechanism? There are some norms we can’t or shouldn’t codify into law; shouldn’t violation of those norms be punished by shaming? Shaming can be very effective – for example, last week we learned the Puritans had a premarital pregnancy rate near zero because they publicly shamed anyone who departed from their moral standards. Might it not be useful to have something like that nowadays, either for premarital sex, or for other evils like homophobia and racism that we want to discourage? And even if I think we shouldn’t, is it really okay to ban the people trying, seeing as they were probably well-intentioned?
I think my answer is: be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness.
II.
A friend (I can’t remember who) once argued that “be nice” provides a nigh-infallible ethical decision procedure. For example, enslaving people isn’t very nice, so we know slavery is wrong. Kicking down people’s doors and throwing them in prison for having a joint of marijuana isn’t very nice, so we know the drug war is wrong. Not letting gays marry isn’t very nice, so we know homophobia is wrong.
I counterargue that even if we ignore the ways our notion of “nice” itself packs up pre-existing moral beliefs, this heuristic fails in several important cases:
1. Refusing the guy who is begging you to give his drivers’ license back, saying that without a car he won’t be able to visit his friends and family or have any fun, and who is promising that he won’t drive drunk an eleventh time.
2. Forcibly restraining a screaming baby while you jam a needle into them to vaccinate them against a deadly disease.
3. Sending the police to arrest a libertarian rancher in Montana who refuses to pay taxes for reasons of conscience
4. Revoking the credential (and thus destroying the future job prospects of) a teacher who has sex with one of her underage students
Sure, you could say that each of these “leads toward a greater niceness”, like that you’re only refusing the alcoholic his license in order to be nice to potential drunk driving victims. But then you’ve lost all meaningful distinction between the word “nice” and the word “good” and reinvented utilitarianism. And reinventing utilitarianism is pretty cool, but after you do that you no longer have such an easy time arguing against the drug war – somebody’s going to argue that it leads to the greater good of there being fewer drugs.
We usually want to avoid meanness. In some rare cases, meanness is necessary. I think one check for whether a certain type of meanness might be excusable is – it’s less likely to be excusable if it’s not coordinated.
Consider: society demands taxes to pay for communal goods and services. This does sometimes involve not-niceness, as in the example of the rancher in (3). But what makes it tolerable is that it’s done consistently and through a coordinated process. If the rule was “anybody who has a social program they want can take money from somebody else to pay for it,” this would be anarchy. Some libertarians say “taxation is theft”, but where arbitrary theft is unfair, unpredictable, and encourage perverse incentives like living in fear or investing in attack dogs, taxation has none of these disadvantages.
By the rule “be nice, at least until you can coordinate meanness”, we should not permit individuals to rob each other at gunpoint in order to pay for social programs they want, but we might permit them to advocate for a coordinated national taxation policy.
Or: society punishes people for crimes, including the crime of libel. Punishment is naturally not-nice, but this seems fair; we can’t just have people libeling each other all the time with no consequences. But what makes this tolerable is that it’s coordinated – done through the court system according to carefully codified libel law that explains to everybody what is and isn’t okay. Remove the coordination aspect, and you’ve got the old system where if you say something that offends my honor then I get some friends and try to beat you up in a dark alley. The impulse is the same: deploy not-niceness in the worthy goal of preventing libel. But one method is coordinated and the other isn’t.
This is very, very far from saying that coordinated meanness is a sure test that means something’s okay – that would be the insane position that anything legal must be ethical, something most countries spent the past few centuries disproving spectacularly. This is the much weaker claim that legality sets a minimum bar for people attempting mean policies.
As far as I can tell there are two things we want in a legal system. First, it should have good laws that produce a just society. But second, it should at least have clear and predictable laws that produce a safe and stable society.
For example, the first goal of libel law is to balance people’s desire to protect their reputation with other people’s desire for free speech. But the second goal of libel law should be that everybody understands what is and isn’t libel. If a system achieves the second goal, nobody will end up jailed or dead because they said something they thought was totally innocent but somebody else thought was libel. And nobody will spent years and thousands of dollars entangled in an endless court case hiring a bunch of lawyers to debate whether some form of speech was acceptable or not.
So coordinated meanness is better than uncoordinated meanness not because it necessarily achieves the first goal of justice, but because it achieves the second goal of safety and stability. Everyone knows exactly when to expect it and what they can do to avoid it. I may not know what speech will or won’t offend a violent person with enough friends to organize a goon squad, but I can always read the libel law and try to stay on the right side of it.
Likewise, in the Puritan community, I know exactly what things I have to do to avoid being shamed. Better still, I can only be shamed for violating one set of moral standards – the shared moral standards of the whole community. This isn’t true of random people shaming promiscuous people, or people with the wrong opinion on race/gender issues, or whatever, on a private blog. Not only do most people reasonably expect to be able to do those things (and/or talk about those things here) without being shamed, but there are too many conflicting standards to meet – plausibly somebody could be shamed by traditionalists for being promiscuous, and by free-love people for not being promiscuous enough. Since shaming is unpleasant and supposed to act as a punishment, this is the equivalent of letting anybody beat up anybody else if they think they’ve broken an unwritten rule. It probably results in a lot of people being beaten up for not very much social change.
III.
The second reason that coordinated meanness is better than uncoordinated meanness is that it is less common. Uncoordinated meanness happens whenever one person wants to be mean; coordinated meanness happens when everyone (or 51% of the population, or an entire church worth of Puritans, or whatever) wants to be mean. If we accept theories like the wisdom of crowds or the marketplace of ideas – and we better, if we’re small-d democrats, small-r republicans, small-l liberals, or basically any word beginning with a lowercase letter at all – then a big group of people all debating with each other will be harder to rile up than a single lunatic.
As a Jew, if I heard that skinheads were beating up Jews in dark alleys, I would be pretty freaked out; for all I know I could be the next victim. But if I heard that skinheads were circulating a petition to get Congress to expel all the Jews, I wouldn’t be freaked out at all. I would expect almost nobody to sign the petition
(and in the sort of world where most people were signing the petition, I hope I would have moved to Israel long before anyone got any chance to expel me anyway)
Trying to coordinate meanness is not in itself a mean act – or at least, not as mean as actual meanness. If Westboro Baptist Church just published lots of pamphlets saying we should pass laws against homosexuality, maybe it would have made some gay people feel less wanted, but it would have been a lot less intense than picketing funerals. If people who are against promiscuity want to write books about why we should all worry about promiscuity, it might get promiscuous people a little creeped out, but a lot less so than going up to promiscuous people and throwing water on them and shouting “YOU STRUMPET!”
This is my answer to people who say that certain forms of speech make them feel unsafe, versus certain other people who demand the freedom to express their ideas. We should all feel unsafe around anybody who relishes uncoordinated meanness – beating people in dark alleys, picketing their funerals, shaming them, harassing them, doxxing them, getting them fired from their jobs. I have no tolerance for these people – I am sometimes forced to accept their existence because of the First Amendment, but I won’t do anything more.
On the other hand, we should feel mostly safe around people who agree that meanness, in the unfortunate cases where it’s necessary, must be coordinated. There is no threat at all from pro-coordination skinheads except in the vanishingly unlikely possibility they legally win control of the government and take over.
I admit that this safety is still only relative. It hinges on the skinheads’ inability to convert 51% of the population. But until the Messiah comes to enforce the moral law directly, safety has to hinge on something. The question is whether it should hinge on the ability of the truth to triumph in the marketplace of ideas in the long-term across an entire society, or whether it should hinge on the fact that you can beat me up with a baseball bat right now.
(if you want pre-Messianic absolute safety, there are some super-democratic mechanisms that might help. America’s Bill of Rights seems pretty close to this; anyone wanting to coordinate meanness against a certain religion has to clear not only the 50% bar, but the much higher level required of Constitutional amendments. Visions of more complete protection remain utopian but alluring. For example, in an Archipelago you might well have absolute safety. The skinheads can’t say “Let’s beat up Jews right now”, they can’t even say “Let’s start an anti-Jew political party and gradually win power”. They can, at best, say, “Let’s go found our own society somewhere else without any Jews”, in which case you need say nothing but “don’t let the door hit you on your way out”. In this case their coordination of meanness cannot possibly hurt anyone.)
IV.
I’ve said many times I find the idea of “safe spaces” very attractive. I think they can be understood not just as spaces that are guaranteed safe for one group, but as spaces that have coordinated meanness against anything that threatens that group – ie they’ve agreed to shame, shun, and expel people who violate group norms. Everybody knows the local norms, and if somebody gets kicked out they can’t say they weren’t warned.
This is the principle with which I deal with the blog comments I started off by talking about. Right now people come to this blog with a default expectation that people aren’t going to be mean to them or try to shame them for things, other than the things universally agreed to be shameful in these general circles (like trolling, spamming, and misusing one-tailed t-tests). I want to explicitly reinforce that expectation here.
If you support being meaner in certain ways for the greater good, either as a subculture or as a society, you’re welcome to try to use this blog to advocate for that policy (within reason), but you’re not welcome to enact that policy unilaterally.
So here are two previously implicit SSC rules, made explicit for your edification:
First, you’re allowed to make (polite) arguments for why we should try shaming certain groups, but you are not allowed to directly shame any commenters here.
Second, you’re allowed to (politely) express your philosophical disagreements with the idea of transgender, but you are not allowed to actually misgender transgender commenters here.
While I largely agree with the object-level conclusion, I have some quibbles with the argument in favor of it.
Taking the example of taxation vs theft, taxation is not free of perverse incentives: instead of living in fear and investing in guard dogs, we avoid otherwise-beneficial behavior on the margins for fear of the tax consequences, and we invest in tax advice, tax prep software, and tax-advantaged investment options to minimize our tax burdens. The particularly rich among us also invests in accountants, lawyers, and (in extreme cases) politicians.
The coordinated nature of taxation does greatly reduce the deadweight loss: I expect the deadweight loss of taxation in the US (and other first-world countries) is much, much less relative to the utility of the tax-funded programs than the deadweight loss due to theft relative to the utility theft accrues to thieves. And if we did have uncoordinated private theft on anywhere near the scale of the current level of taxation, it would probably be the end of civilization. On the other hand, the coordinated nature of taxation allows much, much more taxation to happen than theft, and I’m not sure whether the absolute total deadweight loss due to taxation is less than the absolute total deadweight loss due to theft.
> Taking the example of taxation vs theft, taxation is not free of perverse incentives: instead of living in fear and investing in guard dogs, we avoid otherwise-beneficial behavior on the margins for fear of the tax consequences, and we invest in tax advice, tax prep software, and tax-advantaged investment options to minimize our tax burdens. The particularly rich among us also invests in accountants, lawyers, and (in extreme cases) politicians.
This seems not to be due to the nature of taxation as a policy, but to implementation details. For instance, if we adopted Lord Voldemort’s idea of shifting everything to property taxes, or any of an arbitrary number of other simplifying proposals, it would be easy to reduce the actual time and effort the average person has to put into taxes to about zero — and, similarly, to reduce the perverse incentives against starting new endeavors, to destroy the benefit you can get from paying lots of money for tax lawyers, &c. None of these problems need plague Fnargl’s tax program.
> Lord Voldemort’s idea of shifting everything to property taxes
I assume that you are referring to someone by a nickname, but I am nevertheless going to adopt this as a Harry Potter headcanon.
Apparently it’s a local nickname for Mencius Moldbug. (I just found this out last week)
It’s kind of an inside joke.
There was a flame war a while back that resulted in Scott declaring a moratorium on discussing Moldbug posts.
Naturally people started referring to Moldbug as “he-who-shall-not-be-named” which, thanks to the “headcanon” effect, led to lots of jokes/speculation about what sort of political platform, tax proposals, etc… Lord Voldemort would advocate.
And it’s an incorrect inside joke, because Scott did not declare a moratorium on discussing Moldbug posts and indeed specifically said that if you wanted to talk about Moldbug and/or his posts you should do so and use the name “Moldbug” to make it clear what you were talking about.
But, yeah, it has by now morphed into Moldbug as Voldemort.
I suspect the actual bans are causing some of the problem.
It isn’t obvious, and I certainly didn’t remember, that “Moldbug” is permitted among all the things that are prohibited. So instead of trying all combinations to see what gets through, people use indirect references even when direct references would be allowed. Scott’s policy of banning certain words has effects outside just those words.
If memory serves, it wasn’t Moldbug’s name which was banned, but the name of the political philosophy which he espouses.
So taxation without deadweight loss works in theory, but has anyone actually tried it?
Actually, lump-sum taxes (which are theoretically non-distortionary) have been implemented many times.
Shifting all taxes to property taxes does not remove the deadweight losses or perverse incentives.
It simply moves them to a different place. (Probably a less-obvious place.)
Actually if by a property tax you mean a land value tax it at least drastically reduces the deadweight losses/perverse incentives. The reason is that the supply of land is completely inelastic; if you tax income, people are incentivized to work less, but no matter how much you tax land there isn’t going to be any less of it.
Of course there’s the issue of progressiveness, but if you have the ability to convert all taxation to land value taxes you can probably institute a UBI or whatever to make up for it.
“Make as much money as you want, however you can, as long as you don’t increase the value of any durable property” isn’t a perverse incentive?
To be clear, Land Value tax is not quite the same as property tax. The entire point of Land Value tax is that you *don’t* count the value of any of the buildings/improvements on it, so that what you are actually taxing is the “ground rent” itself — ie, the value your land has accrued by virtue of being in proximity to things your neighbors have produced.
I’m not an expert but apparently lots of smart economists point to this distinction being what makes Land Value tax special and less prone to deadweight loss than other taxes (including Property tax).
In short, the theory is that ground rent represents value the community, not you, have produced, and the rent of the stuff on your land represents value that you, not the community, have produced.
Put another way —
By taxing the ground rent, you return to the community the value it has produced rather than let that positive externality be captured and lost to a rent-seeker. The Henry George theorem[1] further suggests that the ground rent is approximately equal to the amount of spending on public goods in an area — so that not only would land value tax be a sensible way to accrue enough tax to pay for all your public goods without needing additional taxes that do suffer deadweight loss, it also keeps the value of public goods from being unfairly captured by private interests who just happen to own land situated in a strategic location (ie, speculators).
That’s the theory at least, explained in its own terms, as best as I understand it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem
Addendum: hilariously, this theory was put to the test when an economic consultant independently derived the theory in order to solve an early problem with speculators in EVE Online:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189984/How_I_Used_EVE_Online_to_Predict_the_Great_Recession.php
“Actually if by a property tax you mean a land value tax it at least drastically reduces the deadweight losses/perverse incentives. The reason is that the supply of land is completely inelastic; if you tax income, people are incentivized to work less, but no matter how much you tax land there isn’t going to be any less of it.”
Utter nonsense. There is a difference between *land area* and *land value*. The former is highly inelastic, but in a completely meaningless way.
Land value is determined by its usage, which is highly elastic. Note for example, that a square foot on the slope of a remote mountain, is probably worth less than a square foot underneath the Empire State Building.
Of the following scenarios, are any possible?
– Taxes on land lead to the abandonment of plans to fill a body of water, resulting in less land than there otherwise would have been.
– Taxes on land lead to reduced efforts to keep the sea out of an area below sea level, resulting in less land than there used to be.
– Taxes on land lead to less care and maintenance of the land, and it desertifies, resulting in the same amount of land, except that less of it is usable.
That argument for the LVT fails to consider that the cost of public goods is related to the improvements more than the land. That is, if I have an acre on one side of a street and my neighbor has an acre on the other side, and I have a single-family home but he has a 100-unit apartment building, chances are he and his tenants cost a lot more (in terms of required schooling, policing, sewer, water, etc) than my family does.
Michael Watts –
In this system, the first two would be the sorts of things government should be doing.
The third, however, doesn’t actually make sense?
In all three cases, you would still buy, and sell, land. You’d be taxed more heavily on your ownership of it, but causing your property values to drop wouldn’t be a very wise choice unless your goal is just to reduce your property taxes – but if that’s your goal, it’d be more profitable to just sell it.
Orphan Wilde, I don’t understand your objection. Land needs maintenance just like everything else needs maintenance. The question isn’t “do I want my land to be more valuable or less valuable?”, it’s “does the value of the land cover the cost of maintenance, or is it better to get what I can while it’s there?”. Taxes on the land reduce its value as accounted against the cost of maintenance.
I also don’t understand the implicit argument that a deadweight loss imposed by taxes no longer counts if we have the government assume general responsibility for doing, at some level, the same kind of activity that was prevented by the deadweight loss.
Michael Watts –
I don’t think value is as easily extracted from land as you seem to imply? My family had land. We sold it; it was a deadweight loss for us. (My grandfather bought land, more or less, because that’s what people did when they got money in the part of the country we lived in. He never extracted any value from it.)
Whoever bought it presumably put it to better use.
If there were a Shinra machine that could leach the life force out of the land and leave a desert and the ex-owner a little richer, we might have a problem; but land doesn’t work like that. (If you killed all the grazers on your land for a long period of time, you might see desertification issues, granted. But hunting rights, for lack of knowledge of the correct terminology, are an entirely independent issue.)
Lars,
So, that proposal (if it could even be implemented at all, which I’m skeptical of) would push people to build out and away from others, creating a different set of externalities (more costs to get from place to place) and deadweight loss (buildings not being built in optimal areas).
@Alex
The square foot under the empire state building is valuable because of the rest of New York, most of which is not under the empire state building’s owner’s control. For a sensible land value tax, the land under the building is taxed as if it were an empty lot, taking the rest of the city constant, so the building itself has no effect on the assessed land value.
@Michael
The first two scenarios are plausible. However, a sensible land value tax should not take into account the state of maintenance and repair of the property in assessing the tax value, leading to no reduced incentive to maintain the land (short of outright abandonment of the property). Abandonment could be a problem with high land value taxes, particularly given errors in the assessments that might put the taxes above the use value of the land.
” For a sensible land value tax, the land under the building is taxed as if it were an empty lot, taking the rest of the city constant, so the building itself has no effect on the assessed land value.”
How can you possibly know what that is?
This still discourages building in developed areas–any tax that can change based on behavior will have DWL.
I’m no property value assessor, so perhaps I should leave that to the experts – but really, it doesn’t seem like you can’t get an approximation. Any time a lot is sold and the existing building is torn down and replaced, subtract any undestroyed improvements and add an estimate of the teardown cost to the sale price to provide an estimate of the land value; develop a model about what factors (location only) influence the land value and estimate the parameters in the model using these data points. You could also use land sales in which the building is not torn down if you can accurately estimate the building value.
No property would be assessed on it’s own actual sale price, only based on the model.
No doubt somebody who actually knows something about this could do much better.
I should note that, if your concern is efficiency, it’s much more important that the assessed land value is hard to manipulate than that it actually be accurate. This suggests keeping the model simple.
There are some deadweight losses because people will forgo opportunities to buy up multiple lots to make improvements to one to increase the value of the others; because there will be imperfections in the assessment that will lead to some scope for manipulation, etc. The point is, these deadweight losses should be much smaller than for any other tax we currently use.
How can you possibly know what that is
The same way you know what the value of a piece of land and building together are worth – look at what similar plots of land and/or buildings are selling for in similar markets. This isn’t rocket science.
It does require enough domain-specific knowledge that I, a rocket scientist, usually just ask an assessor. The ones who have assessed my piece of residential real estate, and I’m looking at one of their reports right now, seem to have had little trouble making separate entries for “current assessed value – land” and “current assessed value – improvements”.
Unlike say the zero rapes in trans open restrooms which are certainly cause for concern.
Property tax as the only fair tax isn’t particularly a Voldemort idea, I seem to recall that its most well-known proponent was Henry George.
Indeed, also Adam Smith (according to Wikipedia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
“Indeed, also Adam Smith”
But David Ricardo, who was a much better theorist than Smith, argued against it—from a public choice/rent seeking standpoint. He pointed out that if the value of land largely depended on the taxes imposed on it, land would tend to be held not by those who could best make use of it but by those with the best political connections.
Which points at one of the problems with land value taxation–the problem of how to separate the site value of land, which is supposed to be what gets taxed, from the rest of the value. It might be doable by a sufficiently intelligent economist who actually wanted to get it right—but he isn’t likely to the person the IRS gives the job to.
Consider, as an analogous proposal, an IQ tax. Properly measured to include only the genetic element, it has the same attractive feature–taxing an input to production in perfectly inelastic supply.
Putting aside possible dysgenic effects.
@David
That’s probably a much stronger objection for relatively unimproved land (e.g. most rural land) then for highly improved land (e.g. most city land).
In the city, if anything I’d expect land taxes to be less subject to political manipulation than current property taxes. Fully developed lots can vary in value for all sorts of reasons but less reasons for a land value tax (location, location, location).
Could something similar have happened in Atlantis? Wrong tax system, and the whole civilization literally sinks in the ocean…
Hell, the Economist advocated for it. Well, not nothing but a property or Land Value tax, but at least more of it.
Can you expand on this in more detail, please? I thought that tax brackets are doing a pretty good job at leaving income monotonic pretty much everywhere.
I’m curious what you think the motivation is, if intentional.
(full disclosure, I have three family members who can only afford health insurance as a direct result of Obamacare; bias applies)
People are very good at not quite intending things that benefit them.
Remember that we have a large bureaucracy whose business is looking after poor people.
Mark’s right. After some of the mid-90s reforms, most American federal welfare programs were pretty decent at avoiding the 100% marginal income tax thresholds, but the PPACA subsidy program really jacked that up. I only know a few it happened to last year, but the exact problem is it happens to people who are making like $15,000 a year, really poor people who can’t afford an out-of-nowhere unexpected two grand bill from the government.
“I thought that tax brackets are doing a pretty good job at leaving income monotonic pretty much everywhere.”
After tax income increases with before tax income under the standard graduated tax system, as long as no marginal rates reach or exceed 100%. But there are costs to earning income. If increasing my income by a thousand dollars costs leisure that I value at five hundred dollars, a marginal tax rate above 50% makes it not in my interest to do it.
Sometimes the costs are even straightforwardly financial. Specific details depend on country; for example where I live there is often the situation where employees could get more money by traveling to work, but they are not allowed to deduct the costs of the travel from their income. So the marginal tax plus the costs of traveling may exceed the marginal income.
The marginal rate greater than 100% scenario is a special case where the effects are large and obvious, but any nontrivial marginal tax rate has distortionary effects. To decide if an economic activity is worthwhile, you look at the expected benefit (after-tax income), adjust for risk, aggravation, status effects, etc, and compare against your next best alternative. The classic examples are work vs leisure (are you making enough the last hour you’re working that you wouldn’t rather be home playing Halo) and market production vs home production (work overtime and hire a painter, or paint your house yourself; alternately, have both spouses work and pay for daycare, a cleaning service, and takeout, or have one spouse stay home with the kids and do the cooking and cleaning). Since market production is taxed while leisure and non-market home production is generally untaxed, high marginal taxes can change which side of the choice looks best. The higher the marginal rate, the more likely it is the make the difference.
The effect is not unique to income taxes. Pretty much any tax has a deadweight loss associated with it. The formulation I hear most often is that deadweight loss is proportional to the square of the marginal rate and the elasticities of the supply and demand curves for the thing being taxed. The latter point is why land value tax is theorized to be an exception with little or no deadweight loss: the supply of unimproved land is thought to be perfectly inelastic because nobody is making more of it (at least outside of the Netherlands).
Search for “deadweight loss due to taxation” or look up the relevant chapter in your favorite microeconomics textbook for a full explanation.
I had an interesting thought that I wonder if anybody has any data on. How much of the change in % of households with two working adults (outside the home in a job) is due to changing marginal tax rates and the cheapening cost of housework due to labor-saving devices?
> and (in extreme cases) politicians.
I think you’re much more optimistic than I am about this. Companies lobby and bribe to increase their profits as a policy, and this is nearly indisputable. (on the internet, people often stumble across laws that are pretty ridiculous, like a tariff on foreign pillow cases or something, and the answer to “why?” is more often than not lobbying)
Back in the 90s, Microsoft used to brag that they spent not a penny on lobbyists. Sounds like great policy – make stuff people want, don’t bother with politics, and everyone wins. So naturally society decided to reward them by…launching a court case to destroy Microsoft as a company for having the temerity to give us free stuff. Now they spend millions on lobbying.
Yes, some companies use lobbyists aggressively to rent-seek. Others just lobby in self-defence.
I’ve talked with left-wingers who don’t believe any lobbying by business is self-defense.
There are left-wingers who believe that all businesses have magical money trees and are willfully refusing to hand the money out, out of pure spite.
At least, that’s the premise that would make their arguments make the most sense.
It’s not like there’s a hard and fast rule against rent-seeking vs. self-defense once you’re forced to lobby.
Microsoft was “rewarded” for being an abusive monopoly. Which is something you know very well. Maybe you disagree with that, but why the fuck would you raise this completely offtopic issue here in such an obnoxious and dishonest way?
Microsoft was called “abusive” for providing free software to its consumers – that competing operating systems were allowed to provide. Microsoft wanted to provide its Office products as a free component of Windows, for example, and was prevented from doing so by court order (no such move against Apple, who does provide such free software). Same deal with IE versus Safari – Microsoft is required to provide a way to uninstall IE. Safari -can- be uninstalled using third-party applications, but Apple doesn’t provide the mechanism.
This wasn’t curbing the excesses of an “abusive monopoly”, this was blatant market favoritism, and I’m afraid I agree wholeheartedly with those who assert that Microsoft was punished for not ponying up campaign contributions to powerful politicians (who run the most abusive monopoly around).
@Orphan
You don’t seem to understand why such rules are in place.
Joe Blogs who runs a small bus service offers free fares for the day: not a problem.
Bill Blogs Inc, a multinational with deep pockets moves into Joes town and offers free fares until Joe and all the other small actors have gone bankrupt then starts charging twice the price Joe Blogs used to charge: Big problem.
(this is actually a tactic that certain bus companies used, using their deep pockets to eliminate local competition then jacking up the price)
If a software company which has 1% of the market offers a free extra to try to draw people in it’s not a problem.
If a software company which has 95%+ of the market uses it’s advantage in one area (operating systems) to try to get an advantage in another (browsers) then that’s a problem.
It’s not one rule for all, it’s one rule for people who control the majority of the market and another for people who don’t. And that’s sane and sensible.
In hindsight it the browser “market” had already collapsed due to some good free browsers. Nobody was going to be able to jack up the price once they had control of the market but the rules are written for the more normal case.
Do you have any cases of such tactics at market capture (through non-regulatory means) both working, and returning a profit to the company that engaged in them?
I’ve personally seen a few companies attempt it. In the cases I’ve observed, they always give up because it didn’t actually work, including in one case an attempt to capture the gasoline fueling market of a town of a couple of thousand people, where it should have worked trivially.
(from The Machinery of Freedom)
(ETA: my point is that this price war stuff is probably a good deal more fiction than reality.).
Well, that’s a great second example of the tactic failing miserably?
Standard Oil is in general a terrible example of the need for monopoly regulation. I don’t understand why people bring it up – on the one hand, yes, it was a natural monopoly. On the other hand, it had been rapidly losing market share to its competitors for nearly a decade when the government stepped in and took credit for what was already happening anyways. (More, I’d argue that the government wouldn’t have dared attack it at the zenith of its market power, because Standard Oil could easily, and relatively cheaply, have purchased most of the government officials of the time)
To me the most remarkable thing about the theory of predatory monopoly is how popular it is with people who also believe that businesses are excessively focused on next quarter’s profit. Of course I have no idea whether the person who brought up the idea here is one of those people.
There are serious problems with the theory of predatory monopolies. First, what happens to the competitors’ plants and equipment when they collapse? Do they burst into flames just because their owners are bankrupt? No, they get sold at cut-rate prices, allowing another competitor to enter the market very cheaply. Of course, the monopolist can try to buy them up himself. I believe Rockefeller tried to do that at one point, and people started building fake refineries to sell to Rockefeller!
I heard a story once about an American chemical manufacturer whose European competitors tried to put him out of business by selling the chemicals below cost in America. He simply hired proxy-buyers to buy up everything they were selling in America and re-sold it in Europe at a profit!
And what if you actually managed to sell your product at a price of zero? How long would you have to do that to finally kill off all the competition? Well, the public school system has been offering zero-cost schooling for a century, and there are still private schools everywhere. So it takes at least a hundred years in the education market, and I see no reason why education should be the exception rather than the rule. That’s a long time to sell at a loss!
Education is the exception because
1) Education quality can really vary, by a lot more than typical widget quality. If Microsoft distributed free browsers that caused a 50% chance of making your computer burst into flames when run, there would still be significant paid commercial browsers. Furthermore, the very fact that public education is run by government causes the government to be able to get away with poor quality products–it’s not as if people can stop paying for them.
2) Many people are very price-insensitive when it comes to buying essentials for their children
That’s news to me. Every source I’ve ever seen says that Standard Oil’s market share had dropped from 70% to 64% by 1911, and this was largely driven by Standard Oil pulling back on some of its more aggressive practices to drive out competitors, precisely to try and head off action by the feds. While there were competitors, they were almost entirely in areas Standard hadn’t expanded into, and held the same vertical structure Standard did (something that would automatically raise red flags today).
That isn’t the relevant timescale.
“In 1904, Standard controlled 91 percent of production and 85 percent of final sales.”
Has anyone ever seen someone dressed like a man enter a women’s restroom? Or any employee at any establishment ever tell a man “excuse me, sir, you’re not allowed in there”? You might say “well, they’re just not taking advantage because, right now, they know they could get in trouble, but if you open the floodgates to giving male-appearing people the benefit of the doubt…” but if there were all these predators out there only held back by the threat of an employee saying “excuse me, sir,” well, one, you would expect them to be making an occasional failed attempt one might witness, and two, I would personally expect the vast majority of attempts to be successful, because most public bathrooms are not closely monitored and the consequences for a failed attempt are nothing more than momentary embarrassment.
This just seems like such a non-issue to me.
Microsoft wasn’t punished for wanting to give people free stuff. If Microsoft decides to provide something for ‘free’ in Windows, all they’re doing is rolling the cost of it into what they charge for Windows, and removing the ability of consumers to purchase one without the other.
From the consumer perspective, “Woo! I no longer have to purchase Office” immediately means every computer they buy from a vendor locked into Windows now costs $50-$70 more, and they have no option to try to use something like ‘Open Office’ or Google docs instead. It also removes most of the need for Microsoft to price Office competitively, since their consumers are only and to choose between somewhat more expensive Windows and nothing.
This is a practice known as ‘bundling’ which we have laws against, specifically because of how harmful it can be when monopolies or near monopolies engage in it.
Was the bundling of Internet Explorer with their operating system the best example of their anti-competitive practices? No. Was it the most urgent thing to sue them for? No. The lawsuit was too little, too late, and fairly arbitrary in its target. That does not however make Microsoft the victim here, it just means of government did far less than it should have to guard against their monopolistic practices.
Something Witty –
They weren’t planning on increasing the price with the mentioned inclusion; their plan was to roll it out with home versions of Windows, so more users would be familiar with it, which would improve their sales to businesses and large corporations.
It was a more official version of their strategy of quietly encouraging piracy among home users for the same reason.
The thing about Microsoft is that, until relatively recently, home consumers were never their target market; they made their money in corporate sales and services. The home consumers were more a marketing strategy than anything else; make sure the people businesses hired were familiar with Windows so they’d have to buy that.
Is there really a general law against bundling? I ask because Southwest Airlines is still running ads boasting about how checked-baggage service is bundled with their regular fares.
I believe the anti-bundling rule only applies to bundling something a company has a monopoly in with something it does not have a monopoly in.
IIUC what Microsoft did would have been perfectly okay for Apple.
@Jiro, are you really saying that the quality of browsers doesn’t vary? Internet
ExploderExplorer has long been the butt of jokes, and even if the government hadn’t stepped in there’s no reason to think browsers like Chrome or Firefox wouldn’t have come into existence.Quality of browsers doesn’t vary as much, even though it does vary. Dumping browsers can make Microsoft get a monopoly in paid browsers despite their browser being inferior, but it doesn’t work if the browser is *too* inferior.
Browsers have not reached that point. Schools have, especially since people have much more exacting requirements for educating their children than for browsers.
Re: Bundling
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/business/26SCEN.html?pagewanted=all
Wikipedia says Microsoft is not actually banned from bundling products under its agreement with the Feds. I think M$ doesn’t bundle Office because it can charge a premium for different versions of Office. The typical home version of Office doesn’t include Access, for instance.
A lot of the business world operates off Office, unfortunately. I have no idea why major companies essentially keep all data in a series of linked Access databases, but what the fuck do I know. *grumble grumble*
@Orphan Wilde
@Psmith
Yes.
The company Stagecoach.
They’ve come under fire from the MMC (Monopolies and Mergers). They would move into a town, swamp local smaller bus services with far more busses and start a half price “sale” that lasts as many months as it takes for the smaller competitors to go bust or pull out.
Since deregulation of the bus market in the UK fares have gone up far far above inflation.
Stagecoach has grown to a 430m pound company. So price wars and unfair competition worked really well for them.
One problem with the Darlington example is that the alleged predator didn’t gain a monopoly. Nor is it obvious that it was even aiming for one; if the article can be trusted, the Stagecoach subsidiary, a new entrant in the market, initially offered free service in order to skirt a regulatory restriction on when it could begin paid service.
In case anyone is still checking these comments; I dunno about in the U.S., but I know in Australia the Bunnings hardware store chain is notorious for price gouging.
I’d guess this probably means other Wesfarmers owned chains would do the same given the chance, but Target, K-Mart and Coles are all in competition with other similarly well-funded chains. Although Officeworks doesn’t seem to have obtained a monopoly despite only being in competition with smaller companies.
@Soumynona – first warning. You are likely to get banned if you continue.
Yes, some companies use lobbyists aggressively to rent-seek. Others just lobby in self-defence.
When rent-seeking becomes the norm, businesses may find themselves rent-seeking (even rent-seeking aggressively) as a matter of self-defense. I don’t blame businesses for doing that – in fact, I’m sympathetic to their plight. Yet it’s still rent-seeking. Or so it seems to me.
It’s also that the marginal cost of rent seeking is lowered by developing a self defense lobby. It’s expensive to lobby to prevent some harmful laws. It’s not much more expensive to also lobby for for favorable laws at the same time.
Once a business has a lobbying ability there is a huge temptation to rent seek. Also, the lower marginal cost makes previously unprofitable rent seeking profitable.
People here seem to be limiting “rent seeking” to behavior they disapprove of. In terms of the relevant economics, defensive expenditures are also rent seeking.
The rent seeking costs of theft include both the thief’s time and effort trying to steal from me and my time and effort trying to keep him from stealing from me.
@David F. Thanks for that. I’ll have to remember to change how I use the term in the future.
Lobbying is a Constitutional right.
As for “bribes” — what’s the difference between a bribe and protection money?
It should be remembered here than in many (most?) other first-world countries, the idea of tax advice or tax prep software (for individuals – businesses are another matter) would be ridiculous.
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/8/11380356/swedish-taxes-love
“In Sweden, the four-page tax form comes in the mail already filled out. On a Saturday morning, Betty and I take our coffee to the couch and review the forms. Seeing they look reasonable, as they always do, we “sign” with a text from our phones. In 15 minutes we are done. We don’t have to hire a tax consultant, and we avoid fights about whether a print cartridge bought at the drugstore is a business expense or not.
The Swedes expect their government to be efficient, and the tax authority is. Only 11 percent of the Swedish taxpayers say it is NOT easy to fill out their forms. I can’t imagine what a similar survey question would show in the US.”
The American tax system is ludicrously, ridiculously inefficient.
I’ll take spending a few hours and having to buy a computer program to fill out my taxes, to an extra 9% of my income, which is the difference between their US tax and their Swedish tax.
Sure, but the tax level is entirely unrelated to this.
It’s easy to exaggerate the difficulty of filing U.S. taxes because for some edge cases (generally involving non-public business owners) it can get very complex.
But for the majority of people that have only w2 income and for whom the standard deduction is best, it is quite straightforward.
I think you overestimate the average person’s ability to fill out multiple-page forms that include pointers in their arithmetic and obtuse language. Or more meaningfully, their ability to determine, based on some often extremely obtuse language, which forms they even need to fill out.
I volunteer with the VITA program, an IRS-sponsored free tax prep program for low-income people. Some of our clients are self-employed with legitimately complicated tax situations, but at least half have only W2 income and take the standard deduction.
Most of the time, they’re still lost amid the thicket of tax forms.
I agree, the Swedish system would be by far the best. Send a simple pre-filled tax form, with a cover letter saying “If you’re self-employed, or you donated more than $X in non-cash charitable gifts, or you XYZ, you should probably fill things out yourself instead.”
Fair enough. I’ve only done my own — both by hand and by computer program — never tried to help anyone else.
Be aware that state and local income taxes or sales taxes (but not both) can be deducted. It takes a highish middle-class income or a high-tax state or both, but it’s not uncommon for that to push you out of standard deduction territory alone, whether or not you have mortgage interest or large donations to deduct.
Doesn’t make tax forms much harder, though. I bought tax software for years before figuring out that doing it myself wasn’t much more of a pain.
If I think it would be good to shame a particular group of people (not on this blog, in general), how do I know when I have sufficient coordination to meet the standard? The only specific examples I see in this post is government, which seems like a decent way to coordinate violent meanness, but not necessarily of coordinating shaming; and meanness to protect safe spaces, which is different from shaming random individuals who aren’t trying to be part of your group.
To be more specific, suppose I want to do the Puritan teen pregnancy shaming thing. Do I have to get Congress to pass a bill saying everyone should be mean to teen mothers? Should I conduct a poll of my local community and look for a particular percentage of support? Etc.
I think it depends on which community you want to discourage from having teen pregnancies. If you don’t want pregnant teens in your internet forum, you need to talk to the forum moderators. If you don’t want pregnant teens using Tumblr, you need to get something added to the Tumblr code of conduct. If you don’t want pregnant teens at your school, you need to talk to the board of directors. If you don’t want pregnant teens in your nation, then yeah, you need to talk to Congress.
Note that most actual communities, when they want to dissuade people from doing something, will have a better way of punishing people than “random people will shame you”. Being shamed by random people is not a very good punishment, because it’s difficult to predict, and because it falls more heavily on some people than others. Communities will assign punishments like “forum moderators will ban you from the forum” or “police will put you in prison”. The specific tactic of shaming is something that people only need to use when they don’t have sufficient coordination to create an actual rule against a behavior.
I suppose it’s possible that someone might be coming at this question, not from the perspective of “I want to dissuade teens from getting pregnant”, but from the more specific perspective of “I would enjoy shaming some pregnant teens”. All I can say is that person would be a jerk, and that person should not be allowed to shame anyone.
Despite LW-style rhetoric about people’s single true objection, most people have multiple reasons for what they do. It’s not beyond belief that someone would both enjoy what he does and want to do it to better the world as well.
grort: That reasoning implies you should always oppose protest marches.
That does not seem to invalidate the reasoning at all.
Banning pregnant teens from Tumblr probably won’t do much to prevent teen pregnancy. Arresting them or kicking them out of school might, but both of those options are all-but-guaranteed to mess up their lives, and we don’t want to do that.
Shaming can potentially discourage a behavior without creating substantial material harm to the people who are shamed. IF we’re going to institute a punishment to discourage a self-destructive behavior, shaming seems like one of the better options, if not the best.
Of course, shaming can still cause material harm (to mental health). I’m not saying anyone should go around shaming teen mothers (I feel bad picking on them; I just stole them as an example from the OP). But I do think shaming and others forms of meanness are sometimes a useful tool, when used judiciously, and I’m against a general rule prohibiting all disorganized meanness, and all shaming, without respect to context.
The reason shaming makes people feel bad is because it tells them, on an emotional level, that others disapprove. “I disapprove” and “you suck” have essentially the same semantics, but “you suck” is stronger emotionally. I think sometimes, in some circumstances, it’s necessary to make someone feel the disapproval to get them to understand. It’s not just about punishment (although that can play a role), but about conveying emotions.
I feel like teen mothers aren’t really the best category to use as an example for shaming, especially for online communities, since like you said the effects would be negligible. Teen pregnancy isn’t really an idealogical position or attitude as much as a sign of poverty and bad sex education, so things like homophobia or racism work better as categories when thinking about rules for communities. Someone can refrain from saying a racist or homophobic thing in a comment on a blog, but a pregnant teen can’t just stop being pregnant at will to follow the rules of a group.
This may not be entirely accurate, at least in an American context. See for instance.
Depends on the jurisdiction.
Ok, but I don’t want to talk about using shaming (or whatever) to enforce norms within the context of a group. I want to talk about using shaming (or whatever) to reduce bad behavior in the wider world, and increase the world’s overall utility.
I still think that “random people will shame you” is a terrible punishment. People who are powerful within the community would be immune to this punishment, because nobody would dare try to shame them. People who are weak within the community would be shamed much harder.
If you’re proposing that the government, or some other centralized process, would shame people in a controlled and measurable way — I could imagine that being useful for some forms of behavior modification. For example I can imagine a software engineering group where, if you break the build, you have to wear the Hat of Shame for a day.
This is the yes-man phenomenon, and it doesn’t just apply to shaming; it applies to any form of showing disapproval. If someone powerful requests honest feedback on something, they will be less likely to receive negative feedback if people don’t like it. I actually think this is a negative for powerful people, but I’m sure many of them like it.
If we’re going to ban anything that people apply unfairly based on status, we’re going to have to ban literally all social interaction.
I recall one discussion on Hacker News about an office where the last person to break the build was awarded a rubber chicken, to be displayed prominently on their desk until someone else broke the build. This was in a larger thread about building a big red flashing light that would go off continuously as long as the build was broken.
So yeah, group shaming seems to be a fairly common and effective method in that circumstance.
We really have built a big red flashing light that goes off continuously whenever the build is broken.
We don’t have rubber chickens, but we do have periodic discussions about hooking up a nerf gun so it will auto-shoot whoever breaks the build.
At my last job, there was a large orange pipe wrench, which upon build breakage was carried to the person responsible (by all engineers present, with musical accompaniment by a button that played the Imperial March) and left on top of their cubicle until the next time the build was broken.
I’m not sure it really mapped to shame, though. I received the wrench a few times, but never felt like it was an attempt to show bad feeling towards me, and when I was helping present the wrench it didn’t feel like we were trying to make the other person feel bad. It was more just a shared ritual among the group, all in good fun, with the additional side effect of making sure a build breaking was never trivialized or ignored.
Shame is bad. The problem’s not that Dan broke the build; the problem is that the build is broken. So a red flashing light indicating that we all have a problem is far preferable to a chicken or wrench or dunce cap indicating that Dan has/is a problem.
It should be everyone’s top priority to get the build un-broken ASAP. Maybe at first only a couple of people can pitch in usefully; that’s OK, but they should be able to pull in others as needed. (And don’t underestimate the efficiency of simply reverting to the last working build and integrating Dan’s stuff again.)
Next step is to figure out why the build broke on the build server: did it work on Dan’s machine? Are there tests that only intermittently fail (that is, only intermittently do their job)? Is something different about the configuration on Dan’s box and the build server?
Whatever the answer, make sure to fix that, with the same urgency that you fixed the build.
“The specific tactic of shaming is something that people only need to use when they don’t have sufficient coordination to create an actual rule against a behavior.”
The existence of systems of social norms is evidence that the tactic can work. My standard example is that there is no law preventing me from teaching university classes stripped to my waist—but it would be a foolish thing to do.
For more and more elaborate examples, see Order Without Law by Ellickson.
So…this article is a long winded way of saying “Say whatever you want except attacking other people in the comments section directly”.
As I understand it, it’s basically “It’s okay to say that iPhones suck and should go away, and people who use iPhones should be ashamed of themselves. But it’s not okay to say another commenter sucks because they use an iPhone”
That bout right?
>long winded
you lost bro?
Scott writes an entire argument on being constructive in the comments section, and you happen to write a poor quality comment in the one way that isn’t explicitly stated to be wrong.
Well, to be honest, noting on an SSC post that it is long and can be said in fewer words is also not exactly constructive, nor new information 😀
Yeah, yeah. I think Scott needs to start making TL;DRs for most of his posts, because I think some people might find them too dense.
This one wasn’t even long..
Why are you complaining about him doing something that, by your own admission, isn’t wrong?
“That bout right?”
I don’t think so. If you say that all iPhone users should be ashamed of themselves you are still shaming the iPhone-using commenter in a (very clumsily) concealed manner. The post isn’t about being a sneaky dick. It’s about not being a dick at all.
Talk, instead, of all the reasons why iPhones create a great social harm and why having a policy of aggressively discouraging iPhone use would lead to great justice.
Yeah, you can’t say “all [category you’re in] are terrible” to someone, but you can use it in an abstract argument. I think. As long as you say in a polite and far-view-sounding manner.
I’m curious about how this interacts with the notion of criminal law as a mechanism to limit power rather than control behavior.
The notion goes thusly: we can’t really stop everyone from being jerks by government action, and we shouldn’t try because that would lead to anti-libertarian (statist?) dystopia. So the purpose of criminal law is to stop it from going too far – saying “okay, you can be jerks to each other, but if it goes too far and you hit the other guy’s head or car with a baseball bat, the government’s going to step in”. I like this approach (I should probably admit that I got it off the Dresden Files).
This gives a notion of the use of power that’s orthogonal to the meanness axis, but is still important: locally (if you know the story and the people involved), you might be able to judge a situation well enough to interfere based on who’s right. But if you’re a government (or even a closer authority figure like a schoolteacher), you probably can’t, and should leave things alone until they get out of hand.
The problem is that this implies that the only people who are allowed to be mean are people who know you personally. Say, in a situation where someone needs to realize he’s passed the bounds of good taste and is just being a jerk, you shouldn’t coordinate your response – someone who knows him needs to tell him. This is a contradiction I’m having a hard time resolving.
(Also, does the explicity of the new rules mean no one’s allowed to say things like “bronies are creeps?” Becuase if so, yay.)
Somebody on this blog who didn’t leave in the great Hegira to Tumblr actually said “bronies are creeps”?
Yes.
Oh, well…. fimfic. I can sympathize with him, even from the inside.
There exists an r/bronyweapons for just this sort of content, I believe.
Why do I get the feeling the kinds of people who organize Everfree are not particularly happy about that?
Oh hey, here comes more happiness. >_>
Reckon there’s still time to organize a West Coast Armoury group visit before next week? I kinda wanna see someone’s fluttershy-themed suppressor build…
Hang on, if you can’t shame people out of the safe space for violating group norms, it’s not a safe space. To me, it just looks like you’re saying “nobody is allowed to guard the wall”.
Also, “the things universally agreed to be shameful in these general circles” are determined through practice, not discussion.
Right, it’s not a safe space. It’s Scott’s space. He is allowed to kick people out for violating
grouphis norms. No coordinated meanness is necessary.Which means any group that wants to dominate discourse is motivated to be constantly pushy and provocative at a low level that just slips beneath Scott’s willingness to waste all his time policing thousands of comments a week.
Feels like it’d shape up exactly like Twitter’s moderation system, with all the same mob-coordinated manipulation.
Well yes if a huge group is putting in a concentrated effort to dominate you and your space, the response necessarily needs to be different than a system designed to fend off random bad actors. Twitter has millions more people than SSC has commentators, so there are things that will work here that won’t on twitter.
You forget Scott’s reign of terror, he can just block the email addresses or IP addresses if he gets sick of moderating individual comments.
I kind of want to start calling Scott a noble dictator now. Can we do that?
(actually, I think the modern word for this is “mod”)
@Rob: How about “philosopher king” instead?
@Error: Discerning despot?
Monarch/CEO/beneveolent dictator chimera?
Enlightened tyrant?
In the event that happened, I imagine he would disable commenting for non-whitelisted accounts.
Yeah, and we’ve seen it. They don’t seem to be able to stay below the threshold consistently, though, and they get banned.
I’m very very lenient to anybody who’s nasty because somebody provoked them first. There have been a lot of otherwise ban-worthy comments I’ve let slip for that reason.
Only when you notice and care about the provocation, which you don’t.
But it still puts you in the position of having to mentally process all of them and apply the appropriate amount of leniency in the context of a 5-deep comment chain full of catty sniping.
It doesn’t have to give you impossible decisions to overload your system–just too many annoying ones that suck up valuable time.
It’s a standard entryist trick, isn’t it? Create lots of drama, demand more moderation, accuse moderators of the usual transgressions (not caring about the safety of X!), then offer to take over moderation as volunteers.
It also exposes the moderator up to outside attacks that they could have otherwise avoided by avoiding certain subjects. Penny Arcade’s community is a prime example of this exploit working extremely well.
You’re a dozen times smarter than I am, but you still only have 24 hours in a day. That’s going to be the weak point of any one-man moderation system, no matter how effective and charitable it is.
Four thoughts:
1) “a church worth of Puritans” is my new default unit of social approval/disapproval.
2) In some cases, might it be necessary to have uncoordinated actions before society can agree on coordinated actions? Sometimes it might be awareness raising, other times we might want to beta-test them. As an example of the former, the civil rights movement had to overcome a lot of community standards through individual demonstrations against them before there was a societal and legal change. As an example of the later, we had to infect a few people with cow pox before we could demonstrate a need for societal-wide vaccination.
3) I find these lines blurry in terms of actions vs. words. Namely, how do we distinguish “shaming” from broader societal wide discourse? So If I write a letter saying “Green-eyed people are ugly and should not represent our nation. They should have their passports revoked” and send it to my [brown-eyed] Congressman, that’s fine, but sending the same letter to my green-eyed neighbor is forbidden?
4) How do we define the societal unit? This blog has high standards for one-tailed t-tests, and you seem to think it’s reasonable to enforce that. What’s to say me and my two buddies don’t constitute our own community with standards we can enforce? What if Town X hates green-eyed people, but the state that town is in loves them?
4b) Proposal: “a church worth of Puritans” is the minimum level of societal organization necessary to declare your own community standards. I’m only half-joking.
2) Then coordinate doing it in a small area. You’re not going to demonstrate anything with random smallpox vaccines. Demonstrating something requires more coordination than actually doing it.
3) You’re allowed to say that you find green-eyed people ugly and you do not think they should represent your nation in public discourse. You are not allowed to single out green-eyed people.
4) You and your friend are allowed to make your own community and enforce your own standards on each other. The point where you can define the community as an area or something instead of the people who agree to be part of it is where the latter stops being practical. I can just stop being friends with you and you can keep track of this and not give me the benefits of friendship, but the US can’t stop giving me roads.
Really? I missed that one, last time I checked the federal and state governments were pretty aggressive about rooting out nonconformist communities.
If what you want to do is any weirder than hypothetically refusing to bake pizzas, you can expect G-Men armed with military weaponry to show up without warning and put a stop to it. Remember the FLDS incident a few years ago?
I mean, the entire history of Mormonism is a pretty good counterpoint to that idea. Even if you move out into the middle of an empty desert the government will hunt you down to make damn sure you aren’t being too weird. I’m half-convinced that the reason so many FBI agents are Mormon is for self-defense.
They were violating the part about the community being only people who agreed to be a part of it, specifically all the 10-year old girls being married off to the elder with 36 other wives. Mormons were completely left alone by the FBI when they didn’t do that.
Do you have any evidence that this actually occurred?
There were certainly accusations, but AFAIK the government was never able to back up any of its claims and the initial complaint was exposed as a hoax.
You guys must be referring to a different thing than I’m thinking of. Warren Jeffs definitely actually occurred.
I think the reference is to the actions taken against the FLDS in Texas by the state child protective authorities. They raided a settlement on the basis of a bogus phone call by someone who claimed to be a female minor in the community married against her will, actually had no connection to the FLDS and a history of making bogus phone calls. They seized about three hundred childen from infants on up, labeled various mothers as minors without making it clear in their public statements that they were refusing to accept documentary evidence of age—it eventually turned out that most of them were adults. The children were only returned to their parents after unanimous decisions against the child protective authorities by both the state appeals court and the state supreme court.
It was a pretty ugly series of actions, and I think one could make a case that the authorities were guilty of attempted genocide, given the current legal definition thereof. For details (I followed the controversy pretty closely when it was happening) see:
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/search?q=FLDS
Yeah, I didn’t hear about that one. I’m guessing it’s recent then, because I haven’t really paid much attention to the news for the last few years. Not all FLDS are created alike and I guess it’s a shame they all share a name, but the unfortunate side effect is law enforcement will be jumpy. ‘G-Men armed with military weaponry’ made me think he was talking about Warren Jeffs and the FBI, not Texas Child Protective Services.
We generally accept the idea that a community can exert control over its 10 year olds whether they agreed to be part of it or not. Objecting to this on the grounds that the 10 year olds didn’t agree is an isolated demand for rigor.
The only thing that distinguishes this from “well, the FBI could also break up any community that sends their kids to bed without dessert and makes them do homework” is that you have independent reasons for thinking that marrying off 10 year olds is bad, reasons which have nothing to do with your supposed community principle.
Exactly.
Isolated demand for rigor? Non-Mormons who marry 10 year-olds also get arrested. This is not an out-of-the-ordinary demand made only of Mormons.
What makes it an isolated demand for rigor is that you only invoke “the 10 year olds didn’t agree to be part of the community” when what is being done to 10 year olds is something you already dislike for unrelated reasons. You don’t apply it to every instance where a community does things to 10 year olds against their will.
The isolated demand for rigor isn’t being applied to only Mormons, it’s being applied to only selected community actions against 10 year olds..
I’m not really sure how to respond. I mean, you’re right, I guess. The issue the Feds took with the FLDS wasn’t that the children there had no say in being part of it. The issue was they were raping children. That still seems to mean it’s not a counterpoint to the general observation that you’re free to go start a community in the middle of nowhere and be generally weird, provided the weirdness isn’t criminal. The FBI has never gone after Guerneville.
Your argument was more general than just “they are raping children”.
Your argument was that when a community does things to children, the children have not agreed to be part of the community, and therefore prohibiting it is not interfering with the community’s own practices. Taken seriously, that argument applies to anything done to children–it includes child rape, but it also includes completely innocuous things. Making that argument and then not actually applying it to those innocuous things is an isolated demand for rigor.
“The issue was they were raping children. ”
In what case? In the original Jeffs case, the charge was that he had pressured a woman into a marriage (with someone else) which she later said she hadn’t wanted. She wasn’t a minor and I don’t think that the husband in that case had other wives. I didn’t follow the details of the later case involving Jeffs.
I don’t believe anyone in any of the cases was accused of forcible rape, of children or adults. In the Texas case the authorities claimed that various of the mothers were underage—but they were refusing to accept documentary evidence of age, so “underage” meant “we have decided they are underage,” and mothers were reclassified when necessary to get the numbers up.
In one case where they held two pregnant women until their children were born and thus under the control of the authorities, they eventually conceded that one of the mothers was eighteen and the other twenty-two.
By the time all of the fraudulent claims were eliminated, it was not clear that the teen pregnancy rate among FLDS women was higher than the Texas average.
In the Texas case, the three hundred children seized included infants, male and female. They weren’t seized to prevent them from being forced into marriage ten years later.
And, in that case, the age of consent had been raised and the legal penalty for polygamy increased for the explicit purpose of targeting the FLDS–the original proposal being by a state legislator in the town they were moving into, described in legislative documents as for that purpose.
The treatment of the whole case in the media was extraordinarily biased, treating CPS assertions as facts and generally downplaying known facts inconsistent with them.
I was still talking about Jeffs. He’s currently serving a sentence for multiple counts of sexual assault and aggravated sexual assault of children. If you don’t think that’s rape, fine, but I think it’s fair usage of the term. As long as you agree on the facts of the case, I don’t really care the specific verbiage used to characterize them and am willing to call it whatever you’d prefer to call it.
That’s an excellent point.
“I won’t particularly like it there, but there will be a place for me there.”
I hope so! I just happened to be reading:
As a Mormon who grew outside the west, your analysis hits home. I like the US right now, and I like the founding principles, and I’m committed to keeping it going, but I don’t necessarily expect it to last forever and it certainly doesn’t have my highest allegiance.
So are you not going to believe me when I say that wasn’t the argument I intended to make? You’re responding to a comment in which I just said you’re right. All I was originally doing was counterpointing the premise that it’s not possible to form a weird community of your own because the FBI went after the FLDS. I really wasn’t trying to make any bigger point about children consenting to being part of a community. I can’t go back and edit it now.
FLDS people are not Mormons.
And the reason the feds interfered with the Mormons in the 19th century was only partly the fact that they were polygamous and otherwise weird. They were basically running a theocratic and totalitarian society, which led to a lot of oppression of dissenters.
Great, when will the FBI invade Massachusetts?
Notwithstanding the rest of this comment, this is an excellent post and I thoroughly approve of the principle proposed therein.
It seems to me that a ban on uncoordinated meanness makes it difficult to coordinate forms of meanness that aren’t already coordinated, and thereby makes it a lot harder to change the status quo. Which I guess could be thought of as a good thing from a Chesterton’s fence perspective, but there are so many respects where the world is obviously broken that I’d be hesitant to create more obstacles to fixing it.
If we lived in a world where people routinely ate unambiguously-sentient babies, this principle would suggest that we should make lots of philosophical arguments against babyeating, but we shouldn’t actually seriously try to stop it (at least on an individual level; maybe some kind of complicated economic incentives might be okay, but those could easily be mean too). After all, the babyeaters would say that babyeating is very important to them, and so making them feel bad about it is mean (and I think they’d be right). Anti-babyeating would be thought of as a weird-but-interesting ivory-tower thought experiment rather than as a real thing that people should actually do, kind of like Peter Unger’s positions are thought of in our world. This seems bad, and I think it’s a good metaphor for a lot of real-world moral issues.
(I think the argument I’m making here could be considered a steelman of political radicalism in general.)
I like this steel-man argument. But I think most cases where “being mean on a micro level” worked (of which we certainly have a number of examples) have some common characteristics: basically, I think that in none (or few) of them did meanness work as a deterrent (white people in Southern communities of the civil war era didn’t spontaneously get together and say, “let’s desegregate our public institutions to prevent all these freedom riders from bothering us” and Irish independence didn’t happen from the English parliament saying, “ok, the IRA is just causing too much havoc: we give in to their demands”). I think that what the micro-meanness accomplished, rather, was exposure: it kept the question in the public consciousness and gave voice to people who cared enough about it to be mean. In this way I don’t think the function of the meanness was that different from Gandhi’s hunger strikes (which were not mean) or even ISIS’ gratuitous violence (which is mean in a totally random way): all of these are ways to, at worst, maintain hype and “feed Moloch” and, at best, ways to force the silent majority with a weak opinion to examine their beliefs and cause coordinated change.
I’m not sure you can classify ISIS with the others there, since their violence appears mostly random (I don’t know if it actually is, but neither do most other people, so they’re not effectively spreading awareness).
Well ISIS needs media attention for recruits and funding. If I were the sort of person who decides between donating to ISIS or Al Quaeda, say, I would be likely to choose the one I’ve heard more news about, and the one that seems more passionate about what they’re doing. (Although I do agree with you that ISIS is part of a different context, and is not really trying to convince anyone of anything: I included them just as the opposite pole from Gandhi in the “trying to increase exposure” category.)
I’ve read somewhere that ISIS spends over 70% of their budget on fundraising, rather than directly funding genocide, oppression, and random violence. I’d recommend waiting until GiveWell does a writeup on them before donating.
Not random, and also not intended to convince other people of anything. It is intended to convince themselves that their religion is true. Islam basically teaches that in the plans of eternal providence, it will conquer the world by force. The obvious falsity of that claim terrifies them, and so they respond in a desperate attempt to make that doctrine true.
Unilaterally trying to stop other baby-eaters from eating babies would go extremely poorly. Seems likely you would just get eaten/otherwise killed and no babies would be saved. You would just be causing trouble for no real reason.
On the other hand, in a world where you can’t generate coordinated opposition to babyeating, uncoordinated opposition to babyeating probably won’t suffice to get people to stop eating babies. From a non-utilitarian perspective, it might satisfy a moral imperative, but in consequentialist terms it’s unlikely to accomplish much.
But you could save a few babies, probably.
The Underground Railroad certainly would not have ended slavery.
Obviously we don’t have a counterfactual but at it’s peak, the Underground Railroad was helping a thousand slaves escape a year. Project that forward a few decades(and imagine that it grows in number) and it doesn’t seem especially unlikely.
Even if it didn’t directly end slavery, it does seem to have contributed to a confrontation between the North and the South that led to abolition.
It is greatly improbable that it would have increased in number. The more damage it did, the more they would throw into stopping it.
But isn’t this basically the position anti-abortion types are in? (Leaving aside the literal eating.) They believe life starts at conception, and millions of human lives are being murdered and then most Western societies expect them to not even harassas abortion providers? [Note: I’m pro-choice myself.]
Or if you believe that people who don’t accept Jesus Christ as their saviour are going to hell for all eternity and the you can’t get Christianity taught at schools.
Or you’re a fervent animal rights activist…
But, on the whole, most pro-lifers or born-again Christians or animal rights activists don’t resort to violence or even uncoordinated meanness against those who disagree with them (yes there are terrorists and persistent harassers, but they’re rare relative to opinion polls). Presumably they mostly regard this world as a better one than one in which they are at war with most of their society.
Sort of. I think most Christians would say that God has ordained both the end we work towards as well as the means we’re supposed to use to get there. The Christian view of morals is neither entirely deontological nor entirely consequentialist, and has shades of virtue ethics in it too. We have a duty to fight the evils in the world, but we’re not allowed to fight evil by absolutely any means we please. The abyss gazes back, and all that. While there are cases where you’re allowed to violate a lower moral principle to uphold a higher one, you better genuinely be in a situation where you absolutely have to break the lower rule. These situations are much rarer than a lot of people believe.
This is one of the problems with the trolley problem- that three deaths are worse than one is a transparent moral fact, but establishing the general principle that we may sacrifice one life to save three others is far more difficult.
The question here is what if you’re wrong?
What if people aren’t eating babies, they’re just taking a harmless drop of their blood for medical reasons, and you’re being mean to them for no reason.
Or abortion as some people are saying. A lot of people literally believe that abortion is on the level of eating an unambiguously sentient baby. Should they be aloud to be mean to people who have an abortion?
An advantage of only supporting coordinated meanness, even in dystopia where evil is common place, is that the requirements of coordination serve as a filter to identify genuine wrongs from harmless things people simply think are wrongs.
Not a perfect filter, but it’s a good idea to have it in the pipeline of filters.
A lot of people literally believe that abortion is on the level of eating an unambiguously sentient baby.
Is that what I believe? I had no idea. I’m so glad the better informed can instruct me!
Since I appear to be going for maximum offensiveness these days, Scott can you explain why you were worried about the latest chapter of Unsong appearing to be pro-life? What is so terrible about us that you would rather make it unambiguously clear you’re not one of those?
To be fair FH didn’t say *all* pro-lifers believe that and I’m pretty sure a reasonably large number of pro-lifers do view abortion as morally equivalent to murdering a child and once you’re into the realm of murdering children, eating your victims only moves you a little further down the scale of evil.
Correct. I was thinking more about the people who actually attack abortion clinics than anyone likely to be posting here.
Though even more moderate pro-lifers will quite gladly state they believe abortion is the murder of babies.
Well, I believe that abortion is literally the equivalent of killing a baby, but I also think that blowing up a clinic would be at least as bad, which is the reason I don’t oppose abortion with violence.
I don’t recall anybody specifying that you were one of those people. Empirically, it’s clear that a lot of pro-lifers believe that abortion is baby-murder. They’re usually happy to volunteer this information themselves.
Yeah, we do, and we are.
Murder is strong word.
I would say that abortion ends a human life. There are circumstances where killing is a defensible, even the correct choice, but lets not beat a round the bush.
Yes, murder is a strong word. But these people do feel strongly about it. They don’t want to pussyfoot around with euphemisms for what they see is a heinous act.
Abortion is too coordinated to be murder.
Was the Holocaust too coordinated to be murder?
Fiction has a weird tendency to be pro-life by default. My guess is that’s why he was apologetic about it, the thoughtlessness of that tendency.
@ Deiseach
Aside from the eating, where do you draw the line/s, and which lines are they?
That’s a really cool story that I haven’t seen before. But as a side note, what’s up with the rape stuff? That probably prevents me from linking to this story in polite company.
Unsympathetically, Yudkowsky being *edgy*.
Eliezer claims it’s there to further the story’s theme of ethical incompatibilities: the humans of the story aren’t as weird as the Babyeaters or the Superhappies, but their ethics are not ours. Surprise!
I don’t think this is complete horseshit, but I do think Eliezer likes to shock the normies, and I also think he’s not sending quite the message he thinks he is. He has a long history of being a little tone-deaf on sexual issues.
I mean, it was just completely unconvincing – instead of making the future humans seem weird, it simply broke my suspension of disbelief.
And anyway, that wasn’t even the only pointless mention of rape in the story. At the very end, the confessor confesses:
It’s things like this that make the story mostly unlinkable, even though it otherwise raises some interesting points.
I hate to be That Guy, and especially as one of the first commentators, but
It has happened before.
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I like where you’re going with this and I think that there are a lot of good ideas here. But I think that ‘coordination’ is a lossy heuristic at best. In particular, I think your second reason is… optimistic.
I don’t think this is very accurate in practice. Mobs of people are terrifying, and some people have a shockingly good ability to rile them up and point them in their preferred direction. Large groups of people acting in a coordinated fashion also have an amplified ability to cause harm. A single lunatic trying to rob a grocery store is easily stopped; a coordinated mob is doing what it will do. There are plenty of edge cases like this and I’m interested in hearing you expand on this.
You’re tentatively hypothesizing: “the line where it’s ok to be mean is drawn around coordination”. I don’t think it’s fair to say this, because I don’t think there can be one line drawn like that. Coordinated meanness has a much more damage potential. It should be held to a higher expectation than uncoordinated meanness
—-
On the other hand, I think you hit on something very important here
This seems to me to be one of the most important functions of the law, any law, and with some drinks in me I might even argue that this is what defines something as acceptable. Safety and stability are so important, because they help you to set expectations and proceed accordingly. A law might be unjust, but if it is easily understood and consistently applied, anyone can avoid trouble, or at least try to. By way of example, consider your point about taxation. We all agree that taking someone elses’ things, with threat of force, is immoral. Taxation is taking someone elses’ things, with threat of force, but we generally agree that it’s ok. Even ignoring any philosophical implications, people don’t have the knee-jerk outrage against taxation that they do against robbery. I think the consistency of taxation is what makes the difference.
With the tax man, you know exactly how much will be taken from you. You’re told this in advance, and you can plan your life accordingly. You might resent this, but you’re given a sort of simulated exit alternative: you’re free to do whatever you please to mitigate the damage. Maybe you decide “well then, I’ll work less so they take less”. You have that option.
With the robber, it’s sudden, it’s a surprise. You’re not given any opportunity to react. You can’t plan your life around it. You can’t take actions to mitigate the damage. There’s nothing you can do.
In both cases the same thing has happened: someone has taken a thousand dollars from you by force. But the predictable, fairly-applied nature of taxation makes it ok. On this point of yours, I’m in complete agreement.
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Excellent post, as always. It’s always a joy to read your posts
Mobs strike me as quite rare in contemporary Western societies. And when they do occur, eg the London riots a few years ago, they seem to be more motivated by looting and the pleasures of breaking stuff than by a desire to actually harm a particular group of people. (Note I was living in London at the time.)
They are fairly common on social media nowadays though and regularly get people fired or otherwise in major trouble.
Compared to single harassers getting people fired, or posting nude pictures of their exes, or goading them into committing suicide?
They occur less often than that, but single harassers are very common. Just because something is rare compared to something else, doesn’t mean that it is quite rare in general. For example, only 3 percent of the water on Earth is freshwater, yet I wouldn’t call freshwater ‘quite rare’.
I would also argue that if you take effectiveness into account, the gap between the number of single harassers that actually manage to get people fired or commit suicide and the mobs that manage to do so shrinks considerably.
Anyway, we probably have a different definition of ‘quite rare.’
Just how ‘regularly’ are we talking about? In say people fired (or equivalent) per 100,000 population per year?
Quite rare nowadays, but there does seem to be an increase if you look at the trends.
How could you tell if there really was an increase? Keep in mind that there are a lot of folks who are paid to make you afraid of your fellow humans.
Mobs are rare because the state takes action to prevent them.
Coordinated meanness sounds very much like tyranny of the majority. This is a good thing?
It’s better than tyranny of the minority.
Also Scott mentioned other mechanisms like the Bill of Rights by which coordinating meanness needs to achieve a higher bar than just a majority, which is an important tool for avoiding both tyrannies.
Disagree, tyranny of the majority/minority are equally bad.
Disagree, there are a lot more minorities than there are majorities.
@Nebfocus
By definition, tyranny of the majority hurts fewer people than tyranny of the minority. So from an utilitarian perspective, the latter is worse.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time.” – Churchill
I think the second part is needless.
Yes, plutocracy (rule by Pluto) is clearly superior to rule by a mere moon (Deimos).
3edgy5me
That is best seen not as praise for democracy, but as a condemnation of government.
An interesting and bold claim. Particularly given the context in which Churchill said it. Why do you think that?
I take the Churchill quote not as a defense of democracy but as a critique of government. If the best form of government works very badly, that’s a reason to do as few things as you can manage via government.
But I don’t assume that is how Churchill meant it. I suspect his incentive was more rhetorical than philosophical.
At least I know why you take it that way. 🙂
I think it is, sort of, thus all the stuff about how it being coordinated is (a, possibly not the only) *minimum* bar, necessary but not sufficient.
I don’t think uncoordinated meanness is a tyranny of the minority, though. Uncoordinated meanness can go in both directions at all times, which means it can make things worse for everyone, doesn’t essentially exhert any useful incentive in any particular direction, and does a lot of harm for the amount of incentive it does. And it lacks consistency; because it can’t use high probability low impact incentives, it has to use low probability huge impact incentives, e.g. randomly stabbing people instead of fining them.
And the incentive is to try to ramp up meanness more than the other side, any time the other side ramps up, to incentivise more strongly than them, and in the absence of coordination there isn’t an obvious way to get out of that situation aside shaming the other side so hard they stop.
Uncoordinated meanness is more analogous to a war than to a tyranny of any sort. And I think “continual war is worse than tyranny of the majority” is reasonable.
It’s a predictable tyranny. It’s better than unpredictable tyranny.
It has limits. With coordinated meanness there is generally a limit. As bad as Jim Crow laws were, they didn’t have the death penalty. Less coordinated action by individuals and ad hoc groups…
It’s also able to be worked around. There are ways to avoid breaking explicit laws or standards. There isn’t a way to avoid giving offense to anyone.
And most coordinated groups warn first or give lighter punishments in grey areas, fringe cases, and accidental transgressions. Individuals often don’t or can’t.
“There are ways to avoid breaking explicit laws or standards. There isn’t a way to avoid giving offense to anyone. ”
On the other hand, the person who is offended at me has no more access to force, physical or rhetorical, than I do, so acting on his offense is risky for him. Coordinated action is a lot safer for those doing it.
Some of this gets into the logic of feud as form of law enforcement.
Not only are mobs more likely than this post assumes, they seem a danger now.
And huge fascist or nazi mobs are arguably rising: many are concerned that Trump is a fascist, and he’s trying to coordinate meanness against Muslims. Since I’m sure you know the news more than me, I’m confused that’s not mentioned.
And in Germany there’s growing concern about the right-wing AfD — not that neonazis ever disappeared, but they’re rising.
Generally, this article is interesting, but it felt to me like a rationalization a posteriori of “no shaming”.
The problem with your position is that you implicitly assume that Trump IS fascist, while Trump supporters may think YOU are the totalitarian commie (commie and fascist should be equally bad in anyone’s vocabulary).
For example, SJW and leftist mob no-platforming people because someone thought they said something enrageous, are from my point of view far more dangerous than rightwing groups of citizens engaging in democratic process
‘Commie’ and ‘fascist’ aren’t parallel. The use of the diminutive makes the former sound like a playground insult and reflects poorly on the person using it.
Frankly, they both sound childish at this point in history and anyone who uses either should feel bad for trying to use shame instead of reason in an argument about politics/economics.
Paolo,
It is wrong to argue that the supporters of Trump and the AfD are universally fascists/Neo Nazi’s. Of course those people are attracted to those movements, but all the evidence points to the majority of the supporters being people who are disillusioned with Neo-Liberalism; the currently dominant ideology which seeks to internationalize the economy, thereby driving down wages & work conditions and funneling all growth to the 1%.
Large-scale migration is a very visible element of this ideology, which tends to impact people strongly. It tends to be a focal point in the rhetoric, but interviews with supporters generally show that these people don’t want the more extreme rhetoric being made into law. Most see such strong rhetoric as a necessity to break through the political correctness and put issues such as immigration limits and problems with integration on the agenda, rather than aiming for oppression.
In a way this is understandable, since ‘tone policing’ has been used in the past not merely to achieve a respectful debate, but also to censor certain opinions. So they see the use of extreme rhetoric as reclaiming space in the debate to discuss certain issues.
Anyway, I am pretty unhappy that we are now in a situation where many ‘enlightened left wing’ people feel superior to and dismiss these people, without recognizing how Third Way politics and shaming used to defend certain policy positions has impacted many in the lower and lower-middle class. Ironically nowadays we are in a position were many left-wing people are defending the interests of the middle-upper and upper classes, while harming the lower and lower-middle classes that they traditionally used to fight for.
I think it’s not quite that. A lot of them seem just people who want their culture, religion, mores and laws to be used in their country. People who don’t want foreigners displacing them, taking advantage of them, committing crimes at rates greater than natives. The internationalization of the economy is not on their minds, even if the results of it are what brings about the problems they want gone.
I hope that this does not merit to be called a Nazi or Fascist.
@Anonymous
One of the things that typifies current upper/middle culture is Global citizenship, where identity is no longer national. As a general rule, wealth de-localizes people. In a poor community, people often can’t afford formal (taxed) arrangements, so you get informal solutions: handshake loans, share the wealth, pay it forward, quid pro quo free labor, etc. This only works if you are part of a community that has strong shaming and limits on who can participate. These kinds of communities have a certain warmth to them and also strengthen the ego of the poor.
I agree that part of the anger is that these communities have been broken up by immigration. For example, in my country the strongest support for the anti-immigration party is in places where these communities fled to after the influx of immigrants.
However, I can’t agree that the ‘internationalization of the economy is not on their minds,’ since the anti-immigration parties in Europe are universally anti-EU. Trump is also consistently criticizing the current trade deals that he calls unfair to US workers. However, many of the voters tend to have limited education and don’t seem to understand the mechanisms that result in worse working conditions. This is not that surprising, as a deeper understanding of these mechanisms is only now developing among the better educated (under the influence of people like Piketty, more and more information coming available about how big business operates, etc).
So you see a lot of simplistic rhetoric about being abandoned by politics/the elite. In my opinion, these people sense that the system is screwing them over, but don’t entirely understand how.
Yes. I think we’re describing the same thing, but from different perspectives. Your critique is from the viewpoint of someone with a decent understanding of economics and politics, mine from the viewpoint of a random prole who knows he’s getting cheated, but does not know how or who is doing the con.
Yes and I think it is very important to explain that these people have valid concerns and problems, which should be taken seriously. This doesn’t mean that we should accept all the rhetoric, but rather that we shouldn’t dismiss their disillusionment with existing parties as ‘voting against their own interests’ or ‘angry white men wanting to oppress others.’
I profusely apologize for being stuck in the 1600s.
Yes. This is the point. This is by design. They do not care about the lower and lower-middle classes. They stopped doing that decades ago. Read Tom Wolfe.
How many people are murdered by one or two people every year, compared to how many are killed by mobs? In the UK in 2011, the year of the London riots, there were 5 people killed in the riots, and over [edit: 500
800] murdered. If everyone in Britain had refrained from murder when not part of an angry mob, the country would have had the lowest murder rate it ever recorded that year.As for German and American worries about right-wing mobs, how many Muslims are being attacked now by one or two or three assailants away from police eyes? Donald Trump’s rhetoric can do a lot of harm without a literal mob.
The news media has a tendency to report far more on rare events than common ones. One of the reasons I like Scott is that he often avoids that fault.
Then why are the only violent mobs we’ve seen been Trump protesters?
You mean “anti-Trump” protesters, right?
Seems like “pro-Trump protesters” engage in some violence as well. Trump just seems to bring out the worst in everyone.
You mean globally or in the US? If the first, then here is some information:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/alternative-fur-deutschland-conference-protesters-germany-arrested-a7007971.html
“Demonstrators burned tires on a motorway and threw fireworks and flares at officers, according to a police spokesman.”
It doesn’t have to be so extreme. Junior high and high school often can be perfect examples of mob mentality. All that is required is a target where people can justifiably dislike or act in concert against them. He smells. He prays in school. He dresses funny.
The danger isn’t fascist movements, the danger is a small community uniting to hate on a person who is different. Much more common than a far right party taking power and somehow managing to govern effectively.
Not every place tells you in advance how much you owe in all circumstances. Tax codes tend to be impenetrable, perhaps especially the US code.
Sure there is. Learn some self-defense, get a gun, get a bodyguard, leave for places where robbers are less common, etc, etc.
One notes that exactly following IRS directions is not a defense in tax court.
I shouldn’t be surprised.
I run into that in other areas of regulatory compliance.
I’ve written several emails to different agencies that boil down to ‘tell me what you want and I’ll make it happen’ and gotten a response along the lines of ‘we’ll know what we want when we see it’.
Yeah, that argument against ‘taxation = theft’ is weak. If Joe Schmoe came to Scott and said he was going to take X amount from him every year and if Scott didn’t comply, he was going to kidnap Scott and put him in a cage, would Scott suddenly think that wasn’t theft?
Basically, the arguments that taxation isn’t theft tend to boil down to “It isn’t theft because the government does it”. The formality of the process is naught but a fig leaf.
Since when did a thief give some of their takings back to you?
So it’s justified because of welfare?
When you pay the mafia protection money, even though it is primarily an extortion scheme, they do, in fact, work to prevent other criminal organizations from operating in your area. (And if popular media is to be believed, sometimes work in other ways to manage their territory.) This seems to me to be roughly equivalent to the sort of services government provides, (police services, at least) but most people would still definitely call it theft.
(At least, I’m assuming you’re talking about getting government services in exchange for taxes. If you’re talking about getting a “refund” on funds that were already withheld, well then, ha.)
Vorkon:
You’re channeling Mancur Olson in your argument here — Power and Prosperity is a very good read that touches on this and several other questions.
Olson argues that a dictator/monarch serves as a sort of stationary bandit who has decided it makes more sense to stay in one place and continue to loot it rather than going from place to place to loot them. But having a stationary bandit in charge is often better than not, because in the process of maximizing his own self-interest, he will end up providing some basic services and security that a roaming bandit would not — protecting his investment. He also won’t steal everything — he needs to leave people with some things so that they will continue to produce things for him to take.
A roaming bandit, by contrast, will take everything that isn’t nailed down and leave the place in ruin.
Likewise, an area that is under the control of organized crime might be safer than one that is not, if government is too weak or ineffective to provide security, since the organized crime syndicate will at least try to maintain a monopoly on criminal activity.
To the degree a democracy is well-governed and looking out for the nation’s interests as a whole, it resembles a sort of ideal, bandit-free community. Its taxes are supposed to be part of a group consensus to provide to public goods, unlike the taxes of the stationary bandit, which serve primarily to support his own lifestyle.
But special interests and corrupt politicians resemble roaming bandits, extracting the maximum for themselves at the expense of the polity as a whole.
So, is taxation theft? I’d say it depends on how bandit-like the government is — i.e., to what degree your taxes support corruption and special interests, as opposed to the public good.
Even ignoring any philosophical implications, people don’t have the knee-jerk outrage against taxation that they do against robbery.
Tangent: There’s a certain sort of libertarian rhetoric that tries to work up the outrage against theft and apply it to taxation. It’s not clear to me how those sorts of libertarians actually feel, but it doesn’t seem to impress non-libertarians, even if the non-libertarians have difficulty articulating why taxation isn’t so bad.
(Full disclosure: I’m a centre-left “yay tax” type.)
*I* tend to view taxes as protection money for living on someone’s turf. And it’s fine with me. I’m perfectly willing to pay that protection money, so long as nobody else is allowed to extort me.
I prefer to see it as a social contract. I pays the moneys, I gets the services.
The part where I get upset is when big business and 1%ers get the services without paying for them, which creates a reverse Robin Hood scenario: taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
What about when you do pays the moneys, but you do not qualifies to get the services? I mean, a modern welfare state has a huge amount of services where you need to be provably incompetent to qualify for them.
I don’t think many people or businesses get services without paying taxes – they may not pay as much tax as you like, but they pay. (And if not paying as much tax as one would like is the criteria, small business and the 99% probably fit the bill too. For example, my base line assumption is that almost anyone who gets paid cash tips, settings money in a poker game, etc. probably is not paying full taxes.)
In the USA the top 1% pay over 40% of federal income taxes, over their share of income, which is 17%.
As for businesses,they never really pay tax because they’re just a legal fiction. All business taxes are paid by some combination of a businesses’ customers, employees or shareholders. The only economic reason to have a tax on business income is to reduce tax evasion and avoidance. Otherwise we could just tax dividends when they’re paid to shareholders and wind up at the same distributional impact.
Anonymous, there are also illegal immigrants whose employers are paying into social security to make the employment look more legal, but the employees will presumably never see the money.
Yeah, but that’s a uniquely American issue, I think. Most of the rest of the world has stuff like national ID registers, so they can actually check if someone is a real person or not.
@Anonymous
The safety net is also a service. Admittedly I’m fudging a bit here. What it boils down to is that my money buys me a set of services and a vote to change those services. An important factor is that I feel sufficient kinship to other people in my country so their votes align sufficiently with my opinion, so I don’t feel oppressed by a majority.
Europeans for the most part don’t feel the same about citizens of other EU countries, which is why the EU is probably doomed. In the US, there was the issue that some states didn’t feel that kinship sufficiently, hence the civil war.
@J Mann
Starbucks paid no corporate taxes in the UK in 2012. Since it’s common for the government to subsidize businesses (which is negative taxes), I suspect that they got more that they gave. Most big businesses nowadays funnel their taxes though tax havens, so that they pay very little taxes in the place where they use the government services. Aka, they are not paying for the services they use.
@Tracy W
The rich use more services than the poor, so claiming that they pay for the services they use by virtue of paying more than 1% of total taxes is not proof that they are paying for the services they use.
Secondly, when you say that they pay 17% of income tax, this excludes a lot of capital. Key to tax evasion schemes is that de facto income is not seen as de jure income, so it’s not seen as taxable income.
Finally, all taxation is fairly arbitrary and pretty much based on legal fiction. However, legally companies are people and thus I can’t agree that they ‘can’t really pay taxes.’ Claiming that they don’t is the same as claiming that an employee doesn’t really pay taxes, but really it is the employer who does so.
1. You don’t need to pay taxes to vote. Is there a country that still does this equivalent to wealth-based voting powers?
2. There exist tax-funded services that you are excluded from by dint of unalterable personal properties.
Social services you don’t qualify for are a case of superrational counterfactual bargaining. If I hypothetically DID qualify for this social service, I would certainly want it to be funded, so even though I don’t actually qualify for it, I am happy to fund it. In exchange, I expect others to be happy to fund social services they don’t qualify for but I do.
Also, sometimes I value the people receiving those social services.
@Anonymous
I wasn’t claiming a direct link between paying tax and voting, but rather a system where you pay based on ability to do so. So a jobless person is still part of the’ pay tax in return for voting and services’ bargain, it’s just that his/her income tax is zero or negative. If the person gets a (decent) job, they simply move up in the tax bracket, they haven’t been exempt.
However, a pet peeve of mine is the implicit or explicit notion that only income tax is tax. Consumption taxes are also taxes and paid by nearly everyone.
As for your other comment, I don’t pay 100% of the tax in my country, so there are people who pay for services that I use and they can’t/don’t and vice versa. Those people and me have our vote to try and change this arrangement. Also what Galle said, it may make me happy when other people are taken care off (and may actually benefit me, for example, mental patients with good care are less likely to harm me).
The United States has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world. European countries have such extensive welfare states because they have higher taxes on the middle class.
I don’t think that quite follows. The U.S. *could* have a continental European style cradle to grave social state, without much higher taxes. We’d just need to have a continental European sized military / national security state and have less inefficient health and education sectors.
Healthcare inefficiency is particularly shocking–our governments (fed, state, & local) collectively pay more per capita (overall population) in healthcare spending than some other first world countries even though the such healthcare only covers less than half the population.
Except the 1%ers are paying quite a bit, whereas a huge number of people in the bottom quintile are paying nothing and getting a lot.
Whatever any of us thinks of social-contract theory, it doesn’t appear to be doing much work here. If having agreed to a social contract doesn’t prevent Aapje from complaining about the insufficient taxes on the rich which are evidently part of that contract, then neither should it prevent a libertarian from complaining that taxation is theft.
@apple: before we get into the vexed issue of capital taxation, you have misread me. The top 1% are paying over 40% of federal income taxes, well above their share of income.
Secondly the US federal government spends about 49% of its money on healthcare and social security, which are not services targeted at the rich.
The “legal person” language of the law just meant that companies could sue and be sued, it didn’t turn them into people who care about their living standards. I do not follow what your comparison with employers and employees is meant to imply.
I believe the argument is the returns to government investment, e.g. all of the great technology we have that originally started out as NASA or DOD projects, or our absolute domination of international trade thanks to the might of our 20th century military, the benefits of interstate trade due to the interstate highway system, have accrued far more to the wealthy than to the poor, not that the wealthy are the primary direct recipients of current expenditures. If that’s our basis for allocating taxes, then indeed, old people and sick people should be paying a lot more.
The counterargument is usually the wealthy could have purchased these things on the private market if there were no government, whereas the poor could not.
“The part where I get upset is when big business and 1%ers get the services without paying for them”
How is that? High income taxpayers pay not merely more federal income tax than low or middle income taxpayers, but a considerably larger fraction of their income as taxes.
For 2010, for instance, the top 1% paid an average of 23% of their income. The average for the population as a whole was about 12%. For the bottom 50%, it was a little over 2%.
(My source). You can find similar numbers from other sources. They are for federal income tax–including payroll taxes makes the net effect less unbalanced against high incomes).
“The rich use more services than the poor, so claiming that they pay for the services they use by virtue of paying more than 1% of total taxes is not proof that they are paying for the services they use.”
That’s an argument against a head tax–everyone paying the same number of dollars. But the rich are not merely paying more money than the average, they are paying a larger fraction of their income. Is there any reason to believe that if Bill has twice the income of Charles, Bill uses more than twice the services?
“or our absolute domination of international trade thanks to the might of our 20th century military”
What absolute domination of international trade? And what does our ability to sell things to people in other countries and buy things from them have to do with our military?
U.S. international trade is 22.6% of its GDP. Japan’s is 33%. South Korea: 82.6%. Singapore 262.8%.
Singapore and South Korea must have impressive militaries.
In absolute numbers, both China and the EU have more foreign trade than the U.S.
@adam, the US federal income tax has been progressive for decades too. And presumably a number of those things you mention have benefited the middle class as well. So anyone arguing this would not have to present some data to support the initial assertion, but also present evidence that the top 1% benefitted significantly more than their share of taxes over that time.
And, what domination of world trade? There are quite a lot of countries outside the USA remember. I’m having trouble working out what you even mean by dominating world trade. For NZ, the UK joining the EEC was a far bigger deal than anything the US has done in world trade. Bit of an insular economy, the USA.
@Tracy W (and Cerebral Paul Z.)
Frankly, I think that you have a rather limited outlook on markets, assuming that prices have to be independent of the buyer, which is merely one way to run a market. I once went to a Czech restaurant were I wanted to look at the prices again and accidentally got the Czech, rather than the English menu. It had far lower prices. Price differentiation is also pretty common in the West for the elderly.
There is no reason why a social contract should have a flat price/tax, so it’s perfectly valid to argue that a group is underpaying if they pay less relative to their ability to pay than other groups.
The social contract I buy into has progressive taxes, so paying more than their share of income is perfectly valid (especially since you ignore wealth, while wealth inequality is actually far larger than income inequality).
PS. Healthcare is a complex topic
@Adam
Yes and no.
The wealthy benefit more, which is justification for higher taxes. The fact that a much smaller percentage of their income goes to basic needs is another justification for higher/progressive taxes.
The poor benefit more from some programs, but much less from others. For example, the poor tend to live in more violent environments than the rich, so the state is more effective at providing safety for the rich than for the poor. Overall they clearly have a worse deal in society, IMO.
A similar thing is true for the (chronically) ill, they benefit more in some ways and less in others.
As for the rich being able to buy services in the absence of a government: you can’t really buy similar living conditions on the whole. In places without (functioning) governments, rich people are required to be warlords and live in gilded cages, since they can’t really move about without armed guards, sticking to a few secure locations, etc.
But of course, the smart rich people tend to just form their own government that works for them.
@Aapjie:
I note that you don’t disagree with anything I actually have said.
As for what you think my outlook is, I will treat this seriously only if you are prepared to first do me the favour of treating whichever viewpoint I assert I think you have as your own viewpoint. To be precise, I think you have the outlook that paying me $(US)10 would be a good thing. Contact me at tracyw1~at~gmx.com for Paypal details.
Maybe, maybe not. But the initial assertion was that the top 1% were getting services without paying for them. Before we move onto this new assertion of yours, are we agreed that the top 1% are at least paying for the services they receive?
“rich use more services than the poor”
How do you figure? Most rich people send their children to private school, never apply for medicaid, may employ private security guards…
Yeah, this probably isn’t worth it. Try to present both sides of an argument and you just get both sides peppering you. Since the only objection seemed to be to ‘domination of international trade,’ I was thinking historically, not exactly this minute, like going back to the gunboat diplomacy era up through banana republics. The U.S. was somewhat of a colonial power for a while and even had a dominant export economy up until shortly before I was born. People don’t only benefit from the state of their country as it is right now.
There’s also more to trade than exports. American poor have benefited tremendously from cheap import goods. American rich have benefited tremendously from cheap overseas labor that allowed them to open up their business to a much larger domestic market. Which of those is the bigger benefit? Shit, I don’t know. I was just trying to say there’s more to trying to figure out who benefits from the services of the government than divvying up last year’s federal budget. Is that much uncontroversial, even if you disagree with one of four examples of how the rich might benefit?
-anon@gmail (who, by the way, in keeping with the theme of this article we should totally coordinate meanness against in order to shame into not using that name/email combination, but I digress…)
-Aapje
Honestly, I fail to see the difference of opinion here. How is paying protection money to live on someone else’s turf, in exchange for safety from other people looking to extort and/or harm you, not a perfect example of a social contract at work? Anon@gmail even agrees that the services rendered make the protection money worth paying. (As do most Libertarians and other people who make the “taxation is theft” argument, for that matter.)
@Adam:
On the USA’s colonial past, Adam Smith, in the Wealth of Nations argued, I think strongly, that colonialism made the people of both the colonised and colonising countries worse off, compared to free trade. I’ve never seen Smith’s argument rebutted.
So if we are discussing gunboat diplomacy and American colonialism, then, at least until someone rebutts Smith, the question is how to properly distribute the costs of past American government actions. In a democratic country, I rather feel that everyone who voted for the government in question, or refrained from voting, bears some responsibility.
That may be. But, given that the top 1% in the USA pay over 40% of federal income taxes, and 49% of the budget goes on health and social security, it’s not like any more detailed examination of the numbers are actually going to change the overall story about the 1%.
(I also note that the only people on this thread who have actually been giving evidence and numbers are myself and David Friedman. If there was some actual numbers showing my argument was wrong, as opposed to vague speculation, I’m pretty confident someone would have cited it by now.)
Being a natural contrarian, this will only make me want to use that email more.
(Digression: I wonder sometimes, what the evolutionary purpose of contrarianism is. The best I can come up with is that these people are a backup solution for when society becomes, in their conformity, substantially insane. Then it’s the minority of contrarians who – through no particular conscious effort – provide continuation of the tribe.)
I took Aapje’s statement to mean more than just protection, but also stuff like health subsidies, dole, public schools, etc, etc – redistributive, socialistic policies. Protection is in the gang’s own interest, so they’ll do it regardless of whether I approve, but it’s a worthwhile anyway. Whereas the redistribution is quite clearly long-term undesirable.
Clearly, contrarianism is an alternative mating strategy shaped by the pressures of sexual selection. Aside from signaling the fitness-correlated trait of high social confidence, this behavior also helps the individual stand out from the crowd of more conformist competitors.
In other words, contrarianism is not about diversity of views.
Sincerely yours,
Robena Hannasdottir
Maybe the function of contrarianism is that it’s good to have some people who reflexively shove back against the tendency higher status have to overreach in their demands.
For what it’s worth, I believe that taxation is a literal instance of theft.
But I don’t have the knee-jerk outrage against taxation. Part of this is because, well, being anti-outrage is really my core thing. But for the most part, I agree with my argument above. It doesn’t matter who can craft the best Worst Argument In The World. Taxation is engaged in by a relatively predictable, relatively consistent manner. We can see its outcome. We can even discuss its outcome and judge whether or not we think it’s good. To my mind, this sidesteps the argument over taxation entirely, and reframes it as a sort of utilitarian calculation. If taxation is theft, that just means we need to figure out the socially optimum amount of theft.
Granted, I also think that it is probably much lower than what we do right now. But that’s an empirical question. It’s not something to take sides over, get outraged and yell at each other. It’s a thing we can measure and settle objectively.
Real theft is when a person takes something from you and that person now decides what happens with your property. In a democracy, you get a vote to how the pooled money is used, so it is clearly different. Is it theft when a sports team pools their money after a game and buys a crate of beer?
Furthermore, I doubt that many people want to live without services paid by wealth pooling, like a police force; while most/all people want to live without experiencing real thievery; again showing that they are different.
Tax rates are much less important to me than to live in a good society. Money is just a means to and end, you can’t eat it. Services bought aren’t necessarily better than services paid out of taxes (although in the US there is a bit of a self-fulfilling view on the government: people have low expectations, so they accept poor services). However, even in the US people tend to understand that you can’t defend a country (or run an empire) without having an army funded by wealth pooling.
No. People have subjective beliefs about ‘what is right.’ When you have a government that creates an optimal meritocracy, where people get paid directly proportionally to the economic value they provide (and non-productive people starve to death), that will make some people happy, but will outrage many others, as they don’t share those ethical beliefs about ‘what is right.’
Of course you may have the opinion that your ethics are objectively correct (although I can’t see how they can be), but you must realize that plenty of other people don’t share the same ethics and thus will take sides/be outraged against you, even if you ‘measure and settle objectively.’
>In a democracy, you get a vote to how the pooled money is used, so it is clearly different.
What about residents not entitled to vote, but required to pay taxes? Almost every state taxes residency, not citizenship.
>Is it theft when a sports team pools their money after a game and buys a crate of beer?
Are they going to beat up the team member who doesn’t want to contribute?
I also don’t believe taxes to be theft, but these arguments are bad.
“Is it theft when a sports team pools their money after a game and buys a crate of beer?”
If participation on both the team and in the pool are non-optional, then yes.
That describes my interaction with the government.
1/300 million isn’t much of a vote. And, it reminds me of the quote that “9/10 people enjoy gang rape”. That something is popular doesn’t make it right.
As a libertarian rather than an anarcho-capitalist, I agree on policing. Of course, this argument fails to take into account that most taxation is not based on police services used, nor is most spending directed towards policing and similar efforts. Get rid of taxation for art projects, schooling and welfare and then we can re-assess.
How can you have a pre-theoretical notion of “your property”? The concept only makes sense within a system of government, which in turn comes with taxation.
Property long predates government.
Not in the modern sense. Only what you could physically defend.
Or what your friends and allies could physically defend on your behalf. Or what no-one challenged you on. Or what you could recover after the event. And so on.
I think saga-era Icelanders (to give one example) would be very surprised to learn that they only owned what they could personally physically defend.
Today’s government isn’t really in the business of property defence. They’re in the business of law and order, which is not the same thing – private citizens are expected to defend their own property, which is why we all lock our doors and most of us have alarms. The police even run adverts warning us not to display valuables in public. If I do get burgled, or robbed, the government may (but probably won’t) catch those responsible, but they certainly won’t recover my property. That remains self-help.
Things have changed far less than you imagine. I’m no an-cap, but I do wonder at the magical powers some people ascribe to government.
That system that you and your friends and allies developed was a government.
Sure if you manipulate the terms it’s easy enough to show that property long predates government. But not otherwise.
The long and short of it is that in the world today the same things that give “your property” any meaning also require you to pay taxes. Taxes are theft is incoherent.
If you don’t like it, bitch at your parents for being responsible for you having been born. Not having been born was the only way you wouldn’t have had to suffer the awful oppression of living in a society with a government.
Fair enough, but that leaves a whole lot of room for governments dramatically, even unrecognizably, different than our own. (See David Friedman–is a “legal system” a government?) I am also reminded of Peter Leeson’s distinction between government and governance.
@Salem
I think there was someone on this post who mentioned they had a car stolen and reported it and the police just said to go look for it herself. That may have been more a matter of triage than delineation of duty, but definitely the government isn’t responsible for recovering stolen property. Even if they find it, I don’t think they necessarily go looking for the owner. That’s what we have property insurance for, though I guess we rely on the threat of lawsuits potentially backed by force to feel assured that the insurance company will actually pay us if we file a claim.
That system that you and your friends and allies developed was a government.
But it didn’t have taxation and it wasn’t a state. If you want to stretch to it “government,” you can, but given that even animals have notions of property, I share Psmith’s worry that you’ve made the term infinitely elastic.
Regardless, we started with you saying that property requires government which requires taxation. I am happy to see that you now cheerfully concede that you were wrong, and that saying “taxation is theft” is not incoherent.
The long and short of it is that in the world today the same things that give “your property” any meaning also require you to pay taxes.
I admire your ability to skip so lightly over several people’s unequivocal demonstration of how wrong you are, and I look forward to your cheerful concession on this point too.
Where shall I tell the travel agent I’d like a ticket to in order to get to David Friedman’s imagined freedom loving ancient Iceland?
TIL: medieval Iceland didn’t real.
“Where shall I tell the travel agent I’d like a ticket to in order to get to David Friedman’s imagined freedom loving ancient Iceland?”
Perhaps from the same source from which you got your imaginary view of my beliefs?
My account of that particular legal system.
Your ability to deliberately misread remains impressive.
As several commenters have pointed out, government isn’t what gives my property meaning in the here and now. Go back and re-read. If someone steals my iPad, the government won’t get it back for me. At most, they will imprison the thief, but for any given crime this is very unlikely. Instead, I have to rely on tacit norms and my own private actions.
But why believe me? Ask the police whether they’ll get your property back if someone robs you. In fact, I encourage you to get robbed first, to put your theory to a real test.
It’s worse than that. The government won’t get your iPad back, but it will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you violate its monopoly on use of force to get it back yourself.
Perfect law enforcement isn’t a prerequisite for providing the only meaningful framework for private property we have.
Again, it makes no sense to be pissed off at taxation “taking your stuff” when without the taxation you’d be living in a world of shit where property more or less doesn’t exist.
If the social contract is such a terrible burden feel free to kill yourself.
Anon@gmail
I get the impression that you are using “meaningful framework” and “social contract” in a manner vastly different from their popularly understood meanings as your position requires a lack of distinction between Malum prohibitum and Malum in se to remain coherent.
Otherwise why kill yourself when you can kill everyone else?
You are welcome to try. I suspect you’ll have no more luck than the poor fools in Eastern Oregon that took the rhetoric people like you recklessly spout seriously.
Also nothing I’ve said has anything to do with theories of criminal law. But quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur, so I guess you’ve got that going for your comment.
You seem to think that the police won’t recover my iPad due to imperfect law enforcement. You couldn’t be more wrong. The police won’t even try to recover my iPad. They are (quite rightly, by the way) in the business of law and order, not the business of property defence.
You keep making these threadbare assertions that the state provides the only meaningful framework for private property, and we all keep laughing at you. Please do keep it up.
There is no social contract, as you know. It’s funny, because I actually do think the state provides an important function, but listening to lunatics like you is powerful evidence that David Friedman is right.
As was mentioned upthread, there is a sense in which “might makes right” is true. But it’s not a particularly compelling argument in favor of obeying the state beyond the bare minimum required to avoid a free ride in the ATF party van. If the social contract is “do what you like and don’t get caught”…well.
If you’re not a certain kind of utilitarian, it’s possible that taxation is theft (in the sense that it is immoral/violates certain rights) AND that a world with government and taxation is better than a world without it. This is how I feel about a number of government functions.
Anon@gmail
How do you square your assertion the legal framework provided by a government is “the only meaningful framework for private property we have.” with your assertion what property rights have nothing to do with legal theory? They can’t both be true.
Likewise “Malum prohibitum” isn’t an attempt to sound profound or incomprehensible so much as it is a commonly used “term of art” that I would expect anyone with a passing interest in the law (or who’s taken an introductory Civics/Poli-Sci class) to recognize as a matter of course.
I didn’t say it had nothing to do with legal theory. I said it had nothing to do with criminal law theory, which is where your terms of art come from.
So how do you get a legal enforcement of property rights without the statutory and contractual prohibitions to which Malum prohibitum refers?
You either have to take the position that the only meaningful rights are those which the government enforces (in which case which rights are enforced and how becomes supremely relevant), or you have to make an appeal to some sort of extra-legal concept of morality/rights in which case we are right back where we started.
Is this the same anon@gmail that everybody else is arguing with? Because unlike everything else in this thread, this comment is actually reasonable. (And there’s no “witty” lines about people how people who disagree should kill themselves, to boot.) It also seems incompatible with the other arguments being made by anon@gmail, so if it is the same one, it’s leaving me a bit confused.
See, this is why I hate anon@gmail so much…
@Vorkon
I sympathize.
“So how do you get a legal enforcement of property rights without the statutory and contractual prohibitions to which Malum prohibitum refers?”
On the unlikely possibility that that is intended as a real question, one answer.
It was intended to point out the obvious hole in anon’s argument. You can’t claim that the state is only meaningful framework, and claim that the question of “Malum prohibitum” vs “Malum in se” isn’t relevant.
As I said before. If the only meaningful rights are those which the government enforces, which rights get enforced and how is very relevant to the discussion.
“If the only meaningful rights are those which the government enforces”
Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but I conjecture that you didn’t follow the link I offered, which described a non-governmental mechanism for enforcing rights.
I didn’t because “the only meaningful rights are those which the government enforces” is Anon’s position not mine.
I read the post as defining “coordinated meanness” as saying the community (be it the country or a church full of puritans” has written or commonly understood unwritten rules saying what actions will result in you being punished, and how those actions will result.
By this definition riling up a mob would be uncoordinated. There’s not many written or unwritten rules in the first world that say “breaking this rule shall be punished by mob violence”. The only example I can think of is lynching in the American south, and that’s thankfully in the past.
Lynching is another example that says coordinated meanness isn’t always good, but Scott said that too in the post.
“Coordinated” is an overloaded term, and I think there is a better word for what Scott is getting at (though I don’t know what it is).
But I disagree with you. Because consider: until 15 years ago, we had coordinated meanness around gay marriage. We all coordinated to say that gay marriage was wrong, and we will punish people who advocate for it.
For one, this is in my mind a clear cut example of invalid meanness. But secondly, this is very much a mob thing. Because why are we coordinated? Most homophobes don’t care about gays one way or another. They don’t think it through. They just live their life. Part of their life is that they belong to a community that informs them that being opposed to gay marriage is a required shibboleth, so they shrug their shoulders and go along with it.
Part of why they shrug their shoulders and go along with it is because the leaders of their community are able to rile up the more zealous members of it. This shifts the social default to a position of homophobia, and people follow.
Scott seems to mean a sort of deliberate, measured meanness. Meanness decided upon rationally. But this is not always the same as coordination. The homophobia is coordinated meanness, but I’d bet that for the most part it was not rational or measured.
Attempt it, sure. Advocate for it? As far as I know, no one got thrown in jail or beaten up by cops for being on the anti- side of Prop 22, let alone the better-known Prop 8.
I think you’re overlooking the “minimum bar” part of Scott’s post.
Coordinated meanness isn’t always good, such as your example of homophobia, but uncoordinated meanness is always a problem.
This is only true if you buy into the semantical con that “nice”/”mean” are functionally different from “good”/”bad”, which they are not.
I think you miss a critical element of coordinated meanness:
Who is going to stop it?
Once 51% of people want to do a thing, something like 30% of the people won’t care either way.
Have you just reinvented the rule of law?
One of the things I wish I could telepathically install into everyone else’s brain is what’s so subtle and important about the rule of law.
One author gives the essential components as Generality, Prospectivity, Publicity, Consent and Due Process. It took me years to appreciate how profound that is.
Scott is grasping for a bunch of those notions in this post. Coordination -> Consent: we need a majority vote. Prospectivity and Publicity are how you know what libel is before you get arrested for it. And Due Process is what ensures you don’t just get beaten up in a dark alley.
“The Night Watch” is one of my favorite Pratchett books because it’s a sort of civics class as a novel, and Vimes is able to cope in a corrupt world because of his understanding of the foundations of civil society.
Also, one of my favorite Borges quotes is about Due Process:
“The [execution] was set for March 29, at 9:00 A.M. That delay … was caused by the administrative desire to work impersonally and deliberately, as vegetables do, or planets.”
On the other hand, the impersonal and deliberate work, as in the death penalty (whether you agree with it or not, and I don’t) means that the State, by taking on the role of revenger, avoids things like lynching mobs and blood feuds. Since it is done on behalf of and in the name of us all, there is no personal animus or anger or desire to inflict suffering for the gratification of personal hatred, and there is supposed to be fairness in the process for everyone, accused as well as victim and survivors, which personal revenge does not take into account.
That’s why every society eventually comes up with some form of laws about murder, even if they don’t have the death penalty, and they permit the accused to have a chance of living even if they have to pay compensation to the family of the victim.
“Since it is done on behalf of and in the name of us all, there is no personal animus or anger or desire to inflict suffering for the gratification of personal hatred, and there is supposed to be fairness in the process for everyone, accused as well as victim and survivors, which personal revenge does not take into account.”
That’s hilarious. In the US, there’s a combination of incompetent and overbearing police, coerced confessions, and cheating prosecutors. Most people would start the list with racism, but this kind of thing happens to white people, too. I’ve wondered whether racism is at the root of having a vicious justice system– (white?) people wanting something which would be hard on black people– but I really don’t know how it happened.
I have no idea whether procedures are better in other countries, though not having the death penalty at least solves the problem of government killing innocent people.
I don’t know whether this question belongs in the Albion’s Seed thread, but I’ve noticed that a good many Americans are terrified of being excessively kind, and I don’t know what’s going on with that.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/radley-balko
“If you are kind to the cruel, you will end up being cruel to the kind.”
“the State, by taking on the role of revenger, avoids things like lynching mobs and blood feuds.”
Iceland changed religions twice, in both cases with violence and threats of violence. The first time, paganism to Christianity, the violence killed perhaps a dozen people (going by memory–I haven’t checked the exact number but it was small). That was under a feud system. The second time, Catholicism to Lutheranism, it killed several times as many out of a smaller population. That was under royal rule, I think Norwegian.
I’m referring to it, but I don’t think people automatically understand it to argue against shaming.
“but you are not allowed to actually misgender transgender commenters here.” In my introductory microeconomics class I was discussing the male/female wage gap. A student asked me if what I was saying was relevant to gay people. I said that I wasn’t sure, but then I pointed out that one of the highest paid female executives was born male. I then got nervous that I had defected by accident in saying that this executive was born male because perhaps people such as this executive are considered to have always been female. I ended up just apologizing and saying I don’t know the appropriate terminology but I certainly don’t mean to be insulting to anyone. Given the complex language rules, the danger of following old patterns, and the social cost of being seen to be anti-trans the (unfortunately) easiest thing for many is probably to just avoid talking about people who are not gender conformists.
I feel that the reasonable standard (for this comments section at least) is that if someone says “Please call me ‘x'” then you call them ‘x’ (and extend that somewhat, i.e. if they ask to be called a man, you use “he” to refer to them).
I remember making an argument to that effect in college. (I don’t remember the context, but not in relation to transgender issues.)
The person I was talking with replied that thenceforth he wished to be called “my lord”.
If anyone wishes to be called “my lord”, I will willingly attempt to do so!
I would do it, but I would be as belligerent as possible about it until they gave up.
“Hey Ro-”
(loudly:) “YES MY LORD AND MASTER? WHAT MIGHT YOU REQUIRE OF ME?”
It’s easier to say that now when no one is asking you to do so. If everyone in the world was making up pronouns and asking you to refer to them by these terms you might throw up your hands and admit that there should be a limit.
Call us lords, we need more respect around here.
@Rob
The question is, will Scott tolerate people being literally in compliance with his new law, while being openly mocking its existence when doing so? Will the interests of those the law is meant to protect be happy with that arrangement?
Wrong Species: Hopefully most people who are serious about their gender pronouns won’t do that, and IME that’s been the case. Most people who I know, both offline people and online people I interact with frequently enough for it to be a concern, either use he, she, or they. Semi-unique words to refer to a specific person present even outside of context already exist; those are their names. Pronouns have a different language function than names, and should be fairly few in number else they’re basically nicknames and no longer work as pronouns.
Part of the problem is that English speakers haven’t fully settled on a gender-neutral singular pronoun for people yet, so some who don’t want “he” or “she” end up making up their own. Singular “they” is the most popular and IMO makes the most sense since most English speakers already know it and it feels more natural than neo-pronouns when used in a sentence. And we already have precedent for using the same non-gendered word for singular and plural, in the case of “you.” So I hope singular they becomes the accepted standard, or else there’s a different one or two added to the language and accepted as standard, and then unique pronouns won’t be an issue anymore because they’ll have no purpose that isn’t better served by using a name.
“Don’t hit people” is a pretty good rule, even if you sometimes play sport or need to defend yourself. Sure, it doesn’t contain literally every exception you will ever need, but in most situations you will encounter, you shouldn’t hit people.
I recommend the Huck Finn Rule in these matters:
He said we ought to bow when we spoke to him, and say “Your Grace” or “My Lord” or “Your Lordship”– and he wouldn’t mind if we called him plain “Bridgewater,” which, he said, was a title anyway and not a name; and one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for him he wanted done.
Well, that was all easy, so we done it.
However, the rule is conditional on it being easy. I’ll call people by their preferred pronoun if I happen to remember it, but I’m not planning to maintain a database.
Thanks for reminding me that I need to go back and reread Huck Finn. I’ve forgotten a lot of the sick burns and serious shade Twain dished out, all seasoned with a serious dose of common decency.
Cute, but not consistently grammatical — both honorifics and pronouns work by replacing noun phrases, but the rules for when you can use them are different. Sometimes the replacement gives you a functioning sentence, but sometimes it doesn’t, especially in the reflexive and possessive cases:
“He ate the cake.”
“Sir ate the cake.”
“Andrew proved he is stupid.”
*”Andrew proved Sir is stupid.”
“Bob shook his ass.”
*”Bob shook Sir’s ass.”
“Charlie embarrassed himself.”
*”Charlie embarrassed Sirs’self.”
So the possessive ends up looking like you’re introducing a second agent, and so does the personal pronoun, sometimes. You’d need to replace the proper noun too to get it to work, and then it sounds distractingly kinky. And the reflexive is just unspeakably awful — I don’t think English has a form that can substitute for it without rephrasing.
Either that has become startlingly common, or you and I attended the same event.
As was I. Sorry to have missed meeting you.
sweeneyrod, the problem here with reliably using the pronouns that people ask for is that there isn’t a convenient way to find out what they’re asked for if they’ve done it in a past thread.
Is the word “reliably” the problem here? It seems like there’s an implied “… once you know” tacked on, and maybe also an implied “… unless you forget” too.
OT:
I use a forum that labels each user’s posts with their preferred pronoun (text-based gaming, not killallthemisogynists.com or anything – we use a lot of third-person pronouns*), and people screw up other people’s pronouns all the time. People are overwhelmingly polite** about 1) pointing out the error and 2) apologizing for the error.
* It’s a forum for playing Mafia, Classic Soviet-Invented Party Game! You have to talk about what so-and-so said all the time.
** As polite as can be expected during a game of Mafia, Classic Soviet-Invented Party Game!
Some of the people in my gaming group play social games online.
I… don’t understand. I don’t understand! I feel like it’s missing the point. How can you even play the game without looking for tells in other people while trying to fake tells for yourself?
(Incidentally, socially-awkward people: Play social defection-oriented games; creative verbal games like Funemployed or Snake Oil are also useful in improving your Speech score. It’s not a fix – there are some seriously socially awkward people in the regulars group I play with who are still seriously socially awkward – but it does give you some skills.)
Dear Orphan Wilde:
You do it via written language. It’s different, but totally possible. For instance, saying
tells me something different from a simple “I don’t understand.”
Online Mafia games take a long time to play. One “day” in-game might last two weeks, where at a party it’d last 10-15 minutes max.
But they definitely have their own drama. You can check out examples at mafiascum.net or elsewhere.
For example, our host wants to be called Scott [last name] rather than Scott S-sk-nd around here, and I hope everybody would agree that calling him latter (with the actual vowels) would be pretty dickish.
I’m gonna call your comment a DM, because I had forgotten Scott’s government name until you provided some key letters. Consider revising.
And it seems to me that this comment is an attempt to be dickish with plausible deniability. Why not simply write “Scott Alexander rather than his real name”?
I mean, it’s not like Scott makes any effort in hiding his identity, but I think there’s an unspeaken rule of not bringing it up, just in case.
Right, I’m sure many commenters already know Scott’s real name – it’s not very hard to find if you really want to know. The problem with this comment in particular is that it conveys the message “see how close I dare to go to violating Scott’s explicit request not to refer to him by his real name?”, which is certainly not kind and wholly unnecessary in this case. It strikes me as dickish in spirit, if maybe not in letter.
Scott doesn’t necessarily want this blog coming up when, for example, a patient perhaps googles his name. This is a reason not to mention his name, even if everyone here knows it (and quite clearly not everyone knows it; I am mysteriously good at forgetting it myself, having discovered and then forgotten it twice before again being reminded by the comment above).
But then you get people like me:
My preferred pronoun is spelled exactly like the entirety of War and Peace, without spaces. Failing to refer to me this way is clearly a grievous insult.
Fine, but you’re gonna need to conjugate that for us and show some examples of usage, as indeed do the vast majority of neopronoun users.
Nah. It isn’t my responsibility to educate you.
Actually, irl, listing the forms of nonstandard pronouns is common practice.
People that won’t use a consistent identity won’t get non-snark responses. Actually, that would be an interesting parallel to explore. Perhaps another time with someone that will actually stand by their position.
In the vocative case, which I demand be added to English to make it a safe space for me, my preferred pronoun is still spelled exactly like the entirety of War and peace except that Natasha Rostov’s name is now spelled “Throat-Warbler-Mangrove”.
“I feel that the reasonable standard (for this comments section at least) is that if someone says “Please call me ‘x’” then you call them ‘x’”
I disagree. The fact that someone self-identifies as male (or female, or honest, or any other characteristic) doesn’t determine how I see that person.
Referring to someone who self-identifies as female by male pronouns is, under most circumstances, discourteous. The solution is not to lie about one’s own views, which is what using a pronoun that doesn’t correspond to how one actually views the person amounts to, but to either avoid gendered pronouns or avoid references to the person that would require such.
I agree. No one should be ashamed of their gender, and referring to someone as a man or woman is not an insult. If you suffer emotional pain because I call you “he” rather than “she,” you have a mental illness, and I’m sorry for you, but it is the illness that is hurting you, not me.
I also avoid pronouns when referring to “trans” people online. Not so easy in real life, though.
See Scott’s take on that particular reasoning here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ .
Gender dysphoria may be a psychological illness, but most signs point to it being caused by a hardwired and fairly distinct neurological-anatomical incongruity, and not some abstract malaise that only exists in the Cartesian dualist mind. Intentionally misgendering people for some philisophical stance on the issue seems roughly equivalent to repeatedly pointing out someone’s disability after they’ve told you they’d prefer not to talk about it, because you personally don’t think they should be sensitive about their handicap. “In bird culture, this is considered a dick move.”
The second half of this is that by far the most successful treatment of the mental illness you’re describing as a personal issue involves reconciling your external identity with your neurology, since with the technology we have we can’t go the other way around. You’re right that the illness is hurting them – but maintaining a public identity in a neurologically congruent manner is the most successful treatment the medical community has devised for that hurt (a hurt, by the way, which has significant consequences for the outcomes of the illness). So your form of protest against reasonable accomodations for ‘mental illness’ is not just a matter of insensitivity to the feelings of a sufferer but actively interfering with their best attempts at treating the illness -like encouraging a recovering alcoholic to drink. (It may be closer to forcing them to drink, since they can’t decline to be misgendered when you opt to do so, but I’m aiming for charity on my ‘dick move’ analogies)
I don’t think it’s been proven that treating the mental illness requires everyone in society to pretend that a man is a woman (or vice versa).
Also, while it’s true that Scott previously said something interesting about this, as he has about a lot of issues, it doesn’t settle the question. I wasn’t convinced.
Yeah, I try to avoid interactions with trans people and it makes me sad… English is not my main language and I always end up offending people despite care and good intentions, like, I use the pronouns which I feel are best until the person tells me they would prefer something else. Things start to get weird here, the most weird for me is people who like being called “They”. This is super confusing because “They” is already a pronoun, and it is plural! I can understand the Xyr thing but why take words which already mean something else? Best not to tell what happened when I had the brilliant idea of calling people by the gender and species neutral “It” online…
I feel like transgender people are being acculturated to become walking minefields and use their condition as an easy way to gain status by forcing everybody else to modify their behaviour, and this is really bad for them imho, puts them in a bad psychological state.
I think people ought to be called what they are perceived as by the one who is talking about them. It is honest and lets you know where you really stand outside of your own head. I particularily dislike when transphobic or otherwise heretical people are forced to speak in a way which does not accurately represent their thoughts, feelings and perceptions on the matter. It is very bad for them and it is very bad for transpeople who now have an even harder time identifying the people that can see them for what they are.
Singular “they” has been in widespread usage in English for a long time. Like many other standard usages, it’s not “grammatically correct” (whatever that means) and thus is not taught in ESL courses (to the detriment of language learners).
I’m in no position to argue that, but although English is not my first language, I do most of my reading in English and that easily tallies to tens of thousands of pages a year (Estimate is in unit “pages” because it is based on goodreads stats + any reading not in book form). The only place where I ever consciously came across singular “they” is here. This includes “progessive” works e. g. “Ancilliary Justice” etc.
How sure are you that “widespread” does not apply only to your subculture/filterbubble?
Out of curiosity: How “off” does my written English sound, anyways?
It’s much more prevalent in spoken than in written English (as with most “grammatically incorrect” usages), although as Steven Pinker pointed out in his most recent book, it’s been around since Shakespeare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Very interesting, thanks.
Singular they is fairly common, especially in spoken English. But not exactly in the way some trans-people use it.
For example, the sentence: “President Obama is going to Cuba next month, they will meet with Fidel Castro.” sounds very odd to my ear. On the other hand if the subject being referred to is indefinite it doesn’t sound as strange. For example, “If anyone comes in, let them know I’ll be back in an hour.” Anyone is singular, so in the prescriptivist rule the pronoun should him but them sounds fine to me.
@Urstoff
I’m going side with Alex on “they” being a terrible singular pronoun when there’s the far more reasonable option of something like “ve” and “vim” which flows far more naturally in almost any sentence and doesn’t make it unclear whether you’re talking about a group.
People can choose pronouns but if you choose silly ones already in use for something else (worst I ever saw was someone on tumblr trying to claim “and” as their pronoun) then you earn a little scorn for making it really really hard to talk to/about you.
You can try to establish “ve” or “ze” as a convention, and if you do, great. But right now, the singular they is in widespread use, and in most contexts it is not confusing at all.
I’ve used singular they since childhood, well before I was aware of any gender politics, in the UK.
I think I just took it as given that the normal way to address people when gender was unknown didn’t become invalid simply because it was known, and grew up recent enough that singular ‘he’ was archaic.
Online interaction means it gets a lot of use, because often gender is non-obvious or at least not immediately in mind at the point of drafting a sentence.
Murphy:
For sake of completeness, you are not actually siding with me there.
Any argument I brought up against “singular they” works even more so against artificially coined pronouns. Also, let me repeat that I have no political interest in this topic, I’m merely stating that any proposal to motivated gendering is not free as in gratis, linguistically. The question of “free as in freedom” is for others to discuss.
Also, and perhaps more importantly I find motivated gendering to be punishing outsiders, as explained elsewhere in the thread. This certainly is even more true for what basically is the secret language of an ingroup.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect that multiple people might come in, though. The problem with that sentence is not that them is plural, it is that anyone is singular.
Yeah, of course standard English is very explicit that anyone is a singular indefinite pronoun regardless of the plurality in fact. That is a frankly arbitrary rule. The determinism it inspires may be considered a positive outcome, but it is certainly possible to imagine a parallel universe where standard English has a different rule. One where anyone is assigned the expected plurality in fact, for example, is perfectly reasonable as well.
Under such a rule the use of him or them would be interchangeable contingent on whether the speaker expects one or more people to come in during his absence.
Since the motivation for the use of them in this example is as much or more motivated by disagreement with prescriptivist jerks about the plurality of anyone as with the indeterminate gender, I think it is a poor example of the singular they.
I see the “singular they” used far more often in this manner than I do for indeterminate gender.
WWWtbA, that’s a good point. There’s a fuller taxonomy here: https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/dos-and-donts-for-singular-they/
“Someone thinks they got cheated.” That’s similar to the anyone example I gave.
“John or Marsha thinks they can do it.” The article points out it’s hard to make this sentence work any other way.
“My friend said they would be in town this weekend.” This one seems to be fairly common in spoken English and less so in written English.
“I think if someone in my class was pregnant I would be sympathetic to them.” The article recommends against this one, and I have to agree this is a bridge too far for me.
Finally, similar to the one I mentioned that sounds odd to my ear–“Barack Obama said they would meet with the Dalai Lama.”
Unfortunately for those advocating for it, the gender non-binary version of singular they is closest to that last sentence than any of the others, and is going to sound quite jarring to most people IMO.
Data point: As a non native speaker, I generally use singular they for all the “inbetween” he and she. It has never come up in my formal english education, but it did a lot in informal internet conversation, I find it to not be particularly less intuitive than plural you.
brad
Personally I would only accept the first example. The third example seems unacceptable because the speaker would know the gender of his friend, and as such a singular they is inappropriate. The second example is simply a poorly constructed sentence. I can’t easily think of a situation where that sentence would come up.
I learned by myself, mostly reading/internet/watching films etc. Never once saw They used like that other than in very modern works. Of course perhaps I did and ignored it and became confused by it insead?
It is confusing on account of also being a pronoun that means something else… Like if you are talking about a group of people and one of them is a transperson who likes to be called they, what does “They said lalala” means? Are you talking about the transperson or They as a group? Sure, you can use the transperson’s name instead but its not a perfect solution, lets call transperson “X”.
“X and their friends were talking, X said something and then they laughed”
Could mean they all laughed or they laughed, ambiguous. The literature I’ve read where the author uses “they” in this manner is always hard to follow for me.
Is there any native english speaker who thinks “They” is confusing too?
Singular “they” is most common when talking about someone loosely specified or poorly conceptualized. Take for example the sentence “If somebody tries to take my cookies, they should expect a punch in the face.” Somebody is grammatically singular as shown by the verb agreement “somebody tries” (compare “if those five guys try to take my cookies…”), but I don’t think anybody would regard the use of “they” in that sentence to be strange. Possibly this is because the “somebody” in this case represents an undifferentiated mass of potential cookie-takers, and it could be any of those people that will need punching.
With that as a base, singular they has been creeping into ever more specific cases: I personally regard the sentence “The building manager told me that they needed my rent by this weekend” as perfectly natural, with “they” referring in an isolated context to the building manager; for me it’s only really once we get to named individuals that it starts sounding weird.
Except for the made-up pronouns, I don’t see any one solution fitting all cases.
In many, many cases, singular ‘they’ works fine, but “They told me they would be arriving after them” loses too much information.
“She told me he would be arriving after them” is more clear, but “Alice told me Bob would be arriving after the others” would be more clear yet.
“Yeah, of course standard English is very explicit that anyone is a singular indefinite pronoun regardless of the plurality in fact.”
Better still, so is “everyone.”
My wife tells the story of a grammatical purist at her college who, asked “where is everyone,” replied “he want thataway.”
Alex, Anonymous:
See Wikipedia and elsewhere. Singular “they” to refer to individuals of unknown gender is nigh-universal; I’m certain you’ve come across it elsewhere, although you may not have realized it was not intended to be plural. (That said, it is much more common in conversational English, since the authors of texts usually know the genders of all characters.) Its usage to refer to individuals who would prefer not to be identified as male or female is new, but a fairly reasonable extension of its older use.
Anonymous:
Yeah, there’s some ambiguity, but there’s plenty of ambiguity anyway – if you say “he”, were you referring to John or David? If you say “they”, were you referring to two, three, or all of the members of some group (or, indeed, an individual of unknown gender, per above)? If you say “you”, do you mean the single person you are directly addressing, or a group to which they belong?
I don’t think the particular case of singular “they” really adds that much overhead.
I think there’s a pretty clear implication that this is about “mean” misgendering, not accidental. If you refer to someone who identifies as female with “he”, get corrected, and then apologise for the mistake and use female pronouns from then on, my presumption is Scott wouldn’t punish you for that. The issue is when, for example, someone identifies themselves as a trans women or non binary person AMAB and a commenter than insistently continues to use incorrect pronouns, denying then gender identity.
Honestly in a comment thread system accidental misgendering happens all the time because people are just text and usernames, its pretty okay.
In general I understand the point its easier to avoid discussing such people but obviously thats problematic too. I think the solution is just to be respectful and learn from mistakes. You fuck up a pronoun, apologise and move on, as if you’d gotten someone’s name wrong. You won’t be perceived as anti-trans if you don’t politicise defending your mistakes. I often accidentally misgender trans* and nb friends of mine, but I’m pretty sure i dont pay any social cost for that because its understood to be an accident, not a denial of their identity.
“denying then gender identity”
Failing to agree with their view of their gender identity.
The idea that seems to be behind the way you put it is that your identity exists in my head, and thus you have a claim to control over the contents of my head.
Which is why I find the idea that by disagreeing with someone’s view of his, her or its gender identity I am “misgendering” him disturbing.
“The idea that seems to be behind the way you put it is that your identity exists in my head, and thus you have a claim to control over the contents of my head. ”
No, just the contents of your speech on this forum.
So “denying them gender identity” meant “denying that their gender identity is what they claim it is?”
I read it as “keeping them from having their preferred gender identity.” In other contexts, denying someone something means keeping him from having it, not saying that he doesn’t have it.
Well said!
“Sending the police to arrest a libertarian rancher in Montana who refuses to pay taxes for reasons of conscience”
Can federal government tax the air we breathe? They have the power and the legal right to do so.
The federal government claim to massive tracts of land, including majorities of states like Nevada, is absurd. Let people use the Earth and forage or at least acknowledge families like the Bundys that have been grazing on those lands before the remote federal bureaus claiming rents even existed. Or let the states and municipalities administer those lands and charge rents as they see fit. It’s absurd that the federal government is laying claim to such earth and grass.
You are arguing that arresting recreational drug users is legally right but morally wrong. Federal government claims to massive tracts of land that ranchers have been using for generations is completely morally wrong.
In the Bundy case, I’d argue that the moment he resorted to armed defiance it stopped being about ranching grounds – on which I have no strong opinion – and became terrorism, to which the government is fully justified in responding with force. The reason we live in an organized society and not a chaotic wasteland like Syria is that we agree to follow rules even when they’re unjust, or at worst resort to legal action rather than guns.
Not terrorism, rebellion. I don’t disagree with the conclusion, however.
Agree. It’s scary to call that terrorism, and incorrect when he’s doing it in plain sight and random people are in no danger.
I think it’s time to pronounce the 200-odd year experiment of using the word “terrorism” a failure and just move on.
I generally don’t care about the object-level conclusion when people play that sort of language game to support it. Bundy the self-righteously thuggish criminal, I am no fan of. Bundy the falsely-accused terrorist, gets a measure of sympathy from me. Please don’t make me sympathize with people like that.
You’re right, I apologize for that.
But while he’s not a central example of terrorism, there are some significant shared properties (the literal definition, someone who tries to achieve political gains by a show of force, is technically correct about him, even if many of the implications are not). There doesn’t seem to be a good word for that – “rebellion” seems wrong in that he’s not trying to secede, and “criminal activity” isn’t quite right in that criminals hide from the law instead of openly defying it. I guess this is one case we should just avoid definitions, and this irks me more than it should.
How is that the literal definition of terrorism?
I don’t think anyone really uses the term that way.
Terrorism usually refers to the practice of deliberately killing (or deliberately attempting to kill) unarmed civilians with the explicit or implied threat to continue to do so, at random, until political demands are met.
Your definition is far too broad.
A state that declares war against another, perhaps to force the return of disputed territory, but does not deliberately target civilians, is not engaging in terrorism.
A rebellion that targets government military installations is not engaging in terrorism. (They’re the rebel alliance, not the terrorist alliance)
Crashing an empty plane into the Pentagon would be an act of war, hijacking a plane full of civilians and crashing it into the Pentagon is terrorism (and an act of war).
The Bundys may have been deliberately trying to provoke a violent confrontation with government agents, but they weren’t threatening to kill random civilians until their demands were met. The Bundys are not a central example of terrorism, because they’re not an example of terrorism.
How is that the literal definition of terrorism?
I don’t think anyone really uses the term that way.
There are prescriptivist definitions of terrorism that come pretty close to that. Most of them I think trace back to governments trying to define the word in a way that encompasses as many of their enemies as possible but never ever their own actions, but I’ve seen them start creeping into allegedly impartial dictionaries. In terms of descriptivist usage, I agree, that’s not the central example people are using for terrorism.
As with “pornography”, it’s a term that is I think still genuinely useful but will never be defined rigorously enough to prevent people from playing Orwellian linguistic games with it. So my policy has to be, playing those games means losing the game, “Persuade John Schilling that you have something interesting to say”.
While it’s true that many people (and governments) do use an overly broad definition of terrorism, even the broadest official definition I’ve ever heard doesn’t use the term “show of force,” as in Pku’s definition. The broadest I’ve heard is “use of violence or the threat of violence” to achieve political gains, which, while somewhat similar, is still far less broad than the “show of force.”
The Bundys never threatened to use violence against anyone, except, as they repeatedly pointed out whenever they were interviewed, in self-defense, so that definition really doesn’t fit.
If you really want a term to describe what they were doing, I’d suggest you just go with “protest.” The only thing that made what they were doing any different from, say, the Occupy movement, is the fact that they were armed, which I don’t think changes the fundamental nature of what they were doing unless they planned to use those arms. You might call it a stupid, poorly thought out protest, (which, incidentally, is another similarity between the Bundys and Occupy) but that doesn’t change what it is.
(As a side note, am I the only one for whom it feels like nails on a chalkboard whenever I need to pluralize something like “Bundy?” I almost just went ahead and typed it as “Bundy’s” or “Bundies,” even though I knew it was wrong, just to make myself feel better. >.< )
You’re not alone. Pluralizing a family name that ends in ‘y’ bugs the hell out of me, too. And I agree that the most proper term for what they were doing is ‘protest.’ It was effectively the same thing as a sit-in, except instead of chaining themselves to a counter to avoid being removed, they armed themselves to avoid being removed. At bare minimum, you have to actually attack someone to be properly called a ‘terrorist.’
“The only thing that made what they were doing any different from, say, the Occupy movement, is the fact that they were armed, which I don’t think changes the fundamental nature of what they were doing unless they planned to use those arms.”
At least to me (someone far outside of, and kind of creeped out by, US gun culture), this seems… well, hair-splitting at best. That they were armed shows that using those arms was, at rock bottom minimum, a possibility they took seriously enough to prepare for at nontrivial cost to themselves and their cause. You can argue that technically that doesn’t quite rise to the level of “planned to use those arms”, but the similarities between the two seem a lot more salient than the differences.
Apologies for the tangent but I’ve noticed a tendency to underestimate the effectiveness of natural/improvised weapons, and overestimate the effectiveness of purpose built weapons like guns and knives.
A baseball sized rock or empty glass bottle can take out an unprotected human just fine.
@hlynkacg
That’s not really a tangent at all, and is actually probably the best response I can think of to Jeff H’s concerns.
A person with an intent to do violence can be dangerous, no matter what they are armed with. It’s the intent to do violence that is dangerous; If you have that, you’ll be able to find a weapon.
“There are no unarmed men, only disarmed minds.”
Sharpen those Hufflepuff bones!
…You can’t make me read that. I refuse.
I see no particular reason why it is absurd for the federal government to own massive tracts of land, but not absurd for states to own (or administer) those same lands. Perhaps there’s some nuanced policy reason why the latter is preferable to the former, but calling the one absurd just looks like counter-productive exaggeration.
Further, I wonder if your argument would apply equally well to a large absentee landlord, prototypically living out east?
The short version of the answer:
Because this leaves massive tracts of states in Federal control.
Which if you’re on the East Coast (or other densely populated area) may sound like a “So what?” statement; but these areas aren’t generally held in densely populated states, so these states have, effectively, no recourse. Massachusetts has as much say about what happens to federal lands in Arizona as Arizona does. In the 11 Western states in which more than half of the land is owned by the Federal government, there is a lot of bitterness about this, as many people feel disenfranchised; more like imperial subjects than citizens of the country.
Disenfranchised is a funny word to use for the circumstance whereby everyone gets one vote regardless of how close or far he lives from the parcel of land we are voting on.
Nonetheless, I get the argument. I may not agree with it, but I understand how it works and what’s appealing about it. I still think absurd is a bridge way too far. It makes me less sympathetic, not more.
And I think the absentee landlord (a la Ireland in the 19th century) question is a good way to clarify intuitions. Would the situation be different — better or worse — if rather than the federal government owing 80% of Nevada Mike Bloomberg did and he didn’t allow any ranching, timbering, ATVing, etc. on his lands?
So … no problem then? Are property taxes and federal employees behaving badly the main issues to your mind?
It seems obvious to me how that could happen. Imagine a polity consisting of your US state and the country of India holding an election on eating beef. Might you object to the fairness of applying the results?
That’s probably how a lot of Westerners feel on voting with Massachussets and New York on federal land use.
Disenfranchised is exactly the term.
All the land the federal government owns is land that people cannot live on. It’s that much less potential population for these states. It’s that many fewer congressional representatives. All the industry that isn’t allowed to happen is jobs that don’t attract people and enrich the locals. Arizona gets almost no say in how half of Arizona is run.
Arizona can’t be disenfranchised because Arizona isn’t a person. The people of Arizona can vote the same as the people of anywhere else (actually a bit more than some). The potential Arizonians either don’t exist or do exist and live and vote somewhere else and so also aren’t being disenfranchised.
Like I said, and in response to Furslid as well, I get the argument for localism and/or federalism. I see some merit to it, but there are pros and cons. It isn’t a slam dunk. Unless you are planning a civil war (and how well did that work out for the Bundys?) you need to convince, not just preach to the choir. Acting like it’s a slam dunk is anti-convincing — at least to me.
If Mike Bloomberg owned all that land, why would he want leave it unused? He could make a lot more money by putting it to good use.
Voters in Massachusetts don’t significantly feel the economic effects of how land in Nevada is used. As such, they aren’t incentivized to make good decisions about it.
If Mike Bloomberg owned the land, he would have better incentives. And the residents of Nevada do. So Mike Bloomberg owning it, or the state of Nevada owning it, both seem preferable to the federal government owning it.
Exactly.
But it gets worse, one of the things voters in Massachusetts are incentivized to do is engage in virtue signaling by (intentionally absurd example) putting up signs that say “no rednecks allowed”.
I mostly agree, except for the statement “In this case their coordination of meanness cannot possibly hurt anyone.” Not right away, maybe, but that’s how ideological wars start.
I’d also argue that it can move the Overton window.
If there’s regularly someone on TV saying very politely that perhaps we should kill all the Jews then that other guy who’s merely politely saying that perhaps we should consider excluding the Jews from working with children and vulnerable people…. sounds a lot less evil and crazy and when a third person comes along saying that no no no, we shouldn’t do any of those things, all we really need is a register of Jews to help keep track the Problematic ones and nothing more… well he’s sounding even less crazy.
A rational person may be willing to follow this strategy to the extent that he expects that other people will follow the strategy if and only if he does.
However, empirically other people are not rational. In the words of rationalist scripture, “the ‘rational’ strategy adapts to the other players’ strategies, it does not depend on the other players being rational.”
What is the incentive for any individual to cooperate with the requirement to only be mean if it can be coordinated? Do you expect this to be stable? How is it better than other ideologies that would have been perfect if everyone else were just willing to ignore their incentives (e.g. communism)?
If it is known that a majority of the population follows the rule “only be mean if it can be coordinated” and I very much want to be mean to Scott, what is stopping me from making everyone’s life miserable until enough people agree to coordinate to shun Scott? In other words, how does this system hold up when it becomes the target for exploitation by unethical agents?
Making everyone’s life miserable is quite tough, particularly if you can’t make people associate with you.
After all there are plenty of people already who try to make everyone’s lives miserable, for apparently no ideological reason, and when I run across one, my first response to them is to not invite them around and to turn down their invitations.
If you try to harass everyone else into coordinating to shun Scott, and Scott is more popular than you are, the more likely outcome is that everyone else will coordinate to shun you.
If, however, you have enough of a popularity advantage over Scott to make it work… honestly, that sounds like a subplot of a “mean girls” high school novel.
“Second, you’re allowed to (politely) express your philosophical disagreements with the idea of transgender, but you are not allowed to actually misgender transgender commenters here.”
-I dislike this, though I admit it should make comment threads less chaotic. Rules against misgendering people just feel too oppressive on free expression. Transgender as a widely accepted category is a pretty new idea, anyways, and it certainly didn’t spread via greater knowledge of scientific discoveries.
Why rules against misgendering people in particular seem too oppressive? If you want to insult someone there’s plenty of gender-neutral ways of doing so.
And quite frankly here we mostly don’t know people’s gender. I’ve been misgendered a fair few times on the Internet and that never seems to bother the people I’m arguing with particularly, unless they’re also trying to make an argument based on my (incorrect) gender, and those are typically logical fallacies anyway.
Possibly because, as you pointed out, misgendering is really easy to do by accident, especially on the Internet when the only thing you might know about someone is a pseudonym.
I presumed Scott was talking about deliberate misgendering of transgender people, eg someone says they’re a trans woman and then in response someone else calls them “he”. Not accidental stuff.
Sounds like something we should know for sure rather than presume, right?
But addressing transwoman by “he” means forcing someone who thinks man cannot become a women to resign hsi position before a discussion even starts. It’s like forcing Jews to say “Son of God” about Jesus in theological discussions about whether Jesus was really son of God..
Well to be fair, not every discussion with a transperson is going to be over whether you agree with their decision to be trans. At least I hope not.
@szopeno: addressing anyone as “he” or “she” in English is ungrammatical, the second-person is “you”, which is conveniently gender-neutral.
If you find yourself talking about someone in the third-person you can use their name, or handle, and other gender-neutral terms if you want to avoid implying a gender.
I have this problem talking about Ozy, to pick a salient example. I know that they prefer not to be gendered as female, but everything from their appearance to their writing style strikes me as gender-typical feminine, which makes it really really hard not to call them “she”.
I mean, I made a point of doing it in the previous paragraph, but if this weren’t the topic at hand I would probably have just called her a girl.
@Tracy W, You are right; however it requires you to be constantly on guard, as it’s quite natural in human speech to use “he” and “She” regularly.
I am Polish and my language forces me to use gender whenever I talk in past tense (e.g. I must use gender when I say “you said” i.e. either powiedziałeś or powiedziałaś), which might somewhat influenced my opinion above.
@szopeno
See, this is why everybody should talk Hungarian. 😀 It is about as gender-neutral as it gets.
When I am speaking English, I misgender basically everybody from time to time, because my brain just pick one of the pronouns randomly when talking about somebody, with seemingly no correlation to the actual gender 😀
@szopeno:
As Tracy W hints at, this is probably an instance where gender-neutral ‘they’ will serve nicely. It can feel a little odd using it for a specific named person (or at least, I find it feels more odd to use it for a specific named person than for an unidentified or generic person), but it avoids both misgendering your interlocutor and forcing you to accept a position you are not persuaded by.
By the way, I have been trying to learn a little bit of Polish recently (though still at the very beginnerish stages – I can recommend Gabriel Wyner’s ‘Fluent Forever’ as having some useful brainhacks for helping with memorisation), so I can understand where you’re coming from given that gender seems to be more deeply baked in to the grammar than it does in English. But you do have a neuter gender – are there any moves afoot to try to institute a gender-neutral pronoun on the ‘on / ona / oni / ony’ lines that would take neuter? That would seem like a reasonable compromise if it could be made to catch on.
@Winter Shaker: No, in fact quite the opposite: if I recall correctly, Polish feminists (at least those connected to Gazeta Wyborcza) tend to promote feminine suffixes for common nouns that have had masculine forms established as gender-neutral (e.g. psycholożka instead of psycholog for a female psychologist). If you find that bizarre, perplexing and completely backwards, then well, so do I.
@Winter Shaker: And yes, there is neuter gender, but using it for people is quite awkward.
Grey anon:
Okay, but I’m not aware of anyone promoting ‘it’ as a gender-neutral pronoun for humans in English – I assume that would be equivalent to using ‘to’ in Polish? Rather, they are promoting singular, non-gender-specific ‘they’, or more rarely, some more esoteric, consciously constructed alternative like the Spivak pronouns. If you could do that in Polish, either use ‘oni’ (is that the correct plural for mixed-gender groups?) or something else constructed with the ‘on-‘ root, then wouldn’t expect that to sound dehumanising.
Using a neuter pronoun in a language with grammatical gender is just as bad as using “it” in English: It’s unthinkable because you get a feeling of dehumanisation and depersonalisation. But the central cases of trans people – those who transition from one binary gender to the other another – do not pose any problem whatsoever for such systems. It’s non-binary people who are difficult to accommodate because there simply is no pronoun. You have to say “that person” all the time (which in itself tends to come with problematic connotations, because it’s official/distancing).
You can’t construct anything else with the Slavic on- root because if it’s singular, it’s still got to be in some declension class and have some gender. In some Slavic languages, at least the plural is gender-neutral, but in Polish, for example, it’s not – there’s a distinction between masculine and mixed, one the one hand, and feminine, on the other. The only thing you could in principle do is use the mixed-gender plural – I don’t know if anybody’s tried that.
@Winter Shaker
Basically everything Anonymous above said is true. It would be much harder than just using new pronoun in English, because you would have to either (a) use awkward constructions and most people would just think you can’t speak Polish properly (b) there is no way to use “neutral” when using past tense in addressing someone. Even though children is neuter gender, for example, and you can use neuter in third person (“ono powiedziało”) you cannot use it in fsecond person (“ty powiedziałoś” – a construct which does not actually exist – sound like some uneducated redneck talking and sounds just funny).
As for “psycholożka” it’s actually we have masculine “doktor” and feminine “doktor”, which you can clearly see in declension “i see male doktor” – “zobaczyłem doktora” vs “i see female doctor” – “zobaczyłem doktor”. New forms introduced by feminists are unnecessary, sometimes they sounds funny (doktorka sounds like diminutive form of “doktor” and just does not sound serious, though pycholożka seems fine)
Okay, thanks for all the interisting linguistics info. It looks like this is a problem that cannot be solved without getting over the hump of getting an awkward-sounding construction to sound non-awkward to future ears.
As it happens, the reason I was in Poland and trying to learn some of the basics was to visit a friend who is studying abroad there, and who is the social hub through whom I met almost all of the non-binary transgender people I know … but the question didn’t come up in conversation while I was over there. I guess I’ll need to ask her when she’s got time today.
Frankly, I do not see that as a problem at all.
The reason I find a rule against misgendering people oppressive is that it implies that someone else has a claim over the contents of my brain–that I have to believe, or at least pretend to believe, something about that person because that person wants me to believe it.
If someone self-identifies as female and I identify that person as male, it’s courteous not to make a point of the disagreement–just as its courteous not to point out that I believe some here are mistaken on other subjects unless some substantive argument requires me to do so. My usual approach to the problem in realspace is to avoid gendered pronouns in such cases. But I’m not willing to use a gendered pronoun that implies I believe something I don’t.
I should probably add that what I believe about someone’s gender isn’t as simple as XX or XY, which I usually don’t know. Someone who is XY and does a sufficiently good job of seeming to be XX I might well see as female. But if I don’t, I see no obligation to pretend I do.
I agree with you 99% (and it’s great to see someone expressing this sentiment), but not the last paragraph. I might mistake a mouse for a rat, but if I discover my mistake, I’m not going to keep calling it a rat.
My impression is that gender means “perception of sex”, except reified as a distinct object ostensibly unrelated to sex, so that the perception can’t be judged as wrong. It’s like declaring that a specific portion of the map isn’t required to correspond accurately to the territory.
The gender theorists want to define gender based on the object’s perception. You want to define it based on the subject’s. I think perception of sex should be based on sex, because of the general rule that perception of X should be based on X.
Do you think I’m misinterpreting what gender means?
I presume that your assesment of somebody’s lets say grammatical gender to avoid politics is something your brain comes up with in microseconds. Because if that were not so, you could not speak fluently.
I’d like to differentiate “beliefs” (I) formed by that system and “beliefs” (II) formed by conscious thought on a subject matter. Personally I feel _much_ more inclined to defend my beliefs of the second category. To the point where I would not use rhetorics of “lies” or “pretense” in the context of the former first, which, in my view, is basically an artifact of brain wireing, and not something I have particular emotions about.
My surprise re: e. g. Jiro and Michael elsewhere in this thread comes from this conception.
However, I have a category II belief that politics and category I beliefs should be kept seperate in both directions. Neither should influence the other.
I oppose the rule in defense of that category II belief, rather than my category I beliefs about peoples’ genders. Maybe this helps do explain my statements made elsewhere in this thread.
So that’s a thank you for the input, I guess.
Consider the tomato. From a botanical standpoint it is clearly a fruit. However, in a culinary sense it is a vegetable. And what is the culinary sense but the very same thing — a reified perception of vegetable-ness.
Leif: if you are saying that gender is identical to XX/XY, you are misinterpreting it, by taking a complex category and oversimplifying it to the point that it becomes a very leaky abstraction, useless in any exceptional case (this kind of error is described more precisely in the sequence “A Human’s Guide to Words”, particularly “Disguised Queries” and “Neural Categories”).
To focus on the biological component of gender, many separate organs (like the brain, the genitals, muscle tissue, skin, the skeletal system, etc.) go through a process of sex differentiation with each one happening at a different time in development and under different conditions, with the process usually initiated by the transcription of the SRY gene, which is usually on the Y chromosome. If everything works fine, XX/XY chromosomes happen to be a great predictor of every other part of the body (but then again, so does every other sex differentiated organ). So in the typical case you can mostly (sex hormone levels still vary somewhat) reduce all this complexity to a binary gender abstraction.
But you’re not arguing about a typical case, you’re arguing about trans people which is one of the cases where the system breaks down. There are many many other situations, for instance people with XXY, XXXY, XXX chromosomes, people with XX genotypes who are male in every other phenotypical way and vice versa, and many more intersex conditions.
Unless you’re talking about inheritance of traits, the phenotype is usually much more important than the genotype, since it tells you what the person is actually like physiologically versus just the genetic information (consider twins, for instance). In that case you can’t just argue definitions and refuse to update on the information that the genetics are an inaccurate predictor of the actual person – you have to look at each part separately. See “Disguised Queries” – what you mean by gender would then depend on what you hope to infer by learning the gender in the first place. If you were doing a mammogram or breast cancer screening, if you know that the person has breasts (and possibly their hormonal levels), you don’t need to know what chromosomes or genitals or brain they have.
With this in mind, the ethical part of the transgender thesis goes like this: If society is to have a binary gender system, and we have to make a rule to assign a social gender to exceptional cases that is ethical and helps rather than harms people, we should focus on the organ that is actually conscious, intelligent, capable of pleasure and suffering, predictive of behavior and optimal social role, and generally considered the most important part of the body – the brain. Perhaps this is my rationalist/transhumanist side, but in my mind any society that considers the welfare of its people to be ethically less important than some unthinking molecule in their bodies has lost its humanity and reverted to evolutionary paperclip maximization.
Amy:
Not what I said. I said that when people talk about gender, I think they are talking about perception of sex, which should be identical to sex, based on the general rule that perception of X should be identical to X. Rationality involves adjusting our perceptions to match reality.
Sex is a bit more complicated than XX/XY (and it seems like a strawman to involve chromosomes when I never mentioned them). But that doesn’t mean anyone can accurately claim to be any sex they want.
I don’t know the specifics of how you define gender after reading your comment. You’ve said it’s in the head, but what specifically in the head? How do I, examining the contents of my own head, know which gender I am? What do I look for?
I’ve been misgendered a fair few times on the Internet and that never seems to bother the people I’m arguing with particularly
I’ve been assumed to be male and referred to as “he” a few times as well, mainly I suppose because the name I use isn’t identifiable as belonging to any particular gender. It’s been accidental, it hasn’t been intended offensively.
If I were trans, I suppose it would be a different matter and I would be a whole lot more sensitive about it, but oftentimes it is ignorance not malice.
Placing this here but could go in principle, anywhere in this thread
“I’ve been assumed to be male”
I admit to making that mistake. Why?
1) If one had to algorithmically classify internet commenters’ gender, the classifier that defaults to male would show good performance because not so long ago interest in this new thing called the internet correlated very well with maleness. Applying this heuristics is a habit, maybe a bad habit, but one that formed because it worked.
2) Your avatar picture, no offense, I parse, at a glance, as “David Bowie”. Along the lines of 1), “male avatar” seems to predict male far better than “female avatar” predicts female.
3) Other than heuristics 1) and 2) we have first names to go by. This easily fails interculturally and totally fails with made-up usernames. E. g. “-a” somewhat predicts female in many languages but not in Italian “Andrea”.
4) My, maybe faulty, grasp of English grammar prescribes using “3rd person singular” as a pronoun for “somebody”. This already allows for “he”, “she”, “he [generic]”, “she [modern generic]” and “(s)he [maybe overdoing it].
Only by observation I can vaguely guess that the accepted solution however is “they”. This is very easy to miss.
5) In conclusion, choice of pronouns (or what does “gendering” mean, anyway?) is an incredibly complex problem even before it comes to politics. I would expect that “misgendering” on the internet is something that happens to all people all the time. So while I’m not opposed to an anti-misgendering rule per sé, I am very doubtful how useful such a rule might be.
6) Meta-Conclusion: The rule seems a very in-groupy thing which assumes that not only do participants know the gender the other participants identify as (or however this can be phrased more acceptable) but also they know about the non-standard grammar that is the accepted solution. This does not dampen meanness, it dampens outsiders trying to join. Since it comes from the author of “the book” on ingroup/outgroup, I have to ask: is this intentional?
To my surprise, someone told me they’ll been assuming I was male– my livejournal/dreamwidth handle, nancylebov, was somehow getting parsed as nancycle.
As for ignorance as a justification, one of the things I detest about Social Justice is that they use ignorance as grounds for attack.
@Deiseach, I was thinking about the times someone has told me something like “you’re only saying that because you’re a man.”
My favourite was when I was 41 weeks pregnant and was accused of having a typically masculine negative view of pregnancy. I did have to agree that my view of pregnancy at the time was exceptionally negative.
Anyway, yes I think it’s mostly ignorance.
The very first person to wrongly assume I was female on the internet seemed pretty surprised when I told her how often I get mistaken for female over the phone. (And a couple times in person because I had long hair when I was 2 and 13, and another time in person because the mistaken person was blind.)
… Actually, in my first three or so years online, I was frequently mistaken for female. I don’t think my writing style was especially feminine. Maybe it was that I didn’t realize that avatars were a thing? Now I want to archive-dive to look for clues.
This makes me wonder how many of you I’m mentally misgendering because Ghostery blocks gravatar.
For some people that has nothing to do with insulting, but with speaking the truth. I know Scott disagrees with that, but I think he’s mistaken. The fact that someone wants to be called something doesn’t always mean that they are that thing.
True. And I would be curious how Scott would deal with a commenter who claims to be superior to other commenters and as such demands to be addressed as Your Highness, His Highness, etc. Or one who thinks he’s a dragon with matching unique made-up pronouns.
As for speaking the truth, you never have to choose between misgendering and “mis-sexing” someone. (Curious, innit, that “mis-sexing” is not a thing, even though it’s a concern to a far greater percentage of the population than misgendering is.) You can always refer to another commenter using his name. For example, if you feel that calling Ozy “them” is wrong — and yes, I am an English snob who feels singular “them” as deeply awful; you can have my singular/plural distinction when you pry it out of my cold dead larynx — and you don’t want to go with whatever nonstandard pronouns Ozy accepts, you can simply write “Ozy” all the time instead of using a pronoun. (As I just did.) Yes, this makes somewhat stilted sentences and even more stilted paragraphs. And it does not relieve you of the burden of remembering which people get exceptional treatment. But this is Scott’s house, so you gotta obey the rules or take a hike.
This might work for “Ozy” but it would not work for “aratherlongusername”. There is a reson, pronouns exist and that they are short.
Is the gender/sex distinction a result of recent language prescriptivism, or did it exist a hundred years ago as well?
(genuine question, I do agree that prescriptivism or not this is Scott’s garden in the end)
@Anon
I think it’s recent. “Gender” used to be a grammatical concept, where “sex” was the descriptor used for people, rather than words. I know at least one language that still has only the latter, and the former means exclusively the grammatical aspect of a word.
It was at least sufficiently below the radar that the pithy grammatical truism “Nouns have gender, people have sex” had some currency.
@Alex
Some people take offense at shortening their name a well. At best you are kicking the problem down the road a few paces.
Because saying all those nouns over and over can really wear you down?
Because most people don’t do it to be insulting, they do it to be truthful.
Imagine the following comments policy:
There are five lights in this picture. Anybody who says otherwise will be banned.
Also, there are people who go around periodically go around asking “how many lights do you see?”
So you wouldn’t object to someone describing you as a racist, say, or a misogynist, so long as they said their sense of honesty compelled it?
The sort of person who calls people racist non-ironically isn’t going to give people they think are racists a pass because of a “safe space”; the safe space is supposed to protect people from racists, so it’s even more important to call them out.
Which is to say – if it’s the sort of thing they do, they’re going to do so regardless of the norms of the environment. (Online, at least. In person, less so.)
So I feel like a false bargain is being offered here – look, nobody will call you a racist/misogynist in exchange for you treating other people the way they want to be treated. Except you can’t actually offer people not calling other people racists/misogynists.
@Orphan Wilde:
That doesn’t have much bearing on whether or not you object to people calling you a racist or sexist if they really believe it.
I don’t know about Jaskologist, but I wouldn’t object, if there were at all grounds for calling me a racist/misogynist. Especially not on the internet, where the opinion of complete strangers should not have any power.
If this were in real life, and I either thought they were provably wrong, I’d sue for defamation. If they weren’t wrong – at least in some reasonably interpretable way, like maybe I don’t think all races are equal, or maybe think men are stronger than women – then what exactly is the problem?
If I objected to someone referring to me as a racist it would be on the grounds that I am not one, not on the grounds that I don’t consider myself one. Reality is out there–it isn’t defined by my beliefs.
@David Friedman:
What is the reality about whether or not you’re a racist defined by, rather than by your beliefs?
I think he means that whether he’s a racist is defined by his beliefs / attitudes about race, not whether or not he identifies as a racist.
Assuming that the word racist refers to anything other than itself, there has to be some way to objectively distinguish between a racist and a non-racist at least in theory. If the only thing that makes you a racist the belief that you are a racist, then the word is utterly useless.
The difference is that calling someone a racist is an insult (the term has no agreed-upon content). Calling someone a man or a woman is a statement of fact.
Yes there are — the fifth one is behind the guy. 😉
Why rules against misgendering people in particular seem too oppressive?
Because sometimes such rules force people to lie, or engage in elaborate circumlocutions to avoid lying. One of the live issues in gender politics is whether or not people with working penises should be allowed into the safe spaces for people who don’t want to have to worry about being vaginally raped right this moment. Insisting that we refer to a subset of people with working penises as “women”, does not exactly foster clear communication on the subject and I think unfairly handicaps one side in the debate.
And because sometimes it seems that the whole point of the exercise is a “There Are Four Lights” level of enforced social control.
If you want to insult someone there’s plenty of gender-neutral ways of doing so.
And sometimes when people use these words with their classic meanings, it isn’t actually because they want to insult people.
Nineteen times out of twenty, referring to a transgendered person with their preferred pronoun is a cheap, harmless courtesy. The twentieth time, it is the demand that I do so that is insulting. As an absolute policy, “no misgendering the transgendered” does strike me as oppressive, and it is one I will probably end up violating at some point.
It’s funny how we don’t need background checks to sell guns because the criminals aren’t going to follow the law anyway, but rapists are totally going to be frustrated in their rape schemes because the law says they aren’t allowed in the bathroom.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
There’s shitty arguments for gun control, hence we can deploy similarly shitty arguments for bathroom laws?
That’s a poor comparison. With gun control, there’s already a law saying, “Felons shall not be allowed to buy guns.” The traditionalists’ whole argument in the bathroom case is that there should be just such a law saying, “People with male genitals shall not be allowed in the ladies’ room.” In both cases, this signifies cultural disapproval and empowers people to speak up (or call the cops) if they know someone’s violating it.
The analogous situation to background checks would be different – a law requiring armed guards outside bathrooms inspecting people’s genitals before letting them in the main door, but leaving open a side door (analogous to illegal purchases) with no guards.
This is a wonderful example of how being emotionally invested in a preferred outcome clouds one’s judgment. A policy of “no men in ladies’ rooms” means staff immediately acts to head off anyone going in who shouldn’t be there, security gets called straight away, and women can immediately raise a fuss the moment they spot a man walking in. None of this happens if everyone has to walk on eggshells for fear of being labeled transphobic.
You’re right, your comment is a wonderful example of that.
There are lots of trans-accepting bathrooms out there in the world already. How many rapes have taken place in them? How does that compare to similarly situated non-trans-accepting bathrooms?
I don’t believe you are prohibited from referring to transwomen in general as men (although it seems better to refer to them as transwomen in any case, because they are not central examples of men), but merely from using specific pronouns for people who have asked you to use others. As I interpret the rule, you can even call a specific transman a woman (provided you do so in a way that is either kind or necessary).
So if it is either kind or necessary I can refer to a specific transman as “woman” but not as “her”?
Clearly “not allowed to actually misgender…” contains a great deal of detail for people who know the code. Is there an online version of the codebook, because none of this is actually clear to me.
The gender features of pronouns are presuppositional. By referring to someone with a pronoun, you present it as uncontroversial that they are that gender. It’s a kind of “When did you stop beating your wife?” thing.
Hypothesis: That’s what makes it so offensive to the misgendered person.
Prediction: “that woman” should be perceived as equally offensive as “she”.
But this strikes me as being nothing particular to misgendering. I went through a stage where I would quite often rewrite my comments to be much politer and less sure of myself (driven admittedly as much by some times when I’d been the subject of a well-deserved smack down as well as by a general felt moral obligation to politeness).
Saying “have you considered?” Or “why do you think that….?” instead of “you idiot” doesn’t strike me as any less of an inconvenience than editing “he says…” to “[name] says….”
This happens to me so much. Not here as much, as there are notably fewer idiots than on most of the Internet, but a huge proportion of everything I ever type into a comment box I never submit.
There’s a difference between editing for tone and editing for avoiding forbidden truth. I haven’t spent a lot of time in China, but I’m familiar with the various dodges that people have to use to even hint at criticism of the regime, e.g. the fictitious date of “May 35” because suggesting that anything ever happened on June 4 gets the banhammer.
I would rather not see that sort of thing being made necessary here. And no, it’s not something that can always be avoided by substituting a personal name for a pronoun or something similarly trivial.
@John Schelling:
But from the sound of Scott’s description this is a tone thing. You can argue for the position that transgender isn’t a thing. What you can’t do is assert that someone is a man after they say they’re a woman.
I am having trouble imagining a situation in English where you have to refer to someone as being of a particular gender to make your point, even though you disagree with the gender they assert. Can you give an example of this happening in English? (Specifying in English as clearly Polish has its own issues.)
@Tracy
He doesn’t have to anything, not even post here!
@Tracy W: If we’re going to make a point of referring to people in the manner they prefer, I will take pointed objection to your misspelling my name 🙂
As for the specific request. If, as previously mentioned, we are having the safe-spaces-for-the-vaginally-endowed debate, and Janet with a penis says “I am a woman; I clearly can’t use the men’s showers at the gym. If you say I can’t use the woman’s showers in spite of my being a woman you are really saying that I can’t go to the gym at all and that’s oppressing me”, then in fairness I need to be free to rebut that claim by saying, “Janet, in this context at least you are a man and not a woman”. I don’t need to use pronouns to do so, but I do need to be able to deny Janet’s status as a woman.
And, as I might be wrong, she needs to be able to defend her status as a woman, both of us having full use of the English language to make our claims.
If the next day the group is going out to lunch and Janet wearing a dress and not sending mixed signals suggests the new Thai place, I might well respond with “Janet makes a good suggestion and I think we should do what she says”.
@ John Schilling
If the next day the group is going out to lunch and Janet wearing a dress and not sending mixed signals suggests the new Thai place, I might well respond with “Janet makes a good suggestion and I think we should do what she says”.
Okay, thanks for a halfway realistic example. I have been puzzled by what I’m remembering posters saying, something like “address me as I wish to be addressed”.
No one sfaik minds being addressed as “you”* — the second person pronoun. ‘He’ and ‘she’ are third person pronouns; nobody gets addressed by those anyway. Those words don’t come up when Cis Person is talking _to_ Trans Person; only when Cis Person is talking to Someone Else _about_ Trans Person. Which is seldom in Trans Person’s presence.
Which is why I’m calling your Janet/Thai example only halfway realistic. It doesn’t need any pronoun at all; adding one is just clunky. It’s much smoother to say “[….] So let’s do Thai.”
If you wanted to establish Janet’s credibility (perhaps at a formal business conference), repeating her name would be better than a pronoun.
* Now, “y’all” is a different matter, honey.
It’s much smoother to say “[….] So let’s do Thai.”
But that doesn’t acknowledge Janet as the one who initially suggested Thai and found the neat new Thai restaurant. I can find ways to do that, and in the example lead with one, but they are sort of clunky.
To the extent that microaggressions are a thing, does it count when someone gets credit for her ideas only half as often as anyone else because the various ways to say “her idea” are either linguistically clunky or on the unmarked fringe of a Social Justice minefield?
@John:
My apologies for misspelling your name.
On the Janet issue, I note that your suggested reply ““Janet, in this context at least you are a man and not a woman”.” doesn’t actually rebut Janet’s argument. It doesn’t say what changing room Janet should use, and instead it’s likely to get you entangled in an argument about what a woman really is. (This isn’t specific to arguments about definitions of gender, in my experience arguments about definitions of ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ or whatever tend to be equally pointless. The only situation I’ve found arguments about definitions to be useful is if you’re arguing about how someone else used a word or phrase, eg what did Jane Austen mean by “family circle”.
Taking the situation as stipulated, it strikes me as much more straight forward to say something like “Janet, you have a penis, so you shouldn’t be using the woman’s changing rooms because [whatever argument you have for there being changing rooms for the vaginally-endowed.]” This is assuming that Janet has already openly said she has a penis, if you would be revealing private information you could go generic and say “People with penises shouldn’t be using the women’s changing room because…. “
One of the live issues in gender politics is whether or not people with working penises should be allowed into the safe spaces for people who don’t want to have to worry about being vaginally raped right this moment.
It’s fascinating to me that this can co-exist, in heavily overlapping demographics, with the issue over #notallmen/#yesallwomen in which men are expected to understand, and try to accommodate, that many women will regard them as Schroedinger’s Rapists in a wide variety of scenarios.
My guess is, in a few decades’ time all restrooms will simply be labeled “restroom” and gendered labels will look just as backward and bigoted as the racial labels of the Jim Crow era look now.
I think this is a situation where no consistent meta rule can really apply. You either have to accept the concept of misgendering and agree with trans people or you don’t. There isn’t a way to disagree with trans people without being offensive.
“There isn’t a way to disagree with trans people without being offensive.”
Why is that true of this issue, not true of other issues where people disagree?
Can you disagree with someone who believes that global warming is a terrible threat without being offensive? That it isn’t? With someone who believes that taxation is theft? That property is theft?
Because there isn’t a neutral way to refer to a trans person. With global warming there are people who are opposed to the idea of it happening at an alarming rate and are referred to as either a denier or a skeptic but at least in principle it’s possible. The English language doesn’t have a gender neutral third person singular so it forces us to take a side just by talking about it.
I wasn’t planning on living in an era when third person pronouns and the weather are political issues. When I put it that way, it sounds so much like satire.
This isn’t exactly solid evidence for the simulation hypothesis, but I’m tempted.
I think that the fact that bathrooms, the weather, and third person pronoun usage have become premier issues for the cultural elite is actually a serious problem, and a symptom of what I think has caused Trump: berating people who can’t find a job about this sort of thing is the 21st c. equivalent of “let them eat cake.”
To my mind, the really deadly thing is the belief that it’s urgent to convince very poor white people that they’re in general in some sense better off than black people.
I don’t think this really gets how group norms are established. As a social conservative, I’m in favour of informal social norms, such as shaming, doing most of the work to discourage many immoral behaviours. While I’m not opposed to morals legislation in all cases, I don’t think that any comprehensive attempt to supervise people’s sex lives through law is likely to be either successful or humane. It has to be done informally, mostly without coordination. (BTW that also means it’s pretty much useless to have social conservative laws unless the population is already socially conservative.)
One also has to consider how norms are changed. They aren’t mostly changed by discussion, but by people actually testing things out by practice. That means people may test the waters and try to shame someone for something. And if the people around them allow them to get away with it then that helps establish a new norm.
But I’d have thought that conservative informal social norms are in fact coordinated, though not explicitly though the rule of law. You just live like your ancestors taught you to live, don’t you?
Or maybe I’m misunderstanding — I just spent a month around people grown in a village in rural society before ’68, and that’s what I’m thinking about.
There is certainly an order, but coordination would be too strong a word.
I like your point, but I think you could emphasize more strongly the idea that coordination is necessary but not sufficient.
Also, presumably, you are still some kind of utilitarian-like person and you propose this rule as a useful heuristic, not a deontological principle. If that is the case, you should clarify. As some people have pointed out, sometimes, uncoordinated meanness is “good” because it helps change standards.
Aren’t you just rehashing Weber’s ideas on the monopoly of violence?
I think “coordination” is a very poor choice of words for the concept you want to express. A crime syndicate is coordination. A harassment campaign is coordination.
What you really mean is that meanness should be sanctioned and enacted by the state, i.e. the monopoly on force.
I agree, “coordination” doesn’t sound like the right word to my ear. Though Scott is trying to generalize beyond the state, so “state monopoly on force” isn’t quite right either.
I think totalitarians would disagree, along with most communists and anti-majoritarians.
Aren’t small-c communists just people who believe in the importance of community?
That would be communitarians, not communists.
The principle of being nice until you can coordinate meanness does a good job justifying rule 1, no-shaming. The connection between the main argument and rule 2, however, is more tenuous. Scott implies that when people misgender, it’s because they’re being mean for the greater good, but when people insist on misgendering it often has nothing to do with such concerns. Rather, misgendering, to the misgenderer, is about resisting a usurpation of power; the misgenderer objects to being forced to use language they believe to be misleading, or even false. If the misgenderer is a strictly observant Kantian, then complying with Scott’s rule 2 is literally not an option, no matter how much they want to participate in the SSC community, no matter how “nice” they may wish to be, unless they just avoid using pronouns at all.
Of course SSC is Scott’s space and the rule makes sense. But I think the above is worth noting, because it means that “safe spaces” do more than Scott’s post implies. Safe spaces are inherently political. They’re about protecting a community from people who might be hostile to it. But Scott seems to think safe spaces just prohibit certain kinds of meanness, and so prevent political opponents from attacking the community within the safe space. This is false; safe spaces also define what counts as mean, and so, at least sometimes, prevent political opponents from entering the space in good conscience, even when said opponents don’t *want* to be mean at all. Some disagreements are strong enough that no matter how not-mean the two sides are, they can meet only on ground where meanness is not prohibited.
But is a misgenderer being forced to use language they believe is false? How often do you have to refer to someone’s gender?
I once saw a play in which a revelation turned on the character’s gender not being what was thought. After the big reveal we read the programme with renewed interest and it indeed carefully avoided any mention of the performer’s gender.
It’s not a really huge issue in English. In any language where grammatical gender plays a role, it is a great problem.
I’ve talked in a gender-neutral way in Russian a few times when I didn’t know the gender of a person I was talking to. That’s a fun challenge, actually. There’s a hack that you can talk about “a doctor” using masculine forms even if the doctor in question is female because the word “doctor” is masculine and using female forms would be bad grammar.
> If the misgenderer is a strictly observant Kantian, then complying with Scott’s rule 2 is literally not an option
Obviously false: just avoid giving a gender at all. Inconvenient, but certainly does not prevent participation.
This is important, since in fact “safe spaces also define what counts as mean, and so, at least sometimes, prevent political opponents from entering the space in good conscience” is not true. It only prevents political opponents from expressing certain views.
Beware trivial inconveniences. Being inconvenient may be defacto prevention of participation, especially if you require a continuous stream of trivial inconveniences such that your target is likely to slip up at some point and the slipup is used to ban him. (Or two slipups are used to ban him with the first being a “warning”.)
I think what’s going to happen is a lot of conscientious objectors to anti-misgendering are going to adopt some form of evasion of the issue, such as avoiding pronouns vs known transgender people, then it’s going to become a local shibboleth – insisting on referring to someone by their name or handle being a way to recognize people who find referring to transsexuals by their chosen pronouns to be dishonest or oppressive – and then Scott is going to start banning people for complying with the letter of the law, but not its spirit (whatever that is).
Re: the toaster thing on Tumblr, I’m quite happy to refer to someone as a toaster if they ask me to do so (you’re a complete stranger to me, we’re never going to meet in real life, it’s no skin off either of our noses) just so long as they don’t demand I actively work to change my perception in order to believe heart and soul that they actually are a toaster if I can’t convince my brain’s visual processing that they are a toaster.
If that’s misgendering and grounds for banning, then let me be banned.
I don’t particularly object to some lighthearted roleplaying or joking around. So long as both parties know that there are no actual toasters involved, that the toasterosity is imaginary. Not so much if the other party actually wishes me, unironically, not joking, to confirm what I see as a delusion.
I mean, I certainly wouldn’t feed a schizophrenic’s paranoia about imaginary thieves by pretending to admit that they’re real. I’d try to get them to take their meds instead, and avoid the topic of thievery whenever possible.
I expect the medical community will already be working on a transition procedure, involving surgery and testoasterone pills 🙂
…I’ll get my coat.
I agree with the conclusion here about the inherently political nature of safe spaces, that a space isn’t safe for everyone at once because conflicting access needs, etc. That said, the thing that strikes me here is…
Whenever my family visits my grandmother, on my father’s side, we say grace before eating, despite that she’s the only one of us who is Christian. This requires me to lie in what I repeat, and to give implicit endorsement to a memeplex that I think is actually responsible for a fair bit of harm.
And yet it would be very rude for me to obviously refuse to say it, let alone to express atheistic views or something else directly contradictory at that point. For me it is something that maybe is part of an undesirable social phenomenon; for them it is core to their identity. It would be perceived, correctly, as prioritising social campaigning over a family member if I were to ‘conscientiously object’ there and then, to resist the implicit assumption of Christianity or whatever in that manner.
Something can be both about resisting an usurpation of power, and be meanness for the greater good, and even be unacceptable meanness for the greater good.
And there are no strict Kantians. Human refusal to be indirectly complicit/casually entangled in things, is tactically deployed. What people can’t do in “good conscience” reflects the underlying tactical situation remarkably well. It is always aimed at things which still seem in flux in society, at where they think they can achieve change or at least awareness. It isn’t a natural consequence of being generally radically honest; it’s people noticing that being radically honest rather than abiding by social niceties there and then offers a lever on the world.
This is okay, but people judge you for where you do that and you can’t credibly appeal to “I was forced to by general rules”.
It doesn’t seem particularly rude to me to simply sit there with your head bowed and/or eyes closed and not say anything. If you won’t allow prayers to be said in your presence, yes, you’re being a dick. But your grandmother would be being just as much of one if she were to insist that you say it in contradiction to your beliefs.
Actually, for all their faults, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have a good policy about this, since they have so many idiosyncratic objections to things like the Pledge of Allegiance. Their rule is to do one less “step” than everyone else, to strike a middle ground where they’re not appearing to endorse it but also not causing a fuss. So if everyone else stands up and puts their hand over their heart to say the Plege, they stand up but don’t put their hand over their heart.
I’ll agree with that. I think if you go through the motions but don’t actually speak it’s not the same as obviously ignoring their request or stating refusal. It isn’t even entirely unambiguous that you did refuse.
I hadn’t heard of that rule, and I think that’s a fairly good rule in general, so long as it successfully avoids causing a fuss.
If it does you probably do have to resolve the object level question as to whether the downsides of resisting mandatory patriotism or whatever the objection is are worth the fuss. Yes is a valid opinion, though.
“And there are no strict Kantians. …”
This is correct to a large extent, but some people are closer to being “radically honest” than others. And in terms of this transgender discussion, talking about “always aimed at things which still seem in flux in society” isn’t really fair for this reason:
I think that “the pronoun ‘she’ implies that a person is biologically female” is a true statement. Scott’s comparison with the borders of countries actually argues against his own position. For example, it is currently utterly false that “the state of Iowa falls along the western border of the United States.” And I think it is equally false to assert that gendered pronouns do not say anything about a person’s biological sex.
But he is right about this: if the whole world wanted to do that, we could in fact make the western border of the US fall there. In the same way, if everyone agrees in the future to use pronouns in a way consistent with transgender, it will in fact have changed the meaning of the pronouns. So someone who wants to be radically honest will go along with it in that context, but they will not go along with it now, if they hold the above opinion about the current meaning of words. That is because of things being in flux: it is about what the meaning of a word is at various times.
Although this is Scott’s blog and he has a right to any rules he wants, I personally find that rule pretty terrifying, because Scott is a pretty nice person and if he thinks a rule like that is reasonable, that could be a bad sign for me, because I am very far along the spectrum towards the radically honest side. That could mean e.g. it could end up impossible for me to hold a job in the future, even if not because of this particular type of rule, but because of similar rules (which in essence are an attempt to force a point of view about the facts on a person.)
You may want to practice some mental reservation.
“The Protestants considered these doctrines as mere justifications for lies. Catholic ethicists also voiced objections: the Jansenist “Blaise Pascal…attacked the Jesuits in the seventeenth century for what he saw as their moral laxity.””
“But he is right about this: if the whole world wanted to do that, we could in fact make the western border of the US fall there. ”
By this do you mean we could remove all parts of the US that fall west of it, or that we could somehow set up a system where it’s the western border in spite of not being on the border to the west?
I meant we could make the lands to the west of that part of some other country.
There’s a symmetric argument by social-justice people about calling Republicans fascists, or whatever other random grouping and insult. Are your ethics consistent there?
@James Picone – “There’s a symmetric argument by social-justice people about calling Republicans fascists, or whatever other random grouping and insult. Are your ethics consistent there?”
Can’t speak for him, but I don’t have a problem with that. Casual rudeness and spite to my groups have been the norm much of my life. I don’t really get that worked up about it.
On the other hand, I don’t really have a problem using “they” for, say, Ozy.
Yeah. At some moment the insults just become a part of background noise. Instead of “oh, did I do something wrong?” now the automatical thought is “oh, it’s that rude person talking again. Ignore”.
If SJWs tried to be even more rude, they would be just plainly silly. I would probably enjoy that. (That’s why their next step is trying to get people fired from their jobs or something like that. The rude words have already lost all their power to shock.)
My decisions about whether and when to be polite are exactly that: my own decisions. By default I usually choose to be polite, unless I believe there is something more important at stake. If someone would decide that they are a giraffe, I would probably play along, because why not. If I would randomly forget this fact, I would probably apologize, and even feel slightly guilty because I have upset a weird person for no good reason; but if someone would suggest I have actually committed a horrible crime, I would tell them to grow up.
(By the way, I would be perfectly okay with having a norm of calling literally everyone “they”, because that wouldn’t feel like random people imposing their own whims on me. Even better, we could have a script for replacing “he” and “she” with “they” automatically.)
The symmetric argument, I suppose, is that social-justice people have to call Republicans fascists because not to do so would be dishonest? I don’t know that this makes much sense, because I don’t see how not saying something could be dishonest. You can always just stay silent. Everyone keeps quiet about some things some times, that’s how being polite works. The pronouns are an issue for the the traditional-gender-roles Kantian only because pronouns are (in some sense) more central to language than other words. It’s easy to be honest while avoiding calling someone a fascist, even if they are one; it’s hard to talk to someone when there is no pronoun you can use for them that both of you will find acceptable. But people are right (and I said as much in my post) that the Kantian can participate, so long as he accepts the inconvenience of avoiding pronoun usage. If it ever comes to be the case, as others have suggested, that pronoun-avoidance itself is seen as a form of misgendering, then the Kantian will really be in trouble.
(Sidebar: I suspect a Kantian could justify using someone’s preferred pronouns if he scare-quoted them. But I doubt the trans person would be happy about their pronouns being scare-quoted like that. What would Scott’s policy be on such scare-quoting?)
So, the above is why I don’t think any SJ people really need to call Republicans fascist—they just want to. But what I think doesn’t matter! What matters is if they think that calling Republicans fascists is obligatory. In which case… well, you asked whether my ethics are consistent, but I didn’t espouse any ethical principles in my post, so I’m not sure how to answer. All I said was that certain facts followed from certain other facts. In this case, the people who feel obliged to yell “fascist” will be unable to participate in any forum where accusations of fascism are banned, and so any attempt to engage with them in rational discourse will require a willingness to be subjected to such accusations. The general point is that it’s unhelpful and a bit self-serving say “you can make any argument within this space so long as you’re nice.” Your definition of nice already excludes the participation of those who would make certain arguments, and not because they’re trying to be mean, but because their beliefs make certain actions obligatory which you think intolerable.
Incidentally, this is a specific instance of a broader problem with the position: “A wants X to be the case, and B wants Y? Well, let’s make sure neither can force their preferences on the other, and then have them talk about it and maybe come to an agreement.” This works fine with disagreements about taxes and other things that can be described objectively. It doesn’t work very well with disagreements about identity and things like it, where what’s at stake is how we should talk in the first place.
If they believe Republicans are fascists there is no strong reason not to say so. They should, of course, be prepared to defend that belief.
I don’t think it is rude to hold beliefs that happen to be false, although it’s usually better to hold true beliefs. And if you believe something, it is not rude to say so.
I think there is a case to be made that it’s rude to be epistemically irresponsible in believing bad things about other people (and then pronounce that belief). It’s reasonable to assume that most people who believe X are fascists probably do so in an epistemically irresponsible manner; it’s unlikely that they have really considered what the defining features of fascism are and whether they apply to X.
Wouldn’t someone who argued that be completely wrong though? I’m no expert but I was definitely under the impression that the price of illegal drugs eg heroin was going down since the drug war, and availability going up.
Something something correlation something causation. Note that whether that’s true or you just pulled it straight out of your ass, decriminalization and legalization would cause drug prices to fall further.
Where exactly was causation implied?
Well, you tried to refute
> somebody’s going to argue that it [the drug war] leads to the greater good of there being fewer drugs
and that’s about causation, so either you talk about causation or your refutation is invalid.
In plainer terms: That statement claims that waging the drug war causes higher prices than not waging the drug war; that’s compatible with other factors causing drug prices to fall exactly when the drug war started (assuming and not conceding that this fact be true), exactly because of correlation vs causation.
This is still not incompatible with what I said. If the drug war caused prices to rise by a small amount, and then other factors caused prices to fall by a large amount, then thenet effect is still a failure to raise prices.
We’re left with the tautology that if drugs are equally or more available, then they didn’t become less available.
For what it’s worth, there are economic studies that attempt to answer the question of whether drug prohibition causes prices to increase.
Nearly universally they find that prohibition causes susbtantial price increases, although there is some dispute about the exact magnitude.
Here’s one good example, written by an advocate of legalization:
Jeffrey A. Miron (2003) The Effect of Drug Prohibition on Drug Prices: Evidence from the Markets for Cocaine and Heroin, Review of Economics and Statistics, 85(3): 522-530, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/003465303322369696#.VyjMVIQgtD8 ($), http://www.antoniocasella.eu/archila/MIRON_2003.pdf (ungated working paper version).
If you honestly don’t think drug legalization would lead to higher drug consumption than you are just straight out ignoring basic economics.
Ending the War on Drugs is not the same as legalization. Lots of things are illegal without having wars fought against them.
So what actually constitutes shaming? Can we have a definition?
It’s easier to “be nice”, since being nice is crucial for society and is taught. We also have tested ways for regulating niceness — apologizing to each other when there’s a misunderstanding .
Shaming is probably hard to fully define, but in the context of Scott issues with feminism & C., this seems clearly about “shaming” as advocated by the Social Justice movement. Not sure that’s a good definition, but it works if you belong to that movement and want to shame somebody.
I don’t belong to that movement. Care to report what their definition is?
Edit: Also, I actually don’t think that’s at all the type (politically speaking) of shaming that Scott was mostly talking about.
The social justice movement type of shaming consists in the second half of this list of behaviors that Scott disapproves:
As for the other types of political shaming, he explicitly mentioned mis-gendering trans people and being mean to people for being promiscuous.
Is mockery ok? Can I mock someone, personally and directly, for having bad ideas? (As long as I don’t doxx them etc., or misgender them etc.)
We shouldn’t be mean to people for being promiscuous, ok. Is there anything for which we can be mean to them? (Themselves being mean to others, perhaps? Or not even that?)
As long as you are mocking the for the bad ideas, I would say yes. (Although you should always do it with style, if I may recommend.)
The problem is, that more often than not, mocking for the bad ideas tends to quickly give place to mocking for belonging to a group, and then for looking and behaving in a certain way, which can be very much not okay.
@Milan:
Well, fair enough. The point I was making in this thread is that I’d like to hear Scott’s definition (or have him endorse one of the commenter-supplied ones). Until then, the new rules are quite vague…
How about “Anything which conveys the message that the other person’s opinion or action constitutes a moral failing, not a mere error.”
Which means any insistence that certain behaviors are evidence of moral failure, or certain behaviors should not be done, is “shaming.” Scott’s argument is just another iteration of “Hate Speech isn’t Free Speech;” just as there is not, in practice, any meaningful difference between “Hate Speech” and “Speech I don’t like,” there is no difference between criticizing specific behaviors and “shaming” the person doing those things.
Yes, that’s a fairly accurate summary of what I understand “shaming” to mean. I get the impression that you don’t agree, but I can’t tell where the disagreement lies.
“Defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.”
This is a disingenuous line. Who defends positions by citing free speech? What people defend, when they cite free speech in such arguments, is free speech.
“Defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.”
Sometimes you have to remind the jerks that yes, this is perfectly legal for me to say this, sorry but your frothing lynch mob will have to dissipate. And no, sneering at the reminder that this is exercise of free speech still does not make you right and me wrong.
One would assume though that you have other arguments for your standpoint beside legality.
Perhaps I do, but whether that’s the case is none of your business, insofar as the topic of the discussion is “should I be permitted to say what I am saying”.
I think the quotes are about the situation (quite frequently seen on the internet), when somebody voices an argument, which then gets soundly defeated by facts/sources/common sense, and then the person retreats to free speech as a final fallback position.
Is he allowed to do this? Yes. Should this behavior be strongly discouraged? In my opinion, also yes.
I don’t see the “say what you will but that’s just my opinion” employed as a last defense nowadays. The quote seems more like a jab pointed at the vague direction of free speech to me.
We probably frequent different parts of the internet, although I will agree that simply disregarding the counterargument and just trying to label the other side as something bad are more frequent tactics on “my side” as well.
“I think the quotes are about the situation (quite frequently seen on the internet), when somebody voices an argument, which then gets soundly defeated by facts/sources/common sense, and then the person retreats to free speech as a final fallback position.”
I cannot remember having ever seen that argument made explicitly in an online discussion.
And sometimes, the lynch mob is not interested in those.
See my comment over yours, in reply to Said Achmiz. I don’t the quote should be applied in the situation with the lynch mob, but rather in the one described above.
I’ve actually not seen that situation happen. Maybe I browse the more highbrow parts of the internet too much.
What I have seen happen is assert A, back up A with sources and credible theory, and get denounced for asserting A. Not because it’s not true, but because it is unacceptable – the denouncing parties wishing that the one who claimed A be punished in some way for asserting it.
If I am not mistaken, you are describing the argument “no matter if you are right or not, you should not talk about it because offensive or something”. In which case I fully support countering with “its free speech, and you can engage in some undesirable activity if you don’t like it”.
As far as I have seen, social science would benefit a lot from this 😀
“If I am not mistaken, you are describing the argument “no matter if you are right or not, you should not talk about it because offensive or something”.”
“Offensive” isn’t an adequate reason, but there might be true statements that one ought not to make in public. Consider the issue of jury nullification. One might believe that it was morally correct–that a juror who believes the crime the defendant convicted ought not to be a crime should vote for acquittal–but also believe that the consequences of that view being widespread would be bad. Similarly for the argument in favor of rational ignorance in voting.
And, most obviously, for correct information on how to make bombs or poisons.
One would assume though that you have other arguments for your standpoint beside legality.
And if we use only those arguments, we win a few object-level battles on specific issues, but leave the general principle of free speech undefended. After a while, we don’t win the object-level battles any more because we aren’t allowed to talk about them.
Attacking a position by dismissing the other side’s claim to freedom of speech is the ultimate arrogation; you’re saying that you don’t just want to win this debate but to control the terms of all future debates. If you try to pull that one, you can hold nothing but object-level views I strongly agree with and you’ll still find me on the other side.
This is a social justice line used to disparage free speech, and it’s wrong. It’s not a concession at all; it’s addressing a meta-issue. If I claim advocacy of some position is “free speech”, I am not defending the position itself; I am defending my right to advocate it in the first place. I understand that some of my opponents may disagree with the position utterly and completely and that is their privilege, but we should be able to agree that my advocacy of it is acceptable.
I think one of the big problems with this approach is: how do you respond to covert* uncoordinated meanness? If someone is bullying you, this suggests that the correct response is NOT to fight back, but to call in a teacher or parent. Everyone is familiar with authority figures who don’t have the knowledge, incentives, or ability to actually resolve a situation. In a lot of cases centralized (perhaps OVERcentralized) systems have no proportional, appropriate, effective ways of responding to decentralized problems.
Proportionality: If someone punches us, for example, we have little legal recourse in between not pressing charges and charging someone for assault. Sure you can limit it to misdemeanor assault, but that can still end up costing someone 6 months of their life, not to mention costing the BOTH of you a huge amount of legal time and money. The reliance on a centralized authority destroys the ability to respond swiftly and proportionately to all sorts of minor crimes. It forces escalation or surrender.
Effectiveness: The teacher often has no direct knowledge of the bullying, no idea of what the severity may be, and no authority to intervene based on intuition or probability. This means that even if you ask a teacher to help, they might have to shrug and do nothing. This makes for a pretty ineffective response. Due Process is important, but it involves a trade-off that fundamentally leaves a lot of problems unsolved. In many parts of America, cops simply will not respond to reports of gunshots, stolen bikes, etc. This seems to me to be a serious problem with the system, and I have no proposal as to how to solve it, but a bottom-up approach is a lot more attractive than “wait for the state to become perfect.”
Maybe on the whole it’s worse to punch back against schoolyard bullies, but my intuition tells me we can get better results if we have a consistent moral code about appropriate interpersonal meanness rather than one that forbids it entirely.
*whether deliberately or simply through the authority’s inability to find Butt Hole Road with both hands and a map.
Add in the principle of proportional self-defence?
The problem here is: Humans are bad at proportionality, and especially bad at proportionality in the heat of the moment. The most obvious time to punish a bully for his actions is immediately, but that’s also the moment most fraught with bias and rage. While the governmental system has a problem with escalate/ignore, responding to interpersonal violence with interpersonal violence tends to have the problem of escalate or ESCALATE.
Well that’s where the bigger authority comes in. When I was being covertly bullied at school by a boy ‘accidentally’ sticking his foot out when I walked , I responded by ‘accidentally’ stepping onto his outstretched ankle with my full weight, then apologised for my clumsiness in a voice dripping with sincerity. Things stopped there.
Legally there’s the concept of proportional self-defence.
There’s some reasons for disproportionate punishments to intimidating actions /implied threats, that I’d like to lay out:
1. Most defections are not punished. There are few enough people who are willing and able to take the physical (and legal) risk to put a disincentivising stop to bad behaviour. The more such people there are, the less disproportionate responses have to be, but the reason this guy is rampaging around like that is because there are not many such people. “lunatic Vigilantes” are the only unpredictable threat that such people face. A population sprinkled with them is massively more resistant to intimidation, extortion, riots, etc.
2. A directly proportionate response is not a disincentive. If I am a thief, -even a really incompetent thief who gets caught two thirds of the time, and all I have to do is pay back the money when I get caught, then I have no (outside) incentive to stop stealing. If I have to pay back twice the money, all i have to be i a marginally competent thief (51%+ success rate) for this to remain an industry my society encourages me to go into. If I’m a really competent thief, -95% success rate, the punishment has to, before even getting into any other factors, be 20 times disproportionate to make thieving an even-expected-utility action.
3. pushing people around and getting away with it is not just pushing people around. It is a live oppurtunity to transition from your position of tyrant into violence, theft, rape, etc.
4. Little old ladies are not universally psychologically prepared to be around violence, and the implied threat of more. The harm done to the old lady is not primarily that she was moved several feet several times against her will, (though that is dangerous if she is frail), it’s that a lunatic deliberately put her in close contact with his willingness to be violent, -in a position where she was helpless to stop him. And this lack of psychological preparedness is not a unique feature of little old laides.
5. Intimidation is also a thing. If there is an 80% certainty that over the course of this guy’s life, he gets away with it, and that if he doesn’t all that happens is he goes to jail, it’s psychologically a lot harder for the little old lady to avoid fear, -she is much more likely reduced to the status of a non combatant. If there are genuine threats to the minityrant, it’s much easier to adopt the mantle of soldier. It’s the difference between waiting and hoping for the cavalry to arrive, and waiting to die, leaving it entirely in the hands of a demonstrating sadist.
5. Humans are often overconfident. If someone has a 95% success rate at their favoured anti-other-people activity (and probably 100% so far), but believes they have a 99%, 99.9%, or 100% success rate, putting them off doing so
6. For many people, violence is existentially satisfying. If it’s not just about potential profits, but about being a hard man who doesn’t shrink from the true face of the world, nor the risks, who “sees” that e.g. only wolves prosper among sheep, and only the strongest most worthy wolves, then you’re talking about a whole different level of necessarry incentive. Unfortunately criminal’s / traitor’s ideologies are strong forces in the real world.
7. Lowlifes and degenerates are not known for being particularly well attuned to subtle messages. They believe that force is a language, and that it trumps all others. Unfortunately, this is a very workable model of the world, and one highly resistant to being refuted except on its own terms (but not the individual acolyte’s own terms, of course).
8. Humans don’t like to see injustice paraded around, especially if it’s injustice against them. There’s a difference between a crime carried out surrepticiously, and one carried out of people for being too gentle to. Even purely on aesthetic grounds, what could be more appropriate than to prove them gravely mistaken?
Intimidation is not just a temptation, or a profiteering thing, often enough it’s a creed, and it begs out for the incidental, but final, refutation of an appropriate response.
The only contention I might have with the above post is the possible implication that there were not higher levels of force which would have been, in an ultimate sense, more appropriate (though perhaps not in practice). I don’t applaud his christian restraint, except insofar as it is a necessity in a society that thinks violence ought to be the monopoly of criminals, and men in wigs.
Nonetheless, and I mean that literally, none the less, I thank him for his service in defence of country, and what could after all have been my grandmother, -or even just my brother or father.
Thanks. See my comment below about minor aggression.
Also, in Philadelphia, the police didn’t respond to my *car* being stolen. They told me to look for it.
As it happened, they were right– I found it a few blocks from my place (not where they said it was likely to be). Still, there was an element of luck that I found it, and whoever it was took no risks by joyriding.
Did they completely refuse to help? Maybe they meant that you should try looking first and contact them again if that fails.
It could be a sensible approach, if a significant proportion of cars were stolen by Dumb Kids(TM) and abandoned a couple of blocks away.
> The reliance on a centralized authority destroys the ability to respond swiftly and proportionately to all sorts of minor crimes. It forces escalation or surrender.
There’s a connection to be made to Haidt’s victim culture here, I’m sure of it.
I think the huge amount of infighting in supposed safe spaces is decent evidence that not everybody knows the local norms. From my perspective there is startlingly little agreement in social justice circles on basically any proposition, and it seems to me that the norm is to actively avoid codifying beliefs in order to remain nebulous and hard to define so that Motte and Bailey type strategies are more effective.
Having just come back from a weekend in a space which was explicitly declared to be a “safe space” in a speech at the beginning (which, notably, also laid out many of the norms explicitly) and which had no infighting at all, I think your sample might be biased.
And here I thought it was protection money owed to the gang on whose turf you live.
Taxation, just like all laws, can be unpredictable and impenetrable. After all, nobody guarantees that the local polity will not pass a law arbitrarily changing the taxes owed. And instead of attack dogs, you invest in tax lawyers, so I don’t quite see that much of a difference.
In America, sure. In some other countries, you could reasonably expect an expulsion edict to pass.
Sounds like avoiding pronouns is the safest option.
A few times, a man (different men in each case, I think) has taken my hand without my consent.
As it happens, my reactions to being told to do something aren’t especially quick. This isn’t defiance, it’s a processing issue. It could get me into real trouble in an emergency, but fortunately, that situation hasn’t happened yet.
As a result of typical mind habits, I wouldn’t expect someone to let go of my hand quickly because I asked, so I’d yank my hand free hard enough to sting. Yes, I did have a mild intent to punish.
The reaction each time was “You didn’t have to do that!”, but at that point I wasn’t exactly verbal, so I didn’t have words for why I wasn’t nicer. In retrospect, I didn’t *have* to yank my hand out hard, I wanted to.
I think what I did was an example of uncoordinated meanness, and I think it was a right thing to do.
As a side note, it certainly wasn’t dramatic enough for a “You go, girl!” video, and I’m fine with that.
I think this is where the “not to be followed off a cliff” from the preface comes in. “Be nice” is a good rule, but not the only rule.
I admit that I saw “Be nice” which was in large print, and failed to see “not to be followed off a cliff” which was in very small print.
The cliff may be somewhat ill-defined, but maybe cliffs are like that.
Isn’t that the optimal strategy in prisoner’s dilemma? Mild but immediate punishment?
Seems like a better approach than “complain to the guy running the jail”.
It’s the optimal strategy in Prisoner’s Dilemma, but the real world is more complex than PD.
Scott seems to be recommending always cooperate when faced with some degree of offenses until you can coordinate.
This is pretty much what people do in the real world– people generally put up with a lot of oppression unless they see they have a chance of winning. There’s a lot of heated argument about whether there’s a good enough chance of winning to be worth the risks.
“people generally put up with a lot of oppression unless they see they have a chance of winning. ”
In the context of social interactions rather than rebellion, it isn’t an issue of winning but of making the actions you object to unprofitable for those who engage in them. My favorite explanation of that point is “Margin of Profit” by Poul Anderson.
Norm enforcement involves lots of minor, often uncoordinated, “being mean.”
I mean they weren’t people I knew, I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to who they were, and I’m not good at remembering people.
Approximately three times, decades ago, at science fiction conventions.
And you are coming off as mean. Furthermore, you suspected you might be coming off as mean.
If you want to avoid that appearance in the future, drop the “You think?” and don’t ignore it when someone says “a few”.
I apologize for coming across as mean. My intent was genuine curiosity (“how is it possible not to know if it was the same person?”), not to imply some sort of failure on your part.
Thanks. Apology accepted.
Quora might be one of the only places on the Internet that has created a similar kind of safe space at a large scale, and I feel like what you’re proposing is pretty similar to Quora’s Be Nice, Be Respectful policy.
Literally every legal article I’ve read on the Bill of Rights describes it as one of the most anti-democratic things in american life. This is supposed to be a good thing, that 51% of the people can’t establish a state religion or do away with habeas corpus.
I think “super-democratic” is supposed to mean “placed above / on top of democracy”, not “really, really democratic”.
Supra-democratic.
I don’t actually believe that if you prohibited X, and someone were to argue that 1) X wasn’t an attempt to be mean for the greater good, or 2) X actually had enough agreement behind it that it was not unilateral, you’d seriously consider permitting X.
Which of course is your right, but it does mean that your justifications have as much relation to the actual way you run the blog as the Constitution does to why the Supreme Court rules as it does.
I largely disagree with this post.
“you’re allowed to (politely) express your philosophical disagreements with the idea of transgender, but you are not allowed to actually misgender transgender commenters here.”
Maybe we should be allowed to (politely) explain why we don’t think god exists, but we shouldn’t be able to refer to the bible as an untrue document because that would offend christian commenters.
I’m not against safe spaces, or against open forums. But the two should not be mixed. Don’t have the false pretense of an open forum when you’re going to favor the sensibilities of some groups over others. Rules should be kept to very general things, like”no personal attacks” or something.
Where has Scott ever claimed this was an open forum?
I don’t know if he ever made that claim about SSC comment threads in general, but isn’t that what the weekly Open Threads are?
AFAIK discussing race and gender is not allowed even in the Open Threads, or at least it was some time ago.
I always took the idea of the Open Thread as that there was no set topic; in other threads a comment could be deprecated as off-topic, in open threads that particular thing didn’t apply. Later on there were some restrictions as to topic, but even then the threads were ‘open by default’ as opposed to the loosely topic-locked by default other threads.
AFAICT “Open Thread” had no connotations beyond “no specific topic”.
It’s not really analogous since saying the bible is false it not a way to cause targeted, personal pain or discomfort to a particular christian. But more importantly, people here do not, as a matter of fact, gratuitously refer to the bible as a false document and engagements with christians have been uniformly civil.
Sometimes they do. It is, however, a lot less common and a lot less mean-spirited than in a lot of other atheist-leaning spaces, such that there’s quite a few Christians (myself included) who are happy to stick around.
Thanks for pointing that out! I didn’t notice those cases, but I’m reassured by what you say.
I’m actually fine with Scott just saying “This board is my sovereign property. Obey or else.” I appreciate the attempt in this article, but it could have just said that and I would have accepted it. Even better if it was signed with a royal seal.
I never got the idea that Scott was running an open forum where open meant “say whatever you like without limits”. This is a managed community with a particular purpose in mind. A true open community would be closer to a chan /b/.
Indeed.
Any graphics designers want to help Scott with a royal seal?
I would be shocked if Scott, as a con-worlder, did not have several to choose from already.
If we’re going to get into rows about transgenderism (and I feel I have to apologise in advance if that is perceived as an incorrect or offensive term, I am operating out of ignorance of what is a better or considered common use for “philosophy of being transgender”), then what about the requirements or request or demand or hope (however it appears to you) as expressed that “I don’t just want you to use the ‘correct’ pronouns or my preferred pronouns when you talk to or interact with me, I want you to really believe I am that gender [or agender or non-binary or whatever] and if you don’t, then you are misgendering me”?
I’m happy enough to refer to someone as [whomever] if that’s their request, I’m not going to have conniptions about whether they’re going to use the women’s toilets while I’m in there, but if I see a photo and my brain reflexes flash up on instinctual recognition mode [looks male/looks female], I am not going to chide myself for deliberately offensively misgendering you. After all, if the problem is that your exterior does not line up with what your interior is, then I can’t read your mind and know what your interior identification is, and contrariwise, if you can’t read my mind why are you offended if I refer to you as how you wish to be referred?
Well, trans people aren’t psychic, so it’s not like we can actually know how you secretly gender us in your head, unless you take the additional step of telling us about it.
(And speaking for myself only, there’s a big difference emotionally between an accidental/reflexive “ma’am, uh, sorry sir” versus a targeted “YOU ARE A WOMAN DEAL WITH IT.” I don’t really expect people to never do the first kind of misgendering, I just want them to accept a polite correction rather than dig in their heels and start talking about chromosomes.)
I’m a pretty big believer in freedom of thought (distinct from freedom of speech–speaking a thought is different from merely having it) as utterly inviolable. It’s certainly unenforceable. So, sure, think what you like, as long as it stays in your head. I would like you to think of me as male, but if you only behave exactly like someone who thinks of me as male, heck, that’s better than most people manage anyway.
“I don’t really expect people to never do the first kind of misgendering, I just want them to accept a polite correction rather than dig in their heels and start talking about chromosomes.)”
The way you put that (“accept a polite correction”) implies that your view of the subject is correct, their view is wrong, and you expect them to agree with that. If you are someone who is unambiguously male (chromosomes, genitals, self-identification) and someone addressed you as female because you have long hair and the light wasn’t very good, that’s a reasonable expectation.
But if the person was correctly viewing you in terms of his definitions of male and female (but not yours), you are demanding that he alter his view of a pretty fundamental feature of reality to conform with your preferred view, which is not reasonable.
Objecting to the other person insisting on an argument about a subject you don’t want to argue about, on the other hand, is not unreasonable.
Inachodladh:
I think that’s susceptible to the same general rule that you can express ideas, but have to do so “nicely”, which in this context means without language the speaker should know is insulting and can be eliminated without preventing the idea from being expressed.
So if you prefer to refer to the Bible as “the untrue foundation document of the Christanist cults,” that’s probably insulting in an unnessary way. (On the other hand, the statement “there is a lot of historical and internal evidence that suggests the Bible is not literally true”, if relevant to the discussion, would be OK.
IMHO, a closer question would be if you know that some of your readers prefer the word “Bible” to be capitalized when referring to the Old or New Testaments, do you do it? I think Scott’s rule suggests yes – it’s probably not as traumatic for most religious folks as misgendering, but it doesn’t cost you much, and it might avoid offense.
(P.s.: I don’t personally take offense at capitalization, and I don’t know if anyone else does.)
The bible may be false but its not obviously false. The proof that it is not obviously false is that many intelligent people think its true.
Stating your opinion that the bible is untrue is fine. but it actually is rude to act like its obvious the bible is untrue. At least unless your speech is explicitly directed toward other atheists.
dis-claimer: I am an atheist.
Ehhhh both “obviously” and “rude” are in the map, not the territory. The bible is obviously false to me, and to me it is obvious and not even particularly unusual that large groups of intelligent people can be wrong about something.
“It is wrong to tell people they are wrong when you believe they are wrong” is a bad intellectual norm.
“Rudeness” can be swapped out for the “meanness” in Scott’s original post without losing much nuance. I avoid being rude (“mean”) because I don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; but sometimes the goal I’m trying to accomplish is more important to me than avoiding rudeness. So it’s a tradeoff, not a rule, and not very useful as a heuristic.
Maybe not the whole bible, but it’s trivially false onat least a few things, i.e. plants being created before light, bats being a type of bird, or different gospels disagreeing on counts or times, which could just be transcription errors, but still, at least one of them has to be wrong. I think it’s fair to say most Christians don’t believe it’s right in the cases where it’s obviously false, but if you happen to be arguing with one of the few who does, it’s fair to point it out.
The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories,
Huh. That’s really interesting, it seems to approach an idea I’ve had but not easily been able to put into words, from another direction.
Viz, if one large part of the nation has a significant disagreement with another large part, they should agree to disagree, not in the sense that they don’t care, but that they need to find a compromise where they allow the other to go on doing things their way, because they HAVE to — the alternative is civil war. And they can go on trying to persuade each other, but hold off trying to impose their views simply because it doesn’t work. (cf. wars of religion).
OTOH, if a large majority disagree significantly with a small minority, you should (out of general principles of “do unto others” and “what if i’m mistaken” and “human rights are good”) allow them to do what they like when it primarily affects themselves, but when you’re sure you’re right about what’s right, you *should* impose your view on the minority, because you can via normal laws with minimum bloodshed (eg. ban FGM, allow contraception, etc, etc).
The word ‘safe’ ruffles my feathers by virtue of fitting in a pattern of word inflation that typifies SJW rhetoric. Just like ‘microagressions,’ it conflates being offended with being (physically) unsafe. As offense can be taken at everything, including facts or gender/race/appearance, this opens the door to both censorship and segregation under the flag of ‘safety.’ We have seen this exact type of abuse of the term, where people have been banned from spaces by gender/race or have been banned from expressing non-PC beliefs (despite those not being hateful).
If you just want a space with rules of behavior, I suggest using ‘polite spaces.’ Or just say: ‘we have rules of conduct.’ By doing so you abandon hyperbolic and manipulative language, which in itself makes a debate more of a ‘polite space.’
Can’t say I disagree.
“Private property” comes to mind.
How is that relevant?
I’m in favor of safe spaces when they are understood in that context. My entire problem is with advocates of safe spaces who only care about them for their own group, so the safe space is just part of a strategy and not an institutional idea that gets applied consistently.
@TD
The issue is not so much that they only want them for their own group, but rather that some of them want to extend very restrictive safe spaces to public property.
In my opinion, people should be free to put whatever restrictions they want on speech on private property (like this blog). However, it becomes oppression once you start to censor public spaces or only certain forums get funded from public money. An example of the latter is the publicly funded universities that give support to feminist student organizations, but refuse to give the same to MRA organizations.
“some of them want to extend very restrictive safe spaces to public property.”
Yes, that is a problem, but I wouldn’t mind them renting a quiet room from the University as long as they pay for it. They can help upkeep the University, and maybe once they have to pay for it, they won’t be so eager to exploit it. The problem is that a certain kind of student is being subsidized to have the “college experience” and get involved in protests, which is encouraged by a certain kind of teacher trying to relive their youth. Certain courses (again, not naming names now…) have become prominent since at least the 90s which are basically workshops in activism, so it’s really a self-inflicted wound by the Universities.
If everybody can rent one of those rooms, then yes, that sounds cool (provided they don’t run out of rooms, and excluding illegal activites).
What I see as more problematic when they want to extend the safe space to cover the whole university.
As far as I know, “safe spaces” are explicitly designed to be “safe” for a particular group (or, sometimes, several particular groups). As in, “this is our safe haven from the rest of the world, where we can enjoy a guaranteed supportive environment, for a change”. For example, a functioning Christian church is like a “safe space” for Christians. When I’m visiting one of those, I don’t express my opinions about God, the Bible, and religion in general.
A “polite space” is something completely different.
They will not stop you at the door to the church saying you cannot enter based on your outer characteristics.
But they may well look at you disapprovingly if the manner of your dress is inappropriate (such as being topless), or your behaviour is (like shouting). The priest may, in fact, tell you to leave.
Exactly. If a safe space for any group bans people for unacceptable behavior, be it dressing wrong or saying the wrong things, it does not strike me as morally reprehensible. Not letting someone in said space because of simply not belonging to the group, regardless of behavior does, however.
@Anonymous
Neither is censoring of opinions though. I don’t think the Church is going to threat Femen differently from BBAA (Bare Breasts Against Abortion*). Nor would they really care what it is that you are shouting, but rather that you are a nuisance.
* I wish this was a thing
Censoring opinion in a space where entrance is voluntary is of course OK. I now use voluntary in a stricter sense, because technically college is also voluntary, however people should not have their opinions censored there.
I think that you should be more clear, choice is only a valid argument if people have similar options elsewhere. For example, it’s a completely different situation if certain speech is banned from one debate space, but people can have a their own space where that speech is allowed; vs a situation where only certain speech is allowed to be debated.
In the second case, people still have have a choice to attend the debate or not, but they lack the option to attend a debate with their own speech.
That was what I was getting at, thanks for the clarification. (It’s my seventh hour of the workday now, so I’m not really running on top efficiency 😀 )
I am with you on the anti-censorship, but I think in the case of educational institutions it’s because free speech is essential to doing their job well. Educational institutions are about ideas and the only way we can have any confidence in ideas is if they are exposed to the best attacks possible on them and are still standing.
And educational institutions are about transmitting ideas to the students and you can only tell If an idea has actually been transmitted if the student can openly and safely disagree with it.
Banning an educational institution from using freedom of speech strikes me like banning engineers from using calculators or computers, or hospitals from using cleaners. You’re denying them.an important tool to get their work done.
If there was a way to identify atheists on sight, some churches might do that, and I would have no problem with it. In fact, even now they can put up a sign saying “NO ATHEISTS”, and I will stay out.
Well, this to me is a twofold problem. Identifying and locking out atheists who voice their opinion openly would also be kinda ok by me. (I would disagree, but it is their turf.) However, somebody who is outwardly indistinguishable from a believer, just lives with doubt in their heart, locking them out strikes entirely the wrong chord with me.
So, to answer your comment, the sign is ok imho, also “banishing” vocal atheists. Because these things are about choice.
Quibble: If by ‘doubt’ you mean ‘uncertainty’, then that’s something just about every believer feels. You don’t need to be absolutely certain to be a believer. Weak faith is still faith.
@ Anon
I meant something like “I am almost certain God does not exists, but I want to belong to this community a lot, so I will never voice my belief and try my best that others don’t notice”.
@Milan
That might not disqualify you. But you’d probably want to check with a priest.
@Anon,
Thanks, although I was not talking about myself. I am quite comfortable with not believing, and I only want to visit churches on the basis of they look cool.
@Milan
There is at least one pastor who doesn’t believe in God:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaas_Hendrikse
The most progressive end of Protestantism overlaps with atheism.
If your beliefs don’t impact your behavior, they’re ornamental and you’re just LARPing (not that this is a bad thing).
I blame this confusion on the intersection of Puritanism and Quakerism in the pre-Revolutionary USA, one of the great debates was how much God cares about your beliefs, and this kind of bizarre focus has carried over though history. Practical men are often the slaves of a defunct theologian, etc, etc.
@Nita
The only thing that comes to mind resembling this might be that churches with closed communion may not allow you to have the Eucharist (that is, ceremonial wine and bread memorializing’s Christ’s death.)
Most of the ones with closed communion would object to that characterization.
“The most progressive end of Protestantism overlaps with atheism.”
Unitarian: Someone who believes there is at most one god.
Damn. While I don’t believe very weak faith should disqualify a lay member from membership, I think it should very much disqualify from leadership. You shouldn’t become a priest, or remain a priest, if your faith is too weak.
@Nita
‘A guaranteed supportive environment’ is not what Scott seems to ask for; nor is it what people claim who want to turn classrooms and other public spaces into ‘safe spaces.’ So you have people using the same term for different concepts, which invites Motte-and-Bailey discussions, weak manning and slippery slopes.
So my suggestion to Scott and other people who aren’t (big) bigots: use a clearer term.
PS. A church is a rather bad comparison since a service isn’t a debate and sermons are performed by clergy, not regular citizens. Furthermore, at least on the protestant side, sermons can differ greatly. A progressive Christian will not experience a ‘safe space’ during a conservative service and vice versa.
PS2. Is a “guaranteed supportive environment” just another word for an echo chamber?
“So you have people using the same term for different concepts”
Yeah, but you know, those other people are wrong 😀
I would argue that a term is badly chosen when a common sense reading of the term is likely to be different from the intended meaning and a much more clear term is available.
For example, if you want a supportive space, why not call it a ‘supportive space?’ After all, none of the dictionary definitions are ‘supportive.’ The same goes for ‘polite.’ You need to manhandle the dictionary definition and make a bunch of assumptions to go from ‘safe’ to ‘polite’. Why not say ‘polite’ right away then?
I was attempting a joke, in general I think I agree with what you are saying in that post.
No, they are IMPLICITLY designed to be “safe” for a particular group. Otherwise people would start demanding the opposite. Because they want to go anywhere they want and just exclude others.
Anti-SJW has the same exact same problem. Lynch mobs anyone?
I think it’s probably just a millennial thing. Akin to what they’ve done to the word ‘literally’.
Yeah, probably. I blame rapid advances in physical safety putting organisms evolved to cope with high attrition rates in an environment where their instincts don’t align really well with what is actually happening.
Name X used to be associated with most terrible condition A, but technology has reduced the condition to be one-tenth as severe, A/10 – but now this condition is the most terrible, and now gets called X, where in earlier days, it might be called something less hysterical.
I notice this a lot with kids. I grew up in an environment and era much less safe than the typical mid-2010s American suburb, but was less scared of danger, and my parents were less scared of it than parents seem to be today. A little of that is better knowledge about what’s dangerous and what’s not, but the bulk of it is that the standards have changed and increasing safety leads to increased demands for safety.
There’s a point at which trying to minimize danger further yields a smaller benefit than the unintended harms the extra effort causes. I’m not sure where that point is. It’s probably different for everyone anyway. But it exists and we all have one.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
Which millennials would these be?
Guest post by Mr. Yarvin, I assume?
Why would you think that?
A piece exploring the roots of the rule of law results in a comparison to Lord Voldemort.
Interesting.
I consider misgendering someone mean and spiteful. Using the real name of a man who wrote under a pseudonym is significantly worse, however, since it shatters the tacit agreement that we respect each others’ privacy. As a transwoman living in Russia, you are perhaps more in need of privacy than anyone else, and stand to lose more if you get doxxed. On this basis, this is a good example of shameful and shameable behaviour, since the community as a whole benefits from pseudonymity, as does Scott, and as do you and I.
That aside, this is the opposite of the opinions expressed by Mr. Moldbug, given that Scott directly relates coordination to either democratic vote or social consensus, things Moldbug has suggested we replace with an omnipotent and all-killing version of Jabba the Hutt.
I was going to say something, but you managed to express the same idea much more clearly, tactfully, and with less overt nastiness than I would have.
*tips hat*
Moldbug’s identity is hardly secret anymore.
I’m not sure it matters whether it’s a secret, so long as it isn’t common knowledge. Scott’s real identity is probably easy to find, since he goes to meetups, posts personally identifying information, and keeps dropping hints. I don’t know it, because people don’t hate him enough to share it with me.
Even if the cat’s out of the bag with Moldemort, a norm of respect for pseudonyms seems worth encouraging, for the same reason spies in the UK allegedly spent years saying “no comment” when asked whether the gigantic building being built to house SIS and MI5 even existed: easy-to-follow rules cause fewer misinterpretations and let fewer important things slip.
His real name has been discussed here before, not even just in comments, but in the actual post that first referred to the Strange Loop incident. That’s the only reason I know it. In fact, this blog is the only reason I even know this guy exists at all, pseudonymously or otherwise.
I had zero idea that his pseudonym is STILL supposed to be kept somehow separate from his real name???
It isn’t. Moldy never tried very hard to keep his pseud secret, and people did warn him about it. He just did not care that much; in his telling he was using his pseud to avoid being linked to juvenile writing on usenet, not his current identity. This may not have been wise, but it was his decision.
Surprisingly the pseud did last for some time, but it’s been public for quite some time now. At least since the strangeloop saga last year.
You’re not even trying to make sense, are you?
I am somewhat surprised at finding myself in the position of defending multiheaded (sorry, dude, it’s just that I disagree with you on so much…), but:
Contrary to the several folks who’ve replied to the effect of “that comparison makes no sense, wtf are you talking about”, I think multiheaded is onto something (even if their manner of expression is characteristically unpleasant); indeed the parallel between the ideas in this post and those of the referenced writer is one I also noticed, immediately upon reading it. The role and purpose of law, specifically, is one on which he’s written in a similar vein quite a bit (although he’s far from the only one! Take this Less Wrong post, for example, which refers to a closely related idea).
Please don’t be so quick to judge nonsensicality, eh? 🙂
I don’t know about Scott but multi is definitely a death eater. Look at how many people are calling her nonsensical; that’s THE death eater trait.
Multiheaded is clearly not a Marxist, but a Marxist-Nixonist!
If supporting stare decisis, a fundamental principle of jurisprudence, makes you Literally Moldbug, your outgroup homogeneity bias has officially taken over. The comparison is still ridiculous.
I would like to propose that Godwin’s Law be extended to Moldbug for the purposes of this blog.
Outgroup homogeneity? No, you’ve got it quite backwards. I am not saying “gah! the mention of this sort-of-similar idea makes you as bad as That Dude There, who is just… just… so bad!!” Quite the opposite: I’m saying “ah, I note a fascinating parallel between this idea you mentioned and some commentary of That Dude, who says interesting things!”.
Not everything is battle lines in the culture war. I can say that multiheaded is right about a certain thing, and not, thereby, establish myself as a member of … whatever Hated Sinister-Side Tribe you snap-judged me as belonging to. (Though I understand the impulse, so no harm done, I suppose…)
Edit: In short, I do not mean to tar Scott (and Eliezer) by the comparison, but to praise him. And (even more ironically…) I am fairly sure that was multi’s intention as well.
^ you absolutely get it, thanks.
I like multiheaded, even when I disagree with her. I think because we both seem to agree that class is woefully unrecognised as a defining social force by progressive thought (and conservative too, let me give my own side a kicking here) when dealing with matters of oppression or equality, seemingly mainly because it makes people uncomfortable to examine their class advantages (“America is a classless society, unlike Europe/We’re all middle-class now” depending what continent you’re on) or broach the topic unless we’re talking about those people, them, the ones we can all comfortably agree are the underclass (and not within a hundred miles of anything to do with our own social circle or background): the ones we are comfortable dismissing as “IQ 90 people” or not within a standard deviation of our own lofty intellects.
Boy howdy, sure is a lot of venom in the replies to this slightly snarky but basically accurate observation. IIRC, back when Moldbug got disinvited from Strangeloop, he said something like “tell me what creed I have to profess in order to be accepted, and I’ll happily swear to it in the presence of three witnesses of your choosing”, or words to that effect–not trolling, at least not any more than he always is–and nobody would offer him a suitable progressive shahada. Compare to
(The Trve Cvltists would rejoice to hear Obama declare himself emperor-for-life and exile Congress to a Gulag in Alaska.). Jim also likes to talk about this–the leftist singularity can only be stopped by a leftist pope, and the issues of the particular policies being enacted are not as important as those policies being predictable in a way that Jim and Moldbug think requires something like a King or Pope or sole proprietor. I don’t know if their solutions are right, but I think they, and Scott, aren’t obviously or trivially wrong to claim that there’s a problem here.
IIRC, back when Moldbug got disinvited from Strangeloop, he said something like “tell me what creed I have to profess in order to be accepted, and I’ll happily swear to it in the presence of three witnesses of your choosing”, or words to that effect–not trolling, at least not any more than he always is–and nobody would offer him a suitable progressive shahada.
Yarvin is a racist windbag, but that response to the Strangeloop drama and the absence of a progressive shahada in response to him massively increased my respect for him.
Under what definition of racism is Moldbug racist?
Belief that certain racial groups are more intelligent than others, or more suited to slavery, makes one racist by many common definitions.
He believes that some mental traits vary by human population (“HBD”), and divides up the human population in ways that most scientists believe are a colonial social construct. Or in more impressionistic terms, dude basically loves everything about Samuel Johnson except his anti-racism.
OK.
“He believes that some mental traits vary by human population (“HBD”)”
Are you implying that you don’t believe that, or that believing that makes one a racist even if it’s true?
“Belief that certain racial groups are more intelligent than others, or more suited to slavery, makes one racist by many common definitions.”
So the author of Albion’s Seed is a racist? Judging by Scott’s summary, he believes that white indentured servants were less suited to slavery in colonial Virginia than blacks.
We know that easily observable physical characteristics have a different distribution in different racial groups. Surely the default assumption is that less easily observed characteristics, such as intelligence, probably also have a different distribution.
Do you want to use a definition of “racist” which applies to almost everyone, the only difference being whether or not people are willing to admit the views they actually hold? That strikes me as a bad idea.
HBD isn’t racist, but only racists insist HBD is correct.
The evidence is weak; this is defended by arguing that the mainstream scientific establishment is suppressing evidence. Which may or may not be true, but, however conspicuous, absence of evidence is not, in fact, evidence.
Evidence is evidence. And the evidence is quite weak. HBD requires assuming that evidence is being suppressed, that fake evidence is being entered into the record, that the Flynn Effect is false and the evidence is wrong there OR that the Flynn Effect is weaker than current evidence in existence (note that the Flynn Effect is still being observed in low-IQ populations in the US, whereas it has apparently stopped for average-to-high-IQ/wealth populations), and/or that IQ maximums have already been achieved for all populations (again, the Flynn effect is still being observed for low-IQ populations, so this is clearly false).
A weak form of HBD is clearly true, genetics vary between populations; the “strong” form, that this implies significant variations in intelligence or personality across genetic populations based on genetics, isn’t supported by the evidence; it requires a leap of faith to believe.
Why would you make a leap of faith into believing in a theory which implies racial superiority, unless it supports a belief you already have?
@David Friedman
I don’t hold to those definitions; in particular, I reject categorically any moral system which holds it to be morally wrong to believe something which is well-supported by evidence. But a lot of people do. And they really refuse to believe in the differences they object to, too. (I take it as a given, as they do, that calling something “racist” is saying it is morally wrong)
I haven’t read Albion’s Seed, but I think that some of those who hold the views I describe would not object to saying that blacks were physically better suited to survival doing manual labor in colonial Virginia (though some would), but any hint that blacks were more docile or otherwise receptive to slavery in particular would get you branded as a racist.
@Orphan Wilde,
Let’s not drag this into a discussion on the biological reality of race: if you want to continue the topic, perhaps link to a new top-level post in the Open Thread?
That said, you are incorrect regarding the evidence for substantial racial differences. A lot of evidence is reasonably well known and accepted in particular fields but rarely talked about outside of scientific circles. I’ve seen this firsthand with genetics: there are a lot of interesting, and politically touchy, findings which make their way through the community but aren’t trumpeted to the mainstream population. HBD online is basically the equivalent of pop science blogging, just on more (politically) controversial topics.
Fair enough, if you’re arguing there is real evidence out there that is being ignored.
I haven’t seen it. And none of the people who propagate the idea have offered it, so I must conclude they don’t have it.
@David Friedman: If HBD is true and the human population objectively divides along “white”, “black”, “East Asian” and “Amerind”, I would say “racism is true” rather than bending dictionary definitions of the term.
If mental traits are caused by evolution and vary between human populations but don’t divide up along the lines of early modern racism, I wouldn’t call accepting this truth racism. I’m skeptical of HBDChick’s hypotheses, but I wouldn’t call having Darwinian hypotheses about the obvious differences between contemporary Muslims and Christians/Westerners racist.
Why am I still skeptical? Because HBD claims depend on materialist priors + empirical claims about how fast evolution works in a species with a 20-30 year generation that they haven’t demonstrated.
But it would be a very noncentral example of racism that’s true. Using noncentral examples this way is a bad idea.
@David Friedman
If racism is true, then being a racist is correct and nothing to be ashamed about. If racism is false, then being a racist is incorrect and something to be ashamed of.
@Anonymous
It seems to me that you’re implicitly using two definitions of racism. Racism as in “HBD is true”, if you want to call that racism, is different from racism as in “people of races I dislike should be treated badly”. Isn’t it? Are you really saying that the only reason you oppose race-based oppression is because you don’t believe there is any correlation between race and IQ?
Who says I don’t believe there’s any association between race and IQ? By the definitions given by The Nybbler and Le Maistre Chat, the (minimum?) standard for racism is simply believing in genetics-based racial differences in mental features. If that’s what racism is, I see exactly no reason not to be racist.
Read that sentence carefully. In context, his whole statement was mildly amusing in terms of playing against the expected response of bombastic defiance. But, let’s be serious – he was making a joke, and everyone with some background in these sorts of controversies can recognize he was making a joke. Whatever his character faults, the guy does seem to have a dry sense of humor.
Nobody gave “a progressive shahada in response” because progressives weren’t inclined to play a game with him. One of the things which shows very clearly how much “SSC commenters lean right”, is the way things which are extremely common to anyone even mildly left, are treated as complete mysteries by the right-leaning group. Any progressive who engaged with him on the level of taking that seriously was going to get endless grief from right-wingers looking to score in-group points. It’s no surprise that no progressive bothered. It was a joke, chuckle if you appreciate that sort of thing, but it’s not like any deep discussion was going to happen.
Strikes me as ha-ha-only-serious. That is, he’s trying to be funny, but he’s also trying to make a point.
I agree that he didn’t expect to be taken up on the offer, but that was the point. Insofar as SSC missed that, I don’t think it’s a right-wing thing, I think it’s a literalism thing.
Just so. I agree that Moldbug, for all his edgier-than-thou protestations of formalism, has too much fun LARPing as a brave dissenter to ever really give it up and swear fealty to orthodoxy as a practical matter. But nobody asks the Liberty University admins what dogmas you have to believe in order to be a member of the community in good standing, because they can point you to any of several places in which they explicitly enumerate them.
(This example elides the difference between believing and professing, but you get the idea.).
Exactly. It’s not a matter of us being right-leaning or autistic. It’s a question of whether leftists have any coherent text enumerating their truth claims. It looks bad for leftists if Catholics can point to the Summas and they are sub-literate.
C’mon. It’s not a mystery to have, e.g. “Don’t write anything that sounds like you’re justifying racism, especially biological-determinism arguments that have literally hundreds of years of nasty oppressive history behind them.”
But anyone even slightly socially liberal just knows what’s going to happen with that – point-scorers rushing to write along the lines of, for example, “Oh, oh, look at me, the right-winger, I’m such a clever person, let’s play where’s-the-boundary, I bet you’ve never heard that, progressive. Is this racist, huh? How about that, is it racist, huh huh uh? It’s science, right? You want me to deny science, progressive? GOTCHA!”
The “SSC commenters leans right” part comes from the complete lack of understanding about how tedious and annoying that can be, especially by people who think it’s a killer rebuttal.
Recursively, for all the rhetorical excesses of the left, there’s some inverse case where we are now having a thread about professed ignorance of a creed e.g. “All those arguments which have been used to justify slavery, colonialism, racism? Don’t make them”.
[Pre-emptive disclaimer – the above is not a statement itself on the truth-value of the arguments, technically. Only the supposed obscurity about them.]
@Seth,
I agree that no-one, Moldbug included, is actually unsure of why he was considered controversial. The greater point that he made though, that the standards of what is offensive enough to disqualify you from the public sphere are genuinely very unclear and rapidly changing, is pretty valid.
A few years ago, when Trans was still on the back-burner in favor of gay marriage, the range of acceptable opinions on the subject was much broader. Today it’s difficult to even know what to call them: I’m pretty sure transsexual isn’t allowed anymore but how bad is it, more of a faux pas or is it on the “creating a hostile work environment” end of the spectrum?
You can keep track of all of the developments, if you’re keyed into activist culture or just obsessively follow the news, but if you’ve got other time commitments it’s pretty easy to find yourself a decade or more behind the times on any given issue. And as we’ve seen, some of these seemingly innocuous missteps are career-ending.
I think there’s another, perhaps more important, point: It may be that people do have standards, but that those standards, when spoken out loud, are obviously indefensible. Asking them to state their standards is a way to confront them with this fact. (For instance, suppose that someone wants Moldbug to avoid pointing out uncomfortable truths. He might not be willing to say out loud “I want Moldbug to avoid saying uncomfortable truths”.)
@Dr Dealgood – I completely agree with you that there is a problem with unclear and shifting standards, overall. However, Moldbug is not an obscure or unclear case at all. That is, we are approaching a fallacy that might phrased as because there is a bailey, there is no motte. Moldbug is not a complicated corner case. He’s much closer to a central example. He’s (Techie) Racism 101. While he’s not any more racist than many people around, let’s not conflate that with any sort of idea that he’s unwitting or unaware of what he’s advocating, and why it’s inflammatory (to put it charitably).
@Jiro – (Group) biological determinism is well-trod ground. It’s just an instance of nature vs. nurture, which has been debated endlessly in many contexts.
Moldbug is graduate-level techie racism, TYVM.
Disclaimer in all caps since this off-hand remark unexpectedly blew up.
I LIKE THIS BIT OF MOLDBUG, THIS IS WHERE HE SAYS FUN AND WORTHWHILE THINGS, I DO NOT NECESSARILY ENDORSE SHIT, BUT FORMAILISM IS A COOL IDEA TO EXPLORE.
I WAS READING MOLDBUG WAY BEFORE MANY OF YOU HAVE STARTED, ANYWAY. MY THOUGHTS ABOUT HIM DO NOT, IN FACT, REDUCE TO “PURGE HIM FROM EVERYWHERE AND COMPARE HIS EVERY WORK TO MEIN KAMPF”.
Co-ordination is a trade-off. Perfect co-ordination requires totalitarianism. No co-ordination means anarchy. Good co-ordination mechanisms are robust, so they still work if there are some defectors.
And so my gast is flabbered by your object-level examples. Real-world co-ordination to “shame”* promiscuous women is functioning and robust. Yet, because a few people on Jezebel complain about “slut-shaming,” you argue it’s unethical to continue, not because the Jezebellers are right, but because we don’t have universal co-ordination? Meanwhile the co-ordination of the Jezebellers is multiple orders of magnitude less, but something tells me you’re not going to condemn people who flaunt their sexuality for acting without perfect co-ordination.
Nice is loaded. Nice to whom? And it’s not hard to notice your thumb on the scale.
*A tendentious description, but I’ll let it go.
I also think it’s… struggling for the right term here, but let’s try to get the concept across with the jumbled-up collection of words and ideas of crass pragmatism, anti-idealistic, might-makes-right thinking to deny the lone plucky idealist his efforts to change the culture.
I want to make an analogy about the Galileans telling Jesus to stop making all the sinners feel bad, but sadly my hermeneutics aren’t up to scratch.
Well, that’s also the opposite of what Jesus mostly did. He wasn’t called the “Friend of Sinners” for nothing.
Jesus was mostly kind to sinners, but he didn’t seem to mind making (high status?) Pharisees feel bad.
He was kind to you once you admitted you were a sinner.
It is not too far off to say that Jesus was the proto-SJW.
Nonsense. Jesus was very explicit about his not getting into the legal side of things.
Did anyone notice I might have mis-capitalized Jesus’ pronoun? Did anyone care?
Are non-believers expected to use deity-case for Jesus as a form of politeness?
In the Jewish context, I don’t think non-Jews are expected to go through the G-d circumlocution, though on the other hand writing out hypothesized pronunciations of yud hay vav hay in causal conversation does strike me as rude.
Did anyone notice I might have mis-capitalized Jesus’ pronoun? Did anyone care?
You mentioned the Christ in a sense of general approval on a blog that is largely peopled by anti-faith types. I care about the capitalization, but not anywhere enough to get upset over it.
(OTOH – the new Catholic missal for English has, through some fairly clever phrasing, pretty much eliminated gender assignment for the Holy Spirit, and greatly decreased that for God (to be separated from God-the-Father.) I like this. It’s making my mother cranky.)
“No co-ordination means anarchy.”
Government produces all order.
Under anarchy there is no government.
Therefore anarchy is chaos.
Q.E.D.
In Washington there isn’t any plan
With “feeding David” on page sixty-four;
It must be accidental that the milk man
Leaves a bottle at my door.
It must be accidental that the butcher
Has carcasses arriving at his shop,
The very place where, when I need some meat,
I accidentally stop.
My life is chaos turned miraculous;
I speak a word and people understand
Although it must be gibberish since words
Are not produced by governmental plan.
Now law and order, on the other hand,
The state provides us for the public good;
That’s why there’s instant justice on demand
And safety in every neighborhood.
Haha, very good. I apologise for my sloppy language.
I was using “anarchy” in the looser sense of chaos. With no co-operation, we truly would have a Hobbesian chaos. You are of course right that anarchy, in the anarcho-capitalist sense, involves plenty of co-operation, and that most co-operation, even today, is not overseen by the state.
I would add that I was certainly not suggesting that social norms need, or should, be underwritten by state action. Indeed, I think often of the anecdote from al-Tanukhi that you quote in Chapter 13 of Law’s Order, in terms of the limits on the state’s power in that regard.
If I say “I think you are wrong” or “That is a bad idea”, I’m not trying to shame the person who puts forward such a notion. Not unless I believe they know it’s a bad idea or wrong but are still proposing it, or are trying to use it as a means of unwarranted moral superiority, or prop up “And this is why you lot in the opposing camp are all Nazis!”
There’s no shame in ignorance or honest mistake or difference of opinion. Perhaps a lot of misunderstanding comes about when one person thinks another is trying to shame them or make them feel ashamed; if person B did not have that intention, then you get the duelling “They were being deliberately offensive and hurtful to me!”/”I only pointed out the errors in their thinking and they immediately started yelling about oppression!” interpretations of interactions.
A friend (I can’t remember who) once argued that “be nice” provides a nigh-infallible ethical decision procedure.
I think your friend is mistaken, though; niceness has little or nothing to do with whether something is right or good (or good for you either personally, whether it’s death by chocolate versus broccoli – I know which I think is nicer – or the body politic, when it comes to making laws about taxes).
There’s no shame in ignorance or honest mistake or difference of opinion.
This is why I find the rise of “[z]splain” as a thing to be mocked insidious. When even good faith attempts become ammunition, there’s not even a potential for reconciliation. The bridge has been burned.
Okay, so I have a question. If someone would say, “you can choose if I address you as he, she or they (or an arbitrary one agreed on by the majority of the forum), but I will ignore the requests for more tumblrian sounding options”, is that also misgendering?
I mean, if you have ten people on the forum each requesting their own pronouns, and if you use the wrong one you get banned, then how quick will it empty?
(Please note that I am not arguing for or against the described behavior, I am just curious. I don’t really have a stake in it myself, because I don’t comment here that often, and my default solution would be just using their name each time instead of a pronoun.)
I disagree pretty strongly with this post. I think Scott’s philosophically incorrect on several points, starting with his ranking of laws which are good over laws which are consistent and clear.
No. That is an outcome over system error. We can not have a workable system of laws which treats everyone nicely until we have fixed the issue of everyone knowing and understanding the laws, and agreeing to follow them.
Secondly, the “be nice until you have a group behind you to be mean” is both morally and practically in error. First, insisting that people may only express the morals of a larger group is, I think, deeply wrong, and betrays all sorts of individual freedoms. Secondly, by so strongly preferring moral codes that favor group effort, we set up a situation where instead of chiding one person into stopping being an asshole, we have a whole group who are engaged in, and dedicated to, that action. A stitch in time saves nine.
I don’t have a huge problem with either Scott making rules for his space, or for the general idea of not being cruel to people with gender disphoria, but I find this attempt to define a system of niceness to be extremely problematic long time before we get to the cliff.
(And on edit – that line about taxes not being unpredictable or unfair is a clear sign that Scott hasn’t attempted to run a small business.)
I more or less agree with this comment. I just want to add a quibble, which is not a disagreement per se, but:
I actually read that bit of the post as a sort of… rhetorical working of one’s way down from the position that “having just laws” is the only thing that matters (which is the position of your stereotypical young idealistic liberal etc.). In other words, we must first acknowledge that Law matters, as well as Good, before we can move on to the position that Law matters more than Good (and possibly from there to the position that only Law matters, and there’s no such thing as Good, a la Voldemort et al).
In other words: sure, yes, the thing you said, but it’s a “no, we need fifty Stalins!” objection — we’re getting there.
When did I rank laws that are good over laws that are consistent, except chronologically?
When you said:
As far as I can tell there are two things we want in a legal system. First, it should have good laws that produce a just society. But second, it should at least have clear and predictable laws that produce a safe and stable society.
If you meant, “we want two things: 1) xyz and 2) abc, then I would probably understand it to mean a non-ordered list. But the way you phrased it made it seem pretty clear that you were valuing good laws over clear laws.
If the intent was (as above) to say “we need laws that are both good and clear” then I didn’t follow, and I agree that including both is important.
This is not about Correct ethics, is it? It’s about implementation in a world where people do not have sufficient empathy and theory of mind to not be assholes, right?
Because the Correct ethics is still “universalize as if the process you use to universalize would itself become universal”. Which is obviously completely incompatible with the very principle of fixed laws and crushing societal structures.
Universalizability is inconsistent with fixed laws? Do you just mean that if everyone were perfect there would be no need to have government enforcement, or something else?
Not only, though that would fix everything, tautologically, of course.
I mean that every fixed law will have corner cases where it is violating the point of having it, without even getting into how enforcement works in reality. They are always trade-offs, every boundary will have Type I errors on one side and Type II errors on the other. A system of bounding the acceptable behaviors with the meta-universalizability criterion does not need fixed laws; I think that’s what the contractualist anarchists say they want (but forget to count the time to go over all the overlapping contracts they’d be bound by, which would involve recursive combinatorial explosions of frictions for resolving any dispute).
Of course the next practical problem is to assess the actual preferences of people in cases of dispute also, which isn’t remotely more solved than recursive resolution of possibly-incompatible-and-overlapping contracts. But I don’t despair yet that they might be practically automatable some day.
Not so sure how I feel about your point 2.
I can absolutely see aggressively, publicly using something other than someone’s preferred pronoun, and drawing attention to it, as being a hostile thing to do.
On the other hand, I really don’t think you’re being very charitable or, frankly, well-thought out, on the subject of the transgender pronoun issue, particularly when it comes to social conservatives, vis-a-vis safe spaces.
Obviously transgender-identifying people prefer to have language used a certain way in relation to themselves.
On the other hand, for many social conservatives, this new language norm being aggressively rolled out by activists and the blue tribe is roughly equivalent to waking up one day and being told by Your Betters ™ that, going forward, 2+2=5, and you and your kind can expect very severe public sanction (that you and your entire local culture did not agree to) if you dare to say 2+2=4. Which is to say, I flatly don’t think you can have both a safe space for transgender-identifying people, and a lot of social conservatives, right now. There isn’t actual common consensus, and any proposed norm is politically aggressive to someone.
I’ve always admired your original norm of trying to read other people charitably, and expecting your commenters to read both you and each other charitably. I find it inspiring. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it, but I feel like your point 2 is abandoning that charity… which, purely as a matter of pragmatics, is too bad, too, because I think your unusual commitment to charity has been a big element of how wonderfully heterodox your community of commenters is. But maybe it’s just me being uncharitable with what is admittedly a pretty terse sentence.
“Which is to say, I flatly don’t think you can have both a safe space for transgender-identifying people, and a lot of social conservatives, right now.”
You mean not a safe space for both at the same place and time, right? Because otherwise I can totally imagine having both of those space, just somewhere else.
FWIW I don’t think Scott is trying to make this a “safe space” for trans people in the SJ sense. I think that he’s mostly just trying to shut down people deliberately misgendering as a form of attack.
Then he should damn well make that an explicit part of the rule.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but wouldn’t that produce a rule like ‘you can misgender people if it’s not an attack on them’? I don’t see how you can enforce such a rule.
“For the purpose of preventing the deliberate use of misgendering as an attack on transgendered people, do not misgender trans people on this forum.” There is no reason why the spirit of a rule cannot be part of its letter.
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state…” 🙂
It would also be wise to avoid such terms as “misgender” which are not commonly known.
Why? If you know what a gender is and how the prefix “mis” generally functions, the meaning of “misgender” is pretty obvious. Especially so if it’s clear from the context that you’re discussing transgender people, like, for instance, if the very next word is “transgender” and that’s not even the first mention of the concept in that sentence. If a person with the IQ I’d like to think the typical SSC reader has claims not to understand the word given all those clues, I find it more plausible that they’re playing dumb to make a point than that they’re genuinely confused.
If you know what a gender is…
Then you’re living in a different century, because in this one there are too damn many definitions of “gender” for anyone to keep track of and some of them are decidedly Humpty-Dumptyish.
Yes, lets not be charitable to Scott, the master of charitability. He obviously doesn’t mean “don’t call people he or she as an insult”.
Yeah, exactly.
@ candles
Which is to say, I flatly don’t think you can have both a safe space for transgender-identifying people, and a lot of social conservatives, right now. There isn’t actual common consensus, and any proposed norm is politically aggressive to someone.
It’s easy to avoid using ‘he’ or ‘she’. There’s plenty of neutral ground. We do it all the time when referring to a poster whose sex/gender we know nothing about. When necessary, ‘they’ or ‘zie/zis/zim’ are available. So to use a hurtful pronoun as an ‘in your face’ flaunting of some conservative principle or as begging the question, is very rude imo.
Otoh, for the trans person or ally to reject the safe neutral ground of easy avoidance and insist on a particular favored pronoun, or to ‘call out’ some careless or uninformed use as coming from some elaborately-described bad motive — is unreasonable and rude.
Both of these derail productive discussion.
It is also kind of rude to suggest someone should have used a word that they have probably never seen before. Zie might be available, but how many English speaking people do you think have ever heard of it before? 5%?
By the way, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, Scott has an excellent post on his tumblr about this recently. I don’t know the criteria for what gets promoted to this blog and what doesn’t, but he’s had some interesting things there today.
Some requests seem reasonable, others like dominance games. For me, a continuum emerges that goes “call me by name”, “call me she”, “call me they”, “call me zie”, “call me zerina”, “call me princesself”, all the way to “call me Xychromatron The Seductive, Ruler Of The Labia, Archetype Of Femininity, Planetkin And Friend To Asteroids”.
Getting called the wrong pronoun out of “he/she” presumably hurts for someone who has spent their life struggling against it, but getting called “they” instead of “zie/hir/xir” seems less hurtful, and not getting called “princesself” or “Xychromatron” doesn’t seem hurtful in the slightest.
Also, am I the only one whose brain parses 90% of the more “exotic” pronouns to male? Zie, xe, and so on, when I read it, the primary association is male, and then I have to consciously make an effort to correct my thinking. Is this a “male by default” thing? Do women have the opposite effect?
I parse them as extraterrestrial personally. All bets are off since they don’t necessarily reproduce sexually and may not have any kind of easily identifiable dimorphism.
Edit: This possibly sounds insulting, but I don’t mean to imply trans people are alien or anything, just that I associate names starting with a ‘z’ sound with aliens. I’m sure there’s a specific fictional reason for this, but I’m not sure what it is.
Possibly; for me, they tend to come across as female, not least because I learned German at school and zie, xe etc. sound very much like sie, roughly the German for she.
(Then again, sie can refer to forks, and isn’t always appropriate for girls, depending on how you’re referring to them.)
I am much more used to being marginally abusive to everyone in a forum environment, so stuff like this naturally makes me cautious. Nonetheless, SSC is first and foremost a blog run by you with social standards set by you. I think it’s a little patronizing to act like it’s a democratic process in your case, even if the metaphor actually stands on a national level – you’re a moderator of an internet comments section. Reddit is democratized, this place is a bit more like an image-less 4chan, where the behavior of a board depends on direct moderator interference.
You mention that we shouldn’t misgender transgendered people in the comments section deliberately. What’s your stance on the generally accepted gender neutral pronouns (they, them, their)?
(speaking of “they”, my English teacher says that I shouldn’t use those three words as pronouns in a formal paper, even if the dictionary calls it correct. Is she right about this, or is it just her imagination?)
I actually like the being marginally abusive thing on a forum, as long as everybody else likes it as well. Offensive humor is great if everyone is willing to get as good as he/she/they gives.
This is why I made the comparison between SSC and 4chan even if they’re different environments. When you go to 4chan, and you say something stupid that doesn’t conform to their rules, they call you out on it. I imagine it’s the same way here. Not like Reddit, where you can expect communities across the entire site to shift, merge, and split more easily. There, migrants are common.
A paper that avoided plural pronouns altogether would be awkward at best. There’s no reason, prescrptivist or descriptivist, to do that.
Perhaps what he meant was that you should avoid the use of singular they in formal writing. Singular they is well attested back to Shakespeare’s day but the Victorians found it logically inconsistent and many older grammar treatises held that it was incorrect. Its use is jarring to some people. It’s a style choice.
She was telling me to avoid singular they. I understand the reasoning behind it, but it’s a bit strange to try and change a standard I’ve been adhering to all my life (and will probably continue to stick to as soon as I get a new teacher).
Interesting how, in the same thread, there are people telling us we should ignore the illogic of singular “they,” but start putting our commas outside quotation marks for logical reasons.
Speaking for myself, “they” as a singular offends my ear because either you end up using a singular verb with a pronoun I hear as plural or a plural verb with a pronoun being used as a singular.
And I don’t care if Shakespeare did it.
It would be nice to have true gender neutral pronouns, but none seem to have caught on as yet. Contrast that with the striking success of “Ms.”
Speaking only for myself, I’m quite comfortable with the singular they, and I’ve been known to stretch it to “themself”. (Corrected from reflexively typing “themselves”, which probably proves something.)
I wonder whether there are local variations in whether people’s dialect defaults to a singular they. My background is Northern Delaware/Philadelphia.
I’ve used themself, and heard other people around here use it. It does feel more slangy than singular they, which has been a default pronoun that I notice I tend to use whenever someone’s gender isn’t immediately in mind, or when I’m repeating a cached thought, as well as whenever gender is even mildly ambiguous.
I’m in the UK here, so quite far away. Born in the North West, currently living South West.
I wonder if people reacted the same way to the royal “we”, or to the deprecation of “thee/thou” in favor of singular “you” (losing subjective “ye” along the way). Use of the plural form for singular individuals at least has a fairly long history, in English and other languages.
For me it’s an adaptation, but one I’m willing to live with given the available alternatives. “Neutral he” isn’t, “one” is stilted, “he/she” and “he or she” are cumbersome. In practice I’m probably more likely to just recast the sentence, but sometimes that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Yeah, singular “they,” definitely offends my ear.
I also find the demand that I should refer to someone by a gender neutral word to be an imposition in a way I don’t find it an imposition for a biological male to ask me to call her “she,” or a biological female to ask me to call him, “he.”
In my brain there are two boxes for humans: “male” and “female.” There are also some smaller boxes within boxes for “stereotypically masculine males,” “stereotypically feminine females,” “feminine males,” “masculine females,” and so on. There is no “transcends gender” box because no one is an angel or bodhisattva.
I find this last point bothersome because it would be like if I met Rachel Dolezal and referred to her as “white,” but she said “no, I prefer to identify as black; please refer to me as black.” While that would be a little weird, I could handle that. I’d say “okay, you want me to try to slot you in this other box, at least in terms of how I talk about you? Okay.” But I couldn’t accept being told “don’t imply I have a race! I am beyond race! I transcend race!” To which my response is “no, you don’t.”
In other words, you can demand I put you in a different box, but I’m not going to make a whole new box for you. Coincidentally, this is how I feel about the bathrooms, too…
How do you think about people who are bi- or multi- racial?
Recommended: (1)ne Drop, a book about how people have developed black identities. The process and personal histories (this is world-wide, not just the US) are more complicated than I could have imagined.
Well, I’ll agree that the comparison breaks down in that race is a spectrum and gender is, by and large, a binary. Honestly, I just say “half-black, half-white person…”; or, if they prefer to identify with one race or another, then I’d call them that. Not that I am called on to refer to peoples’ races all that often.
How do you deal with writing responses to people with gender-ambiguous names on the Internet? Just avoid pronouns entirely, or use generic he, or something else?
Sometimes I use he/she or s/he. Sometimes I use generic “he.” Around SSC I tend to assume commenters are male unless they have very feminine-sounding handles and/or feminine-looking avatars.
I’ve experienced roughly the same internal blocks to using invented pronouns. I don’t have much of a problem with ‘they,’ but in practice I’ve found myself mostly using names if I know them as an avoidance mechanism.
There pretty clearly are at least some people who transcend our linguistic categories, though. Intersexed people are rare but they exist and there’s no obvious way to pronoun them without asking which they prefer in advance, and it seems reasonable that they might prefer neither since in their case neither is accurate.
And yeah, multiracial. I kind of hate filling out forms that request demographic information for this reason. We don’t have clear records going back more than a few generations and I’ve not taken any genetic tests, so best I can tell is some mix of Spanish and Aztec with whatever the heck else got thrown in along the way. I don’t strongly identify with white or Native American and neither seems to have genetically determined much about me other than lactose intolerance and facial structure. I’m not even all that similar in temperament, intellect, or whatever else seems to matter to our resident population biologists here to my own immediate blood relatives, let alone entire historical populations that used to be more homogeneous from which I’m mutually descended.
Between “they” and “ze,” I’ll take “they,” because the former makes me feel like I’m talking about 2 people, whereas the latter makes me feel like I’m talking about an alien. Both feel rather like saying “the artist formerly known as…” to me, though (as in, they feel like slightly unreasonable demands on others’ patience as a way of making some kind of point about how you see yourself).
I’m glad someone else said alien. I swear there has to be a pop cultural reason for that I can’t remember.
To be fair, the whole “artist formerly known as” thing was mostly just a way to say “fuck you” to record companies who wouldn’t let him use his own name on his music once he left them.
It’s basically the same phenomenon as the people suggesting that their favored pronoun is the full text of War and Peace elsewhere in this thread, except Prince was actually in a position to make people DO it.
“There pretty clearly are at least some people who transcend our linguistic categories, though. Intersexed people are rare but they exist and there’s no obvious way to pronoun them without asking which they prefer in advance, and it seems reasonable that they might prefer neither since in their case neither is accurate.”
On the other hand, hard cases make bad law. When you’re a small enough minority, there start to be things it’s unreasonable to ask for.
“On the other hand, hard cases make bad law. When you’re a small enough minority, there start to be things it’s unreasonable to ask for.”
+1
“I’m glad someone else said alien. I swear there has to be a pop cultural reason for that I can’t remember.”
Z and X are the most “alien”-sounding English letters for some reason. If you want to name a scary alien overlord, something like Zaxos is infinitely superior to say, Tipitaka.
They are extremely uncommon (‘Z’ is the least common, according to Wikipedia, with ‘X’ being the third-least common). Summed together with ‘J’ and ‘Q’ (the other two least-common letters), they have less frequency than the fifth-least common letter (‘K’).
This would explain why “Jzqx” seems like a good alien name. Or “Qxzj”.
Good point about the frequency. Q is definitely a good letter for an alien as well, and has in common with x the quality of being, at least in modern English, a completely superfluous letter (q can always be replaced by k, and x with “ks”). Which is probably why they’re uncommon (maybe only used in words of certain etymologies, like French for q, for example).
X is also a letter which sounds like a mathematical placeholder, a film rating, and a radiograph. All making me think of “Kwisatz Haderach,” though maybe that could be made even more alien and less Arabic as “Qwisatz Haderax”
There are enough different transliteration schemes for Arabic floating around that the Q, at least, would be normal in some of them. I’ve never seen X used in one, though.
Singular “they” offends my ear too… but since both writers as eminent as Shakespeare and writers as socially conservative as C. S. Lewis used it, I’m treating my offense as something more about myself than about the English language, and accepting the usage anyway.
The gendered languages (i.e. all languages that I speak other than English) that I know all have a quite definite gender neutral pronoun – he. Because the word “human” is grammatically masculine (in Czech, German, Spanish, very likely in all Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages, but I don’t know that for sure, I think that some Scandinavian languages might not have genders). Hence using “he” as a default pronoun comes to me naturally in English as well and the idea that it somehow excludes women is quite outlandish to me – I understand this particular “he” as a “human” not as a “man”. And human is a sufficiently abstract word that I don’t really imagine a human as a man, even though the word is masculine.
Also, the word “person” is grammatically feminine in the languages I mentioned, so I also have a tendency to use “she” in conjunction with that in English. Similarly, I do not imagine a person as a woman.
And the “right” pronoun for a child is “obviously” it, because in Czech and German, a child is grammatically neuter (I find it strange that el niño means both a boy and a child in Spanish, being a masculine word).
English is, or was, the same way. He / his can be used as generic pronouns, and Man / mankind for the human race generally.
S/he, he or she, they, xie and other attempts at gender neutrality are recent innovations.
“Mann” was originally more sex-neutral, in terms of describing people. Wermann became “man” and “husband” in English (the division between adult-male and married-male as concepts perhaps contributing to the split; I have no idea where “husband” came from, perhaps another language, or perhaps dialectic mutation?), and wifmann became “woman” and “wife” (likewise, again, perhaps adult-female and married-female required distinction); the former arose through dialectic crossbreeding of some kind (I guess?), the latter through shortening.
I once knew the pronouns for all three, but I’ve since forgotten them. But IIRC, “he” and “him” were pretty close to the gender-neutral version, with the male-gendered version having been dropped at some point.
I’m way late here, but “husband” is Saxon/Old Norse for roughly “the freeman of the house”; the hus- part is the same as in hussy (= housewife). In Swedish, for example, “husbonde” is still a word meaning “master of the house” or “the man a servant works for” and just “bonde” on its own means “farmer”.
Ostensibly neutral “he” tends to carry male-as-default along with it. I’m pretty sure most people would find a construction like “An employee may use his paid medical leave if he becomes ill or pregnant” jarring, however grammatically correct it might be.
(Though of course insofar as the pronouns are divorced from biological sexual characteristics, that may not be the case going forward.)
Have another test case: “Man is an animal that breast-feeds his young.”.*
*Note rational punctuation
I’m pretty sure the appropriate pronoun for Man-the-abstract-collective is “its”, just like it uncontroversially is for humanity-the-abstract-collective.
Playing around with “building” a language for a fictional human subspecies (desert dwelling transhumans/nomads), I eventually decided that this group had collective pronouns for various groups, that would be translated as “they/them” in English
– one word that meant “that group over there which is yet unknown” and would also be applied to some groups of animals (wolf packs yes, herds of goats no)
– one word that meant “a group of only adult men”
– one word that meant “a group of mixed genders and ages” – because it was beyond rare for there to be three or more women together and none of them with a child at heel.
They had different pronouns for males and females based on age – and a general “neutral” (not neuter/genderless, but of unspecified gender) pronoun for unweaned children and toddlers.
“SCOTT — YOU STRUMPET!!”
I just, you know, wanted to try it out and see if it felt good . . .
Way behind the cutting edge of modern insult technology. Nowadays you call a guy a beta cuckolded by strumpets.
I think it should be allowable to call men strumpets too; if they behave like strumpets, why confine a good condemnatory epithet to one sex?
Also “minx”, there are definitely some men I would (approvingly) like to refer to as “minxes” (and no, I’m not going to tell you who) 🙂
Oh, a few thoughts.
You never actually describe what qualifies as “coordinated” meanness. It’s hard for me to see how “if you say something that offends my honor then I get some friends and try to beat you up in a dark alley” could be more clearly within the semantic space described by “coordinated meanness” as the words are conventionally used. And indeed there is an oversight process there; you have to convince your friends that what I said was bad enough to be worth the attack. Beating someone up one-on-one in a dark alley is risky.
The ideas I’ve absorbed from American culture say that mobs are very dangerous and in fact prone to self-rile regardless of what their nominal leader might want them to do. They say that there are a lot of things people are only willing to do as part of a mob. Some of this may be unfair mob stereotyping, but…
I take exception to this. It amounts to SSC taking an official position on the nature of reality, and purposefully hamstringing arguments on one side. As I understand the rule, this would be acceptable:
And this is unacceptable:
My words reflect my assessment of the world. You are overreaching to tell me they have to reflect yours instead. But here are some situations that I see as analogous in some relevant way:
1. I read, years ago, about a man who took out a billboard showing a photo of himself cradling the outline of a baby, with the paraphrased text “this would have been my child if my ex-girlfriend hadn’t had an abortion”.
Obviously, that’s an anti-abortion argument, but what makes it interesting to me is that it’s made in very strong terms. Compared to most arguments you’ll encounter on either side of the abortion debate, this one packs a punch. I brought it up to my mother intending to have a discussion about arguing in weak terms or strong terms, and was shocked by her reaction — she didn’t think a billboard like that should be allowed. After much hassling about freedom of speech and debate on political issues, she said she thought her reaction was because she was deeply uncomfortable with strong attacks on abortion, because she felt that, as an abortion provider, they put her personally at risk.
2. I hope we all remember the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons. They occasioned a lot of controversy here in the US, with many otherwise respectable outfits taking the position that while it was all very well — even important — to have a discussion about the Mohammed cartoons, that could be done without having the bad taste to actually display the cartoons. This can’t work; it cedes the idea that publishing the cartoons was wrong before the argument even begins. And the hey-why-don’t-we-not-kill-people-who-haven’t-done-anything-wrong argument becomes much stronger when you don’t act like those people are asking for it.
People have to be allowed to make their arguments at full strength. “No matter how much she might like it, wishing won’t turn her into a woman” is a self-evidently self-defeating statement.
3. In Cohen v. California, the “fuck the draft” case, Warren Burger was so anxious that “fuck” not be uttered within his courthouse that he opened with a tactfully stated request that Cohen’s lawyer observe what he felt was proper decorum: “Mr. Nimmer, you may proceed whenever you’re ready. I might suggest to you that as in most cases, the court is thoroughly familiar with the factual setting of this case, and it will not be necessary for you, I’m sure, to dwell on the facts.” [1]
Mr. Nimmer, accepting the wishes of the court not to dwell on the facts, kept it brief:
Nimmer realized that conceding that it wasn’t appropriate to say “fuck” compromised his case. And people have credited the fact that he won to the choice he made to use the word in court. [2, footnote 8]
So, in sum:
1. I object to the idea that you can tell me what I think.
2. Referring to masculine people with masculine pronouns adds emphasis to your statements, and this should be allowed at “pretty important” levels of “should”.
3. Having people refer to others that they are claiming to be masculine, as feminine, adds some crippling self-contradiction to everything they say, and this must not be required, at “critically important” levels.
4. It is fundamentally dishonest to say “people are welcome to argue this topic here, but the arguments on one side will be handicapped”.
Why is saying “you can argue that they’re men, but you have to admit they’re female” less weaselly than saying “yes, the pictures are newsworthy; yes, it’s important that we’re allowed to print them; but no you can’t have them accompanying your article on the subject” or “of course you can make anti-abortion arguments, but not the kind that might make someone really upset“?
If I were to argue with you about transgender stuff, and I were to refer to you as ‘that total fucking arsehole’ every time I brought it up, I would expect to be moderated – likely banned for a period of time.
As far as I can tell, you seem to be arguing that I should be allowed to do that – after all, I think that people who deliberately misgender trans people are total fucking arseholes, so refraining from referring to them as such is conceding the argument before it even begins.
I fundamentally don’t understand your position. You’re arguing that you should be allowed, in polite argument, to refer to people in a way they find incredibly insulting and hurtful.
Isn’t this something multiheaded does a lot?
I think the basis is that the new rule expects you to admit that 2+2=5 in practice while you are (for the moment) allowed to disagree in theory.
Multiheaded has also been banned a lot.
And they’ve been banned a lot. The system works!
So, again, you’d prefer insults all around? The conservatives call all the left-wing people commie entryist hippie scum, the left-wing people call all the conservatives evil fascist heartless warmongering bastards, the atheists call all the religious people ignorant sheep, the religious call all the atheists immoral lecherous monsters, and the less said about what the alt-right and the social justice people call each other the better.
You are not required to refer to people in the most insulting way you believe is true.
Indeed not. But neither should I be forced to refer to them in plainly false manner. I will comply with Scott’s edict, but in ways that don’t require lying.
In what way does calling him a total fucking arsehole strengthen your argument? “She is not a woman” vs “he is not a woman” is pretty clear; while in the case of “total fucking arsehole is wrong” vs “Watts is wrong” I’d even say the latter is more persuasive.
In what way does calling a transwoman “he” strengthen your argument?
And if it does, then if I’m arguing that you’re a TFA for misgendering someone, then surely calling you a TFA strengthens the argument in the same way?
It strengthens the argument because an argument not containing a contradiction is stronger compared to one that does.
Saying “she is not a woman because….” is contradictory. It concedes, by use of pronouns, the point which it tries to argue against.
Obviously if by the rule of the site, you must concede the opposing premise as part of stating your opposition to it, you come off as someone with deep ambivalence about the issue, if not incoherent.
The trouble is that having the argument every time one wants to make a response to a transgendered person is tiresome and derails the thread.
Same question as below:
Why on earth would anyone want to engage in an argument on the question if a given individual qualifies as “a woman”?
It’s the difference between saying “Ice is not cold” and “This water is not cold”. If I concede that this sample of water is indeed ice, then I am conceding that it is cold.
Conceding that someone is “she” means conceding “is a woman”, since we use “she” to refer to women (if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be having this damn argument over pronouns in the first place!)
You’re welcome to refer to me that way; it’s likely to make me more dismissive of you in general. But it will generally be orthogonal to any argument you’re trying to advance, which makes it a tolerable grounds for banning. (In a discussion of whether I should be banned, it would be a coarse way of expressing an idea that was very on-topic, and therefore it should not be grounds for banning when said in that context.)
You can argue that Caitlyn Jenner really is a woman without referring to me as “Total Fucking Arsehole”; I cannot fully argue that Bruce Jenner is a man while referring to him as “she”. Just as the article defending Jyllands-Posten while tastefully not showing the naughty pictures is not making the same argument as the identical article displaying the pictures.
I’m going to use pronouns; that is the structure of human language. I’m not going to use pronouns that cause me to pre-emptively admit that I’m wrong. You are symmetrically welcome to be generally dismissive of me. But your offense doesn’t determine what I think, and I care what I think more than I care about you. I think you’ll find, on reflection, that you care what you think more than you care about me, so I hope you can understand the sentiment.
Until you can control my mind, you’ll have to just get over the outrage you feel when I dare to speak my own language.
Finally, I will note that for purposes of making policy, your genuine hurt cannot be distinguished from hurt that you claim to feel because you want me to shut up. But it doesn’t matter so much, because even assuming my words cause you deep and genuine pain, that won’t justify making me change them. When you’re using civility to stop people from making the case for their position, you have taken civility too far.
I’m not arguing that I should be allowed to hurl insults.
I don’t see how calling you a TFA is more orthogonal to the argument being constructed than calling a transwoman ‘he’. The claim “transwomen are men” is the output of your argument, not an actual argument as such. Similarly, calling you a TFA is an output of the other side of the same argument, not the actual argument as such. If refraining from using the wrong gender fundamentally hinders your argument, then surely refraining from describing the implied ethics of the position hinders the other side of the argument.
Yes yes, liberalism etc. I’m not arguing that a law against misgendering people would be a good idea. I’m arguing that deliberately misgendering people is incredibly rude, and thus a) you shouldn’t do it and b) it’s totally reasonable for places that aspire to civil argument to forbid it.
Again; symmetry. You could assume that Multi and Ozy and whoever are faking insult specifically to shut up conservatives, and they could assume that all the people talking about how the social justice movement scares them are just trying to delegitimise perfectly reasonable arguments.
Or, y’know, we could have a civil discussion.
Also in practical terms I think once people start having surgery and taking hormones it’s kinda hard to argue they’re doing it for rhetorical effect.
I am arguing as follows:
1. If it is incredibly rude, it is so only because of campaigns to deem it rude. “You” (I don’t really mean to refer to you personally) could try to fix me, or you could try to fix yourselves by taking less offense.
2. I may not like being incredibly rude, but I hate lying more than that.
3. While it may be reasonable for places that aspire to civil conversation to prohibit misgendering, places that aspire to civil argument on the topic cannot reasonably do so, and for that purpose misgendering must necessarily be considered within the bounds of civility. My response to you is the possibly-familiar “wishing won’t make it so”.
I’ll repeat my original closing question:
Why is saying “you can argue that they’re men, but you have to admit they’re female” less weaselly than saying “yes, the pictures are newsworthy; yes, it’s important that we’re allowed to print them; but no you can’t have them accompanying your article on the subject” or “of course you can make anti-abortion arguments, but not the kind that might make someone really upset”?
Michael:
I understand what you are saying.
However, the question is why do you care about making the argument “He’s a man, and wishing won’t make him a woman. He has a working penis, and could father a child tomorrow.” in the first place. Care in fact so much that you think the alternative was a “lie”.
I’m asking because really there are few things I could care less about than the gender of quasi-random people on the internet.
The “misgendering” problem imposes complexity on my pronoun determinition algorithm. As described elsewhere in this thread, maybe even intractable complexity. To some extent the same is true in person, where I consciously have to override the pronoun my brain would decide upon, left to its own devices.
However, this objection is about the way language is wired in my brain. It is not about having strong opinions on other people’s identity whatever that might be.
So again: Why care at all?
I care less about making the argument itself than about honesty about what is permitted. If we’re not actually allowed to make the argument, then you and Scott should say so. Having a limbo where we’re officially allowed to make the argument, but restrictions defacto prohibit it is dishonest and does nobody any good.
Jiro:
Point taken. But re: “you and Scott”, please leave me out of it. I was just curious. Other than that I’m okay with you making every argument you could wish to make.
Alex:
I do not care about making the argument, and haven’t made it. I was not even aware that an argument of this sort was active in the SSC comments until I saw Scott addressing it in this post.
I do care about honesty, and I find Scott’s attempt to legislate the contents of my mind incredibly offensive (my summary point 1), not to say totally incompatible with the idea that the person with the better argument should win (my summary point 4).
@Jiro
From Scott, emphasis mine:
I don’t see why you need to talk about specific commenters on Slate Star Codex in order to discuss the topic of transgender people. You are more than able to express your opinion on what maleness and femaleness are (and how transpeople fail to successfully capture the necessary traits of the gender they want to be perceived as) without calling specific SSC commenters specific genders that they would rather not be called. If you absolutely need to cite something there are plenty of transgender people who aren’t commenters here who can used as examples, though in general it would be preferable to stick to the abstract on the off chance that they read the comments.
“I was just curious” is normally said by people who are not just curious but want to passive-aggressively make an accusation without actually saying it outright. By saying “I was just curious”, you sound exactly like one of those people who is not just curious.
If you actually are just curious, please try to avoid the overly literal Internet attitude which believes that only your exact words count. People don’t act that way; “I am just curious” doesn’t communicate what its literal words seem to say.
Jiro, I assure you that I have no interest whatsoever in disallowing any argument whatsoever. I asked a simple question, first in what I feel to be a very civilized way, and then again, along with my growing confusion in a “what the …” way. I apologise for the phrasing of the latter, if that helps. There is no “me and Scott” on this point and hasn’t ever been on any point, as far as I remember.
Naturally I cannot prove my intentions to you, but if you want to cross check my other comments in this thread, if anything, I argued against the proposed rule, though for other reasons than you.
However, I will not honor your interpretating what ever the hell you like into things I never said on the grounds of me being to literal. Saying what you mean and meaning what you said should be considered a virtue. And you can take that, [I will imitate a phrase from another poster, that I rather liked] “from my cold dead larynx”.
Using implication is an important part of how human beings communicate. You can’t just say something which has non-literal implications, and then insist “well, being literal is a virtue”. No, it’s not, and you can’t make it be so by saying so.
The use of “I am just curious” as a roundabout way of accusing people of things is not something I just made up in order to reinterpret you. It’s used that way all the time. People are not computers and don’t talk like computers; if you treat human communication with utter literalness, your communication isn’t functioning well.
Please allow for cultural differences when dealing with a global audience.
“I’m asking because really there are few things I could care less about than the gender of quasi-random people on the internet. ”
I think that when such arguments come up, they are not over what a particular person’s gender is but over what “gender,” “he,” “she,” “man,” woman” mean. Given that gender is one of the ways in which we make sense of the world, it’s not an unimportant question.
David:
Thank you. My possible replies to that are unfortunately scattered around the whole thread. I’d like to refer you to other comment
Why on earth do you want to make an argument about what people want to mane an argument about?
Curiosity is an argument now?
By all means, be inquisitive. No one ever objected to a little inquisition.
How could they object to it, when they never expected it?
Perhaps I’m splitting hairs, but the rule refers specifically to “transgender commenters”. Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner doesn’t post here (as far as I know).
My objection to this policy is more theoretical than actual; I’ll refer to a commenter as “he” or “she”, but it’s too much damn work to use any of the alternative pronouns on a case-by-case basis, or to avoid gendering altogether.
In some cases I suspect these sorts of demands are a strategy to make the demander hard to respond to; in those cases on other forums I use s/h/it. I suspect that would get me banned here (but I think commenters trying that crap might get banned here first).
Also purely theoretical here though not elsewhere are people who switch back and forth (I won’t try to follow it more than twice), and people who do things which completely destroy their credibility (e.g. a man with a full beard and no plans to do anything about it claiming to be a woman — I view such a person making me call him “she” as a mindfuck and dominance technique)
Look, if in the morning you declare on here “Call me xie/them/zer”, I’ll do so. It’s no cost to me to do so.
Demanding I believe you are three genders at once, or a new undefined gender, and that if I still have some notion of gender binary in my head that I never express to you, and that if I never say anything, use the pronouns you want, I am still misgendering you and causing you hurt and offence – that’s excessive.
The argument here is not whether or not being misgendered is insulting but whether it is an insult, is what I’m picking up. OP believes that misgendering is a part of his assertion, and that his assertion is disingenuous if he does not use the pronouns he believes in. I’m prone to side with OP, but I also think Scott has the right to enforce his own rules.
With respect, how applicable is “She’s a man, and wishing won’t make her a woman. She has a working penis, and could father a child tomorrow.” to specific assertions of SSC poster’s gender?
I mean, I’m not sure what goes on at the meetups, but I’m reasonably sure that haven’t in fact personally verified the genital configuration and function of most of the posters here.
So, if all you have to go on is the poster’s words to determine their gender…shouldn’t you go on their words? You can still make arguments that all people with functioning testes and a penis are men, but you don’t have standing to apply that to other posters here. And while I do think that the odds of you being banned under the Reign of Terror are moderate if you did repeatedly assert a trans-exclusive definition of gender, I think that you could do so and remain intellectually honest without falling astray of this specific rule.
*If* that’s all that is known, then sure. But if someone introduces themselves as trans*, then more is known. If they post a picture of themselves, then more is known. If someone wants to secretly be a man/woman on the internet, nothing stops them, and they will likely be believed, and fake-identity-compliant pronouns will be used.
I like to think that SSC commenters are aware that “all people” includes SSC commenters.
How many SSC posters can you personally confirm have or lack testes and a penis? (Or chromosomes, or whatever?)
My own opinion is that concepts like “Man” are important and valuable, and that they match really well to reality, and that there are connotations in terms of both gross physical attributes and social behavior track extremely well across time and culture. Gender cleaves reality at the joints most of the time.
But some of the times, it doesn’t. Trans people are a thing. Intersex people are a thing. People with chromosomal abnormalities are a thing. People who are just outliers in their gender space are very much a thing.
Gender is a useful categorization of things we see in the world, but it’s not reductive, and attempts to make it reductive run into the aforementioned edge cases. And so, given that, I absolutely no harm in being polite, on the grounds that whoever I’m talking to almost certainly knows their personal gender situation better than I do.
—
Biology and gross physical structure matter. Growing up with one set of gonads putting sex hormones into your body during puberty matters a lot. And, as a result of that, there are a whole lot of cases in which the category of (cis men and trans women) and (cis women and trans men) are useful distinctions.
But trying to overload “man” or “woman” for either of those sets is just sloppy, especially when every supposedly-rigorous definition of gender runs into numerous edge cases and exceptions.
They’re a thing, but a thing that happens less than 1% of the time.
Why should we throw out a classification scheme that’s valid 99.7% of the time? This isn’t particle physics, two nines is excellent in terms of reliability.
Newtonian mechanics works really well most of the time, but I wouldn’t try to set your GPS with it.
Likewise, attempting to apply that classification scheme with two nines of reliability to the sub-population of trans people will produce less-than-stellar results. And when you’re interacting with a subgroup of people, those results matter. To three nines of reliability, nobody has cancer, for instance.
Ok technically relativity isn’t particle physics but you really did demonstrate my point there. We have absolutely no need of that level of precision in ordinary language.
And the “less-than-stellar” results of calling a transwoman he rather than she or they are dwarfed by the costs of reorganizing the whole English language to avoid it. Not to mention vigorously punishing anyone who uses the old format, which as it happens is the main “less-than-stellar” consequence of misgendering. The cure is worse than the disease.
There are a few issues with the “it’s rare” objection.
The first is, if you’re going to make that objection, saying, “let’s be practical here”, you don’t have the standing to make stands “on principle”. I mean, if you’re going to make pragmatic concessions for the purpose of having neat and easy classification schemes, then why not have pragmatic concessions for the purposes of counteracting dysphoria etc.?
The second is, if you’re going to say, “it’s rare”, then you’re vulnerable to the “well, moving to the new standard won’t be too burdensome for you then will it?” objection.
It is a pretty big imposition, not because there are a lot of transpeople (transhumans?) running around but because a lot of perfectly clear statements suddenly become objectionable.
So if I talk about my opposition to circumcision, do I have to clarify that some children with foreskin are “girls”? Or that sometimes “men” give birth too when in a discussion of falling fertility rates in the West? Or any number of ridiculous edge cases that serve as distractions from otherwise normal discussions?
This happens a lot, and to certain demographics is the actual point of pushing trans politics. Making it more difficult to talk about anything relating to sex is frequently an end.
Level of imposition: let’s split off making general statements about men and women, and talking about individuals.
Talking about individuals – i.e. the issue raised in the original post, i.e. not misgendering the commenters, well, if the individual is trans then that’s analogous to the case where you’re building a GPS system and have to decide whether to take relativity into account. The fact that relativity doesn’t matter most of the time doesn’t matter in the cases when relativity does matter, likewise with trans, intersex, etc.. This is what I meant by “not excessively burdensome”; most of the time, the person you’re talking about won’t be trans. Not even in my social circles.
Making general comments about sex and gender in society… For a lot of correlational work, it doesn’t matter that much which classification scheme you use, the numbers will work out pretty similar. In general, if you’re doing correlational work then you’re pretty much saying that your generalisations have exceptions, your correlation coefficients are a way of quantifying how many.
For things like your foreskin and pregnancy examples… Our experiences appear to vary. I’ve never heard anyone complain about the foreskin thing. I’ve occasionally been known to talk about “pregnant people” but to a certain extent that’s just me, and partly because I’ve actually met a pregnant transguy. Go ahead and make your generalisations, but be prepared to admit that they have exceptions.
Yes, there are going to be people who take things too far. Yes, there are people who will use things as excuses to push other agendas. Yes, there are some circles where people will be ridiculously persnickety about things (one perk of being somewhat trans* myself is that I get access to various support and social circles and people are often a lot more relaxed about things than in activist and academic circles. People only exposed to activist and academic circles must get a distorted view…). Possibly things are less sane in the USA than the UK; I hear more horrible culture war stuff from over there than I do from my own country, even if I only take the left into account. I’ll admit that trans* terminology (and all of the arguments about it) does my head in at times.
But one thing I always like to say is that the practise is easier than the theory. A lot of the worst of it can be avoided by not deliberately seeking it out. Not misgendering people, and making it so that people can go to the loo, isn’t hard. Not unless you make it hard by fighting a long drawn-out rearguard action. (It’s notable that children are often much better at getting the whole trans thing than adults are.)
I don’t mind the discussion about gender roles and expectations and I don’t particularly mind calling someone whatever they want to be called.
I do get irritated about the “biology doesn’t matter” because, as you put it, the “gross physical structure” does matter. Humans are not seahorses, a “pregnant man” is not a biological male, they are relying on functioning female biology to produce that child. They are the mother, not the father (they needed a cis male’s sperm to fertilise their or the donor ovum) and in many cases, medications will affect men and women differently, or women will exhibit the symptoms of heart attack differently to men, etc. Someone with ovaries can still develop ovarian cancer, regardless of the insistence on “I am a man and I demand you see me as such”; if the presence of ovaries (or testes) is not accounted for in medical records, and I think that such is seen as “gatekeeping” and foisting coercive gender identity on people a la “assigned/coercively assigned male or female at birth”, then ignoring the possibilities because “we don’t need to check for this because that’s a male/female disease and you’re not male/female!” is negligent.
I also think some people would react “The doctor spoke to me about my ovaries/testes, they misgendered me and were offensive!” even if it was in the context of “we need to keep in mind for your health”.
So insisting that I change my mental beliefs to “this person is a man who is pregnant and that means biologically as well as preferred gender identification” is something I resent and will not do.
I’m prepared to say “X who identifies as male is carrying a child and he and his partner are very happy”. I’m not going to say “X is the world’s first pregnant man” (where “man” here is meant quite plainly to infer biology, not ‘brain formation due to foetal testosterone exposure in utero means X identifies as male regardless of biological sex’ or however it goes).
I’m not going to insist to X “Look, you’re pregnant, that makes you a woman!” But equally I’m not going to say “There are women who have uteri and women who have penises and men who have penises and men who have uteri and that is so because in a tiny percentage of cases there are intersex people”. If your biology is functional enough that you can get pregnant and vaginally deliver a child, you’re not intersex, so we’re talking about your mental sense of self as a particular gender (or no gender, or genderfluid) which may be based on your brain biology (rather ironic that ‘male brains’ and ‘female brains’ are being used to support arguments about transness, given that (a) feminism has tried to do away with such distinctions, since traditionally they have been used to ‘prove’ women can’t use logic, are more emotional, etc. (b) we get told chromosomes don’t matter, hormones don’t matter, genitals don’t matter, physical biology doesn’t matter, when it comes to assigning gender).
I now await all the people going to jump down my throat about intersex biology.
Deiseach:
I talked about this a little on Ozy’s blog. Basically, I think that the problem is that conceptual space is being turned into a DMZ in the culture wars.
One group of people are strongly resistant to the idea of (cis woman, trans man) and (cis man, trans woman) being useful, descriptive sets that deserve names, let alone being the default for words like “woman” and “man”.
Another group of people are resistant to the very idea of gender being complicated, even in the edge cases, and who are very firm on being able to address other people by the gender they perceive.
Perhaps one day the Culture Wars will have their Christmas Truce and we’ll be able to stake out the space of Misgendering People Is Bad But Biology Matters, without anyone trying to stake out the territory for a tactical advance, but that level of general consensus and commonality does not appear to be here today.
I find your post more convincing than Scott’s, which is very rare for this blog, but also I’m biased on this particular issue.
The proper extension of gender pronouns sure is a weird hill to die on. If someone wants to be referred to as “he” or “she” or “it”, who cares? I don’t really understand why people feel that their integrity is somehow being violated if they call someone by whatever pronoun that person prefers. It’s not a “there are four lights” situation; gender is a fuzzy concept, unlike whether someone has two arms or a particular set of genitals. Using whatever pronoun that a person would prefer is not being coerced into lying.
Gender is not a fuzzy concept. By what justification are dictating that everyone must simply accept that it is?
Depends on what you mean by gender, etc. (“fuzzy” was perhaps an improper choice of words; I didn’t mean “the extension is indeterminate”; rather, that there are multiple distinct concepts tied to the word)
Here’s where I see this conversation going: one side thinks sex determines gender. Given that this makes the concepts coextensive, gender in this sense is a superfluous concept (I doubt they differ in intensional properties, either). The other side thinks that sex does not determine gender; rather, other factors (particularly internal psychological factors) do. This means that their concept of gender is distinct from the concept of sex (a concept that both sides hold in common).
So if a person asks you to use a gender pronoun based on their concept of gender that is distinct from sex, I don’t see what the difficulty is doing so, even if you typically use pronouns based on the sex of the person rather than gender. Modifying your use of gender pronouns is not lying; it’s simply changing your usage to reflect a different convention. Thus, I’m not sure I really see why people feel that their integrity is violated when they are “forced” to use a pronoun based on the latter concept of gender.
Personally I don’t -have- an internal concept of gender. I find the entire idea rather repulsive and oppressive. “Gender” exists solely in my translation dictionary, and translates, more or less, to “Label loosely correlated with sex which implies a lot of social norms and obligations.”
I translate anytime I speak, but if somebody didn’t, and they just had words for sex, then yes, you’re asking them to lie.
Which is why, ideally, people that prefer others to use a different convention act with patience and explain that convention.
I like the idea of having two definite biologically defined genders, purely because it’s a bit more clear-cut than the near infinite scope that people seem to create on tumblr. That being said, we don’t live in a perfect world, so there is a significant population that can’t fit into those rules. I think that for that population, I should refer to them how they like, but first and foremost they have to be in that category. On the internet, that’s as simple as saying “I’m trans,” but if I were a lawyer in a court of law, I would probably draw the line at *in the process of getting a reassignment surgery*.
The odd thing comes from encountering the output of some old-ish strands of feminist thought; there’s lots of mention of the “sex-gender distinction” and “gender binary” but without the idea that they were separate fields in a database and you could have “male” in one slot and “female” in another slot. This often went along with blank-slate views of the mind whereby gender was what you got by the way society treated you based on your anatomy. So various things could be to do with sex and various things could be to do with gender, in a similar way that some things could be to do with having a penis and some things could be to do with having testicles (and the possibility of having one but not the other not being discussed or important). There were various ideas of destroying the gender binary, but this seemed more to be about stripping male/female of connotations than adding extra possibilities for denotations; you could do this by acting in a way that presented a weird mix of stereotypes, even if in modern terms it was all entirely cis way. This paper on “rejecting the gender binary” (basically, fun with word2vec) seems be an odd throwback to the old definitions.
What seems to have happened is that various trans* types entered the conversation, and the meanings of the words changed even if the valencies stayed the same. A cynic might say, “the gender binary is whatever it is we’re meant to be against this week”.
This is what I’ve worked out from my own observations, at least. I expect that at least some people will say that I’m wrong…
(I think there’s a fallacy that says that if there are two near-synonyms then there must be exactly two things, distinguished by one neat distinction. When there’s a big messy pile of things, with so many joints that if two people try to carve at the joints they’ll carve in different places, then if people believe the fallacy then confusion will result. But that’s a whole other can of worms…)
You are assuming precisely what is at question, namely whether pronouns should refer to (social) gender or (biological) sex.
No, I’m treating the “should” question as trivial. It’s a convention, not a factual question. I don’t see the convention of deriving pronouns from gender any more factually correct than deriving pronouns from sex, but if someone prefers a particular method, and it’s of little cost to me to adhere to that convention (which it is), then I see no reason to be obstinate and refuse to use their preferred convention.
With you on the first part.
As for “but if someone prefers a particular method, and it’s of little cost to me to adhere to that convention (which it is), then I see no reason to be obstinate and refuse to use their preferred convention.”
Taken literally, this does impose significant overhead to the point where I have to keep an Excel file of the preferred pronoun (if known) of every internet acquaintance.
I’m willing to accept “they” as an easy way out. For some values of “easy”. Still you have to inform every newcomer, potentially not a native speaker, of that convention. Also, this is not how language works. If “he/she” had nothing to offer that “they” did not offer, “he/she” would have vanished between Shakespeare using “singular they” and the present day. Or to phrase it differently: In linguistic terms the mere existence and widespread use of “he/she” proves that the cost associated with “singular they” is not “little” in an absolute sense.
Right; for internet messageboards, more leeway should be given. For friends you know in person, it’s not a burden.
Back in the (Good/Bad) Old Days, “sex” was the word, indeed I think the use of “sex” for coitus is a relatively recent thing. “Gender” was a gramattical thing, in English it seemed to be all about pronouns, but in other languages it’s more complicated. Cue my confusion in German classes as to whether I had to refer to my pet dog as der Hund and er despite her being definitely female. (Apparently, oh god, it’s complicated)
Then came a long middle period where a) people got a bit prudish about saying “sex” when they didn’t need to (due to connotation of coitus) and started saying “gender” instead then b) feminism and so forth happened and then c) various trans* types entered the conversation and so on…
Of course, these days in some parts things have come full circle; gender is, in practise at least, about pronouns again.
I am about as “Pro-Trans” as anyone on SSC. But I think it is almost always bad form to ask “why is this the hill you want to die on?”. There are many reasons to “die on hills”. Notably that slippery slope is very real.
Is it bad form if I’m genuinely curious? The implication is that I perceive it to be a fairly minor thing from the perspective of the person being asked to use a particular pronoun, but for others it’s clearly not a minor thing. I don’t really see the slippery slope here, myself.
Not to get too Orwellian here, but control over the language and framing used in a debate gives significant advantages. As has been noted above, drawing a distinction between gender and sex concedes vital ground.
—
As to why it’s important, I have a theory. There are four broad schools of thought: 1) that gender and sex are different, and gender is determined internally by self-image, 2) that gender and sex are different, but gender is determined by social role, 3) that gender and sex are different, are aligned in healthy people, and are both determined by biology, and 4) that gender and sex are the same, and sex is biological.
For 1), gender is individual, and it doesn’t matter what you call someone. It’s a silly debate: you should just call someone what they want to be called!
For 2), calling someone their preferred pronoun is allowing them to circumvent gender norms. Someone can’t claim to be a woman and gain the rights of womanhood without undertaking the duties and obligations. For some, it’s perfectly acceptable to transition convincingly, while for others, being a gender requires having lived it for a very long time.
For 3), someone can’t choose whether or not they have gender dysphoria, nor choose their chromosomes. Calling them their preferred pronoun may be done as a kindness, or may not be done in an attempt to help them get over it.
For 4), transpeople are identical to otherkin, a pack of rowdy teens who want to force everyone to call them silly names.
Only 1) wants to define gender as non-binary. Only 1) and 2) think it’s possible to change your gender. Only 1), 2), and 3) think gender exists.
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It should be fairly obvious, from this, why different types of people think this is important. 1) are exasperated by the whole thing, and don’t understand what the fuss is all about. 2) don’t want transpeople to shirk their duties or erode traditional gender roles. 3) either don’t want to give in to the demands of the mentally ill, or feel the mentally ill are entitled to a bit of compassion. 4) don’t want to put up with cheeky little buggers from Tumblr telling them what to do.
Having asked a question similar to Urstoff’s and getting similar results, I find eh’s comment very helpful. It is No. 2, that had me puzzled.
However, there should be a variation of 4) stating that gender does not exist as opposed to being the same as sex.
Presuming that sex and gender do both exist, 1) and 3) (unlike 2) are actually just different conclusions from the same thing. Both believe that gender is determined internally, they diverge only on the question if this should be considered as a problem.
Actually this is a continuum. There is an interpolation of 1) and 3) where one does acknowledge gender as an internal conception, but neither feels obliged to embrace others’ internal conceptions (1) nor to fix them (2).
If I were forced to choose a stance, it’d be that one. Live and let live, so to speak.
My question for people with this view is, self-image of what? I.e., what does being “male” or “female” gender imply you are imagining about yourself? I don’t think gender can be defined as self-image of gender; that seems meaninglessly self-referential. The only viable candidate I’ve been able to come up with is self-image of sex, but if that’s the definition, isn’t it correct to say that transpeople have an inaccurate self-image of their sex? And that when they ask other people to use their preferred pronouns, they are asking others to share that inaccurate image?
Leif:
Outsider’s perspective, actual trans-people should correct me.
Numbering as per eh’s list.
To believe in the existence of gender (1,3) you have to, at least in part believe in gender (2) because in your head you can do whatever you like and if it was only that, we would not have a problem. So I imagine getting accepted in a social role is part of the deal.
In your words, defining gender (1,3) as the self imange of gender (2) is not self-referential. It only looks that way because words do not equal meaning.
In the most general terms, the political problem with gender (2) seems to be, that it is determined to a large extend by secondary sexual characteristics.
So even if an individual, in eh’s words, undertakes all the “duties and obligations” this is likely to be overruled by not trivially changable outward characteristics.
I can understand that this is terribly “unfair” for some values of unfair. [And I do mean this sincerely, Im not trying to diminish the problem]. However, many a proposed solution to that problem brings new problems.
Maybe it is a mistake to artificially import this problem to cyberspace where said characteristics are already hidden by default. I really mean no offense here, but if one prefers to be gendered as “she”, why not adapt an internet persona that can be actually identified as she-gendered by username and or avatar?
Alex:
Thanks for trying to explain. I’m not sure whether your interpretation is correct or not. But if it is, I think I’m against that belief.
When I was little, my parents told me something like: “Boys have penises. Girls have vaginas. Some people think being a boy or a girl means you have to play with certain toys, but those people are wrong. Anyone can play with any toys they want.” That’s still how I feel about it.
To the extent that social gender roles exist, aren’t they just the composition of peoples’ biased behaviors? Shouldn’t we try to get everyone to stop being biased, rather than trying to make it easier to change which set of biases people apply to you? (Imagine if we applied the latter approach to racism…)
Isn’t biased behavior a product of the biased person’s perception of the other person’s qualities? What is the quality they are perceiving? It can’t be gender(2), because now that would be self-referential: we are creating the full definition of gender(2) here, which can’t include itself.
Does it boil down to: gender(2) = social role = others’ biases = others’ perceptions of sex? Because then we’re still ultimately talking about sex: transpeople are asking others to perceive them as a particular sex, or at least to apply the biases they would normally apply to members of that sex.
If transpeople are inviting gender-biased behavior appropriate to the gender they identity with, are cispeople inviting the same thing? Should cispeople switch to identifying as agender if they don’t want people to apply biases to them?
If a three-year old wants hormone blockers and sex-reassignment surgery, who cares?
This isn’t about language, it’s about doing the right thing. The pro-trans community’s stance – that when someone says they’re transgender, they are, and deserve your support in their decision – is completely incompatible with the reality on the ground. You cannot hold this belief and acknowledge the reality of people like Walter Heyer, who, in a fit of depression, completely ruined his life because a homosexual activist convinced him it would solve his problems. You cannot hold this belief and acknowledge the fact that the overwhelming majority of children who present as transgender do not persist in this belief into adulthood, something that will only get worse as more and more children are pushed (there are reports of schoolchildren convincing their classmates, who had never identified in this fashion at all, that they should “come out” as trans) into this.
Scott wrote a singularly horrible post about transgenderism, in which he mocked the standard practice of his fellow psychiatrists of not going along with the delusions of their patients, belittling it as nothing more than “that’s just not the way we do things.” That is not why that is done; it is done to prevent even more harm.
Signing on to the transgender movement, as Scott does, is not an act of kindness, it is an act of unspeakable monstrousness; you are encouraging people to harm themselves, to ruin their lives, all so you can feel sufficiently progressive. There are nowhundreds of children who are being destroyed, all so that some of us can smugly declare ourselves better than those “less enlightened.” It is an entirely fitting irony that Scott was fond of comparing social problems to Moloch, as this is nothing less than the barbarism of the Cannanites.
could you elucidate for us why that article is bad and how exactly transitioning harms trans people?
I would expect the adverse effects of surgery, and certain chemical/hormone treatments to be obvious. It’s not like you can “undo” them.
hlynkacg: What adverse affects?
ETA: Also, afaict WPATH standards of care require that those receiving surgery be over the age of majority.
I can (sort of) answer that.
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mentalhealth
///Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex. A 1998 review by the Research and Development Directorate of the NHS Executive found attempted suicide rates of up to 18% noted in some medical studies of gender reassignment.
…
Mr Bellringer, who works at the main NHS gender identity clinic at Charing Cross hospital in west London, said: “I don’t think that any research that denied transsexual patients treatment would get past an ethics committee. There’s no other treatment that works. You either have an operation or suffer a miserable life. A fifth of those who don’t get treatment commit suicide.”
///
“and how exactly transitioning harms trans people?”
I think it’s obvious that the poster believes that many or all of those who transition are not really trans–i.e. that they don’t have a female brain in a male body or vice versa, to use the simplest metaphor.
That view isn’t absurd–people do sometimes fool themselves about themselves for a variety of reasons. If you are really male, biologically and emotionally, and get your body surgically and chemically altered in an irreversible way that prevents you ever being a functional male, that’s a pretty serious mistake.
Anon asks: What adverse affects?
See David Friedman’s reply above.
Not to mention something I’ve heard from the trans-sphere themselves – that post-op transsexuals apparently have sky-high suicide rates.
“The pro-trans community’s stance – that when someone says they’re transgender, they are, and deserve your support in their decision – is completely incompatible with the reality on the ground.”
Unless you have figured out how to diagnose people over the internet, you have no way of knowing which people in the comment section are genuinely transgender and which aren’t. Which is what the rule regulates.
“You cannot hold this belief and acknowledge the reality of people like Walter Heyer, who, in a fit of depression, completely ruined his life because a homosexual activist convinced him it would solve his problems.”
I’m not sure why you think Scott’s position is mutually exclusive with that.
“There are now hundreds of children who are being destroyed,”
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Younger transgender children can receive treatment on the NHS, but at that age it takes the form of counselling and support sessions. Medical intervention isn’t considered until they approach puberty, when hormone blockers might be offered.
Blockers delay the physical changes associated with puberty, giving the young person longer to decide if they want to live as a man or a woman. At the age of 16 a patient can then take cross-sex hormones, with full surgery only offered after the age of 18. The estimated cost of gender reassignment surgery on the NHS is around £10,000.
///
Yeah, it looks like they are doing the sensible thing. Having people go through therapy in order to see if it is a real issue, attempting to weed out the false positives and not taking permanent changes until they are an adult.
Of course, that assumes that getting the therapy itself doesn’t push them in one or the other direction. I’d suppose that social assumptions, at least, would mean that someone getting that therapy would start more- or less-strongly thinking of themselves as transgender.
(Which may or may not be a good thing, overall, depending on base rates, screening tests for the therapy, your standards for “Good Thing,” and a number of other things.)
The rule is “don’t personally attack other commenters”. In the quoted sentences, are you talking about a hypothetical transsexual or your interlocutor specifically? It’s not a perfect defense, because you can pretend to talk about hypotheticals while actually insulting a specific person, but it should make a difference when done in good faith.
And why would you need to talk about anyone else than a hypothetical transsexual in a discussion like that? Is saying “you’re a dude, dude, neener neener” or something really essential to your philosophical integrity? You can’t argue against transsexualism without doing it?
I disagree with you about transsexualism. I also have dangly bits and have no problems calling myself male. It’s impossible for you to misgender me, so does that mean I win the argument?
I’m not sure whether this was intended as a reductio ad absurdum, but my perception of these two formulations is that they illustrate perfectly why the rule makes sense. I’m cis and I still perceive the first statement as a simple disagreement and the second statement as disrespectful when uttered about a transwoman. Odd as it may be, “she is a man” feels like a perfectly coherent thing to say. (At the same time, I do find it incoherent to refer to Ozy, who insists on not being called “she”, as someone’s girlfriend. So obviously “boyfriend/girlfriend” is specifically tied to gender in my mental lexicon while “man/woman” is tied to… whatever.)
I accept that this is your perception. My perception is that the second statement is a coherent assertion of a position of fact (that might be wrong on several grounds) whereas the first is almost oxymoronic and denies the ability to present a coherent argument for the speaker’s position.
I genuinely do consider it disrespectful, offensive, and actually infuriating to be told that I must conform to the first standard. This is going to make it difficult for us to communicate, I think. Possibly Scott’s banning policies will render the issue moot.
I wonder if this whole thing isn’t really a difference in the mental lexicon. That would kind of explain why people are so extremely offended by being asked to adjust their pronoun use, because it’s kind of unpleasant to be told that you can’t speak your own language.
Not that I really understand what precisely that difference between our idiolects is. I’d be interested in an intuition from you. Let’s say we’re talking about a transwoman. You assert that this person is a man. Someone else wants to contradict you. Does that person have to say “No, he’s a woman” or “No, she’s a woman” in order for you to perceive them as making sense?
In my native language, “No, he’s a woman” is straight-up oxymoronic. “He” is a pointer to a member of a class which is defined as not having any women in it. Depending on the context, I will probably be able to decipher the intended meaning, but in roughly the same way that I can decipher figurative uses of “literally”.
“No, she’s a woman” is a perfectly coherent statement of fact, and the proper rebuttal to “he’s a man”. It may be false, but that’s something we can discuss rationally.
Or not, if saying “In this context, the penis makes Jane a man no matter what Jane would prefer”, constitutes “misgendering” and gets me banned.
@Creutzer
I think John Schilling wishes to be able to say that eating babies is immoral without having to say it as “eating babies is not eating babies”.
I agree strongly with this (edit: Michael Watts’) post. The very use of the word “misgender” is begging the question. I would contend that “transgender” commenters are the ones misgendering themselves! Can we expect these individuals to be banned posthaste?
Further, I reject the assertion that using correct pronouns to refer to “transgender” commenters is intrinsically mean. I don’t deny that this practice may cause pain to some people, but the same could be said of the Mohammed cartoons. Offense taken is not always reasonable! It seems to me misguided in the extreme to forbid many (by my reading of this thread) SSC-goers from honestly expressing a facet of how they perceive reality.
I suspect that Scott *doesn’t* truly want anyone to express a philosophical disagreement on the concept of gender, no matter how polite – or at least doesn’t want a large number of people to do so. How would “transgender” readers like it if everyone used their preferred pronouns, but strong disagreement with this norm were the prevailing opinion of SSC commenters, openly and regularly voiced? I imagine that they would feel uncomfortable and indeed “unsafe” regardless – consider that polite and nuanced disagreement with the ideals of the social justice movement is labeled as misogynistic/racist/etc. on a regular basis.
It seems to me that the rule as written throws the other side a bone to avoid the unpleasant business of outright banning a line of argument, but in the end the other side is not exactly welcome. I agree that it would be less distasteful if Scott were to just take an explicit position on this.
This, however, is always unacceptable.
“she said she thought her reaction was because she was deeply uncomfortable with strong attacks on abortion, because she felt that, as an abortion provider, they put her personally at risk.”
That argument would also apply to strong attacks on any political position, including mine. For samples, see the Facebook climate arguments.
There’s deadly violence against abortion providers. So far as I know, this isn’t the case in disagreements about global warming.
Or if there was, in the analogy, it would be directed against coal barons or something, not against college professors. This guy’s mother doesn’t feel targeted because she’s made academic arguments in favor of abortion.
There’s deadly violence against abortion providers. So far as I know, this isn’t the case in disagreements about global warming
It has certainly been advocated, and on a mass scale. Please don’t make me go out into Tumbler and Gawker and the like to find examples, but there is no shortage of people who explicitly want all the “deniers” to be rounded up and sent to prisons or reeducation camps or whatnot.
The difference is that climate-change catastrophists believe themselves to be politically ascendant, thus capable of coordinating their meanness, and if you expect the government to do that on your behalf Real Soon Now then going out and doing it yourself isn’t terribly appealing. Much of the right-to-life crowd believes itself to be politically marginalized, and if that’s the case then only small-scale disorganized resistance will be possible at this phase.
And I can’t help but appreciate the irony in two people named “Friedman” and “Lebovitz” arguing about whether or not to take seriously the people who say they want to round up millions of people and send them off to camps, or just dismiss them as a fringe political movement that will never amount to anything.
What would be a good way of estimating the risk of large-scale violence against people who don’t think global warming is a major problem? When would it be likely to start.
For the short run, abortion providers are in clear and present danger.
FWIW, Bill Nye has publicly advocated this.
For the short run, abortion providers are in clear and present danger.
I believe there has been exactly one abortion provider killed in the United States in the past decade, and one unsuccessful attempt; I don’t think that is statistically significant. Possibly you are thinking of the 1990s, when the rate was one every other year or so, but that problem has been mostly solved.
Roughly speaking, nothing that kills one person every other year is worth worrying about unless it’s your job to worry about it. Things that might kill thousands or millions of people in the future, might be worth worrying about a little.
There is currently an attempt by, among others, a bunch of state Attorney Generals to hold a firm liable for damages for the offense of not having supported the correct position on global warming. Quite a lot of the people who argue the issue online claim that “deniers” ought to be held liable.
Being sued isn’t as serious as being killed, but an attempt backed by lots of respectable legal authorities is more of a believable threat than illegal actions by a few individuals with extreme views.
I am not loving this article. I am a resident of the Great State of North Carolina, which has recently passed HB2, resulting in a number of significant trans-unfriendly outcomes. I don’t think that the right answer here is “Well, they’ve got sufficient coordination here, time for everyone else to move out.”
I really don’t think meanness is the right standard at all; as you note in your examples, groups have a starting predefined set of default sympathies; being nice implicitly includes some people, and excludes others.
I feel like there’s a valuable idea here, about avoiding spirals where two minority groups spend more and more of their energy tearing each other down rather than coordinating (or simply ignoring each other), but doing bad things is bad regardless of whether it’s one person or your entire community doing it.
Furthermore, the idea of tying effectiveness of enforcement to the metric is just weird. If I have a rifle and no morals whatsoever, I can effectively enforce a morality taboo by sniping people who I see out and about dressed improperly. If I do it right, murdering from well-chosen locations such that I can get away, and I don’t leave evidence behind, then I can probably kill quite a few people before I’m caught. If I can kill enough people to actually effect social change, then have I passed the effectiveness coordination hurdle?
Using any of guns, social pressure, or peacefully-passed legislation to hurt people are all bad. I do agree that here and now, for some groups, the level of harm from the legislation is going to be much less than from the less-coordinated actions, but that’s only because those groups basically fall into the set of people everyone is being nice to already. A moral ideology that says “Well, we’ve already coordinated against this Hated Outgroup, so I guess we’re fine now, but our terrorist predecessors were immoral getting us to this point.” is contradictory to all manner of good sense and reason.
—
And, re: the misgendering thing; People, really? Look. People agree to work around tendentious and politically-charged concepts all the time, when speaking to people who don’t share their views. If you have a different opinion than Scott’s on what constitutes manhood or womanhood, then address that without making it personal to the other members of the discussion.
Also, to be blunt, we only have each other’s words, given names, and tiny icons to work with. How the hell does anyone here really know the gender of whom they’re interacting with, excepting what they tell us? Can you not just pretend a poster is saying “Actually, all of that stuff I posted that gave you the impression I was male/female/other was part of a careful Internet prank, my genitals and lifestyle are actually in the configuration you would expect for the pronouns I request.” I mean, that’s not ideal, certainly, but if you’re not going to take people’s word for their gender , should you really be spending the pixels and effort to back-and-forth with them at all?
From the pictures of themselves they post online? I mean, there’s at least two people associated with SSC who aren’t shy about their looks and gender identity. Why exactly would I disbelieve that what they assert to be them is actually them, and what they claim to be their gender identity, to be their gender identity? You could, of course, adopt a policy that everyone is male, even the females, except the underage ones, who are FBI agents instead.
The point isn’t that the details are in doubt. The point is that some people object to being coerced to use language in a way that contradicts what is credibly known.
I will draw upon the traditions of my people to respond to your question; why would you believe the posted pictures and disbelieve the naked assertion?
Again, I think that if you don’t trust people to accurately report their gender, then you don’t have a lot that can be credibly known about them.
If you can basically trust people, then the best way to resolve the apparent tension between what you perceive their gender to be and what they are telling you is to trust them. And if you can’t, then since you’re going off self-reported data anyway, you have not enough information to tell either way. So, given that, why not default to what they’re asking for?
I don’t. There is a difference between believing an assertion and regarding it as true.
If someone incapable of seeing colour regards blue and red as the same shade of grey, I will believe them that they think so. I will also know that these two are clearly different colours, and the problem is very likely with their perception.
Because if they assert A and ~A, I’m going to have to choose one. Do you want me to believe A and ~A at the same time? I sure don’t want myself believing that!
I don’t think anyone is misgendered on the basis of avatar or posting style or whatever, but on the basis of an explicit statement of being trans.
Being against uncoordinated meanness still lets you be against coordinated meanness. The point is that uncoordinated meanness is almost always bad, but coordinated meanness is only sometimes bad (according to Scott).
” If you have a different opinion than Scott’s on what constitutes manhood or womanhood, then address that without making it personal to the other members of the discussion.”
The sane rule there would that no one is allowed to bring up personal matters in the discussion.
Not quite so sane. For example, upthread, we’re discussing the complexity of the US tax code. Someone claimed that a simple W2 should be simple enough for most people to use; I responded based on my experience as a VITA tax volunteer that it isn’t.
True, for all you know, I could be making up the story… but it’s still at least as valid as the rest of the discussion.
Ah, the question is what would your reaction be if someone said that you were making it up?
Is “You’re a woman.” bringing up personal matters?
Is “I’m a man?”
You know, maybe Scott should embrace his original rule literally, declare No Race And Gender in Open Threads, and add man/woman, male/female, guy/gal, and all gendered pronouns to the ban list. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell for all!
(Epistemological status: .28 Swifts.)
Unfortunately I wonder whether competition between different shaming systems is won based on simple numerical advantage in people following one system vs another, i.e. people “vote for norms through shaming”. In which case people who subscribe to the meta-ethical principle of only coordinated meanness would see their object-level ethical principles lose in culture wars. (SSC is a monarchy with Scott at its head, so I doubt it would fall prey to this particular failure mode, but culture at large may very well.)
This was interesting, and my first impulse was to say that I wholely agree. Reading the comments I’m less confident about it than I was on first read, but I think I still agree, although without confidence because my experience has been that human norms are damned complicated and often held in place by non-obvious systems of incentive, and I don’t feel I have a good grasp of the ones pertinent to this.
That said, I think to make it work you need a *narrow* definition of meanness/shaming; exercise of force, insults, mockery, deliberately trying to render someone unemployed, etc. Specifically it needs to be actions intended to disincentivise/emotionally hurt others that a large supermajority can agree are intended as such. This is a good argument against vigilantism generalised to social shaming and unnecessary cruelty well, but it gets trickier when the meanness is potentially an incidental side effect of other things.
It works well as *a* moral guideline, but you’ll need others that draw in less broad sweeps to get a good fit.
I think that proviso doesn’t apply so strongly when you’re using it as a philosophical basis for deciding what your forum’s rules should be, though, rather than as a norm for how everyone should be expected to behave in life in general. There you can just do what seems right and people can have different rules elsewhere.
Monopolies of violence enforce the rules the community has decided to enforce, and this is not mean because it is coordinated.
Is it mean if it is a monarch enforcing it, or does that count as coordination too? If it doesn’t automatically count as coordination then either we’re a community of progressives coordinating to ban misgenderings, or Scott is an EVIL TYRANT doing MEAN THINGS.
When a monarch does it… I suppose on SSC Scott and his computer really can be a one-man ruling band, albeit over a limited domain. A powerful AI backed up by not-sentient-enough-to-count robots might be able to unilaterally enforce rules with the consistency usually associated with co-ordinated efforts too.
In the case of someone like Henry VIII, though, it’s Henry’s men that do the actual enforcing, they co-ordinate by doing as the monarch says. (Or not, if they’re like Charles I’s men).
But this is a pedantic quibble. At any rate, you’ve hit the nail on the head – the key point here is the monopoly on force and not co-ordination as such, although the two seem to go together.
Scott isn’t a tyrant. He doesn’t rule by virtue of his banhammer. If I stole his banhammer, I wouldn’t rule SSC. He would make a new blog, and everyone would go there. SSC is where Scott’s posts appear.
He rules by virtue of his posts being the content that brings us here. It is more like the patriarch who provides for the family getting to set the rules, less like the despotic king.
EDIT: Meant to reply to Peter, not OP. Sorry.
Can we just make everyone to have touchier skin so they won’t be bothered by shaming and being beaten up? I really want that.
I, for one, think the world would be a harsher and less beautiful place if people with thin skin were not in it.
Why?
See: 4chan
4chan requires thin-skinned people to function. You can’t be offensive without somebody to get offended.
The thin-skinned people aren’t on 4chan, and only about 0.01% of the content is ever known to external individuals. Presumably the fact that very occasionally the Internet gets angry at 4chan isn’t the only reason people post on 4chan.
Although I guess you could be saying that 4chan can only be 4chan because there are norms of offensiveness in the world at all (although that’s not the same thing as being thin-skinned). Which is probably correct in a broad sense. This makes me wonder if you can have norms of respectful behavior without norms of offensiveness. I don’t find 4chan terrible because it’s offensive; I find it terrible because it’s endlessly tedious (as are most comment sections on the Internet). Without strong norms of respect, it seems to me that the signal to noise ratio quickly drops to zero.
Respectful conversation doesn’t generate signal; nor does non-respectful conversation destroy it. 4chan is full of people entertaining themselves; that’s what it is.
But I argued on /pol for a little while at one point. And when I wrote a thread, with serious, well-researched, well-argued positions – I got a lot of serious, reasonably-researched, reasonably-argued rebuttals. They weren’t trained to a high level of discourse, but some did attempt it.
The issue isn’t the standard of discourse. The issue is that the system doesn’t differentiate based on quality of discourse. 4chan is, essentially, random. I didn’t continue arguing on /pol past that point, but not because of the incivility – it’s actually quite a civil place once you understand what the norms are and why they exist – but rather because the system was designed so that I could not colonize it.
I agree that respectful discussion does not necessarily generate discussion, but disrespectful discussion, at least on the internet, certainly does seem to reduce signal. To use a highly technical term, it can often lead to shitposting, which can drive out people interested in having actual productive discussions, because shitposting is incredibly tiresome.
The problem in environments where “shitposting” are viable tactics is that the environment is such that shitposting is a viable tactic. I don’t think norms of respectfulness really enter into it.
I’m not seeing the problem. It’s fair to say that not everywhere should be 4chan, different strokes for different folks and all that, but 4chan doesn’t strike me as conspicuously bad in any meaningful way.
Because I think it is good and right that the world move our emotions, and I think it is good and right that when what is in the world is ugly that we be angry at it and be repulsed by it. Because I think it is very easy, in living day-to-day, to become callused to the sheer amount of cruelty and heartlessness that exists in the world. But if cruelty and heartlessness are real things and not simply constructs the human minds create, then they do not merely receive our emotions but can also merit them. I think it is very easy for those of us who inclined towards reductionism and the measuring of marigolds to forget that no matter how much we measure the human mind never comes to taking in all the information contained in a physical object or event. Of course one should not use one’s sensitivity as a shield from criticism, but neither should one’s intellect be used as a bludgeon. I think that the burden of reasonable conversation always lies on everyone involved in that conversation, and that the claim that those who lack thin skin should leave is too often a retreat into arrogance for those who think kindness beneath them. I think that the people I see most often out in the world doing those are not the rationalists and the intellectuals but the people who, without a shred of intellectual rigor or backing, were pierced by a problem in the world and went out to correct it. Because maybe it’s true what we say, that those with thin skin lack emotions fully grounded in reality, but why should that matter? What in the world made us think reality was something comprehended with the mind in the first place?
There are those who hurt people for the sake of hurting them.
Being thin-skinned isn’t a shield; it puts a target upon you, “Torment me, for I shall amuse you when you do”. It doesn’t prevent harm, it foments it; and the thinner-skinned you are, the more readily you take to taking harm from things, the less sympathy your harm will garner from those so inclined.
What moves you more – the crying child? Or the adult stoic with a single tear, struggling to maintain their composure? One of these happens because candy wasn’t purchased – the other has significance, has weight, has gravity.
You and I can likely agree that emotions are important. But I think this means that emotions shouldn’t be spent on trivial matters, such as what some asshole on the internet says, but rather felt because there is something worth feeling that way about.
Well, what’s a trivial matter? I think that there are more and less important things, sure- but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the smallest leaf falling in a forest has more significance than humans attribute to the battles of great nations.
I’m sorry, are you actually arguing that there’s no significant difference between a leaf falling and millions of people dying horrible deaths in battle?
Of course there’s a significant difference! I simply think that humans are very bad at seeing both the scale of that difference and where either lies on a scale of “absolute” goodness or badness. Thus, I have a proportionate mistrust in any decision a person makes that requires them to calculate either of these correctly.
Which, to be clear, is why I said “humans attribute”.
People can’t help being born with a thin skin, but constantly demanding the world wrap everything in cotton wool for fear you will get a jar makes you the centre of the universe, and any accidental bruise becomes a deliberate injury to be revenged:
I don’t think giving people touchier skins is really what you want to do here.
Unless it is germane to the specific topic under consideration, nobody should specify their gender at all, and to do so should be regarded as defection from a group norm in which we collectively move past all that nonsense and are measured on the merits that actually matter in the medium. (Same thing with race and sexual preferences and most anything else people are frequently terrible about.)
Now, I don’t say that because I believe it – I do, but that’s not the reason I say it – but because I’m interested in a question which underlies that idea: Who would this advantage, and who would it disadvantage, and why?
Because I’m reasonable certain pretty much everybody would believe that this would primarily advantage their enemy tribe, no matter what that tribe is.
Regardless of “whom does this advantage”, your plan doesn’t work at all when the following two conditions obtain:
1. The topic of conversation (as handed down by our host) often directly concerns gender, sex, etc.
2. Commenters refer to personal experience or anecdotes of any kind when discussing the topic.
#1 is a big part of what makes this blog so interesting. #2 is a big part of what makes the comments section of this blog so interesting. I’d hate to lose either.
Those conditions are exactly what “Unless it is germane to the topic” refer to.
Ok, but my point is, it is germane to the topic on a regular basis; and that’s already the comment threads where people talk about their own and each others’ genders. IOW: “don’t do X unless it’s the kind of situation where you should do X, which happens all the time, and is the sort of situation where you do X already, so really, just keep on doing X”.
Gender is almost never germane to the topic, including when you’re talking about gender.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone, because a well-introduced fact about yourself can -seem- germane, and can -seem- to add something meaningful to what you say, and often other people will take you more seriously when you do so which makes it a quite seductive tactic – but in reality, my gender does not have a bearing on the legitimacy of my observations about gender. The correctness of an observation about reality isn’t dependent upon the observer.
If the topic is lived experience, then yes, your gender is germane. Otherwise? No. Not at all.
Suppose you’re arguing that transexuals face significant discrimination in the workplace. Now suppose one of your opponents – who is arguing they don’t – asks whether or not you’re transexual. Consider this case for a moment. Is the question germane? Does either answer change any of the substantive arguments you’ve offered? Does it make you more or less correct? Offering the fact up front doesn’t make the fact more relevant.
But it is relevant, you say! Well, if your opponent is transexual, does their argument that transexuals don’t experience discrimination have more weight?
I see this issue all the time. In one forum, a woman who says women have it worse should be taken seriously as lived experience – a woman who says women have it better is just lucky (or biased), her evidence doesn’t count. Or, in another forum, a woman who says women have it worse is just unlucky (or biased), women who say women have it better are the ones whose lived experience matters.
We defend the relevance of the evidence that supports us, and discard the relevance of the evidence that weighs against us. It’s never germane, but we like to pretend that anecdotal evidence that supports our position has special relevancy.
@ Orphan Wilde:
Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.
I did read the rest of your comment — and so “stopped reading there” would be inaccurate — but I may as well not have. This assertion of yours is absurd, and so are all of your arguments and examples in support thereof. (I apologize for not providing a fisking, but I think that would be unproductive.)
No. If you have a really good argument, present it. I’m happy to change my mind in favor of better arguments.
That, however, is not an argument. It’s a claim that argument is beneath you, that I am beneath you. Well, it’s not beneath me, and if there’s a truth to be found behind the sneer you present here, then you are doing me a grave disservice by giving me the sneer and not the truth.
@Orphan Wilde: Human beings love talking about themselves and how whatever topic is under discussion affects them personally, no matter how contrived the connection. You can ask them to stop doing that, sure. You may as well also ask that they stop wanting sex, power, and wealth, while you’re at it. As a general rule, it’s not going to happen.
I disagree with the transgender concept for the reasons I’ve stated in other comments. And I don’t belong to a tribe, which may be why I fall outside your generalization: I have no objection to the policy you suggest, and I think it would benefit people who disagree with transgender. The reason is that the people who disagree are simply accepting a status quo, it is the others who are trying to change something. If no one mentions gender, nothing will change.
If no one mentions gender, something has changed, I think.
Regardless, thank you for the data point.
Unless it is germane to the specific topic under consideration, nobody should specify their gender at all, and to do so should be regarded as defection from a group norm in which we collectively move past all that nonsense and are measured on the merits that actually matter in the medium. (Same thing with race and sexual preferences and most anything else people are frequently terrible about.)
I suggest that race, gender, SES and geographic location are a lot more germane to a number of topics than some are willing to acknowledge. We-as-humans don’t have a long history of differentiation on those grounds just because the wind is southerly.
Outside very narrow domains, it is either an argument from authority or ad hominem.
That’s a claim you have to prove.
I decline your invitation to begin with the assumption that you are correct. Relevancy is something to be established, not presumed.
I think you are saying “outside of very narrow domains, mentioning race, gender, SES, and geographic location of the speaker is irrelavent to their argument outside of very specfic circumstances”. You are making the strong claim that the speaker’s identity is basicaly never relevant.
I am claiming “you probably can’t escape your identity, it’s always going to be relevant to your argument”. Outside of formal mathematical proofs, I can’t see how I’m wrong, here. It can be minimzed, sure, but that still requires a construction to minimize your identity (which is hard), and given how informal everything is here, seems to be a bad assumption.
“it is either an argument from authority or ad hominem”
Or a datum.
If I report on my observations, my characteristics are relevant.
It doesn’t have jack to do with whether your position is correct or not or whether your argument is valid, but I’ve found it more illuminating than I’d have thought now that all this Albion’s Seed stuff has been explicitly articulated. It makes more and more sense to me why this whole red/blue tribal divide thing never rang true or made sense to me as a consequence of my own region of descent. I’m sure there are several other places like this (maybe Vegas?), but Los Angeles was effectively an inaccessible backwater with only a few thousand people living there until the 20th century when the railroad came and especially after the automobile became prevalent. We seem to have escaped the legacy of founder effects from specific subsets of English immigrants to the American east coast.
Officially, it was Franciscan Spaniards who created the first communities that still endure to this day, and later Rancheros who owned most of the land before anyone lived here, but really the place that is recognizable today was simultaneously founded by so many different groups of migrants coming from different places all at once that no single one of them could ever be dominant. My own hometown was founded by Quakers in the 1880s, but almost none of their legacy is intact except the street names. The city is overwhelmingly populated by second and third generation Mexicans not much impacted by 17th century English class disputes.
We’re also strangely home to the largest Buddhist temple in the western hemisphere, but it’s not college student Buddhists you’d stereotype as ‘blue tribe.’ We just happened to catch a huge wave of Taiwanese immigrants back in the late 60s when we assigned immigration quotas to countries and diplomatically recognized ROC but not PRC, meaning Taiwan could effectively send unlimited people here.
It almost always adds information, but in an Internet context, it also very often sheds more heat than light. And from a community culture standpoint, I think it often makes sense to avoid the latter at the cost of the former.
One of the problems I see arising with this idea is- who gets to decide what’s mean?
It seems to me that a precondition of profitable discussion is that no single party should get to dictate the all the terms of the discussion. Saying, “You’re not allowed to be mean” is fine until one person gets the ability to decide that “‘Mean’ means disagreeing with me”, and suddenly disagreement with them boots you out of the realm of civilized conversation.
The majority does. This is how, for example, we have decided that being a nazi is mean regardless of whether you kill jews. It’s also why conservatives are threatened by the culture shift – if the majority starts believing that most of your beliefs are racism and racism is mean, they’re gonna boot you out of all conversations.
If we have a culture war it is/will be the result of progressives achieving majority in some areas of life and using that power prematurely (before they’re a majority everywhere, and against a group that isn’t so small).
In the specific case of SSC comments policy, ultimately Scott gets the final say. Except the final say isn’t completely final, as if really seriously messes things up there’s a danger of mass exodus.
In the more general case; the largest or most powerful group who has done the best job of “co-ordinating meanness” gets to have that power – often exercised indirectly by controlling who it gets delegated to. So the USA gets to make law that defines property rights that define who can have certain privileges on computer systems, which means that Scott has admin power over this forum, which means he gets the “final” say. Also, the USA won’t let him force us to use this forum (not least because many of us are outside its jurisdiction) so I guess we have the final-final power of walking away.
Sure- but history would suggest the majority is wrong about what’s mean quite a bit.
Scott’s friends, of course, just as your friends moderate what you say. Scott has already explicitly said that his social standing with his friends moderates his speech (thought not in those words), so his approximation of what his friends will find offensive governs his decisions. multi will get banned half a dozen times but it will always be temporary, some random 4chan shitposter will get permabanned immediately; despite their behavior (and thus their “real beliefs”) being the same.
For all the slow people in the audience, I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s just what happens.
And that’s the culture war in a nutshell.
When it starts, you can solve the dilemma by refusing to be shamed, by continuing to speak up, and by objecting to the shaming. Unfortunately that all fails if the “anti-meanness” people manage to get in a position where they can actually censor. But in a place where new forums may be created easily, that doesn’t work so well either. They play whack-a-mole, sometimes they get control of infrastructure (e.g. 4chan and reddit), but even that doesn’t work; unless you’re as powerful as a totalitarian government, you can’t stop it all. And so you get ants… and Trump.
What’s really frustrating is when meanness is used as the criterion for deciding if an argument is right or wrong or valid or should be permitted.
It’s really annoying to be trying to thrash out definitions and rules and having that exchange be shut down by people going “You’re being mean!”
Because “being mean” hurts their feelings and hurting their feelings is bad and wicked and evil so you are bad and wicked and evil and your ideas are bad and wicked and evil and we all agree bad and wicked and evil things should not be permitted, so shut up you people with the bad and wicked and evil ideas.
I don’t think being insulting or offensive or hurtful for the sake of it is any good at all, but if there is a really important question on the line, someone is going to be hurt by being told they are in the wrong on this, and hurt feelings alone are not enough to decide if the agreed view is right or wrong.
The hypocrisy then creeps in where X group can’t or shouldn’t say mean things, and because Y group all agree X are bad and wicked and evil, it’s perfectly permissible to say mean things about them (because they’re not mean, they’re true). Like blog posts about how all Trump supporters are Nazis, that’s the only reason they follow Trump.
I don’t like Trump, but I don’t think he’s Hitler. Far from it. However, when his campaign finally runs into the ground, the way may have been paved for a real Hitler-a-like to use that wave of disaffection; if all the Right-Thinking people have been calling the Trump sympathetic racist sexist homophobic religious fanatic ignorant swine, that’s not the kind of enticement to make those so called switch to the party of the Right-Thinking people where they will continue to be called racist etc. A genuine demagogue with neo-Fascist notions can reap a lot of benefit there. How about not calling a sizeable number of your fellow citizens neo-Nazis, maybe that might convince them your Nice Party of Niceness would be nice to them, too?
I’m astonished that I hadn’t seen the “do you want ants? because that’s how you get ants” joke before this.
I’ve used it before:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/15/links-416-they-cant-link-our-dick/#comment-347964
Two comments.
1) There’s a very… Prachettian feel to all this. Like the licensed thieves, who would only mug you twice a year, and you’d always get a receipt (or, later, you could pay your inn-sewer-ants and skip the whole being-mugged thing altogether).
2) US Bill of Rights. Unfortunately the trouble with a US Bill of Rights setup is that it tends to entrench the power of those enfranchised at the time of passing over those not so enfranchised. How might US history have been different if it was possible to get something like the 13th Amendment through by a straightforward majority vote in Congress?
“How might US history have been different if it was possible to get something like the 13th Amendment through by a straightforward majority vote in Congress?”
The South would’ve seceded back in 1850 when California was about to give free states a majority in the Senate (since they already had a majority in the House.) Some historians argue that the North wasn’t yet prepared to win the war then.
On the more meta-level point: Changing that standard changes all sorts of things and makes factions far more touchy, with unpredictable results.
California was pro-Southern (it had the smaller share of votes for Lincoln out of any state he won- only 32.3%). As for the Senators you had Fremont (first republican candidate for president), William M. Gwin (strong Southern Sympathizer), John B. Weller (“As Governor (1858-1860), he intended to make California an independent republic if the North and South divided over slavery,”) and David C. Broderick (who was pro-Union and killed in a duel for it).
With at least 1 Senator, the South had equal votes in the Senate.
There were a lot of other “doughface” (i.e. pro-Southern) Senators from free states, too. But California still banned slavery, and at the time, that was perceived by the South as being the most important thing.
Pro-Southern as in “born and raised in the South”. Or
///Here Gwin’s Chivalry faction spoke on the South’s behalf. Gwin even considered that it might be possible for a Republic of the Pacific centered on California to secede from the Union. But when his party suffered badly in the elections of 1861, he saw there was little more that he could do in California to promote that cause.///
Interesting post and I think the principle could work well within the bounds of a society with good basic norms of fairness and inclusivity and constitutional protections of those same values.
And I hate to be the one to bring up Nazi Germany, but it seems appropriate. Nazi Germany had a coordinated meanness against people they said we’re weak or degenerate or responsible for social problems. Just about any authoritarian society seems at least particularly vulnerable. Singapore is an authoritarian society with coordinated meanness I might be able to stomach; Saudi Arabia less so, and then there’s North Korea with a level of oppression meeting the definition of “totalitarianism” which is definitely a form of coordinated meanness. To contrast, China’s cultural revolution was a form of maybe vaguely similar uncordinated meanness, but I’m not sure NK’s coordinated meanness is any better and it’s probably a lot worse.
Maybe the takeaway is that coordination is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for justifying meanness?
Even though I agree with the conclusion, I disagree with most of the argument:
I think two things are being conflated: ethical meanness (insert your definition of “ethical”–if a consequentialist, “meanness that brings about good consequences”) and unethical meanness (for a consequentialist, “meanness that brings about bad consequences”).
It seems to me that individual acts of ethical meanness are not only necessary, but that, at times, they are the only way to achieve certain good/ethical results. This is why private charity is much more effective with the same amount of money than public: if you make a law saying “all poor people get charity, except those who fail a drug test,” then inevitably you’re going to end up being unethically mean to some drug addicts who might get back on their feet with charity, and also unethically nice to some poor people who really would be better off, long term, if they stopped receiving charity, even though they aren’t drug addicts. The individual case worker has discretion to deal with individual cases. The law cannot.
That said, if there is an act of individual ethical meanness which can be scaled without becoming unethical, then there’s no reason not to scale it. But conversely, the mere addition of orderly predictability will not, in most cases, turn unethical meanness into ethical meanness. The only case it would would be one in which the only thing tipping the scales into unethical rather than ethical territory was precisely the disorder and unpredictability. I don’t think that applies to many cases. Usually, if you’re going to be helped by charity you’re going to be helped by charity, whether administered by an individual or a large group. If you’re going to be hurt by charity…
And this, in my opinion, is really the core of libertarianism: what would be bad if you did it as a private individual does not become good just because you do it as a representative of some big, orderly process. Unless, of course, the only thing keeping it from being good was, precisely the disorder. But such cases are rare. The primary problem with a private individual robbing you because they think they know better than you how to spend your money is not the disorderly, unpredictable nature of it.
And this also overlooks the fact that predictability and consistency are not always better. In the case of receiving private versus public charity, the certainty that you are, for example, legally entitled to continue receiving unemployment benefits for the next two years, might be precisely what keeps you from seriously looking for a new job for two years, whereas if you have to convince a private charity worker you are making a serious effort or risk being cut off at some unpredictable time, then you are more likely to make a serious effort.
I agree with all of this, and your other comments elsewhere in the thread.
Just so. Can’t live your whole life on a meta-level.
“Meanness” is a moderately interesting lens through which to view ethical questions, primarily because its use can potentially sharpen a consequentialist argument. As you say, it breaks down as a tool if it is used to replace a consequentialist argument.
It reminds me of … Nyan .. Warg .. that guy’s old Less Wrong post, Morality is Awesome. Using the word “awesome” to ground your thinking is interesting and even useful in a sense, but it breaks down into consequentialism as soon as you try to apply it in complex ways.
As a Jew, if I heard that skinheads were beating up Jews in dark alleys, I would be pretty freaked out; for all I know I could be the next victim. But if I heard that skinheads were circulating a petition to get Congress to expel all the Jews, I wouldn’t be freaked out at all. I would expect almost nobody to sign the petition (and in the sort of world where most people were signing the petition, I hope I would have moved to Israel long before anyone got any chance to expel me anyway)
If most people in the United States are signing the petition, how long do you think it would be before Tel Aviv winds up as a smoking radioactive crater? Probably from an Iranian, Saudi, or Turkish missile rather than an American one, but that hardly matters.
Point being, I think the entire argument of this post is at least subconsciously rooted in “My tribe, which is right about everything, is in the majority in the powerful places and has the greatest capacity for organized meanness”. In which case, yes, if you are always right and always powerful, only allowing organized meanness is the winning move. And one of the ways it wins is by using organized meanness to prevent smaller, weaker factions from organizing.
If you look at it from the point of view of the genuinely weak, uncoordinated meanness has a lot going for it. One of the strategies that works when you can’t win every fight and can’t ever win without excessive cost, is to pick a few fights and press those anyway. They cost you more than they are worth, but they cost the attacker more than the cheap victories he’d win if you never fought back and so act as a deterrent. This works at every level from the personal to the international – not as well as being strong enough to defend yourself against any attack, but much better than nothing. It is, for example, the sort of thing Israel would have to do if it didn’t have the United States as a patron.
And at the lower levels, it is extremely difficult to coordinate. But, A: it doesn’t need to be coordinated, and B: the individual acts of resistance are nuclei around which a coordinated effort might coalesce. The Civil Rights movement largely grew out of this sort of thing.
I think it’s also important to note that in real history people have theoretically had the chance to move to another country before things get really bad with coordinated meanness… but it doesn’t help much when the SS comes marching through the streets of your new country *anyway*.
Never mind that other countries tend to lock down and close the borders if too many refugees try to flee from somewhere.
So there’s the implicit assumption that you’d be ahead of the curve for predicting the decent into meanness.
I think you’re hitting the right note with uncoordinated meanness of the genuinely weak: When you don’t have power often one of the first moves by those in power is to block you from coordinating. At that point you have the choice of giving up or trying out asymmetric warfare.
Indeed, if the greatest world power was taken over by Nazis then a small country packed full of Jews and with a hexagram on its flag seem like one of the last places in the world where you would want to be.
Anyway, Scott’s whole argument in favor of coordinated meanness seems weird:
1) a bunch of anons who hang around /pol/ and Stormfront and occasionally get out of their basements and individually try to beat up Jews.
2) skinhead gangs beating up Jews 20 vs 1.
3) angry mobs doings pogroms against Jewish communities with the tacit complicity of the government.
4) the government rounding up Jews and sending them to the showers.
are in order of increasing coordination. Would Scott argue that they are in order of decreasing concern?
There is something about not following a rule over a cliff in fine print at the top of Scott’s post.
I think the charitable reading is to not engage in or support uncoordinated meanness, and that there’s a lot more coordinated meanness that’s actually somewhat useful.
However, there’s also so much coordinated meanness in the world which is much more mean than useful that I think Scott’s rule needs a bunch of scope analysis.
Has anyone else gotten to The Art of Not Being Governed yet? Those early empires were coordinated, mean, and a net loss for a lot of people in them, as evidenced by how much trouble those empires had keeping people if those people had a way to escape.
I think one of the ideas is that the government rounding up Jews is less of a threat because since it takes a lot of people to do, there’s less of a chance of it happening in the first place, and something that is less likely to happen is less of a threat.
(Incidentally I’m not convinced by this. If you’re going to compare the government to the bunch of anons, you need to compare the *expectation*–that is, the risk of it happening multiplied by the damage it causes when it happens. The government of Nazis is less probable, but does correspondingly more damage, so the danger doesn’t actually go down, and it may go up simply because the government can do things that a bunch of anons just couldn’t.)
I feel like everything is backwards in this post.
Coordinated meanness is so much worse and scarier than uncoordinated meanness. It is also probably more frequent as well if you count individual actions. Even skipping over the Hitlers, Stalins and Maos of history and just focusing on the US it is pretty freaking obvious (to me) that coordinated meanness is shudder inducing terrifying.
You wouldn’t worry much if skinheads proposed anti Jew legislation? How would you feel if you were part of a group that was threatened by a presidential candidate with imprisonment and or deportation? What if the current president was shipping out your friends and family at a rate higher than any other president in history? Coordinated meanness against Jews is unlikely, but that is simply genetic luck for you.
Deportation is pretty benign compared to drone strikes, mass incarceration of minorities, genocide of Native Americans, Vietnam, etc- and the US is one of the NICE societies.
The scale difference between coordinated and uncoordinated is enormous. Taxation = theft is really a misnomer, would I rather get taxed or mugged ? That is an easy one. Would I rather get taxed every single day of my life in 5 different ways (property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, social security tax) or maybe get mugged and have to put effort into not getting mugged? That is an easy one in the opposite direction.
Given the scale differences it is plausible that coordinated niceness could be far worse than coordinated meanness. If public education in the US was even a tiny negative for minorities individually it would do more harm than the existence of the KKK.
Yes, exactly. By contrasting thugs beating up a Jew in a dark alley with people peacefully soliciting support for an anti-semitic proposal you’re fairly certain will gain no traction, you’re stacking the deck in favor of the ethics of predictability and large-scale, coordinated action. If we contrasted “individual thugs sometimes unilaterally decide to beat up Jews, but we usually catch them and throw them in jail” with “the society has decided to legally empower squadrons of Jew hunters” then orderly predictability doesn’t sound so good.
Basically, something that was unethical when an individual decided to do it only becomes scarier when a group decides to do it.
What Scott is really arguing seems to be simply that large groups are less likely to do bad things than individuals because coordination is hard. But that also means large groups are less likely to do good things. Large groups are less likely to do things in general, but history doesn’t seem to show at all that large groups, on average, behave more ethically than individuals. And predictable, orderly doom is worse than possible doom, so predictability itself isn’t always better, either.
>5 different ways (property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, social security tax)
That’s four!
You could also add money printing tax.
(You get taxed for earning money, spending money, and having money in two different ways.)
Ultimately, though, there are groups you can’t mutually satisfy.
Like, I like buildings to stay where I put them, and not catch fire. Arsonists probably see that as super unreasonable.
Form the perspective of an arsonist, the current presidential candidate, and all the others, are THROWING HIS PEOPLE IN JAIL (where they will likely be mistreated, and possibly sexually assaulted) unless they successfully pass as cisnotstartfires. Our response is, basically, “lawbreakers are out-tribe. No one cares what happens to them.” Is this coordinated meanness?
Pivoting to your immigration example, say for conversation purposes that you are all about this whole rule of law thing. Call your tribe the law abiders if you got to. If we stipulate that the immigrants broke the law by sneaking across the border, then you and your buddies want them deported. Say that I’m a member of an extended family with American and foreign members. Say that the foreigners can’t legally get here, and there is a civil war going on in their country. (this isn’t as hypothetical as I wish it was). One of us isn’t going to be happy. I can call y’all racists, You can call us crooks, but the fact remains that our preferences aren’t going to mesh.
Is it meanness if the immigrants take some resources that locals want? If so is it coordinated? Is it meanness if we eject border jumpers whenever we catch them? Should their crimes be pardoned? If this is meanness, is it coordinated?
There is certainly a question here, but I don’t think it reduces to niceness/meanness. It is two different groups of people, with very different notions of what is important and what is to be done. Reality is finite, and the sets of preferences are mutually exclusive.
This argument falls apart since the law can be changed. Virtually no conservatives are advocating mass deportation along with much easier immigration laws to enable legal immigration. On the other hand no conservatives are arguing that we need to go over the records of every Jew that immigrated during WW2 to ensure their entry was legal.
Rule of Law arguments are Motte and Bailey stuff. Black’s shouldn’t break the law if they don’t want to go to jail! Rule of Law!
*blink*
Um…do you actually believe that there aren’t people who think that folks should obey the law or suffer the consequence? Like, fun blog fights aside, that’s just not true. Those people totally exist. They are most people.
“Do the Crime, Do the Time” isn’t a dog whistle for “Screw people with different skin color from my own.” It is a real point of view, with a wide following.
“We can change the law” isn’t a counterpoint to “obey the law or take your punishment”. It is pretty much orthogonal. Conservatives believe that you should follow immigration law. That they don’t want to change that immigration law is a separate deal, and I’m having trouble understanding how you think that it somehow makes the argument fall apart.
You can even *gasp* believe that you should follow the immigration laws (and the drug laws, and sex worker laws), WHILE wanting to change those laws. Being pro rule-of-law isn’t just a mask that people who have object level positions wear, it is a totally real thing.
And yes, obviously, black folks, (and white folks too. Every kind of folks, even.) who don’t want to go to jail shouldn’t break the law. That’s super obvious, and its worrying that you are repeating it like its a counterpoint.
Yes, allow me to second that blink.
Though now I’m imagining the classic D&D alignment matrix in terms of “Chaotic Evil” vs “Racist Good”.
This is the Motte. If these people were really worried specifically about obeying the law then they were be a near perfect overlap between their group and concerns about police abusing their power, instead the correlation is practically the reverse. Instead they loudly declare their support for the law against groups that they dislike and are quiet when groups they like run afoul.
You can, but almost none do which is the point.
I find it far more worrying that there are blatant examples of historically terrible laws that should never ever be followed, and yet people still fall back on the old “its the law” defense.
There’s more than one Bailey to that Motte. Some of the Law-n-Order types talk big about the Law, but it’s really Order they care about. They’re against anyone bucking Authority, no matter how bad the Authority acts and no matter who the group is that is bucking it.
@baconbacon
When I say “people who believe in the law exist”, and you respond that this statement about the world is a Motte that I maintain in order to gain argumentative advantage, I worry that you’ve rationalized your common sense away.
Like, do the math. The complexity of the conspiracy you are positing is STAGGERING. Who goes around informing all of the kids being taught that you should obey the law that really what that means is that the cops will club their enemies? None of those kids ever recorded this? None of them ever became people who agreed with you and testified?
The belief that “Everyone who says A really believes Y” should need extreme evidence. You are going with “if they really believed Y they’d be extremely concerned about Z, ergo they don’t believe Y.” That’s…not really sufficient.
First off, plenty of folks think you should obey the law and also that the law should be changed. You are sort of hand waving them away, and it is important to push back on that. Marijuana legalization is the most obvious recent case that I can think of. Look around, you’ll find an ocean of “I never tried this because it was illegal, but now I got high and let me tell you what it was like” sort of stories.
But moreover….I’m unconvinced by your counter assertion in its entirety. Saying that if people really meant that laws should be followed they’d be concerned about police abuse of power, and they aren’t, so they don’t, is super shaky. If A -> B, but not B, ergo, not A, has a bunch of links, and most of them you are making up.
Why would people who are most concerned that the law is obeyed be super concerned about police abusing their power? You sort of snuck that in there, but it doesn’t seem to track at all. Police mostly don’t abuse their power, when they do it is rarely law abiders who suffer, other police are always around them, they rarely go to jail, etc. Plenty of reasons that it isn’t a big deal to your typical suburbanite.
There are people who believe in following the laws. Motte and Bailey isn’t a magic thing that lets you ignore the evidence. How to put it in less wrong terms… your map is wrong. I’m telling you a fact about the territory.
@baconbacon
You’re just asserting that the police are systematically abusing their power but not everybody agrees. If you’re going to use a controversial issue in support of your argument, you should at least defend it.
Taxation isn’t theft, taxes are the subscription price to live in your country.
They say that the queen owns all land in England. To me it looks like all governments are the de facto owners of their respective territories. That justifies taxation.
To complain that you can’t escape taxes because all countries have them is is the same as saying that I can’t be a farmer because all fertile land is already taken and they want money to let me use or buy a field. That’s life.
Still, you could complain that governments are an oligopoly, which is a different complaint from “taxation is theft”. And then we’d be talking.
I don’t think many people will find “might makes right” a compelling argument in any context where they did not already agree with the conclusion it implies.
Oh no, it isn’t might. It’s general agreement.
The fact that everyone, except for a few anarchists and anarcho-capitalists, agrees that it is right.
Might follows from that.
If you own a piece of land, what makes it yours exactly?
The fact that you can physically force an intruder out?
Or is it general agreement that you have a right to do so?
(I know that some would say “it’s mine because I settled it first” or something, but that isn’t how real life works – I live in an ancient country and nobody remembers who settled it – everything runs on general agreement).
You have the might to force an intruder out of your property (with or without help from the police) only because everyone agrees with it. Or else you wouldn’t.
Usually and ideally, might follows from (most) everyone agreeing that it’s right. Even the might of governments.
You see, private property isn’t any different from government power. Either you are a left-anarchist or you have to recognize that governments, like landlords, have a degree of legitimacy.
This is a subtler and more contentious question than you seem to think it is. There’s an enormous number of different systems of land tenure, both within and outside of modern states, and an even more enormous number of justifications and rationalizations for them.
Whether taxes are legitimate is also a subtle question, but we’re just talking here, not writing treatises.
Like I said, everything runs on general agreement.
General agreement falls apart with the first defector if it doesn’t support some kind of enforcement mechanism, so there’s a component of force. But there’s also a component of mutual trust. The details, and the circumstances under which those enforcement mechanisms are used, vary widely and don’t always include anything we’d recognize as state power.
It’s rather like the situation around systems of money, and for some of the same reasons. Describing either one in terms of a yes/no, legitimate/illegitimate binary is probably going to be more misleading than helpful in most contexts.
I agree.
(that’s the reason I wrote “a degree of legitimacy”).
I just wanted to refute the anarcho-capitalist idea that government is 100% illegitimate.
There was a discussion about this in a recent links thread, starting here and continuing at some length.
I’m more or less with anon on this one, for what it’s worth.
It’s actually stronger than this. Governments are sovereign powers over their territories. Sovereignty is stronger than ownership, and in fact ownership rights are granted by the sovereign power to people living in its territory.
Therefore, you can own something only to the extent that the government decides that you own it.
Theft is taking something you own without your consent, therefore taxation is not theft because the government just decides that you don’t own that money anymore. On the contrary, tax evasion is theft because you are appropriating money which the government decided that you don’t own.
and in fact ownership rights are granted by the sovereign power to people living in its territory
This is pretty solidly established with respect to ownership of land, less so with respect to other sorts of property. And even with land governments are bound by their own laws and by customary international law, and for the most part cannot arbitrarily revoke any property rights they have contracted to give or sell without offering fair value in compensation.
On the contrary, tax evasion is theft because you are appropriating money which the government decided that you don’t own.
Not until you establish that governments properly own absolutely everything. And it has to be “absolutely everything”, or close enough as makes no difference, because tax bills are not constrained by the amount of actual money the in the target’s possession.
Then let’s revisit the legitimacy of all the offshore bankers who have faithfully held stewardship over the money of kleptocratic governments when mere people, who have no right to own money unless the government says so, have made claims on it. Last time I checked, they were supposed to be the bad guys, but apparently that’s changed.
That’s not what the 5th Amendment says.
If I were the sort of person who thinks transgender is a delusion then I would say the thing about misgendering at the end is a totally unprincipled exception to everything you wrote above it. There you are proposing to shame and exclude people for committing the newly invented offense of using English the way it’s always been used!
I don’t actually think it is an exception, but I do think it points out a limitation to your main point, which is that sometimes it is impossible to include everyone in a civil space, yet alone a safe space.
I’m also worried that this unfortunate mutex has been strategically and in some cases deliberately created. I don’t doubt that trans people experience misgendering as a slur, but that experience is mediated by culture and that culture’s activist purposes are served by them experiencing it as a slur. I worry about the moral hazard and what new offenses will be invented next.
I wonder how much of the willingness/readiness to misgender is rooted in a fundamental doubt that the target is actually hurt by the act.
I bet it is most of it. People aren’t orks in most contexts. I am rarely slapped in the face, but when I had a broke finger people would shake my hands if I didn’t warn them. They didn’t know they were hurting me, so they would. If I told them, they were fine with changing their greeting ritual to avoid causing me pain.
Similarly, I don’t let people decide what sandwiches I eat. That’s not their business. But I have a coworker who has a peanut allergy. In deference to our shared lunch space I don’t bring PBJ’s. If I stopped believing in his allergy (say I saw him crunching down on a pbj, or I saw a science study that revealed that peanut allergies are not a thing), I’d probably go back to eating whatever I pleased.
What stays my hand is my desire not to cause harm. If I don’t think I’m causing harm, my default response to orders from strangers is disobedience. They don’t get to tell me what to do, etc.
I think it’s mostly motivated by concern for moral hazard.
Like, I know it’s going to hurt Muslims to see cartoons of Muhammed, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them tell me I can’t draw one. Without the attempt at censorship Muhammad cartoons would be r/atheism edgelord drek. Grownups wouldn’t bother with it.
Same with pronouns. The attitude is, “look I know this hurts your feelings but I’ll be damned if I let you tell me I can’t use the English language in its accurate and correct form”
Does it matter? Do you worry about hurting the feelings of the schizophrenic guy who thinks he’s Jesus by “mispersoning” him?
@vV_Vv
Actually, yes I would. Why would I want to antagonize him just because I’m right and he’s wrong? What purpose would it serve?
But if there was a frighteningly censorious movement of schizophrenic activists that was successfully redefining what language is considered the minimum standard of politeness in the surrounding culture, I might feel differently.
It’s not entirely a matter of “using English the way it’s always been used”. There’s a largely-agreed-upon meta-principle at play here, the same one that compels us to respect each others’ bodies and possessions (even if we think we know what’s best for someone else and their property), and in particular, to call others by the name and the pronunciation they prefer. (Of course, such rights are generally denied to children, for reasons.)
If your name was given as “Dam Sun”, you requested everyone call you “Superior Lord Liskantope”, or you insisted that you were really Napoleon Bonaparte, you’d meet resistance; the first because it sounds like a joke, the second because it demeans whoever uses it, and the third because it’s insane. The same perceptions, wrong or right, are probably behind misgendering.
If a biological male is making a good-faith effort to present as a woman, many reasonable people will also act in good faith and use the correct pronouns for her. That good faith is shaken a bit when the individual insists on “they”, and falls apart completely with the more exotic pronouns. It feels less like mutually-agreed-upon respect, and more like an ideological mugging by someone who just wants to throw their social justice cred around. When Lawrence d’Anna says “I’m also worried that this unfortunate mutex has been strategically and in some cases deliberately created”, I think this is what he’s worried about.
This comment is meant as a response both to you and to Lawrene’s comment below.
I agree that probably a lot of the motivation behind misgendering is a desire to “respect the truth”, rather than any malicious attitude, and certainly not primarily out of disregard for anyone’s body, property, or name. That said, I don’t see why my suggested meta-principle can’t be fully applied without creating a conflict with anyone’s respect for their perception of truth.
If I insist on being called something that sounds like a joke or which makes the addresser feel demeaned (“Superior Lord Liskantope”… I like it), then I may still have a basic right to be addressed thus, but others certainly have the right to judge me as obnoxious and avoid me. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode “The Maestro”, where Elaine dates a musician who insists on being called “Maestro” even in purely social contexts. I suggest that he has the right to insist on being called “Maestro” and, say, to break up with someone purely on the grounds that they refuse to call him by that title. On the other hand, Elaine might not want to hang out with someone who expresses such a pompous and silly preference, and she has every right to stop dating him for that reason. I propose that those who do have to interact with him — for instance, his coworkers — really should call him “Maestro”, even as they inwardly roll their eyes at his obnoxiousness. Similarly, the fact that a male-presenting person wishes to be referred to with female pronouns might strike another party as irrational, or as though they’re trying to shove extreme political-correctness-culture ideas down their throat. The other party still should respect the meta-principle, even while they have the right to avoid the transgender person’s and the perceived unreasonableness of their attitude.
Now of course there are certain circumstances where respecting a certain name preference might actually directly cause a problem in certain environments. I’m too tired to think of examples now that don’t sound silly. Clearly, in these situations other considerations have to be weighed against the meta-principle.
Similarly, if I insist that I’m Napoleon Bonaparte, then there’s a good chance that my basic sanity is in jeopardy. The fact that I should immediately be taken to a health care professional doesn’t contradict the notion that in the meantime, others should address me the way I ask. This is vaguely analogous to the fact that, despite our society’s meta-principle of preserving free speech, action should be taken in response to statements that present a clear and direct threat to anyone’s safety. This doesn’t contradict free speech: when we arrest someone who threatens violence, they aren’t in trouble for saying they plan to kill someone; they’re in trouble because of their evident intention to do so.
But I might be getting too tired to write coherently; time for bed. Lord Liskantope out.
I agree with you on the object level; but I think your meta argument would be very unpersuasive to anyone that doesn’t agree with you on the object.
I think they would say: “gender like a fact, not a name. And respecting facts can’t possibly disrespect someone’s body or possessions or name.”
Shaming is a big part of support groups – whether it’s Alcoholics Anonymous or the Red Pill, complaints of victimhood are often swiftly rebutted by a group leader with a call for perseverance, renewed faith in personal agency, and dismissal of the idea that for some people the situation is just too challenging. And there’s some shaming of the reported actions that led the person into their current “woe is me” crisis.
One of the ironies of shaming these shamers is these support groups know the victim’s struggle better than society at large; they know the ecstasy of a bender and what you’d sacrifice to go on one. And as a group these support groups have inexorably moved toward shame (or is it guilt?) as the best tool for personal change.
The mark of the unhelpful support group is its reluctance to shame: for example in the movie Jerry McGuire, Renee Zellweger needs to be torn away from the grievance culture of jaded divorcee (always the man’s fault!) before she can enter into a union of love or at least hope. Sounds a lot like MRA, doesn’t it?
As other people have said, “Be Nice” only works when everyone is on the same page re: Niceness. When what qualifies as Nice or Mean is itself under dispute the rule cannot possibly function.
One of the big problems with both modern progressivism and religious fundamentalism is the assumption that everyone already agrees on the ethical questions, in their hearts at least, so all disagreement must come from ignorance or rebellion. This is recapitulated to a degree here.
We all agree on what constitutes Niceness and Meanness, so all we have to do is work through which acts of Meanness are too important to punish and which acts of Niceness are too trivial to make cumpulsory…
Very much this. Also I translate “coordinated meanness”, however well intentioned, into “forcing people _not_ on the same page into submitting to our notion of niceness”. I’m not saying it is wrong to do, but you have to be _very_ sure that you actually are on the right page to do this. And there is the old joke that it is always the wrong people who have sufficient levels of sureness.
> coordinated meanness happens when everyone (or 51% of the population, or an entire church worth of Puritans, or whatever) wants to be mean.
Now you’re just being naive. Is 51% of the population really of the opinion that smoking marijuana users should be sent to prison for 10 years? Or that people pirating movies should pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and be sent to prison? Or that that a teenager should end up in jail for paedophilia if she sends nude pictures of herself to another teenager?
Some of the “coordinated meanness” is there because a relatively small special interest group has somehow captured disproportionate share of power. Some of it is there because the system is so complex that crazy edge cases happen without anyone noticing. In a system that follows some kind of moral average of the people would, I think, have much less coordinated meanness because peoples’ opinions on things tend to vary a lot and most people are relatively forgiving creatures.
One important advantage of coordinated meanness is that it allows netting.
Say Blues are a bit more powerful than Greens. In an uncoordinated state, you might have Blues subject to eight units of meanness by Grerns and Greens subject to ten units of meanness by Blues. If people coordinate, they can instead make it two units for Greens and none for Blues, preserving the effective punishment for being Green while delivering a nice Pareto improvement.
We go a couple more rounds of this and maybe people will believe me when I say Less Wrongers have a much larger set of Right Answers than is explicitly stated.
As in “they betray their own ideal” or as in “they are really up (on?) to something”.
Technically it’s a “betray their own ideal”, but honestly no one post-Less Wrong actually believes in the ideals as total system anymore (this is what Meaningness and the post-rationalists are getting at), all explicitly totalizing systems are gonna fail eventually.
What I mean is there is a much stronger set of norms that actually apply, in a community that prides itself on openness and niceness. It is mean to hide your doctrine if you have it.
I get the same impression. Could you, for interest in the history of internet communities, elaborate on the connection to “Meaningness” (assuming you mean the blog/book project of that name)?
“Naive” Less Wrongism is only stage 4, “proper” Less Wrongism is a useful construct in stage 5 (that could be made better), he has some points made about this. They’re either recent, or hyperlinked to recent posts. Of course I don’t like the whole stage x model he’s got in general, but in this case it’s a useful description.
Any suggestions for a reliable self-test w.r.t stages?
Chapman’s most recent post is about the importance of going from 4 to 5: http://meaningness.com/metablog/stem-fluidity-bridge.
And here’s a general post about them: https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/
Other people at Less Wrong agree with Scott on this?
This argument has a lot going for it, but I think it suffers from a flaw. If the rule is that no one can be reproached for doing anything that isn’t actually illegal, then there is going to be a tendency to push to criminalize everything that is reproachable. The problem with that is there is a negative effect on society for each thing we make illegal. ‘Good laws’ are laws that make something illegal which has a larger negative effect than the ‘cost’ of the law itself. For an easy example, laws against murder very clearly meet this criterion: the cost to society of murder is greater than the cost to society of outlawing murder. But to accept this does not mean you have to be blind to the cost of the outlawing. There are people in our society right now sitting in prison for murders they did not commit. That’s a real cost that we accept only because the harm of murder is so great.
Once this is recognized, and the cost of outlawing is factored in, then it becomes apparent that there are almost certainly some activities which are harmful to society, but have a cost of outlawing that would be even greater. Adultery might be an example of this. Or a certain low level of bigotry that is subjective enough that outlawing it would be overly Orwellian. There are other possible examples, and much room for debate about what is in this category and what is not. But the category almost certainly exists, and the rule described in the main post leaves us with no way to deal with it. We don’t want to accept these activities, because they are genuinely harmful to society. But we don’t want to outlaw them, because doing so would be even more harmful. Closing the door on the possibility of shame means that we will either have to fully accept them, or outlaw them, neither of which is a good solution.
So I guess I am arguing for shame, or reproach, as a tool necessary for our society. But of course like all tools, it can be misused. It’s probably best used between people who know each other very well. For example, if my best friend told me that he was cheating on his wife, I would be in a position to reproach him much more effectively than I would if some commenter on here started bragging about their adultery.
Therefore, in the context of governing blog comments, the rule makes a lot of sense, because blog comment threads are perhaps the worst place possible to employ the tool of shame. But that doesn’t mean it has no place.
Yes, the law is a blunt instrument. If it is the only instrument allowed, you’re probably going to end up with even more collateral damage.
“but you are not allowed to directly shame any commenters here.”
I’m kind of curious whether this extends to people describing abhorrent acts, if some commenter posted up a long gleeful but polite account of their favorite hobbies of systematically outing/doxing gay and trans people who live in countries where such things carry the death penalty and hanging out in communities for supporting suicidal people and then trying to taunt them into killing themselves.
Does the first reply calling them a disgusting, sadistic evil monster who should be ashamed of themselves attract a ban or is truthfulness a defense?
Your example would probably find little disagreement here, but there are acts that some people firmly believe are abhorrent even as others have no problem with them at all. For example, I’m thinking of the woman for whom Scott was attempting to raise funds some threads back who violated an agreement to have an abortion. I believe that violating such an agreement, in general, is completely unconscionable, though I refrained from saying so in that thread. Many others disagreed.
At the same time, I saw commenters shaming this woman for engaging in promiscuity/polyamory, and I didn’t think *those* criticisms were founded. Nevertheless, I personally wouldn’t forbid such criticism. I find these “anti-shaming” norms quite stifling: in the extreme, I cannot remark on your hypothetical doxxer’s abhorrent behavior and must act like nothing has happened. It doesn’t sit well with me.
… and I’m the exact opposite: I’m pro-life; I think it was virtuous of her to break the abortion contract, just like it would be virtuous for a hired hitman to break his contract. I also think polyamory is morally bad, though I refrained from saying so in that thread (or most other places; I’d rather not get into a discussion of it).
Still, I totally agree with your criticism of anti-shaming norms. They break down in extreme examples, which points to how there’s some other principle in play which Scott didn’t articulate in his post.
“but you are not allowed to directly shame any commenters here.”
I’m curious about a different question of interpretation.
Suppose someone, in an argument, deliberately lies, asserts facts that not only are not true but that he knows are not true. Demonstrating that shames him, given the norms of our society. Even demonstrating that the asserted facts are not true and are easily seen to not be true may well shame the person who asserted them, even if he didn’t know they were false.
One might argue against ever doing that, perhaps on the grounds that we are all too willing to believe that asserted facts we disagree with are obviously false. But accepting that argument eliminates a lot of legitimate arguments.
I believe you mean “suppose someone who isn’t a trans woman deliberately lies”.
I have at least one very culturally conservative Facebook friend who likes to complain about transgender in terms such as: “you can ‘identify’ as a woman all you like; you’ll never have the same status as my wife or mother.”
Lurking behind these kinds of statements, I think, are sentiments like “I take pride in my masculine identity and my wife’s feminine identity; these identities are central parts of my being, and you can’t just take them on and off like you would put on a new pair of shoes or switch political affiliations.” Unlike my facebook friend, I don’t have a problem calling someone with a penis “she” if she asks me to, or someone with a vagina “he” if he asks me to. But I also don’t share my friend’s sense that my masculinity is a core part of my identity.
This relates to a strong liberal (in the broad sense) tendency to push people to divest their personal identities from unchosen, largely immutable group memberships. You can be proud that you’re a doctor or a lawyer or a Bernie supporter, but you can’t be proud that you’re white, or have a penis. Because you had no control over the matter. Related, you can’t condemn a person with a penis for being attracted to other people with penises because that, also, is something they have no control over (by logical extension, you also shouldn’t be “proud” of being a gay woman of color, though arguably that is a counterweight to historical undervaluation; it does point, however, to the ways in which SJW is fundamentally illiberal, even reactionary in a meta sort of way).
I’m pretty sympathetic to the traditional liberal view and its logical endpoints. Being proud about something you had no control over and condemning people for something they had no control over seem pretty lame. I’m not a fan of identity politics of any kind. At the same time, I can’t claim to have no emotional investment in being a white, heterosexual, American male (the “American” part is not biological, of course, but I didn’t really have a choice, either).
Also, this may sound strange, but a lot of people don’t have that much to feel proud about. It may be easy among a group of MDs, PhDs, JDs, etc. to say “be proud of your own accomplishments! Don’t try to bathe in reflected glory of membership in some big, unchosen group!” but most people don’t have MDs, PhDs, JDs, successful artistic careers, etc. so in saying they can’t take pride in unchosen group membership we may, in essence, be telling them they can’t feel proud in general (though maybe they should instead take pride in being nice or ethical).
As with most things, I think the best guideline is “live and let live.” I should not intentionally misgender you, but you’re moving into the realm of imposing on me if you demand my restaurant install a third bathroom, or that everyone at an event go through an elaborate exercise of stating their preferred pronouns when the traditional pronouns are good guesses 99% of the time.
Conversely, just because you don’t consider your maleness or whiteness or blackness or Americanness to be a core part of your identity, doesn’t mean others should not (this might, ironically, be a point of agreement for strong traditionalists and trans people: if you are going to go to the trouble to come out as a trans woman rather than falling into the default your genitals would sort you into, then you must, to some extent, consider your gender to be an important part of your identity, as the traditionalist, in fact does. I, on the other hand, am closer to a “cis by default” person for whom gender identity is not a very big deal).
The only point which seems irreconcilable is the one where the unchosen, immutable nature of an identity is precisely what makes it valuable, or at least part of what makes it valuable. This is why transgender presents a challenge both to traditionalism and also feminism. Not sure if there is a simple solution.
Part of the problem though is that a lot of what enables our achievements is equally unchosen.
My intelligence and personality are the output of my parents genetics interacting with my environment. And turning that raw ability into domain skill cost an enormous amount of other people’s money, whether my parents’ or the government’s, which I could have rejected but had little choice in recieving. Can I take pride in my educational accomplishments, knowing that? Evidently yes, because I do.
Who you are and what you’ve done are inseparable. Being proud of one means being proud of the other. Denying a man pride in his masculinity and denying an intellectual pride in his intellect are identical, and wrong in either case.
Yes, this seems the logical endpoint, arguably repugnant conclusion of certain aspects of liberalism: you can’t credit or blame anyone for anything.
I think people like your friend take less pride in being male than in being a man. That is, they feel that being male implies a certain ideal to strive for (in some domains) that is different than that being a female would imply.
In that sense he is earning his pride if he is appropriately masculine–obviously a word with varied connotations, but whatever the goal is as he sees it, he has worked for his progress towards it.
And then of course there is the point that the PhD’s and MD’s are proud of utilizing their intelligence, ambition, opportunities, etc., which, while admirable, are also probably largely unearned, rather inborn.
Good point. This same friend seems to have lots of high standards about what constitutes “manly” behavior: acting tough and honorable and protecting and providing for your family, etc. In this sense, being a “man” is something you earn, just like an MD. But by this logic, if a woman is tough and honorable and provides for her family, does she become an honorary “man”? I don’t think this person could accept that.
Could go either way. Among macho men, a woman might be accepted as “one of the guys” if she displays masculine attributes but it’s probably understood as an honorary position and not the norm.
Queen Elizabeth I was manly by that definition.
“Emperor” Wu Zetian was certainly perceived that way–and criticized harshly for it.
Elizabeth I was adored for things like her “I have the heart and stomach of a king” speech, which I suppose tells us something about traditional Chinese vs. English gender roles.
That is interesting. China had a long history already by that time of conceiving of gender roles and hierarchy as part of the natural order of the universe (yin and yang, therefore eunuchs, which are neither yin nor yang, are suspect, as are womenly men, and, especially, manly women, who are a threat to civilization itself, which depends on masculine authority controlling feminine nature).
For all intents and purposes, yes.
Note how women like Margaret Thatcher, and Marie Curie are often dismissed by so-called “feminists” for being insufficiently feminine (or feminist).
I always assumed Thatcher was disqualified as a woman for the same reason Clarence Thomas is disqualified from being black. Though it is interesting to consider whether this was a factor as well (or whether there is any truly “feminine” way to be a powerful politician). But feminists don’t seem to have a problem with Hillary, and she doesn’t strike me as more feminine than Thatcher. Then again, they don’t seem to have embraced her very vigorously, either.
(Weirdly enough, being a feminist itself, paradoxically, is not stereotyped as a very feminine thing to do, either).
It’s not that weird; I don’t think feminists respect femininity all that much either. I think they would argue gender roles are socially constructed to give power to men and weakness to women; why respect someone who chooses to exhibit weakness well?
Then why don’t they love Thatcher and Ayn Rand? I think it can only be because having the wrong politics trumps almost all else.
Why on earth would it not? It’s a political movement. This is like asking why the French liberation movement in the 40s would kill French collaborators. I mean, they were French, right, so aren’t they who you’re supposed to be fighting for?
Granted, that is what they’d argue; but it just makes the dismissal of women who demonstrate that they can successfully compete with men “on men’s terms” all the more strange.
We are presented with a paradoxical situation where it seems that the “misogynists” are more ready to recognize and reward female strength/ability than the supposed “feminists”.
Edit:
To continue the French liberation analogy, it’s almost like the Resistance deciding to fight the American and British “invaders” at Normandy.
Wait, why is that strange? I’m with Adam, as a political movement, feminism is only going to publicly avow women supporting the same goals. Make a graph with axis of strength versus adherence to political feminism, and they will most admire the women in the + feminism, + Strength quadrant. The other quadrants are either defectors or oppressed.
“Why on earth would it not? It’s a political movement. This is like asking why the French liberation movement in the 40s would kill French collaborators. I mean, they were French, right, so aren’t they who you’re supposed to be fighting for?”
Yeah, but it’s not like Thatcher and Rand argued for oppression of women while breaking down barriers and stereotypes in their own lives. They merely supported the cluster of beliefs which most feminists broadly associate with “them,” rather than “us.”
It’s sort of like the issue of black conservatives: if your number one issue is helping black people do you praise a successful black conservative politician because he’s a living example of what you want, or criticize because he’s harming the cause? I guess I can understand the latter, but it’s rather question begging (assuming you know the answer of what’s really best for black people) and patronizing (not respecting the judgment of an individual black person who presumably doesn’t think of himself as a traitor to his race).
If you’re a feminist, then while you’re obviously allowed to hold other political views, you should at least have some respect for actual women who achieve the goals the movement supposedly wants to make possible for more women. If you then disrespect those women’s right to have an unorthodox opinion on other issues then you are, in some sense, disrespecting the autonomy you’re supposedly fighting for them to have.
That is, it is arguably more sexist or racist to believe that there is one “correct” political viewpoint for women or blacks to hold.
If you are a successful woman who does not advocate for feminism, you are refusing to help others rise up. You are a sell-out, basically.
If you are an “unsuccessful” woman who isn’t feminist, you are held back by your delusions.
If you are an “unsuccessful” woman who is a feminist, you are held back by oppression, and need the systemic change advocated for by feminism to achieve equality, etc.
I would assume they applaud the fact that a black person can achieve a position of esteem while simultaneously criticizing the content of whatever they’re advocating. That isn’t inconsistent in itself. It’d be a little inconsistent if you claimed your primary concern in life was women achieving power and then get pissed when it happens because it’s Margaret Thatcher, but I haven’t ever heard too many feminists say something like that is their primary concern. Usually they’re advocating for specific policies, not personal achievement, and any policymaker that advocates opposite policies is going to be an enemy.
It’s actually not so much direct criticism, by feminists, of people like Margaret Thatcher and Ayn Rand that bothers me, but more of a subtle ignoring of achievement on the part of people on the wrong side of the political divide.
Like if Margaret Thatcher had been a Labor politician and equally successful, but never particularly championing the cause of women or doing anything that obviously made women better off, I kind of suspect that she would nevertheless have been held up as more of a feminist hero.
Ditto Ayn Rand. Self-taught philosopher, fleeing oppression (too bad she was fleeing the wrong oppression), supported her husband, one of the best-selling authors of all time writing in her non-native language… by all rights she shouldn’t just be tolerated by feminists, she should be a feminist hero. It’s more the deafening silence that gets to me.
Since we’re talking about replacing all the white men on the money lately, I will trade liberals every other founding father on every bill and coin if only we can put Ayn Rand on the 100. The best part about the proposal is that it’s somehow appropriate whether you love her or hate her.
Various other people have pointed out why feminists would have a problem with Thatcher, but I’m curious about your mention of Marie Curie. I don’t recall hearing much, or indeed any, feminist criticism of Curie.
@ onyomi
Then why don’t they love Thatcher and Ayn Rand?
And Palin and to some extent* Hillary. Till 2000, Palin was a model for a ‘liberated woman’ by our 1970s standard. Self-made career with house-spouse and breast fed her baby at the Governor’s desk.
Sometimes I get the impression that a woman who has already got success with her own style and issues … no longer counts as a woman. Dunno enough about Golda Meier or Indira Gandhi to generalize further.
*Hillary works for women’s issues, but it’s been kind of a sideline to her day jobs (national health, foreign affairs, economy etc).
“Sometimes I get the impression that a woman who has already got success with her own style and issues … no longer counts as a woman.”
I do think part of it is the bipartisan fact that the personality traits associated with political success are not, by and large, associated with femininity. That is, it may not be that politics makes you masculine, but that the most stereotypically masculine women go into politics.
There may also be the fact that Republicans/right wing/conservative parties tend to expect higher adherence to gender norms, so while Republicans go for “manly” men (Trump), they expect their women to be well made-up, wearing heels, etc.
I don’t know where Fox found Megyn Kelly–someone who apparently has the time to always looks like a supermodel yet have three children and be a serious thinker who won’t shrink from any debate.
Thatcher was notorious for preferring all-male cabinets (as she allegedly felt better able to control men*); in all her time in office, she only appointed one woman (Baroness Young) to her cabinet and possibly that was mainly because Baroness Young was Leader of the House of Lords and a very staunch ally on Section 28.
*I remember a sketch on “Spitting Image” where Thatcher brought her cabinet to a restaurant; after the waitress took her order she asked “And what about the vegetables?” to which she answered “Oh, they’ll have the same as me”.
This doesn’t sound strange, it just sounds wrong.
My Wife has a song for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpvfmSL6WkM
There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your various identities. Assuming you are American, you are part of the most successful branch of humanity. We have eliminated famine, we have protected and expanded our Forefathers notion of liberty, we have walked on the Moon and explored the deepest secrets of the Universe, etc.
Not taking pride in this cultural-political identity strikes me as odd.
Diminishing the achievements of normal people just going about their day also strikes me as odd.
It strikes me as not unusual but still wrong to consider a college education or “art” as superior to successfully raising a family. Bobo thinking.
I tend to agree. However, there’s also struggle at the margins. As an individual, the best thing to do is to keep in mind core values and sacrifice unneeded hobby horses.
The problem is that often one person’s defense against meanness is another person’s meanness. Tax resistors think taxation is meanness, while most people think that the government is entitled to that money and the resistors aren’t doing their part. People who favor the recognition of transsexuality think that misgenderers are being mean by not accommodating people’s pronoun requests, while the opponents of recognition think that it’s mean to force them to use language in a false and politically charged way. Some SJ people think that calls for open discourse are mean (“How dare you put my existence up for debate?!”), while proponents of open discourse think the SJers are being mean by silencing them.
There may be a fact of the matter about which side should get its way, but determining which side is being mean is often dependent on which side you think is right. So when both sides agree that something is an instance of meanness, ~75% of the work has already been done.
Also, when an instance of meanness is coordinated, that often makes it worse even if (sometimes because) it’s applied predictably. For example, if my neighbors hate drug use, I can hide it from them by keeping it at home and not talking about it – not great, but doable. But if they coordinate and pass anti-drug laws, then I have to worry about the police breaking down my door and sending me to prison. Disorderliness is far from the only problem for most instances of meanness.
Taxation is meanness, but it’s okay* because a lot of people are collaborating to be mean. With regard to your other points, it seems like the main question is, what’s the default, such that a deviation from the default can qualify as meanness? Moldbug had an essay about how defaults get determined: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2012/11/adore-river-of-meat.html If the sovereign determines the default, then that’s coordination, which then licenses the meanness, whatever rebellious malcontents may claim. It gets a little trickier in a democracy, because the sovereign is the Cathedral, which doesn’t explicitly coordinate. But we all have a systems view here, I’m sure, and implicit coordination is plenty sufficient for us.
A lot of people will claim (sometimes rightly) that the default is mean, and also we probably don’t want to commit to the relativistic position that meanness is necessarily deviant from the default in a given society – e.g. if slavery is the default, it’s still mean.
For the specific sort of meanness that is “deviating from reasonable behavior in order to be pointlessly rude”, the default is what matters, since if it’s the default it’s not rude, you’re just oversensitive.
I think “no pointless rudeness please
guysfolks” is the reasonable core of what Scott was shooting for, but his aim wasn’t very precise and he has ended up with a lot of collateral damage to reasonableness in the process of walking his shots.I think your first paragraph is basically a restatement of Scott’s rebuttal against his friends’ assertion that niceness is the measure of how ethical something is.
At the same time, it seems that when comments are exchanged on an online space, it is much more likely to be obvious who is being “mean” to whom. (You might say the exception is something like use of pronouns referring to transgendered people which you referred to… I would disagree that each party has a valid case that the other was being “mean”, at least as long as the demand for certain pronouns only applies to the trans person being directly addressed.)
“society demands taxes to pay for communal goods and services”
Quick (or not so quick) (libertarian) nitpick.
Society* does no such thing – nor are the things provided typically strictly communal.
(TL;DR summary above – if you care about the details of the complaint, keep reading.)
Government demands taxes to pay for government distributed and provided goods and services.
Some, like roads or mutual defense, are basically communal – others deliberately not so (food aid and scholarships – I do not hold that unevenly distributed benefits are inherently wrong by any means; just they’re not “communal”, nor should they be).
To the extent “society” acts, it acts organically and through its constituent individuals.
The State acts in a different manner, though the input of individuals and the desire to gain their approval [votes] means that the State sometimes appears to act as a proxy for “society”.
But the State is, nevertheless, not society, nor a very good proxy for it, and it leads to grave errors to conflate the two entities.
(* I am tempted to quote Thatcher and deny “society” even exists [as a coherent and relevant entity, rather than the abstraction in the next paragraph], but that’s neither here nor there, and rather more complicated than it’s worth.
Even if we grant “society” as “the sum of all people in an area who have a shared public context”, which is perfectly fair, that blob doesn’t demand those things and is nearly incapable of a coherent demand or policy decision.)
I’m surprised I had to go this far to see some version of Bastiat’s distinction between government and society.
I like the main argument in this post, but it has a glaring weakness: it doesn’t account for the ways that regulatory lawmaking and the increasing use of lawfare effectively short-circuit the 51% safeguard (or even a super-majority safeguard like the Bill of Rights). At the national level, there is very little democratic check on the actions of the politically-appointed leadership of regulatory agencies, and there is almost literally no democratic check on the actions of those agencies non-appointed employees. And as over 90% of all laws passed are regulatory, not legislative, this means that the “51% agreement for coordinated meanness” standard applies to a vanishing number of the laws that govern our society.
The embarrassing episode (or scandal, depending on your point of view) of the IRS’s “enhanced scrutiny” of politically conservative nonprofits starting in 2011 is a good example of this. There were floods of applications for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in 2010 and 2011, and the records make clear that a pattern emerged very quickly with how the IRS handled them. By early 2012, the IRS’s clear tendency was to give quick approval to over 90% of the nonprofits with names that sounded politically liberal and to withhold or significantly delay approval for over 90% of nonprofits with names that sounded politically conservative. That is a pattern of unfairness, and I feel comfortable saying that it isn’t something that 51%+ of Americans would approve of. But it was done — and, by all accounts, still continues to be done to a certain extent — because there is no democratic check on regulatory agencies.
Another example is the “Dear Colleague” letters from the Department of Education regarding how colleges and universities are being asked to handle accusations of sexual assault. The letters made clear that the administration was interpreting Title IX to require colleges to revamp how they handle accusations of sexual assault. Specifically, the guidance in those letters “strongly encouraged” (see: required) university administrators to:
A) hold their own extra-judicial hearings on accusations of sexual assault
B) use very low standards of evidence and “preponderance of the evidence” — the lowest possible burden-of-proof standard — for verdicts
C) effectively operate on a presumption of guilt rather than a presumption of innocence.
A “strange bedfellows” coalition of men’s rights advocates, civil liberties watchdogs, and college administrators came together to protest the guidelines as unjust, unworkable, and/or unconstitutional. Multiple courts agreed, holding that these standards violated the Due Process rights of the accused. And the DoE appeared to back down, withdrawing the guidance in the “Dear Colleague” letters … until they inexplicably and very quietly revived that guidance again in March of this year. It seems pretty obvious that, at the very least, there wasn’t 51%+ support for this change. That didn’t matter, though, because the regulatory rulemaking process is almost designed to function best in the absence of that kind of consensus. For people who valued effectiveness over democratic legitimacy — in other words, most progressives from the Progressive Era — regulatory rulemaking is a godsend. For most of the rest of us, it’s a net-negative with an impact that runs the gamut from “annoying and inconvenient” to “a threat to life and liberty”.
In this situation, the 51% standard is more idealistic than realistic. We haven’t operated in a 51% world for a generation.
You nailed it. As a conservative, I feel very unsafe with the current rules for coordinated meanness in America, and the only way to mitigate it is to hope for a Red President to capture the regulatory agencies. That’s a weak solution, since the President literally cannot fire a bureaucrat, but it’s better than being treated as an enemy when the regulatory agencies are under a Blue President.
They actually seem like bad examples to me. They were quickly noticed and heavily pushed back upon. In the case of the IRS, the pushback was successful, at least for a reasonable value of ‘success.’ No charges filed, but several top officials forced to resign and they can’t do this any more. Better examples are hundreds of regulations no one even notices or thinks about, but of course, being that, no one will ever bring them up, either. I don’t even know what they are.
What makes them bad examples? Paul points out how the Department of Education’s letter is currently in place. The IRS incident was also successful in that they delayed numerous nonprofits’ approval past the 2012 election, which Democrats won (would more conservative nonprofits have made a difference? Probably not… but who knows?), and they’ve still escaped prosecution for it.
If you disagree, you disagree, but I definitely said what I think makes them bad examples.
So Scott, you’ve made many posts implying that everything is about tribes, either genes or deep culture.
In this post, you say that what would creep you out about lawful skinheads is their circulating petitions to discriminate against the tribe of Judah. You don’t, if I recall aright, identify with Judaism, but as an atheist. So you identify with the tribe of Jewish atheists because philosophical choices and unchosen heritage are both objectively important to identity, am I correct?
On the other hand, you’ve come across as a Christian sympathizer ever since you were Yvain (one of Arthur’s knights) on LessWrong. Indeed that’s the only reason I was attracted to your blog: you came across as the Only Sane Man in a group where most members mimicked Yudkowsky’s Dawkinsian (“I’m interested in science, and any subject I’m not interested in is objectively false!”) autodidactism.
SO, what prevents you from updating your beliefs to include “God exists”, can you imagine ever updating your beliefs thus, and if so, would you become a practicing Jew, a Christian, or something out of left field?
I’m speaking for myself, not Scott.
I’m an agnostic of Jewish heritage and background. I don’t practice the religion. Anti-Semitism terrifies me. I have a Jewish name. I apparently look Jewish. Anti-Semites don’t check for agnosticism.
Ms. Lebovitz, I don’t recall you coming across as a Christian sympathizer. Polite, to be sure, but nothing like Scott’s active interest in the Church Fathers (“Even Origen would admit you’re going to Hell”).
In your case, it’s straight up rational to identify with the tribe of agnostic Jews. And personally, I hold the belief that skinheads, like Communists, deserve a degree of coordinated meanness.
Even if Scott doesn’t identify with his Jewishness, the skinheads would probably identify him with it. Luther and Torquemada may have been satisfied by renouncing the Jewish religion, but ever since Darwin, antisemitism has tended to apply a one-drop rule.
I know you’re probably right, but doesn’t literally everybody in the Western world, if not the entire world, have one-drop?
It’s not literally one drop. For better or for worse, anyone that doesn’t use the halachic rule uses the one grandparent rule that the Nazis came up with. Including the State of Israel.
“SO, what prevents you from updating your beliefs to include “God exists”,”
Are you serious?
“can you imagine ever updating your beliefs thus, and if so, would you become a practicing Jew, a Christian, or something out of left field?”
He did just do a post about people who are relatively like him that followed that path. Of course it involved heavy abuse of mind altering drugs and unexpected results, but I imagine that is the most likely version he can conceive of. If it was clear what belief he would follow right now, he would be following them.
Yes, I’m serious. As a Bayesian rationalist, Scott could have thought processes like this:
“*hears the ontological argument* I’ll have to take that into account.”
“*looks up the existence-is-not-a-predicate rebuttal* My belief on God’s existence is unchanged.”
“*reads Goedel’s ontological argument* … well now I do need to update my belief.”
Since neither the ontological argument nor any of the Five Ways indicate which monotheistic religion to believe, Scott could choose to worship God as a Jew because of the importance of ancestry, as a Christian because of pre-existing philosophical sympathies, or anything else logically compatible with Classical theism: Muslim, Hindu, etc. IOW, what tribe he’d identify with upon becoming a convinced theist with nothing more to go on like personal revelation.
Drugs have nothing to do with it unless you assume materialism. Not every change in mental state has to be a change in chemistry unless the mental is reducible to the material.
“As a Bayesian rationalist, Scott could have thought processes like this:”
That isn’t how Bayesianism works. At all. Hint- if it was, I could make any Bayesian believe anything by repeating wrong logical arguments as long as I cycled through different ones. And then I could make a different Bayesian believe the opposite by switching the conclusion.
Logical arguments are true as long as the conclusion follows from the premise and the premise is true. If neither of those hold, the only Bayesian value they have is “a person is making false logical arguments for this position”. Is that more likely in a universe where that position is true or more likely in a universe where that position is false?
“Scott could choose to worship God as a Jew because of the importance of ancestry,”
That is like rejecting relativity because your ancestors didn’t believe in it.
“as a Christian because of pre-existing philosophical sympathies,”
I don’t think you get his philosophical sympathies at all. He wrote articles for less wrong. He agrees with EY about most of the stuff there.
“IOW, what tribe he’d identify with upon becoming a convinced theist with nothing more to go on like personal revelation.”
Deism. Why is this even a question?
“Drugs have nothing to do with it unless you assume materialism. Not every change in mental state has to be a change in chemistry unless the mental is reducible to the material.”
Yes, why would a psychologist who can see how people’s mental states are changed by drugs believe that people’s mental states are reducible to material phenomena.
I’m not gonna speak for Scott, but I am another person with an undergrad philosophy degree, and doing that kind of thing entails having an interest in the really drawn-out thoughts of people from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, as opposed to being obsessively focused solely on post-enlightenment vaguely positivistic science advocates. As it stands, getting a philosophy degree from an American university entails reading a whole lot of Christian thinkers because that’s basically the western heritage once you get past 160 BC or so. Becoming very finely acquainted with this history is sufficient to demonstrate that nearly every human who ever lived isn’t just insane or instantly dismissible because I disagree with them about a fairly fundamental proposition regarding the nature of reality. On the other hand, it still doesn’t mean I agree with them.
Again, not Scott, but what would cause me to update is personal revelation. I feel fairly confident after spending a decade reading thousands of pages on each side that rational discourse doesn’t give a satisfying answer one way or another and at best can only convince me of a vague sense that we exist on purpose, not of any specific religious particularism, and if it just so happened to be exactly the same one my grandparents believed, that seems too convenient and motivated. I’ve read some pretty damn good arguments from Muslims, Buddhists, even shamanistic animists. So really the only argument for any particularism I’ve ever felt sympathy toward is the argument from religious experience. And as it stands, I’ve never had a religious experience.
You might enjoy A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism— it’s polytheistic theology.
Maybe. Thanks for the recommendation. I’d never actually looked into post-Roman European polytheism, more native North American and Southeast Asian traditions.
Another example of coordinated meanness is the behavior of recent Muslim immigrants into Europe shaming native women for their western style dress. Actually this is a reversal to the slut shaming mentioned in the post by Scott. Also for various other non-Islamic practices, like Charlie Hebdo style irreverance.
It appears to be having an effect, despite not being near a majority, due to having strong coordination and confidence within the subculture.
“Greetings, infidels! We thank you for letting us move here and collect welfare. The new rules around here, as commanded by God, include women having to dress modestly on pain of assault and no drawing pictures of Muhammad on pain on death.”
“I don’t think sharia bloody allows it”
I don’t know that the biggest issue is “coordination” as “proportionality”.
The main issue with shaming, doxxing, beating up in back alleys, etc., is not so much who does it, as the magnitude of the punishment itself. E.g. Brendan Eich got fired for simply donating to a cause (that actually won a popular vote!) a few years before. Or someone might get driven to suicide for being promiscuous.
On the other hand, “coordination” could conceivably eliminate the pile-on effect. Uncoordinated, the pile-on is hard to avoid – none of the individual people saying “I don’t want to use Firefox because Brendan Eich is against gay marriage” were being particularly mean. No is the single person saying to the promiscuous teen – “I personally disapprove of your many sexual escapades”. But when everybody is applying shame to the point where the consequences become severe, then yeah, that’s serious meanness. Still a hard nut to crack.
> but you are not allowed to actually misgender transgender commenters here.
FWIW, I feel this is too harsh, since I don’t even know the gender of most commenters here — and thus I’ve got something like a 30% chance of failure (assuming I remember the results of the demographics survey correctly). If you said, “but you are not allowed to intentionally misgender transgender commenters here”, then I’d be 100% on board with the rule.
you’re allowed to (politely) express your philosophical disagreements with the idea of divinity, but you are not allowed to actually tell religious commenters here that their god doesn’t exist and their religion is all made up.
Scott’s ruling on this apparent double standard is very relevant to my interests.
you’re allowed to (politely) express your philosophical disagreements with the idea of divinity, but you are not allowed to actually tell religious commenters here that their god doesn’t exist and their religion is all made up.
I’m not sure of Scott’s position on that but for myself, I don’t mind if you do, so long as it’s not couched in the terms of two six year olds having a row in the playground (“And you’re a stupid poopyhead if you believe that!”)
Does this mean we agree that when people use the word “God”, they usually mean something more personal – like their parents, or their local church?
Does this mean we agree that when people use the word “God”, they usually mean something more personal – like their parents, or their local church?
From “The Screwtape Letters”:
So yes, we make little idols and think of them as and call them “God”, and yes, it’s possible we say “God” and mean “my church/my social circle/what I have been brought up to think is the right thing to say and do”.
But it’s not always the case, and even in the cases where people are going by “my family/my church/my neighbourhood”, they may also have an idea of God as God.
I would not agree that all the time, what is meant by “God” really is “some other thing in the environment”. Unless we’re going to also agree that what people mean by “correct form of ethics” is “my Bay Area vegan transfriendly computer programmer college graduate circle’s preferred model of behaviour” 🙂
I think it’s possible to be a vegan, non-binary, climate-friendly-renewable energy-using computer programmer who also is sincerely trying to live by a coherent and accurate system of ethics based on a set of principles not dependent on how their like-minded friends and colleagues like to live (and would shun them for departing from such) 🙂
I don’t know what powers you attribute to this “God as God”, and I’m certainly not inviting you to tell me. But I look around at theists and see a lot of behavior that I can both explain and excuse, on the sole condition that their true underlying belief – the actual difference in their models of the world – is that their parents/church possess limited magical powers which will protect the believer against anything really bad happening if they follow the rules.
(A promising feature of this theory is that, when an atheist subscribes to the Just World Fallacy, such people could reasonably think the atheist believes in their “God”.)
How they square this with the existence of death is an interesting question. Clearly they think the spell rules out death of some types, as we see from people ‘losing faith’ when it happens to someone they can’t classify as an unprotected out-group member (or whatever dodge gets them through the day).
That is your interpretation of their belief, not what they may actually believe. I suppose if such a theist say “No, I believe in God!” you would explain that as “They think they believe, but they really alieve in their church/family”.
Which doesn’t get us any further forward in understanding one another, as I could equally “explain and excuse” your atheism as “Oh, they think they believe this on rational grounds of scientific empiricism but actually they are being deceived by the Devil” and I would dismiss all your protests over “No, that’s really not what is happening!” as “Yeah, but you would say that, under the Devil’s influence”.
(Please note: not what I honestly think you think. But anyone can explain someone else’s actual behaviour as contrasted with stated beliefs by saying “I can tell you don’t really believe what you say you believe and I have a better model for what you do believe”).
I think you’re right that we do tend to attribute “limited magical powers” to authorities, but once we’re old enough to understand that no, our parents are going to die or no, bad things happen to good people, we should become mature in our faith.
For some people, that may mean they do indeed lose faith. But that is no more a true measure of what the principles are then someone who says “I thought improving and advancing medical science means I could live to be three hundred! What do you mean you can’t guarantee I’ll live to be ninety? I’m going to go for the crystal healers and latest lifespan extension fad diet, they’re guaranteeing me extra longevity!” reflects on the actual worth of medicine.
There are better reasons for losing faith than “I thought it was magic and it’s not”.
A few thoughts, @Daniel Keys:
You’re probably right about most theists. I see this a lot as well and agree that they should stop thinking this way. Magical thinking and just world fallacies did not become common by being easy to avoid. But I think it would be an error to say that theism ends there. I have been around plenty of theists who have lost people close to them, and the majority of them have not lost their faith as a result. I think it’s interesting to examine the reason death fails to make them lose their faith. In most cases, the answer is simple- they believe their dead relative is in heaven. In their view, all the sadness is on their side. They have redefined death so that death is not so bad.
It seems fairly obvious why this happens. Simply put, humans are very bad at holding two propositions in our heads at a time. Acting and grieving are in some ways mutually exclusive. We have only a finite number of neurons and therefore only a finite amount of brainpower. Devoting resources to action takes resources away from grieving. So in most cases, we move on by, on some level, driving the feeling of badness out of our minds. Oh, most people will acknowledge that death is sad no matter how much time has passed, but they no longer feel it on a visceral level. It’s the nature of how our minds operate.
Now, you seem to be making a distinction between how theists might deal with death and how you, presumably, would. But it seems to me that you have not transcended the dichotomy of how the human mind works. The hope of heaven reduces the sting of death by giving believers hope beyond death- telling them it is possible to move on and be joyful again. But I think things like Eliazar’s post “You can face reality” often have a very similar effect. That post, too, tells us that no matter how bad the world is we can move past it. The basic message is the same; only the source of the hope is different. While the hope of heaven, for the believer, makes death not so bad it can’t be moved past, being told they can face reality can do the same thing for the non-theist. In practical terms, all that either might mean is that the bar for “bad thing” has been moved.
Perhaps you aren’t like this, but I notice that many atheists seem to have undergone this bar-moving process. They say, “Theists are weak! They need God to deal with the bad things in life, but I can handle it on my own”- when in reality, all that has happened is that you have substituted “my ability to get past what happens to me” for “the comfort given by God”. You have done exactly the same as the theist, but you have done it with a different source. Of course, I’m sure we’ll all acknowledge that bad things are bad, but on an emotional, visceral level, don’t those bad things seem a little smaller when you remind yourself you can face reality?
Rationalists are not immune to being shattered by events, but it seems to me that many rationalists have changed what events can shatter them. Perhaps most of us can face and move past the reality of the death of a close friend or family member- but what about losing our intellects? How many of us would that destroy, at least as thoroughly as the theists you’re thinking of are destroyed by a close death, Daniel? Atheists are not stronger than theists; their supports are simply in different places.
If religious belief couldn’t survive contact with death, there wouldn’t be any religions for us to even talk about.
This is a great blog… But commas should go inside all quotation marks, ditto with periods and question marks! Outside placement is British Standard Usage. (In American Standard English, colons and semi-colons still go outside however.)
This is a somewhat contentious issue. I prefer commas and periods outside quotation marks, because they’re not part of what’s being quoted.
Ditto.
This comment is so SSC
On the contrary, American punctuation is distinctly un-SSC on account of its illogicality. See all the other comments on this subject.
I forget which version it is, but I always preferred to have the punctuation inside the quotation marks if and only if the punctuation is a natural part of the quoted text. So the comma would go inside only if the speaker of the quote was inserting a comma like pause there.
But American Standard English is stupid and wrong (in this regard).
It may be true that ASE is stupid and wrong, but following it is neither, I think. Deviating means you lose reader credibility, and it’s also an eyesore to those accustomed to normal usage. If Scott genuinely cares about innovating and changing usage norms, then this trade-off is worth it. But if he cares primarily about the content of his posts, the best way to persuade/gain credibility/ensure smooth reading experience is to follow usage norms.
Here in this programmer-adjacent community, we put quote-external punctuation outside the quotation marks because it isn’t actually part of the quote and quotes should nest cleanly inside the sentence structure. [joking]Additionally, you’ll offend all three descriptivist linguists that read the comments.[/joking]
You mean prescriptivist, I think?
I mean that the descriptivists would be offended by Gordon Brachmann prescribing grammar when Scott’s quote usage was perfectly understandable.
The name for the Correct school of linguistics is “descriptivism”, not “prescriptivism”. The latter seems to be a common misspelling.
Is this an American versus British English thing, because I put punctuation marks outside the quotation marks?
Yes it is; see this link (h.t. Jaskologist) for an explanation.
No. The “punctuation inside quotation marks” rule is stupid. We decline to follow it.
The rule is not stupid, but an artifact of mechanical problems which were alleviated by placing the period inside the quote.
Now that you know why the fence was there, feel free to remove it.
With respect to Chesterton, I did not say that the rule was always stupid, or that it was obviously invented by stupid and/or evil people, etc. But now, especially when advocated for by people who very likely have no inkling of the history involved, it is a stupid rule.
That links says “Printers discovered through trial and error that commas and periods could be more reliably printed if they were routinely placed inside of quotation marks.” without further references.
That sounds like a just-so story. I’m inclined to give it near-zero weight. It’d be much more convincing to see a contemporary description of “mechanical problems”.
I place periods, question marks, and commas inside quotation marks if and only if they’re part of the text being quoted, and you should too. It’s easier to parse, and it pays to be polite to the natural-language processing systems mining your communication for advertising data, because they’ll rule the world someday.
I think your naivety has you labouring, despite meagre evidence, under the delusion that this blog is orientated only to Americans. It would behove you to change that assumption.
I believe you meant “behoove”. Also… uh… Aluminium ?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/behove
Wow, I had no idea there even was an American version of that word, or that “behoove” was it. I stand overwhelmingly corrected !
Wait, you say it so it rhymes with “alcove”??? I’m American and for me it definitely rhymes with “remove.”
This post reminds me of what I’m pretty sure is the only time I got piled-on in any comment forum, which goes to show how little time I’ve spent participating in internet discussions in my life. I don’t remember which post this was in response to, or even precisely what I was arguing. But I was sharply criticized in an SSC comments section for advocating for the existence of some set of rules as to what type of personal remark should or shouldn’t be made in the workplace, subject possibly to some sort of discipline/reprimand. I remember that one of the responses was something like, “Well, I would sure hate to work with you! Who knows what kind of innocent comment might get me disciplined.”
To which I tried to respond that they were missing my whole point! The main advantage of having a set of rules which lays out what sort of remarks should or shouldn’t be made is that everyone knows what to stay completely safe from reprimand. It’s coordinated meanness, if we consider that it’s “mean” to tell people they can’t say certain things. It protects everyone from the seemingly-arbitrary whims of an individual who decides one day that a particular thing is unacceptably offensive.
It doesn’t work that way. If there’s a set of rules like that, the best you can expect is anyone who violates them will be disciplined. Anyone who is called up on the carpet and confidently asserts that they should not be punished because they clearly broke none of the rules will be shocked by the response. The authority will either stretch one of the rules beyond all bounds of reason, in ways they have never done so before and will not generally do so in the future, to justify the punishment, or they will come up with a new principle which is supposed to be obvious and self-evident (e.g. “you should not say anything which makes people feel uncomfortable”), and claim your behavior violated that principle.
Rules only provide reasons to punish; they do not protect non-violators.
You really reminded me of part of the description of Qing law in Legal Systems Very Different from Ours:
Hmm, I don’t know. My above comment (somewhat accidentally) is relevant on more of an object level as well, since maybe a reasonable set of rules would be something like the rules Scott has advocated in this post. In other words, you’re allowed to have a discussion in the break room about your opposition to promiscuity, or homosexuality, or some types of religion, but you’re not allowed to directly belittle a coworker for being promiscuous, gay, or religious. I think this is unambiguous enough that it could be consistently enforced.
I admit, though, that it’s problematic, since there will be many who claim, not without reason, that (for instance) openly mocking the particular religion of a coworker is just as oppressive to that individual as explicitly belittling them. I don’t know what a feasible adjustment would be, or even if there is one. So I’m not sure whether my “rule suggestion” from before could be made to work. And I’m not actually endorsing what I said on whatever comments section earlier, since a lot depends on the context and I don’t remember exactly what my stance was, but I am defending it against the claim that I was calling for arbitrary policing.
I’ve never actually seen this set of rules in the wild, but if the behavior of schoolyard bullies is any guide, it’ll make explicit mockery of a colleague’s race or religion will go away and be replaced by people just happening to have a discussion about how much that race or religion sucks every time that colleague walks by. Which will correctly be interpreted as the same thing. Language is flexible; it’s quite hard to police its content by policing its form.
(“In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.”)
The reasonable rule to me seems clearly have whatever discussion you want outside of the workplace, but don’t talk about how stupid some part of another employee’s personal identity is either directly to that employee or anywhere else while on duty. If it sucks that much to not be able to make fun of religion on the job, go work for the Freedom From Religion Foundation or some other place where they’ll allow it.
Not that I have any idea how to translate that rule to a blog. Obviously, Scott has the right as the page owner to police his comments section however he sees fit, but what the optimal policy is to promote whatever goals he is actually trying to promote, some of which seem at odds with each other, is a mystery.
I think your suggestion is a good idea for a guideline of workplace social behavior, better than my suggestion above.
This is a great rule until The Other Side decides it’s OK to talk about how great their personal identity is and how wrong yours is, and starts suggesting ways to handicap the wrong-identitarians in order to make a more inclusive and welcoming environment for the correct-identitarians.
(e.g. the correct-identitarians might suggest a prayer before every meeting, disallowing work on their Sabbath, a ban on the wearing of Color of The Evil One, requiring all requests to end with a blessing on their lord, etc)
That’s exactly what I just said is against the rule. A rule obviously doesn’t work if it isn’t followed.
Adam, yes, the rule doesn’t work if it is not followed. And the rule you propose is never followed and is a magnet for selective enforcement.
Oftentimes safe spaces are used offensively though. For example “This university is a safe space”. If every group got their own little safe space it wouldn’t be too bad but in reality I don’t think that it would be distributed that fairly.
In the context of universities, generally I see specific spaces designated as spaces for specific groups – “the campus LGBT center is a safe space for queer and trans students”, etc. I don’t think “this university is a safe space” is anything like a central example; in fact I can’t recall any examples of that happening at all.
There’s a fair amount of “making X a safe space for Y” rhetoric used to justify censorship and/or mobbing campaigns. For example, from the famous “Yale students yelling at a college master” video: “it is your job to create a space of comfort and home for the students who live at Silliman… when you hear the provost say she didn’t know how to create a safe space for our freshmen at Silliman, how do you explain that?”
The general pattern of “offensive use of safe spaces” Kyrus talks about is that someone says that a place ought to become a safe space for [historically marginalized group] and this puts their demand that X opinion is grounds for expulsion or silencing on firmer ground. At least some of the people arguing against them don’t have problems with explicitly delineated safe spaces created to be safe spaces, they have a problem with the expansion of the ideals of the safe space to something which existed to be something else – an intellectual space, as universities, or a public area, or a competitive arena, or a safe space for people with a different and possibly mutually exclusive set of requirements as Scott talked about in A Response To Apophemi On Triggers.
I thought you were making fun of them until I clicked through and saw the place really is called ‘Silliman.’
I’ll take any misgenderers that aren’t accepted here.
Take them where?
I might be willing to misgender someone in exchange for a night on the town
Presumably, to his blog.
Which is weird because his blog isn’t remotely about the same topics.
A private discussion group which does overlap with topics here more often than not. With the difference that we are not nice nor coordinated.
I wish to know more. Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
My email address is in the about page at my blog.
Spandrell, didn’t you say you would never post here again? Couldn’t you line up some proxy poster to advertise whatever it is you’re pushing?
He has been pardoned by the sovereign.
His ban may not stand, I don’t know. But he did, prior to being banned, say he would never post here again or take the site seriously. And yet here he is again, so I wonder what changed his mind.
I am offering a mutually beneficial deal: I take away evil reactionaries to a place they will enjoy, so Scott can spend less time banning evil reactionaries and explaining to his friends why he allows evil reactionaries in his blog.
I have no interest in posting normal comments here. I could use as an excuse that the cause of that old comment of mine isn’t in a position of influence over Scott anymore, but really, rest assured I will not haunt you with my crimethink.
But if I leave this place forever, where will I get my latest update on what the intelligent leftists are doing?
That’s what Freddie DeBoer is for. This blog is where the host makes an exquisite exposition of a reactionary-ish viewpoint and smart leftists try to shoot it down under strictly nice rules of engagement.
I had been wondering if my Chaotic alignment was dissolving into neutrality. This stirring, and admittedly rather disturbing, argument for Lawful Neutral is evidence against. Good to know I’m ideologically consistent.
I don’t believe in the existence of “society” as a thing distinct from collections of individuals, except as a fictional entity invented by bullies now that their “God” excuse has run its course. Since “societies” don’t exist, “social functions” don’t exist either. Only events such as helping and hurting individuals exist. The former is something done by good people whereas the latter is done by evil people, and bullying belongs to the latter category. (In a collection of individuals, I prefer to have Rawls’ maximin principle applied to individual liberty.)
This is all well and good and I do agree. But what about vegans? I mean, you’re hard-pressed to say they aren’t right (given their ideals are based on niceness) but sometimes their actions are ‘mean’ (shouting at fur-wearers). What does it mean when vegans are ‘being mean’ by taking away your bacon? Do you feel unsafe because your ‘personal choice’ is being questioned?
“This is the much weaker claim that legality sets a minimum bar for people attempting mean policies. ”
There are two ways of reading that, and I don’t think either works for your purposes:
1. You should not attempt mean policies that are legally forbidden.
Shaming people for being promiscuous (or for lots of other things) is not illegal, so that reading does not put that sort of uncoordinated meanness below the minimum bar, which is what you are trying to do.
2. You should not attempt mean policies unless they are legally required.
Making your kid get vaccinated would, by that standard, be below the minimum bar if it didn’t happen to be legally required–and in many times and places it wasn’t.
I don’t think it is clear that uncoordinated meanness is necessarily worse than coordinated–it depends on the details. Sixty percent of the population refusing to hire Jews or to patronize Jewish doctors is a pretty minor inconvenience, since Jews are only about two percent of the population and so can find plenty of jobs and patients in the forty percent willing to deal with them. Sixty percent of the population voting to make it illegal is a more serious matter. More generally, there are some forms of meanness, such as employment discrimination, which are ineffective unless practiced by a lot of people, others, such as assassination, for which that isn’t true.
Some of this might make sense if most people weren’t evil and most human systems weren’t evil.
Since they are, not sure why the coordination even matters.
Very few people are evil.
Human “systems” are evil more often, but not as often as you seem to think
That’s what an evil person would say!
But jokes aside, I really do believe most people are pretty evil, unless we redefine good and evil to give sadism and petty harm infliction a free pass.
Just imagine you could give random humans godlike power over very large but finite universes. And then measure the total amount of suffering, injustice etc. vs. the total amount of pleasure, freedom etc. resulting from that.
I think the outcome would be pretty negative. And that’s without all the coordination failures.
People are a net gain to humanity, as evidenced by the fact that we continue to exist rather than being worn away by entropy and each other. However, I have to include self-care to get this conclusion.
I don’t even think people are a net gain to humanity, paradoxically. The human-on-human torture alone outweighs whatever positive value the existence of people has.
I’d also expect more negative than positive value to nonhuman minds from the existence of humanity over the long run.
Ooh, ooh, I’ve been waiting for this topic for _ages!_
Here’s how I view it: let’s say we have a human being raised in circumstances that would lead us to do evil – a person raised from birth to be racist to the point of violence, or a member of the Hitler youth. If this person, when they grew up were to say, kill someone (or perform some other evil deed), there is sense in which we can attribute this to their upbringing; we might say “if only he/she wasn’t raised to hate minorities!” Yet we would still view their actions as abhorrent, and I’m sure in the context of online message boards, many people would call this person by pejoratives as assholes, scum of the earth, etc.
So now let’s say the circumstances of our own lives were different: what if we were raised in Nazi German to be violent jackbooted thugs? Would we likewise commit such violent acts? There are two answers: Either we deny we would commit such acts (which presupposes some sort of nonsensical ideas about causality and/or assumes we are somehow ethical supermen) or we have to admit yes, we’d likely do (or be predisposed to do) such evil actions as well.
But, this is the trap, because the principle thing that’s causing people to do evil here is the *circumstances*, and if we can demonstrate any given human being would do evil under the right circumstances, then all human beings are evil. Why? Because I can imagine a perfect human being who would do evil under *no* circumstances, a sinless one, a messiah. That person, who would be totally ethically perfect, would be good. A person who would do evil under *any* circumstances is simply evil – which of course, is all of us. (Since a person who does not have a history of evil acts, solely because circumstances did not conspire to give that person opportunity and motive to do so).
>“As the folk saying goes: If you speak for the wolf, speak against him as well. Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is our own. And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: ‘If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?’ It is a dreadful question if one really answers it honestly.”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.”
– Erich Heller
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
If we’re not allowed to misgender transgender commentors, can you give them a little mark so that we know what gender to use? I am not looking forward to the task of compiling a gender database.
At least we’re still allowed to misgender cisgender commentors, phew.
A little rainbow flag perhaps with pronouns on it? Oh, and during any meetups, it would be best if they wore such as armbands. Would avoid miscommunication, I’m sure!
Not to mention non-commenters. So calling you a woman, or Bruce Jenner a man (provided I am not mistaken that he doesn’t post here) is perfectly OK?
Anon, suppose in replying to you one of us says “In his comment, Anon said…”
(1) “Please don’t refer to me as ‘he’, I prefer to be completely anonymous, use ‘they’ if you must” – that’s an acceptable request and it would be churlish to refuse and insist on using “he” (we don’t know if you’re he, she, they, or whatever, so it’s not doing anything but being deliberately objectionable to keep saying “he”)
(2) “You have deliberately and offensively misgendered me! I call for your banning!” – come off it, nobody knows if you’re he/she/they/it/whatever, you’re anonymous and it was accidental or a habit of usage. Getting offended where no offence was intended is over-sensitivity; it may be an understandable result of being deliberately insulted where offence is deliberately intended and it’s a reflex action, but it’s still over-reacting.
Obviously you’re being sarcastic, but I did seriously wonder about how this rule applies to everyone else. Does it bother non-trans people generally to be misgendered? I suppose it would bug me if someone in my physical presence was calling me a girl with the specific intent to belittle me because they think being a woman is insulting.
Unintentional misgendering has been pretty common on the Internet, though, especially since most of my early formative discussion time was spent on the Physics Forums where I had a genderless username and a picture of Sylvia Plath as my avatar. She’s not widely recognizable, so many people just assumed it was a picture of me and referred to me as ‘she’ and I rarely bothered to correct them. It’s not important to me that I get identified as male by other people. I do consider being male to have benefits, but those are benefits of secondary sex characteristics that don’t depend upon the perception of others or even my self-perception, things like not having to deal with monthly cramping, migraines, and childbirth, being generally larger and stronger than at least half the population, being less likely to catch UTIs and STIs.
It doesn’t bother me, I’ve never had a strong attachment to being gendered properly on the internet either, though this is not a problem for me IRL. I do tend to get offended when people misindentify me politically or religously. This is why I’m generally suspicious of a stance where being extremely sensitive to gender identification while not caring about any other type: it seems to me to be pretending modern tribal behavior is actually nontribal ethics. Consistant identitarianism would take into account so much more than it currently does. If there’s a good argument as to why I’m wrong, I’d like to hear it.
The extension to tribal identification more generally is interesting, as I’ve brought up several times recently that’s another one that I don’t really get because I’ve never felt it myself, but the more recent explanations dealing with historical reasons for it make sense in a way that I can at least understand it now. It also happens that strongly-preferenced leftists and rightists on the Internet seem to both assume I’m part of the other group. I’ve varied in explaining to myself why this is from not having strong preferences personally to being generally contrarian to finding arguments more compelling than conclusions, but it probably really is mostly that I don’t have any political or ethical opinions that are particularly central to my own self-image or identity. I try to just believe whatever seems most reasonable, but a lot of conflicting positions that can’t all be correct all sound roughly equally reasonable to me and digging further to reach a personal conclusion doesn’t seem worth it when 25 years of doing that didn’t get me anywhere.
Another one is ethnic identity. I’d think from my last name it’s pretty obvious Hispanic descent at least on my father’s side (and if you know I’m from LA, specifically Mexican is a pretty good bet even if you can’t otherwise tell us apart), but I’ve very often gotten Hawaiian and Japanese and Filipino. I guess there wasn’t a tremendous genetic difference between whoever became the Aztecs and whoever became the Mongols 20,000 years ago, but beyond that, I’m reasonable certain there is no Asian in my ancestry. Nonetheless, it’s never bothered me that this happens.
Somebody misgendering me in real life would simply look absurd. I couldn’t take it seriously enough to be offended by it.
On the internet, it would merely seem curiously strange, since I’m mostly hanging out on heavily male forums such as this one.
I’ve only ever been misgendered (if you can even call it that) by people unfamiliar with English pronouns, almost always Chinese and Korean immigrants. Obviously that doesn’t bother me at all, despite considering masculinity an important part of who I am. If anything it’s hilarious.
If you’re willing to stretch definitions a bit, I’ve definitely been mistaken for gay a few times due to wearing more cosmopolitan fashion in a rural area. That is much more obnoxious even when it doesn’t involve being hit on by chickenhawks. You could definitely make the argument that it’s because I consider it an insult, though personally I think the main reason it irks me is because of the potential for misunderstandings.
I never picked up on any cues to your gender until you said it right now, but I’d always pictured you as male just because of ‘doctor,’ which I guess is probably mildly sexist, though still the safest bet statistically if we’re assuming medical doctor. I’m reasonably certain Jax has mentioned his wife before, which gave away male.
I’ve definitely been mistaken for gay quite a bit, but that was because several of my better friends in my 20s were gay, so hanging out with them put me in a few places where everyone is just assumed to be gay, which had nothing to do with the way I looked. I dress pretty plainly and lazily and don’t look very cosmopolitan in spite of being a born city boy.
Just to be clear I’m not actually a doctor, or at least I won’t be one for another 4-5 years. My handle is a Mad Max reference: my gravitar (which you can’t see?) is a picture of the character Dr Dealgood, Bartertown’s judge / ringside announcer.
I considered changing it to a less obscure reference but I just can’t seem to get beyond thunderdome…
Yeah, Ghostery blocks the gravatar and since I don’t have one anyway, I’ve never bothered to unblock it.
Very few are the native Chinese speakers I’ve met who consistently distinguish he/she and him/her correctly. It’s not uncommon for them to call someone “she” and then, two minutes later, call the same person “he.” I’m pretty sure this is because, in the Chinese spoken languages, there is no distinction.
There is a relatively recent distinction now made in the written language by use of a “woman” radical in the character for “she,” a development which was originally hailed as a feminist victory of sorts. In 2016, weirdly enough, it may seem like a bad thing, since it prevents 他 from acting as the truly gender neutral pronoun it once did.
I didn’t know that the character difference was so recent.
I only tried to learn Mandarin recently and it was kind of odd to me that they’d have different characters for Ta1 when referring to men and women, but pronounce them both identically. I just wrote it off as a wacky Chinese thing and didn’t connect it to their language reforms.
I’ve always found it strange that they have trouble with he/she, since the written language makes the distinction, and obviously the concept of male/female isn’t foreign to them. Are the written characters just much newer than I assumed, or is this another indication of our brains handling written and spoken language differently?
“Are the written characters just much newer than I assumed, or is this another indication of our brains handling written and spoken language differently?”
Yes and, more importantly (since most living speakers grew up with 她), yes.
This seems to be related to that cis-by-default thing that got discussed a few times a while back. Some people care a lot, some people only care a little bit, some don’t care.
It’s never bothered me much.
Nornagest is obviously male if you know the legendary sagas. If not, I suppose someone could parse it as “Norn, a guest” and reason that Norns are female.
(I’ve also been misgendered.)
To be fair, my namesake is pretty obscure. Most people don’t seem to recognize it as Norse, let alone as a specific character.
(A lot of people assume it’s a Tolkien character, which I guess makes sense given how much he cribbed from the sagas.)
I knew of Nornagest via Poul Anderson, who did a fair amount of saga-cribbing of his own.
I didn’t know the name origin, but somehow knew Nornagest was male. Probably something in the comment history. I have to admit I honestly don’t know either way with you, but I don’t comment here as much as most people. Sometimes I don’t read a post for two months and miss a lot. Then I read again and suddenly all the rules have changed and people are using Harry Potter code words and I’ve never read or seen Harry Potter and I’m confused for a few weeks trying to figure it all out.
“Most people don’t seem to recognize it as Norse”
I didn’t, and I’ve read all of the family sagas and Sturlungasaga pretty recently.
It’s from Olafs saga Tryggvasonar, but the bit it comes from is kind of a side story. How it came to be my regular handle is a long story involving a MUD and a couple of in-jokes.
Does it bother non-trans people generally to be misgendered?
I can speak to one circumstance — I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out with Chinese college students, and being around me forced them to speak largely in English.
If a Chinese speaker indicates a person’s gender in speech, it’s because they chose to do so (by using the appropriate adjective); the language doesn’t encode it in any way. There is only one third-person pronoun (variously spelled, in a really stupid move by someone long ago, 他，她，它, or more exotically). This means that Chinese speakers lack the mental circuitry to make the distinction in real time as they produce sentences, and females are routinely referred to as “he”. (I’m pretty sure the thought process responsible for this goes like so: “I want to say ta” -> “what’s the English for ta?” -> “‘he'”).
The girls very commonly make fun of boys who call them “he” (“I’m your girlfriend! Don’t you know I’m a girl?”), but I’ve never seen one take offense. It’s pretty hard to blame someone for making a mistake you know that you yourself can’t help making most of the time.
Though 她 was originally considered something of a feminist victory, a fact which throws into relief some of the inherent conflict between feminism and transgender.
Do you have more about this? The way I read it, 她 was introduced as a translation aid.
Funny you should mention this. I once saw a trans woman tweet that “men” with anime girl avatars should just admit they’re trans and they’ll feel much better once they’re on HRT.
Either she intentionally misgendered you or you’ve been misgendering yourself all these years.
I think these diagnostic criteria could use some work.
lol. I actually use male anime avatars in some places, so I guess I’m intersex or whatever the nice, non-banworthy equivalent term is.
Why would intersex be ban-worthy?
I’m even worse, I play as male characters when playing games as well as using male avatars! Though my current avatar is a Hindu god – hmmm, am I having delusions of grandeur or simply tapping into my innate divinity?
I should just break down and admit I’m a man, right? Or at least an anthropomorphised symbol of destruction and finality leading to new creation in the symbolic circular processes of time and eternity 🙂
(This is the kind of rigorous “homophobes are really closet cases” logic that impresses me so much in debates).
Why Shiva rather than Kali?
You know, I was never convinced that all the Obama birthers really wished they were born in Nigeria themselves.
On the other hand, we should feel mostly safe around people who agree that meanness, in the unfortunate cases where it’s necessary, must be coordinated. There is no threat at all from pro-coordination skinheads except in the vanishingly unlikely possibility they legally win control of the government and take over.
I suppose I’m glad to hear that you’re fooling yourself with regard to other social classes as well.
Some “ideas” exist solely to encourage “meanness”. It should not be controversial to place Nazism in this category; Nazis were beating up hecklers at Hitler’s pro-coordination speeches before they even adopted the name ‘Nazi Party’. (Also, while “National Socialism” could be given a meaning, it sounds like what a Marxist would expect straw-right-wingers to come up with if they needed an answer to Marxism but didn’t have a coherent ideology beyond hating people.)
Man, it is damn hard for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party to get a fair shake, even in the SSC comments section. The term “Nazi” was a slur used by people who wanted to be mean to them; we should be nice and recognize their self-identification.
…but once you’ve established that, you have an incentive to lump as many of your opponents’ ideas into that category as you can, so that you can be mean to them without inhibition. Making this, ironically, kind of an example of itself.
At first, I thought you were heading for something that occurred to me back when same-sex marriage was in question:
Certain conservative ideas imply that, if we can predict how society will change, we have a moral duty to make that happen as soon as possible and pretend it was never any different.
For example, in an Archipelago you might well have absolute safety…
Didn’t Archipelago have a democratic international government? Armed with the supernatural powers necessary to enforce rules like “you can have as many weapons as you like, but no wars”, “no supplying other clades with media that violates their social mores”?
That seems strictly less safe than a normal constitutional government, since you physically can’t defend yourself from whatever the majority decides counts as “human rights” or “punishing externalities”.
Also, the link mentions that
So I don’t just have to worry about 50% of whatever percentage of the population votes going evil, I also have to worry about standing anywhere within a hundred miles of anyone who offends UniGov right now.
EDIT: Also, Archipelago is literally established by the Messiah.
So I don’t just have to worry about 50% of whatever percentage of the population votes going evil, I also have to worry about standing anywhere within a hundred miles of anyone who offends UniGov right now.
Don’t forget, “the slightest amount of coercion to keep her around” might be no more than saying to her “I think you are making a mistake, please don’t go, your views of what are waiting for you elsewhere are wrong and this is why”. Boom! Carthago delenda est!
This doesn’t account for the adaptive and self-regulating nature of shaming. If I attempt to shame someone for something which is not shameful, I will fail. The target person will not feel shame, and any bystanders who witness it will at a minimum think less of me and will possibly jump in to defend / support the target.
Shaming is less effective if the target is genuinely confident of the rightness of their decisions. I suppose there is no way of judging to what extent calls for spaces safe from (contrary) shaming are really demands that others support the moral self-deception of potential targets, but I bet it is at least part of the story. When you know you are wrong, it is far more urgent to escape examination than when you know you are right.
It could be nigh-infallible due to the partisans of niceness continually re-writing morality and consensus social truth to align with whatever “nice” sentiment has most recently captured their attention (deploying shaming to achieve compliance, of course).
Yeah. “Slavery is not nice, so we know it is wrong” – honestly? So if we had nice slavery, that would make it right? Like the type of Roman slavery where educated Greeks were bought to be teachers and doctors? Or an emperor’s ex-slave could have more power than those of free birth?
Might as well ask “what if we had square circles?”.
This doesn’t make much sense. Most people get upset if someone calls their mother a prostitute, even if they know perfectly well that their mother is not in fact a prostitute.
This is not a matter of objective moral truth (and how could it be when there’s no such thing), it’s a matter of empathetic reaction to verbal agression.
I think if you called my mother a prostitute, I would laugh at you.
Now, perhaps if my mother was not a prostitute, but was for some reaswon in danger of being believed to be a prostitute (like she was a single mother living in comfort without a visible means of support) I might be upset due to the threat that others would believe your accusation.
I might also be upset at the implication that you believe my social status to be so low that you could get away with overtly insulting me.
In neither case would I call the resulting emotion of upset “shame”. I am not claiming that suppressed guilt is the ONLY cause of the direct subjective hurt of shaming.
One problem with the SJ paradigm of dealing with social issues is that is hinges upon a subjective/participant-defined approach to acceptable speech. So rather than deciding whether speech is inaccurate or misleading in a way designed to harm a group, it tends ask “is somebody, especially a disadvantaged group, *offended* by this?”, and if so it designates it unacceptable. The difficulty here is obvious – being offended by something has the perverse incentive of allowing you to silence any criticism or debate. Many of your posts highlight this and related problems really nicely. It spoke to what I feel is a widespread mistake – racism or sexism isn’t bad because it hurts somebody’s feelings, it’s bad because its factually incorrect, harms somebody’s actual prospects in life and potentially risks their physical safety. Even then, I err on the side of allowing it to be openly debated, provided it’s not part of an orchestrated campaign of hate, as defined from a value-neutral POV. Censorship naturally appears suspicious and we should try to support a free search for the truth wherever we can. I think it might be better to err closer to that approach in this case too.
Not at all disagreeing that this is a nifty and useful idea, but it seems like it’s just pushing things back onto a nebulous concept of what defines meanness.
Some conservatives could (plausibly) argue that having a flamboyant gay pride parade through a conservative area of town is “mean”. It’s not unreasonable for them to impute an intent to purposefully confront those with traditional sexual mores for no practical reason. After all, would the pride parade be any less effective for every other non-mean purpose if it was done in a liberal part of town …
Similarly, minorities could quite plausibly argue that chalking “Trump 2016” outside the multicultural center is “mean”. It’s not unreasonable for them to impute an intent to confront those minorities with a nativist political sentiment for no practical reason. After all, would chalking be any less effective for non-mean purpose if was done elsewhere on campus …
And then we’re stuck in an unending series of fine (even micro) judgments about when and how public expression cross some nebulous line into meanness.
[ Maybe it’s just my penchant for bright-line rules. I tend to think that issues with implementation are likely just as important as abstract correctness, which leads me to want to make implementation as mechanical as possible…]
Some conservatives could (plausibly) argue that having a flamboyant gay pride parade through a conservative area of town is “mean”.
“Sweden: Gay march through mainly Muslim area of Stockholm called ‘provocative’ by anti-racist activists”
It certainly has been argued. But only a certain kind of conservative is allowed to claim offense. 🙂
All these micro-judgements are just weapons in tribal skirmishes, and don’t have anything to do with the principles people are debating here.
The subject of marches is a politically sensitive one.
Here’s my current take on gender.
I used to believe it wasn’t that big a deal, and people took it much too seriously.
However, it was observable that transgendered people were acutely miserable living by their birth gender, and (from what I saw, I realize there are exceptions) much happier after they transitioned. I literally don’t know of anything else that will make an adult as visibly happy for a few years as transitioning if they need to. After the few years, they go back to what looks like a more socially average level of happiness.
Clearly, there’s something I don’t understand about gender, though I have come to the conclusion that it’s got a large social component, it’s not just about the body. In fact, I don’t believe (for purposes of understanding happiness and transgender) that there’s such a thing as “a man” or “a woman”– there are just men and women of particular cultures. I suspect there’s imprinting involved.
I do my best to call people by the pronoun they prefer because this is much kinder than not. I haven’t had to deal with anyone who prefers a pronoun other than he, she, or they, and I have no idea whether the people who prefer xe, ve, or other non-English pronouns suffer as much if they’re referred to by a good-approximation English pronoun as someone who prefers “she” over “he” does when referred to as “he”.
This doesn’t mean I manage to really believe that someone who looks like one binary gender is actually the other because they say so. However, I don’t trust my beliefs– I think the way male and female are constructed has something wrong with it.
I wonder what’s going to happen with transgenderism if the gender binary is broken down. Obviously, there might still be people who are very uncomfortable in their bodies, but if the social roles aren’t as different, will there be people who desperately want a role which isn’t the one for the body they’re born into?
I’ve wondered the same thing. Grouping all these people together – that is, people who prefer ‘he’ or ‘she’ with people who prefer non-standard invented pronouns – seems like lumping all vaguely leftist weird people in with each other even though they’re nothing at all alike. Wanting very strongly to be a man or a woman, to the point of surgical modification and hormone therapy, seems like you’ve very clearly bought into the notion of the gender binary, that having facial hair and a penis is what makes a person a man, and of course that ‘man’ is a coherent and obvious grouping to begin with, which is pretty much opposite the politics of someone who is genderqueer, fluid, or otherwise non-binary. They may be allied against a common enemy because they’re both non-traditionalists, but they’re not the same.
>Clearly, there’s something I don’t understand about gender, though I have come to the conclusion that it’s got a large social component, it’s not just about the body. In fact, I don’t believe (for purposes of understanding happiness and transgender) that there’s such a thing as “a man” or “a woman”– there are just men and women of particular cultures. I suspect there’s imprinting involved.
Well, that’s what we’re supposed to believe — I always sort of just believed that boys and girls liking different gender-based toys was a product of culture. What is actually true seems to be much different. This study shows that toy preferences among male and female rhesus monkeys strongly parallels those of human boys and girls:
‘We compared the interactions of 34 rhesus monkeys, living within a 135 monkey troop, with human wheeled toys and plush toys. Male monkeys, like boys, showed consistent and strong preferences for wheeled toys, while female monkeys, like girls, showed greater variability in preferences. Thus, the magnitude of preference for wheeled over plush toys differed significantly between males and females. The similarities to human findings demonstrate that such preferences can develop without explicit gendered socialization. We offer the hypothesis that toy preferences reflect hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases which are sculpted by social processes into the sex differences seen in monkeys and humans.’
Also this:
‘A new study finds that young females in one group of African chimpanzees use sticks as dolls more than their male peers do, often treating pieces of wood like a mother chimp caring for an infant. In human cultures around the world, girls play with dolls and pretend that the toys are babies far more than boys do.
…
“Although play choices of young chimps showed no evidence of being directly influenced by older chimps, young females tended to carry sticks in a manner suggestive of doll use and play-mothering,” Wrangham says.’
The tabula rasa theory is comforting when it comes to things that seem to restrict people, but there just isn’t much evidence for it.
That was perhaps the cutest scientific experiment ever. The other candidate is the fairness experiment with cucumbers and grapes.
My toddler girl makes everything into a phone. Her toy laptop can be a phone. A driver’s license-sized piece of plastic can be a phone. Everything in between in terms of size which she can hold up to her ear can be a phone. I wonder what it would take to get chimps to adopt that behavior and the extent to which it would be gendered.
What do you mean “get” them to adopt behavior?
I assume my kid makes everything a phone because she watches people use phones. Would chimps start pretending things are phones if they watched humans use phones enough? Would this be gendered? (For that matter, is making-everything-a-phone gendered behavior among human toddlers?) I have no idea. I am curious, though. (I am not actually in earnest proposing that someone try this experiment on chimps.)
However, if you look at adults, they may have a strong preference for male or female presentation, but they aren’t indifferent about which cultural presentation they’re doing.
Also, part of what shapes my view is contemplating Orthodox Judaism, in which Talmud study is the male-est sort of male thing. Most human cultures don’t have anything much like Talmud study at all, let alone coding it as male.
Just for the fun of it, I’ll add that Roz Kaveney mentioned that when she studied Chinese, it was considered macho to do so. In China, learning Chinese is gender-neutral.
I’m not saying there’s no reality to gender, just that people live mostly in their imaginations, and they have no idea how much they’re making up. And that Mother Nature/Father Biology are rolling on the floor laughing at human categories.
Has it actually been observed? People talk about this like it’s obviously true, but I’m only aware of 2 studies, one by John Hopkins which found no improvement after surgery (but had a sample size in the dozens), and the one linked elsewhere which has a much larger sample and found the abysmal 1/5 suicide rate unchanged.
Only two studies, but it beats zero.
Er
“Research from the US and Holland suggests that up to a fifth of patients regret changing sex. A 1998 review by the Research and Development Directorate of the NHS Executive found attempted suicide rates of up to 18% noted in some medical studies of gender reassignment.
…
You either have an operation or suffer a miserable life. A fifth of those who don’t get treatment commit suicide.””
The first is attempts. The second is successes.
Good catch. Anybody have access to the actual study so we can compare like to like, without reporters getting in the way?
@ Steve Sailer
From a few quick Googles, variations on [ disappointment after surgery ] brings up mostly cosmetic surgery, then weight loss surgery. [ Suicide after surgery ] brought up mostly weight loss, a few mentions of controversial articles re suicide after sex change surgery.
If some sort of baseline were compiled of disappointments with different kinds of (technically successful) surgeries, perhaps it would show high rates of disappointment for people with serious social problems they blame on the original physical defect — such as getting a nose job or weight loss surgery or cochlear implant that does not fix the social problem.
Sex change could bring a strong disappointment as it’s radical and permanent. But if what little data we have shows that X% of patients would be miserable and/or suicidal whether they got the treatment or not, and some who got it would be very happy with the result — that’s a good outcome stronger than likely with the nose job or the weight loss.
Base rates? My sense is that cosmetic surgery is vastly more common than sex change surgery.
Scott’s distinction between free speech and picketing funerals would not be accepted by the courts: picketing is a form of speech. As is so-called “misgendering”: I am not comfortable referring to a trans person by their preferred pronoun, because I believe that amounts to endorsing a theory of gender that is wrong. Not really an issue on the internet, though, because I can just avoid using any pronoun.
Thankfully bloggers, not the courts, have sovereignty over their own comment sections
I think this sort of “half-measure” is unlikely to go well. One option would be to institute the following set of rules:
-Refer to people as members of their self-identified gendered. Do not insinuate this gender is not “real.”
-No discussing the trans-rights movement. Statements in support or opposition to trans-rights are banned. For example discussion of the bathroom laws is not allowed.
Yes, the policy as currently described basically bans any cogent way of articulating the “trans is a bunch of nonsense” position, while leaving the pro side unshackled.
But really, why don’t we get into the concrete case that we all know is going to come up?
Multi is going to bait Jaime, Jaime is going to bite, and then Multi is going to demand that Jaime be banned.
Is the policy that Jaime will be banned for taking the bait, that they both will be banned if he takes the bait, or that Multi will be automatically banned for baiting in the first place, regardless of response? Because this has already played out more than once in the comments, and the perverse incentives some of those options present should be obvious enough. Better to precommit now so everybody knows where they stand.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. Maybe if we are lucky Sunzuanime will get caught up in it as well.
Hey now, that man (or woman) is an artist (or artista).
That’s not a very nice thing to say. I’m going to need to see some org charts here.
That’s such a spiteful comment, what did the anime general ever do to you?
To be honest, multiheaded may be a Commie, have very tumblrish behavior, a recalcitrant hatred of libertarians and be in general a very angry person, but, as far as I’ve seen, the baiting usually goes the other way around.
You really think that would happen?
I’ll admit I don’t always have the patience or time to slog through the comment threads on SSC, so correct me if there’s an example showing I’m wrong – but I’d give good odds that Multi gets banned (again) before Jaime.
… and when has Multi asked for someone to be banned? (Besides herself.)
Most recently, fairly recently, probably kicked off here.
This is the point where I realize I spend way too much time reading SSC threads.
The problem would be that probably the easiest way to solve this would be a list of the commenters’ names with “these are the pronouns each wants you to use, if you use any others I’m going to assume you’re doing it deliberately and ban you”.
But the problem is that would require people to out themselves as trans who might not want to do so, plus it would give a list of targets to anyone who wanted to be an asshole about it.
So unless Scott introduces a policy that requires us to use singular “they” when referring to everyone, the only thing we can do is stumble on with occasionally saying “he” or “she” in error, getting corrected for it and being assumed not to have deliberately done it on the “one bite” rule, and if the same person does it again in reference to the person they’ve been corrected about, then banning.
so there is no such thing as a stupid pronoun? If you think that’s a value-neutral rule, you have your facts wrong
I didn’t say it was value neutral.
Ok, but forcing people to take a specific ideological stance on something as basic as language is a bad thing in a comment section where complicated philosophical subjects are debated using, you know, language.
The conflict should be decided. Allowing this conflict to go on is a bad idea. The rationalist diasphora is 4-5% trans. Scott is not willing to let people call trans-people by anything but their preferred gender.
The one reasonable concession is that discussion should be banned on both sides. So people can’t openly argue for trans-rights.
Though I am actually unsure of Scott’s opinion on preferred pronouns other than he/she/they.
For example discussion of the bathroom laws is not allowed.
That’s tricky, though: suppose one’s position is “I couldn’t give a damn about gender identities, but I think this piece of legislation is piss-poor law on technical legal grounds” and one wishes to argue that? Or the contrary: “I think ‘you can decide your own gender’ is valid but I also think states have the right to create their own laws and this law is legally fine, even if I disagree with it”?
People might want to discuss the technicalities of topics that are in the spotlight but a blanket ban means they can’t do so, even if the point they want to discuss has nothing to do with the hurtful aspect.
“but you are not allowed to actually misgender transgender commenters here.”
Calling people what they call themselves is a basic rule of politeness, but does this extend to wacky tumblr pronouns beyond “he” and “she”? Because that sounds like a tiring series of ideological hoops to jump through just to have a conversation.
Seconded; one of he/she/they/it is manageable, but an arbitrarily large number of unfamiliar terms is obnoxious.
I’d rather leave than be forced to adopt sci-fi pronouns, FWIW.
But sci-fi pronouns would be fun, Le Maistre Chat! And we wouldn’t be arguing over singular versus plural “they” if instead we all used “xie” or “kazarr” or the like.
I’d be much more amenable to someone saying “In future, Xo request kleebah all to address qa with the pronouns “tsanz, tsanx, tsanqq” when communicating with or about qa. Thanking kleebah in advance!” 🙂
Heh, you have a point.
If you’re going to change pronouns, go all the way. Why confine it to third person singular? 🙂
Scott said we couldn’t misgender transgender commenters. He didn’t say anything about honoring requests for zhe or war-and-peace-as-pronouns or toasters or any of the other reductios people are trying to throw against the wall.
So we can call non-transgender commentors the other sex, apparently. I don’t think Scott wanted to create a unique privilege for the transgender caste, but there it is.
What if your “gender” is neither male nor female?
Use singular they or construct your sentences to avoid the need for a gendered pronoun.
Claim you don’t want to because of the purity of your truth telling, claim that you don’t want to because it concedes a point you aren’t willing to concede, claim you don’t want to just because you don’t feel like — all fine. But don’t claim you are being asked to do rocket surgery; it is easy to avoid being banned under the rule if you choose to comply with it. There’s no need to for smart ass requests for clarifications.
Why the spittle-flecked post, Anonymous? Do you think I am not asking this in good faith? Take a deep breath and cool off, because I am being 100% earnest. You someone extracted the idea that the singular “they” would always be appropriate while “he” or “she” very well might not be, but I am not sure from where. Can you fill me in?
FWIW, I read previous Anonymous’s tone as calm, not spittle-flecked. I think the medium of text is making people seem less polite than they intend to be.
Personally, I’d be surprised if anyone here ever took offense to “they.”
Then you’re most likely deluded and should probably do something about that.
I am sorry if this is the n-th time (which as well might be the case) someone came up with this in the comment thread, but it seems to me that the nature of “misgendering” someone is (or could be) quite a bit different from “shaming” people and hence seems like quite an arbitrary (and rather strange) requirement.
The difference between calling someone who is biologically a man a “he” and saying “you’re an an evil capitalist/socialist pigdog” quite a big one I think. If I use the first it could be simply because I might believe that using gendered pronouns based on what people want to be called is nonsensical and I’d rather stick to objective biological facts (rather than dealing with messy contents of people’s heads). It does not necessarily have to mean that I want to shame someone or tell them to “go back in line”. At the same time the pigdog cannot reasonably interpreted as anything other than an insult. There is also a difference between someone calling someone a “he” even though that person identifies as a “she” (or the other way around) and saying “you’re a goddamn man, stop acting like you’re not!”. The first one is just about using a personally preferred concept of gender, the second one is trying to force other people to share that concept as well, which is what I would personally find the most annoying about that.
But the exact same thing (albeit mirrored) is when transgender people try to force others to share their concept of gender. I personally am ok with calling someone who feels like a woman a she, even though it is biologically a man the same way I am ok with calling someone by his preferred nickname (or not using a nickname he does not like) regardless of what I think about it.
But note that there is a difference between insisting on using an undesired nickname, which is definitely not a nice thing and serves no other purpose than annoying that person and using a gender pronoun based on biology, which, even though it could also serve that purpose, can also simply be a matter of how one sees the world. If that is the case, the person insisting semi-forcibly that someone use his favourite gender pronoun is actually the bully, IMO. Hence, since I don’t see that as nice in the first place, I don’t feel obligated to be nice either.
So to wrap it up, generally I think the rule of banning people here who are obviously not nice is a reasonably good one (because flame wars are annoying and make the discussion more difficult…on the other hand, it is useful to have a full information of what people are like if “let loose” and decide to interact or not interact with them based on that), I think one should definitely have quite a high standard of proof for what is “obviously not nice”. The stated principle of this blog is charity – and assuming that someone who refuses address someone else with a personal pronoun of the other person’s choice is doing it for malicious reasons, is not very charitable. While “don’t you call yourself a woman you pansy” clearly meets the standard of not being nice”, referring to a male (male still reserves its biological meaning only, or does it not?) transsexual as a “he” does not.
There’s a commonly used loophole here: Yes, assuming someone is doing it maliciously is not charitable. But you can tell them it upsets you and if they keep doing it, then they’re doing it despite being told that it upsets someone. Knowing that it upsets someone and doing it anyway is by definition malious and needs to be punished.
So not only do we the principle of charity you descrined, we need an additional one which says that just because something upsets someone doesn’t mean that the upset trumps everything else, and something can be knowingly upsetting yet not malicious.
we need an additional one which says that just because something upsets someone doesn’t mean that the upset trumps everything else, and something can be knowingly upsetting yet not malicious
Engaging once again in the disgusting habit of dragging religion into it, this is the “weaker brethren” approach which is an extension of the principle of charity (see St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapters 14 and 15: “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. 2 Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.”)
Arguing that [something] is wrong/right may upset another person yet not be meant maliciously nor need it be incorrect. What we have to do in a particular case is decide:
(1) Is this so important that I am willing to continue upsetting the other person? Or is it only important to me, and not really an important point, so I can avoid discussing it in future or at least not in terms the other person finds distressing?
(2) Is that a genuine request about distress, or are they only using that as a silencing tactic – “help, help, I’m bein’ oppressed”?
In doubtful matters, charity, so unless it is something we can justify as objectively important (and not a personal hobbyhorse), we should take the distress of others into account as to how or whether we argue a point.
You can’t separate between becoming genuinely distressed and using it as a silencing tactic.
It’s common for people to become distressed only if it gets them something–yet their distress is genuine. Their subconscious feeds them distress in a strategic manner even though the distress, when experienced, is real.
By specifically deferring to genuine distress, you just create incentives that encourage this sort of subconscious strategy.
Parents of toddlers know this well. I’m sure my daughter feels genuine distress when I deny her another piece of candy, but giving in to the ensuing tantrum will just result in her continuing to exhibit genuine distress every time she wants something.
Teaching her that my “no” is firm results in much less genuine distress in the long run.
I basically agree with you but also with Deiseach. If something is important (although it is of course also hard to say what is “objectively important”) then insisting on using one term even though the other party is allegedly distressed by it is fine. If not, then it does indeed qualify as malice. I think that using he/she based on biological sex might be argued to be important enough (although to me, he/she is a mix of physical and psychological, basically “I feel like this person is feminine/masculine” rather than “this person was born with female/male genitalia”, but the latter definition is obviously more clear cut). Insisting on calling someone with a nickname they don’t like and which carries no significant meaning otherwise is almost definitely not important.
This is not mathematics and so these things are necessarily more hazy than would be nice and eventually it boils down to personal judgment. But my point is not that “misgendering” (I use the quotation marks, because unless you specify what the one correct definition of gender is, you cannot really misgender anyone, not objectively) people is never malice but that it is not automatically malice (not even if done against the wishes of the one who is being “misgendered”) and does not automatically deserve a ban in the comments section of a blog whose central idea is charity.
What if we reverse this – is it okay for someone to use the birth name of Bob Commenter, if they know it and think that it’s a more “real” name than their online nick? Is it okay to continue after Bob says they prefer to keep their online affairs distinct from their real life? Or if they say they just prefer their handle?
And, I mean, we already use “Lord Voldemort” as a nickname frequently enough. If the person in question posted here and asked us to not do that, I think we could reasonably argue that it’s a more right nickname than his own choice is, since it captures such important aspects of his political views in a way everyone can understand. That argument would not, in my opinion, be correct – it would be as wrong as insisting on using pronouns associated with birth gender – but we could make it. So where’s the actual difference between a (nick)name and a pronoun that makes using one after being asked not to rude, and the other just an expression of a worldview?
I don’t think the line here is as sharp as you want it to be.
Dirdle: I do see a distinction. A name is something rather arbitrary which is given to me. My name is Tibor but from what my parents told me I could have easily been an Adam or a Karel (Czech version of Carl). By changing their mind on the day I was born, they could have made me an Adam, they could not have made me be born a female. The pronouns he and she used as a way to denote someone’s sex are way less arbitrary than given names. That said, I do agree that in some cases a “she” might still be a better description for someone born physically male, because we normally use it to denote more than just what kind of genitalia you are born with and there are border cases of people who’s psychology is rather female even though they would classify biologically as male or vice versa. Still, the physiological part is the most clear cut because it is easier to observe and to judge. If someone decides to use that as a sole guide to which gender pronoun to use then I don’t think that he is incorrect. I think that he is not capturing the full story, but it is far from being mean.
This post was meandering and incoherent, with so many unprincipled exceptions and downright non-sequiturs that my opinion of the author has become much lower.
Why not just say “my opinions are illogical and incoherent, and I may ban anybody who espouses traditional morality,or points out that people who think they are the other sex are wrong, or who publicly disapproves of immorality, or makes me take offense on behalf of some hypothetical person whom I imagine should feel offended or just generally points out that my expressed views are absurd, or points out that the predictable end result of my non-negotiable social beliefs is profound degeneracy leading to the fall of Western Civilization and the replacement and dispossession of the posterity of those who founded and built it. ”
If you’ll read the last bit again, that’s the reason I and people like me consider you and people like you to be existential threats who must be defeated and expelled.
“Why not just say ‘my opinions are illogical and incoherent…'”
Scott’s already admitted that much, at least.
EH, were I to run a traditional (not Traditionalist) Catholic blog and say “I’m going to ban people who argue against traditional morality or who try to push for immorality in society”, would you say that my opinions are illogical and incoherent, or that I do not have the right to run my own blog as I see fit, or that I am an existential threat who should be defeated and expelled from Western Civilisation?
Scott is liberal in his politics and beliefs (by “liberal” I do not mean any particular political position more general than “on the leftward side of the spectrum of left and right”; I’m not trying to pin him down to any particular party or grouping). So he runs his blog by those lights, and he is perfectly entitled to do so.
Whether you or anyone else find his opinions illogical and incoherent is a subjective matter of judgement. But you cannot say that he is acting beyond his bounds in exercising his right to set limits to the kinds of things he is willing to permit or entertain on his own personal blog.
This is not a public space in the sense of the public square. This is a personal and private endeavour. He is not setting himself up as a media or political space for opposing ideologies to fight it out. He is attempting to be a neutral (insofar as we know what he chooses to tell us of his beliefs and ethical system choices, so we can judge where he is coming from) facilitator of a certain level of discussion, but this is not a free-range forum – that’s what the sub-reddit is for. He posts on particular topics that interest him or have attracted his attention, and we get to talk about those.
Scott can, if he wishes, put up a post about knitting patterns. If that meanders into a fight over the future of Western Civilisation, I think he’s perfectly entitled to say “That’s not what I want to hear about, I want to know your opinion on plain versus purl stitch, anybody who wants to fight about the Hurrians if it’s not related to textile arts is getting the boot”.
He is the God-Emperor of this blog and is entitled to invoke the Reign of Terror if it so pleases him, and I’m happy with that! 🙂
There’s a difference between openly not being fair, and pretending to be fair while actually not.
Scott can moderate the blog in any way he wants, but if he pretends to be moderating it for rational discourse while really moderating it against rational discourse, he’s going to get criticized for it.
>EH, were I to run a traditional (not Traditionalist) Catholic blog and say “I’m going to ban people who argue against traditional morality or who try to push for immorality in society”, would you say that my opinions are illogical and incoherent, or that I do not have the right to run my own blog as I see fit, or that I am an existential threat who should be defeated and expelled from Western Civilisation?
[Yes. As a Catholic,your opinions are illogical and incoherent. You can run your blog as you see fit, but that does not make your opinions logical or coherent, nor does it make them correct. Arguing for traditional morality makes Catholics pro-civilization, so tolerable, unlike those arguing for degeneracy, nevertheless the bulk of their beliefs are false and self-contradictory, and ultimately they have no right to be wrong, therefore those beliefs must be defeated. If they don’t surrender and admit their error, then at some point tolerance will end and they must go.]
>Scott is liberal in his politics and beliefs (by “liberal” I do not mean any particular political position more general than “on the leftward side of the spectrum of left and right”; I’m not trying to pin him down to any particular party or grouping). So he runs his blog by those lights, and he is perfectly entitled to do so.
[Yes, but that doesn’t make him right, nor consistent. By the same token, if his host culture doesn’t accept his views, as it shouldn’t, then he has no beef if it excludes him as he excludes those who attack his existance and culture.]
>Whether you or anyone else find his opinions illogical and incoherent is a subjective matter of judgement. But you cannot say that he is acting beyond his bounds in exercising his right to set limits to the kinds of things he is willing to permit or entertain on his own personal blog.
>[A matter of judgement is a matter of being right or wrong. He is wrong. His feelings are wrong. His subjectivity is wrong. His belief in what is best for him is wrong, and his claims of what is best for others are *utterly* wrong. If he isn’t willing to entertain what is right, that promiscuity, homosexuality, mental and sexual disease, the behaviors that spread them, and the culture that supports them are wrong, then he has no right to be accepted by any culture – if he rejects what is right then I reject him, I reject his beliefs, I oppose his spreading those diseased beliefs,]
>This is not a public space in the sense of the public square. This is a personal and private endeavour. He is not setting himself up as a media or political space for opposing ideologies to fight it out. He is attempting to be a neutral (insofar as we know what he chooses to tell us of his beliefs and ethical system choices, so we can judge where he is coming from) facilitator of a certain level of discussion, but this is not a free-range forum – that’s what the sub-reddit is for. He posts on particular topics that interest him or have attracted his attention, and we get to talk about those.
[If this is not a public place, then I suppose that you agree that private shops need not deal with those who oppose their beliefs. If Mr. Aaronson can’t be forced to allow a comment, then a bakery can’t be forced to write endorsements of ass-fucking on a cake.]
>Scott can, if he wishes, put up a post about knitting patterns. If that meanders into a fight over the future of Western Civilisation, I think he’s perfectly entitled to say “That’s not what I want to hear about, I want to know your opinion on plain versus purl stitch, anybody who wants to fight about the Hurrians if it’s not related to textile arts is getting the boot”.
[Hypothetical. He is talking about these subjects, and is asserting that the opinions held almost universally in every culture worthy of the name are now unacceptable.]
>He is the God-Emperor of this blog and is entitled to invoke the Reign of Terror if it so pleases him, and I’m happy with that! ?
[Glad to hear you’re on-board with God-Emperors. Go Trump!]
My last comment should have said: “Mr. Alexander”.
Let me just say that, even if you can coordinate it, being mean isn’t always the best choice.
I wonder how funny the “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer” meme looks now, given that both Cruz and Kasich have dropped out of the race and The Donald is looking worryingly like he will be the Republican nominee? Perhaps framing the discourse on a higher level than “Ted Cruz is weird-looking” might have served the Democrat-supporting right-thinking people better in the long run?
Better hope those t-shirts made a lot of money! Though don’t worry, I think Trump is not going to try overturning Roe vs Wade or anything like it.
The “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer” stuff helped Trump, but not because anyone was convinced of the badness of Cruz as a result. Rather, it looked like the same sort of contempt towards conservatives (broadly, non-leftists) as has become common, which resulted in more support for the one candidate willing to hit back: Trump.
I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of Instapundit’s response to David Brooks these last few months and I expect to get a lot more before November.
Message received and understood.
Translation: “I like things the way they are. People who don’t should kill themselves.”
When you say “America doesn’t need fixing”, what exactly do you mean? Do you mean that America has no problems whatsoever?
Of course it isn’t perfect. It also isn’t broken and doesn’t need to charge radically in order to “become great again”. It’s the greatest it’s ever been.
If the tea party or trump people have their way things will be objectively worse for them (never mind me). Utils from spite are great and all, but you can’t eat them.
And I never said anything about killing themselves, though exile to either Mexico or Moldova (their choice) would be a pleasing aesthetic symmetry to it.
–Bernie Sanders
(wait, shit, wrong guy)
(Also, this does not appear to be entirely accurate when we compare median male income to median male income: https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/. So maybe not.).
(But see also https://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-087.pdf)
If the tea party or trump people have their way things will be objectively worse for them.
The Whole what’s the matter with Kansas? trope has been thoroughly debunked on this blog more than once.
I also suspect that any real attempt on the part of the working class to leave or secede would be painted as treason. After all, the government can’t afford to let it’s tax base fly the coup.
Edit:
also see Psmith’s comment above.
The car thing’s a little more complicated than it seems. I did a similar comparison a while back (a 2012 Ford Focus versus, if memory serves, a ’73 Maverick; a bit downmarket from a Civic and a Buick, but similar in spirit), and found that while the Focus cost twice as much adjusted for inflation, it was also about twice as good in every way that matters: power, acceleration, safety, cargo space, fuel economy. Plus the stereo, of course. And a lot more than twice as good when it comes to reliability; there’s a reason there aren’t many ’73 Mavericks on the road right now.
That all sounds pointless from the perspective of a nineteen-year-old that just wants a vehicle for college, until you realize that used cars now are fairly reliable in most cases, while used cars in 1973 were a crapshoot at best regardless of age or brand. Buy a used vehicle for half of the sticker price on a new one and you’re still getting all those amenities, adjusted down a bit for progress since the last model refresh. Except that your car will probably last for five to ten years instead of ten to fifteen. And that’s still better than what you’d get out of the Maverick.
@Hlynkacg
Flyover working class isn’t a tax base. It’s giant welfare sink, albeit they insist on getting their welfare covertly.
And Psmith wrong person indeed. You can tell because he characteristically writes as though woman aren’t real people. Wouldn’t go well with his pro-rape cheerleading I guess. Ad hominium and all that, but I can’t think of any other person that I’d be less inclined to listen to with an open mind.
Anon, I’m very much not a Jim fan, but he doesn’t even mention gender issues in that post, or women at all aside from a throwaway reference to taking a girl for a ride. Can we at least try to take issues on their merits rather than shitting on the people that bring them up?
In the section quoted it’s the dog that didn’t bark. No mention was the problem.
Edit: Actually there is a mention: “The working class guy of 1972 could take a girl for a ride a lot easier than the working class guy of 2010.”
I’m guessing you suspect him of some sleight of hand by using male income in ’73 vs. median in 2010?
It’s a logical place to look for sleight of hand, but it’s not happening in this case; you get similar results if you use household income, or inflation-adjusted prices without touching income at all. Middle-class wages have been flat for thirty years pretty much any way you look at it, and new cars really have gotten more expensive. However, “new” glosses over some changes in the market, and you’re getting the same or more value for money, as I show above.
Flyover working class isn’t a tax base. It’s giant welfare sink.
Right, because the real wealth producers work in clean places like restaurants and banks, not in dirty places like coal mines and steel mills. This is classism on your part pure and simple. This sort of classism is big part of why members of said class think that “America needs fixing” in the first place.
I can’t think of any other person that I’d be less inclined to listen to with an open mind.
anon@gmail making an appeal to reputation? The lack of self awareness is telling.
@Nornagest
No I’m saying he simply doesn’t care if women’s welfare has improved. They aren’t real people and they don’t count.
While I can’t say I’ve read every anon@gmail post, I’d gladly put up the oeuvre against Mr. Rape’s.
And yes Hlynkacg it turns out Marx was wrong about the labor theory of value. Maybe someone should get the word out to the flyover working class. Who knew there were so many marxists in that group?
You may be right, but surely we, people who aren’t Jim and presumably do care about women’s welfare, might be interested in the prices of consumer goods over time? Women buy cars too.
You might be concerned about the price of consumer goods, but 1) you seem to come to a different conclusion than jim and 2) you (probably) acknowledge that other things are important to.
Besides which I don’t see how any of this is much of a refutation of my claims that: “[America] isn’t broken”, “[America] is the greatest it’s ever been”, and “If the tea party or trump people have their way things will be objectively worse for them”.
@Nornagest, very sound points. I don’t entirely disagree. Tires and brakes have gotten a lot better since 1972, to name but two.
That said:
1. I’m pretty sure that you could at least get a lot more street-legal straight-line acceleration for your dollar in 1972 than you can today. (Well, except for sportbikes, now I think of it. Hm.). To go with the Buick theme, a 1970 GSX claimed 510 lb-ft of torque and a likely underrated 350 hp for $4880 with a 13.38 quarter mile. I don’t believe you can get a stock street-legal car that will do that today new for under $40,000.
2.
I would think the relevant comparison is between ’73 Mavericks on the road today and 2010 Foci on the road in 2053, which doesn’t strike me as an obvious win for the Foci. Also, it’s my understanding that old cars were a lot easier to fix yourself when they broke down, although I don’t have enough personal experience to confirm or deny this.
3. With respect to fuel economy, presumably the stagnationists will say that needing to worry about fuel economy in the first place is a sign of declining wealth.
4. Likewise, I don’t know that I want to say that nobody really cares about safety, but I don’t have much of a response to the claim that we’ve made cars safer not because anybody except Ralph Nader actually wanted safer cars but because we can’t make cars faster, or even as fast as we used to, at the same price point.
@Nornagest: Middle-class wages have been flat for thirty years pretty much any way you look at it, and new cars really have gotten more expensive. However, “new” glosses over some changes in the market, and you’re getting the same or more value for money, as I show above.
But was Jim Sanders right about bread?
anon@gmail
Who said anything about labor theory of value?
You can’t eat a hedge fund, and buying food with that money is dependent on someone having that food and being willing to sell. Likewise you can burn money to keep warm (if you have the physical cash), but burning gas works better.
Seriously, how long do you think the cultural centers like New York or LA would last if the fly-overs actually decided that they were done playing?
Edit:
Maybe someone should get the word out to the flyover working class. Who knew there were so many marxists in that group?
You obviously haven’t been paying attention to the 2016 Democratic Primary results. Anyone else “Feeling the Bern”?
@Psmith: Subaru claims a 13.2 quarter mile for its 2015 WRX, which you can probably get for around $25K. Some modern muscle cars can get you into that neighborhood in their stock spec, too — the Camaro seems to be the fastest — but that’ll push you closer to the $40K price point.
That said, I’m willing to concede that you could probably get a lot more straight-line speed for money in the early Seventies — largely because cars weren’t loaded down with all the safety and emissions-control shit then that they have now.
@Le Maistre Chat: It’s superficially plausible, but I honestly haven’t a clue. If you want to take a whack at it, be my guest.
Diamonds are more valuable than water. Are we going to go through every idiotic misunderstanding of value?
Diamonds are more valuable than water.
Only in such cases where water is plentiful and diamonds aren’t, and even then their relative value is strictly circumstantial. You should look to your own “idiotic misunderstandings of value” before castigating others.
Seriously, you didn’t learn this stuff in high school?
Very nice.
Anyway, yeah, I see what you’re saying. I just think that the stagnationists have at least a colorable case here.
We have speed limits. I’m not sure what advantage there is to getting more speed than you can legally use.
I don’t know about bread because there are many different kinds of bread, but USDA tracks a weighted-average index of all cereal grains going back to the 1880s. It was $1.57 in 1972 and $5.18 in 2010, which at 3.29 is less than the income multiplier of 4.32, as median male income was actually $7450 in 1972 and $32205 in 2010. I’m not sure where Jim got the numbers, but that’s from Psmith’s Census link. The grain price is bulk, not retail, so hey, maybe Wonder Inc. has tripled its markup over the same span, or maybe he’s comparing Wonder bread from 1972 to artisan ciabatta in 2010.
This isn’t to say the lower end of the middle class hasn’t gotten stiffed a bit in the last 40 years (though I don’t see why you need to lie to prove it), but usually the culprits would be housing, college, and healthcare expenses, which have all badly outpaced anything tracked by CPI and haven’t obviously become better products to the extent something like motor vehicles have.
That link was Psmith’s, not mine.Caught me within the edit window.
Is it really okay to compare male income? I’d expect that having more women in the workforce would affect men’s income–if you have more people applying for jobs, but the number of jobs hasn’t gone up by enough, then the salary will go down.
You may need to compare household income instead, but that has its own problems if there’s a greater divorce and single parent rate. Maybe two person household income?
I definitely don’t think you should only look at male income. I just did that because Jim did.
“So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.”
Yup. See also: Rabid Puppies.
Your position can be boiled down to “We should import foreign workers because they’re easier to exploit than the locals”.
That’s refreshingly honest of you.
Edit:
It’s also telling that you assume that dirty work naturally means “unskilled”. Your classism is showing again.
Who said anything about exploiting? It would be a trade of value for value. Is this more cowboy Marxism? Maybe Red was the right color after all.
You did when you brought up finding “other takers”.
You want to find cheaper labor elsewhere? That’s fine, but if you think that’s Marxism, you really need to reacquaint yourself with Hobbes, Smith, and Rand.
I’m not the one that called hiring cheaper labor “exploiting”. Also, no one needs to acquaint, much less reacquaint, himself with a third rate novelist with delusions of grandeur.
No, you just said that they should kill themselves if they’re not satisfied with their lot, or otherwise fuck off to Moldova. Afterall, labor is cheap.
I pointed out that it’s not nearly as cheap as you seem to assume because if the flyover class were to actually “fuck off” en masse the cultural centers that you value so highly would collapse. LA would be a charnel house without food and water from the Central Valley, and New York would freeze come winter without Appalachia’s coal and gas.
You also seem to be ignoring the fact that the “flyovers” are a sizable percentage of the population, and control a sizeable chunk of territory. Why would they “fuck off to Moldova” when they can fuck off to Idaho or Utah?
The irony of course is that any attempt to actually do so gets painted as treason, and the same folks who’re saying that the country would be “much improved if they took a hike” will turn around demand that the US Government use any and all power at it’s command to stop them if they tried. They think the current game is rigged, and that’s why “Flipping the Table” by electing someone like Sanders or Trump is looking like an increasingly attractive option.
No one is or will paint emigration as treason. That’s your own personal delusion.
You’ve obviously never had to pay expatriation taxes, nor have you paid much attention to US history. If (by way of example) the Mormons were to re-found the Nation of Deseret you’d better believe that the US Government would come down on them like a ton of bricks. Historically the Feds have taken a dim view of individual states/municipalities operating independently.
As I said you can’t eat spite.
Except it wont be the flyovers that will hurting for food if the system collapses. As I said above, most of the farms, reservoirs, and power-plants that the coastal urban centers depend on for their survival are situated in flyover territory.
I’m curious, do you view lower-income urban demographics with the same disdain you view the flyovers? or is it tribalism all the way down?
I like the bait and switch where fucking off to Moldova all of a sudden becomes starting a insurrection and trying to steal part of the country. Well done.
As for the urban poor, at least they don’t insist that their welfare be dressed up — and that they really aren’t on welfare but are in fact the most valuable people around. They know their place.
Bait and switch? You just haven’t been paying attention. See my initial reply…
As someone who spent a good chunk of time living/working abroad emigration out of the US is actually rather restrictive compared to most countries. You either need to pay a rather hefty expatriation fee or you need to continue to pay US income and property taxes on your foreign job/home. Otherwise you end up on the IRS’s (and Interpol’s) shit-list. As such leaving isn’t always an option, at least not for low-income folk dissatisfied with the IRS.
That leaves secession or “Going Galt” which you characterized as “trying to steal part of the country” but that characterization begs the question. Why we do the residents of New York have a stronger claim on the ownership of Utah than the Residents of Salt Lake City? Are you really that eager for a scrap?
I’m also curious as to what you think is being “dressed up”, it’s no secret that rural states spend more money per capita on things like roads, irrigation, and electricity, because the distances are longer and the people are fewer but that isn’t exactly “welfare” seeing as how those same roads and power-lines are what allow the rural areas to provide the cities with all the goods they take for granted. If they were to be disposed of it would be the urbanites who felt the pinch first, not the flyovers.
The only one that applies to our hypothetical working class expatriates to Moldova is not paying the five prior years worth of taxes, in which case they are already on the IRS’ shitlist.
There’s a long history of working class dupes thinking they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires and worrying terribly about what their taxes will be once they turn all around. Maybe that’s what you were going for?
As for your last paragraph, subsidies for rural living are not necessary to produce food or timber or coal. They might reduce the price, but they aren’t necessary and are an inefficient way of reducing the price even if they do. And in any event there’s always foreign trade. You threadbare fantasies about how rural areas are the secret beating heart are pathetic. And rural living subsidies aren’t even the worst forms of hidden welfare. That’d be disability, farm subsidies and above all the MIC.
Diamonds are more valuable than water.
Diamond availability on the market is carefully controlled to keep the prices high. God’s sake, even late Victorian/Edwardian novelists were using this as a plot point! (Pardon the faux-Cockney rendered phonetically, it’s in the original):
That’s the whole rationale behind blood diamonds – they are sold outside of the official markets in order to raise finance for warlords or insurgents (and my cynicism prompts me to think that the World Diamond Council was more worried about independent and competing sources of diamonds getting onto the market and reducing the price, rather than the ethics of exploitation and warmongering).
As much as I hate sending traffic to Salon, this article I just read responds perfectly to those who think “there’s nothing wrong with America.”
Just goes to show you myopia isn’t limited to the left or the right.
This is just nonsense. Forty years ago was not some sort of golden age for the lower classes. On the contrary. The only metric that’s gotten significantly worse since then is inequality, and the only people that care about that are those that want to harness the politics of resentment and jealousy to further their personal ambitions. A rising tide really does, and has, lifted all boats. What it doesn’t do is fix the flaws in human nature, unfortunately.
Not exactly the last word in coherence, that article. If Clinton is a tool of the elites, and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Clinton and Trump, what can it possibly mean to say “the game, for the elites, is over”?
“The only metric”
I rest my case.
I wish I was a good enough writer to channel Deiseach, but just imagine one of her “tru wuv” responses on gay marriage except this time on the pride of the lower classes. I give no fucks. If they aren’t just dupes and really do want to burn it all down and experience true pain because their feelings are hurt, than I am entirely justified in thinking we’d be better off if they fucked off to Moldova.
That is kind of a key point. I do believe we’re dealing with Social Contract Is Love Social Contract Is Life anon from upthread.
I wonder about this, actually. Going by the standard “federal money in minus federal money out” type metrics, red states tend to get a pretty good return on their taxes relative to blue, but the presence of the black belt complicates attempts to apply this fact to discussions of the white working class. See for instance 1, 2. But see also.
Nobody said that it was, only that it was arguably better than now.
Consider the alien world described by Jack Kerouac and JD Salinger where people can just wander in off the street, ask for a job, and have a reasonable expectation of getting it. Consider the experience of someone who grew up in the “rust belt”. Who’s parents lost their jobs when the local mine or factory closed, and who has since watched their hometown fall apart.
Do you really think they’re better off now than they would have been 40 years ago or even 20?
…and they are equally justified in thinking that we’d be better off if the urbanites fucked off to Sweden or Cuba. Yes, you can argue that all the money gets made in the cities, but they’ll just respond that without them there’d be nothing that money could buy.
You’re basically in the position of any good Londoner of the 1800s who hates it when those damn dirty Sepoys try to haggle with you on the price of tea and will demand that the full might of the Empire be brought down upon them should they try “steal” India from it’s rightful British owners.
PS:
In regards to the “working class dupes thinking they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires” you conveniently left off the part at the top where…
If you are a U.S. citizen or resident alien, the rules for filing income, estate, and gift tax returns and paying estimated tax are generally the same whether you are in the United States or abroad. Your worldwide income is subject to U.S. income tax, regardless of where you reside.
Which, once again, I covered in my earlier reply when I said…
“I’m sorry it upsets you so much that the people you’ve decided to identify with are cryto-welfare queens.”
Perhaps I missed it–did you explain what you meant by that and why? Are you claiming that white working class Americans are mostly on welfare? If not, what?
“I like the bait and switch where fucking off to Moldova all of a sudden becomes starting a insurrection and trying to steal part of the country. ”
The example offered was the case of the Mormons. In what sense was the area they settled “part of the country?” Because the U.S. government claimed it but had done nothing to get control of it until the Mormons settled it? That was about as pure a case of Lockean property claim as you can expect to find.
Deiseach quoted “Diamonds are more valuable than water.”
And responded:
“Diamond availability on the market is carefully controlled to keep the prices high. ”
The diamond/water paradox was discussed by Adam Smith, a little more than a century before the formation of De Beers. Diamonds were described as valuable by Pliny and others a considerable while earlier.
And, currently, De Beers controls only about a third of the rough diamond market.
David Friedman asks:
It’s the old “rural areas receive more federal money than they pay in” metric, which I’ve already responded to.
After all, we expect rural areas to pay more per capita for things like roads and power lines because the distances are longer and the population is lower. Likewise most of the federal money they receive tends to be in the form of things like military installations, power-plants, and NASA test facilities which are generally built well away from urban centers due to the whole NIMBY effect.
The problem is that even if you don’t have to pay, proving to the US government that you don’t have to pay is extremely expensive, requires hiring lots of specialized paperwork pushers that are hard to find overseas, and subjects you to large penalties in case of a mistake. If you’re a multinational corporation, you have a house lawyer to deal with this., If you’re an individual, you’re just screwed.
If you are an individual who is no longer a US citizen or resident, why do you even care?
Because the US government will put a warrant out for you if you don’t.
It isn’t extremely expensive and you can do it yourself. At least for the population under discussion. The rich are a different story, but temporarily embarrassed millionaires aside, that’s not relevant to the discussion.
Also, I like that Atwood thinks his ancestors found an empty desert with no one living there and turned in into a land flowing with milk and honey. Good story, but seems a bit derivative IMO.
If you are an expatriate, i.e. you’ve renounced your US citizenship, and you aren’t a covered expatriate you neither need to continue paying taxes on your worldwide income nor pay an expatriation tax.
This isn’t rocket science.
It is quite surprising (though maybe it shouldn’t be) and upsetting to me when the people deploying those weird-geek-shaming strategies against Cruz (they don’t genuinely think he is Zodiac killer but they think marking him as “weirdo” and then exploiting base revulsion towards “weirdos” as a weapon is useable) look like the same people that could be singled out and ostracized as “weirdos” in certain high-school environments or similar places. I mean, you don’t have to like Cruz, it’s quite fine to oppose everything Cruz stands for, but could we please at least go above “this guys doesn’t look like somebody I used to see, he must be a serial killer” thing, and from the same people that would swear they are for maximum inclusiveness if asked?
I suspect most left-wingers, if pressed, would admit that they find the prospect of a Trump presidency slightly less terrifying than the prospect of a Cruz presidency. At least the ones who know anything about Cruz beyond “he’s the Zodiac Killer lolz!”
(Was this meant as a reply to me? I don’t see what this has to do with my Homestar link.)
I’m left-leaning by birth although definitely not a left winger anymore, but I still have many friends across the spectrum between blue dogs Dems and social libertarians. So I can tell you with some authority that, I don’t know about “most”, but among some of the more perspicacious on the left, there is definitely a scootch more opposition to a Cruz presidency than a Trump presidency. Trump is seen as ideologically repellent, but basically an oaf. Cruz is seen as ideologically as bad, but intelligent, devious, and scheming on top off it.
I, personally, breathed a huge sigh of relief when he dropped out. Without intending to start any debate, my personal opinion was that Trump would be a loud, obnoxious, but basically ineffectual lame duck and Hillary would be a menace who won over half the country even as she sold us all out (Hello Obama II, er, GWB III, er, Reagan VI) but the worst we’d face is another recession. But Cruz, now, the prospect of him with real power scared me.
But if the strategy for dealing with political opponents is to use mockery, then the mockers have no right to be shocked and appalled when (a) that mockery is used against their candidates (b) the other side ends up represented by someone who is unaffected by their mockery and indeed welcomes it because the more jeering they do, the more they are persuading people to come to the opponent’s side.
And it is rather hypocritical for people who strive to lecture the world about inclusivity, non-shaming, not judging people on appearance or ability, acceptance without judgement, and so on to resort to “He’s got a weird face, haw haw haw! He must be so dumb! Haw haw haw!”
Exactly!
In fact it’s an almost predictable result, to tie this into the Genetic Engineering thread one post over; If we select right wing politicians for ability to resist mockery, we will eventually breed politicians who are less susceptible to mockery. Some might even adapt to harness it as an energy source.
My assumption is that if “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer” did Trump any good (did it?) it’s because a lot of Trump supporters want a leader who can get away with saying any old thing, as long as it’s hostile.
They didn’t want Donald Trump because he’s a horrible bigot. But faced with other candidates for the Republicans, they didn’t like any of them – fair enough. But the only grounds they used were mockery and stupid memes like “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer” (yes, I’m sure the families of the murder victims were laughing right along at that one).
So if you have no coherent expression of why you think Candidate X is a bad candidate, then you get a Candidate Y who doesn’t care a straw about your jeering. And people who might have supported Candidate X are not feeling “Yes, I should definitely think about going to the side of the people who thought the Zodiac Killer meme was hilarious, I’m sure they will welcome me and strive to honour my values”, so if all they are faced with is Trump as the only viable alternative, what are they going to do?
I imagine a lot of reasonable people will not vote, or will vote third party/independent candidate if one is available. But I can see a lot of people going “This is the only choice you left us, so I’m voting for him. How funny is that joke t-shirt now?”
I do have concerns about the transgender issue. Not the bathrooms. If you use the bathroom of the gender you look like, no one notices anything different.
It’s the operations that concern me. It seems like surgeons are trying to sell people stuff that doesn’t exist– as many expert sales people do in all areas of life. You get people radically altering their bodies, experiencing pain and trauma from the surgery– and from it being nonreversible. And people believing that this surgery and these treatments are going to make them into the other gender. But they’re not.
The surgery is far from making a person’s body into being the gender that they have been fantasizing about being. They’re made into a crude imitation of that gender, that likely doesn’t measure up at all to what they were fantasizing about.
It’s not that I think there should be laws against transgender surgery. It’s just that I wish it were possible to have a more open discussion of these issues, without rigid sides taken. You don’t have to be fundamentalist religious or Right Wing to have concerns about transgender issues. But it seems most folks are either politically correct Right Wingers, wanting to discriminate against transgender people– or else politically correct Left Wingers who feel they must show so much respect for transgender folks as a minority, that the liberals treat tans folks like most liberals treat Black Lives Matter folks.
Liberals mostly just act as if trans folks are right about everything, to be politically correct. So if trans folks fantasize that this surgery is the answer to all their prayers, then we aren’t allowed to question that.
Or maybe we don’t feel free to talk about what the surgeries actually do to a person’s body. Hopefully their surgeons are legally required to talk about this to them.
But many trans people probably have their eyes on their fantasy stars and pay little attention. Because that’s what humans are like. We think about what we want and ignore a lot of uncomfortable realities.
Rather than speculating, why not talk to people that have gone through it, and see how they felt about the outcome of their surgery? Or better yet, look for research that’s done that systematically? It’s been performed for many years now, so you should be able to get an idea of long-term as well as short-term outcomes — and you should be able to find data from before it was a political football, too.
(Note that I haven’t done this, and I’d be interested to see what the results are.)
I do have concerns about the transgender issue. Not the bathrooms. If you use the bathroom of the gender you look like, no one notices anything different
Among adults, sure. But a big part of that battle is being fought in high schools. And while seventeen-year-old Jackie may be as fully invested in her current gender identity as is possible for someone with a penis that the surgeons won’t touch for at least another year, most everybody at the school clearly remembers the thirteen-year-old socially-maladjusted Jack. Possibly some of the other girls remember Jack’s clumsy, creepy attempts at hitting on them back when he was trying to fit in as one of the guys.
This is a hard problem; I don’t see any obvious answers that don’t leave some people feeling genuinely threatened by the outcome.
Interesting. I never thought about it at the high school level. Strange that a transgender individual would choose high school as the time to come out It’s got to be the absolute worst time of life for someone to do that.
But I am looking now, and I see a lawsuit was filed on this topic in Chicago. Interesting.
Part of the issue here is, what is there to keep people who are not transgender from pretending to be, in order to get access to girls in the girls locker room? Nothing, it seems.
I joined a women’s group once, and one of the people who showed up to the meetings was a transgender female, born male. The group ended up splitting up, rather than go through a big fight about who could be in the group. The group was about sharing experiences of growing up as a female– which of course the transgender person didn’t have. That person had experiences of wishing to be female, which are quite different.
None of the group members born female wanted that person there, although no one cared which rest room they used. And no one wanted them to be discriminated against in jobs or restaurant service, or anything like that.
That’s the problem though with liberal political correctness. Being a minority means always being considered correct, and having all your demands granted.
I say this as a person who is progressive, but not politically correct.
Strange that a transgender individual would choose high school as the time to come out
Well, puberty. This is the time when your body is changing on a very deep level and the stresses of dysphoria (if present) and social roles and expectations etc. are going to be at their most immediate.
If you’re going to identify as “not this gender”, this is your time to do so since people really no longer have the option of thinking of you as “a tomboy but she’ll change when she gets older” or “he’s very quiet but once he starts growing taller and getting stronger he’ll hang out with boys his own age instead of his sisters”.
@ Jill
Part of the issue here is, what is there to keep people who are not transgender from pretending to be, in order to get access to girls in the girls locker room? Nothing, it seems.
Perhaps similarly handled as are needs for other medical accommodations. Need to bring a service dog to class … ground floor classroom for those in wheelchairs … etc. For example, there are government regulations as to which handicaps entitle someone to bring a service dog into certain facilities.
Not to add an extra burden to the trans people, but to give some recourse when an unreasonable person is abusing the tolerance of reasonable people.
“Part of the issue here is, what is there to keep people who are not transgender from pretending to be, in order to get access to girls in the girls locker room?”
The fact that being transgender is generally viewed, I suspect especially among high school age kids, as weird. I can imagine a teenaged male caught going into the girls’ restroom telling the school authorities that he is transgender and telling his peers how clever he was to claim to be, but actually pretending to be transgender if he isn’t sounds like a high price to pay for the opportunity to freak out teenage girls by going into their restroom.
That’s true now, but the people pushing for transgender access are the same ones fighting to normalize transgender status in general. The more normal it gets, the more plausible the scenario becomes, so I find it a little dishonest for those people to claim that it’ll never happen on grounds of high schoolers being too skeeved out by the option.
(That said, I think the chances of normalizing it to that extent nationally, and having it stick for more than a few years, are approximately zero. I also think the whole bathroom issue is an incredibly stupid topic for a national debate.)
Strange that a transgender individual would choose high school as the time to come out It’s got to be the absolute worst time of life for someone to do that.
Except that it’s the time when people generally get far enough through puberty to understand, or at least believe, that this is what they have to do to be happy.
Pragmatically, my advice to any high school student with transgender inclinations would be to live the next few years like you were a spy under deep cover in enemy territory, your very life dependent on maintaining cover as whatever it is people already think you are. Then take a year off after high school, and go to a college where nobody knows you while consistently presenting as whatever gender you are sure you want to be seen as. But that comes with costs too, and it’s not fair to put them all on someone already so vulnerable.
Hence, the hard problem.
Part of the issue here is, what is there to keep people who are not transgender from pretending to be, in order to get access to girls in the girls locker room?
Right now, the severe social stigma afforded to the transgendered in all but the most enlightened environments (i.e. not high schools). That’s going to be a powerful deterrent to would-be Peeping Toms for some time to come. But the same people who are trying to open the women’s rest rooms, locker rooms, showers to the self-identified transgendered, are also trying to remove the social stigma. I am genuinely not sure how that story ends.
There are certain types of people who are not concerned about social stigma e.g. psychopaths. And policies of letting anyone who claims to identify as transgender into female locker rooms or bathrooms, may seem like an engraved invitation to such people.
That would require them to be willing to live as the other gender. While they don’t care about other people’s feelings, I have doubts about their willingness to wear short skirts and high heels for years. It really cuts down on your ability to attract girls through normal methods.
This is not true. The criteria is self-identification, and self-identification alone, and frankly, that’s all any business is going to have to go on.
Do you really want to claim that living as a woman is all about wearing short skirts and high heels?
I don’t really think anyone is concerned with actual transsexuals molesting or spying on women in locker/rest rooms. They are concerned with people using the law as cover to do so without official suspicion and a ready alibi.
I still find the idea of sexual predators pretending to be transexuals just to gain access to bathrooms kind of far-fetched, but a more serious issue does occur to me–one which will almost inevitably start coming up assuming increased acceptance for transgender identity claims: prisons.
How long before a male convict claims, at heart, to be a female in order that he be transferred to an all-female prison? Not that that would necessarily be pleasant for a single man surrounded by criminal women–he might end up regretting it–but it seems like it might happen anyway.
@ onyomi
How long before a male convict claims, at heart, to be a female in order that he be transferred to an all-female prison?
Look up Pvt. Chelsea Manning.
Her case seems to have good evidence: military medical records etc. But if some men were faking, why would this be a big serious problem?
I do recall the case of Chelsea Manning, though in her case I’m pretty sure it’s legit and, in any case, she wasn’t headed for a maximum security-type prison anyway.
But aren’t the problems pretty obvious if the bar gets set low enough that any man about to go to maximum security man prison has to be taken seriously if he claims he belongs instead in maximum security female prison? Being the only man in a huge group of admittedly not-nice females sounds a lot more fun than being one man among many other violent men with no women around.
@ Onyomi
Being the only man in a huge group of admittedly not-nice females sounds a lot more fun than being one man among many other violent men with no women around.
So, again, why is this a big serious problem? So a few men go from high sec mens to high sec womens? So what?
If some officials find it a problem, they can squash it real quick by minor regulations. “We want to support your health and preferences. Have you taken your hormone pills today? When would you like your surgery?”
Mandatory hormone treatments might be a way to deal with it.
Mandatory hormone treatments might be a way to deal with it.
For a subset of gender identities, yes. The people who feel they need to present themselves socially as a woman but have sex by inserting their erect penis into a vagina – and I’m sorry I don’t know whether the correct term is “hetero transwoman” or “gay transwoman” or what, but they do exist – will find such a practice as abhorrent as e.g. what was done to Alan Turing.
All of these problems are easy if we only have to deal with a subset of gender identities that people claim in the real world. And it may be that the best we can do is to throw up our hands and say “OK, this covers 99.85% of the population, Dear God we’re sorry for the hell we’re going to put the rest of you through, welcome to Omelas”. I wouldn’t be averse to thinking a bit harder about the alternatives before we break out the mandatory drug therapies.
“and I’m sorry I don’t know whether the correct term is “hetero transwoman” or “gay transwoman” or what, but they do exist ”
Futa? Or is that just the porn term?
@ John Schilling
The people who feel they need to present themselves socially as a woman but have sex by inserting their erect penis into a vagina– and I’m sorry I don’t know whether the correct term is [….]
Normal heterosexual plus cross dressing.
You mean transvestites?
Pertinent Eddie Izzard sketch
@Samuel Skinner
Futa is short for futanari, which is the Japanese word for hermaphrodites.
@ InferentialDistance
Futa is short for futanari, which is the Japanese word for hermaphrodites.
Better see what Google / Urban Dictionary says before using ‘futa’, though.
@ Randy M
I don’t really think anyone is concerned with actual transsexuals molesting or spying on women in locker/rest rooms. They are concerned with people using the law as cover to do so without official suspicion and a ready alibi.
I remember a similar vision being used against the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) circa 1970s. And, Google informs me on a search for { ERA restrooms }, similar fears were used to defend Jim Crow customs, and for some political and semi-political issues in decades earlier yet.
“Futa is short for futanari, which is the Japanese word for hermaphrodites.”
So gelborru is misusing the term. Dang- I hoped that was a correct fit.
@ John Schilling
To posit a John/Joannie (aka JJ) in pretty much the same situation. Attempting “to live the next few years like you were a spy under deep cover in enemy territory” is unlikely to work if the normal signs of male puberty aren’t happening. Worse, if this JJ has already come out to some extent.
So what are the respective outcomes? If the mtf trans goes in the girls’ restroom, there’s maybe noise and some girl might even think she’s in danger of rape — very unlikely.
If zie goes in the boys’ restroom, there’s danger zie will be bullied or given real physical damage.
Similarly, cochlear implants don’t really give you the same quality of sound perception that naturally hearing people have. The technology is getting better, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement. And most people are not aware of this.
Technically, doctors have to inform their potential patients in order to obtain their informed consent. Are there reasons to believe that some doctors have been shirking this duty, and people have been undergoing surgery while misinformed about its results?
Parenthetical aside, just catering to a pet peeve of mine: not a liberal here, but a good friend and frequent close observer of many. Please reconsider painting liberals (or anybody) with a broad brush. I know an abundance liberals who are skeptics by nature, on all issues, and most of the people I know on the left who agree with the what might be called ‘party line’ on trans issues do so because they’ve thought it through and can support that opinion with cogent arguments, not out of some kind of “political correctness” or “bleeding heart” empty-headed, knee-jerk sympathy for underdogs, as apparently in so many conservatives’ imaginations. (FWIW I have no opinion on the issue itself, I’m not informed enough about it to form one so I leave it to others.)
In somewhat stronger terms, I feel Black Lives Matter is at its heart one of the most important issues facing our nation today, and while there’s wrong on both sides, the only right is on the side of BLM—I have yet to hear a single argument against it, in many months of attention, that isn’t solidly grounded in either misinformed ignorance or ingrained, structural white supremacy (except in one single case where it was grounded in individualized, explicit white supremacy).
If you want to form a valid opinion about it, I would suggest you should very carefully study the issue and learn the arguments for it, as understood by the more rational people involved in it, in addition to whatever arguments you may have heard against it, before commenting on it publicly. There are aspects of the black experience in America that are very difficult to grasp if you haven’t personally been on the wrong end of them (it was difficult even for me to grasp, and I approached it with a far more open mind than you seem to be exhibiting here.)
That is not an opinion formed out of some sort of knee-jerk “political correctness” but rather the result of several years of personal critical observation and active inquiry, and a complete (and demonstrated) willingness to change my most dearly-held beliefs when the factual evidence is against them. You insult people like me, and my vast efforts and difficult path to truly understanding the issue, when you disparage and trivialize it as you have.
It’s my fondest hope that the ultimate result of BLM will be to normalize the understanding of systematic racism among people who have no firsthand experience with it, as I’ve begun to understand it. If that happens—and I’m by no means certain that it will, there are enough bad actors on both sides to easily derail the entire thing—but if it does, comments like yours here are going to look far uglier by the light of history than they may to you right now. They do to me, and a few short years ago they wouldn’t have, either. But I think this is a much more serious issue than those who don’t understand it tend to perceive, and it’s as close as I come to religious faith that the sub-cognitive social machinery of structural, ‘implicit’, or ‘invisible’ racism is a cancer that will metastasize and eventually spread to attack far outside the current limits of its victims.
If BLM fails, it will be a national moral tragedy of historic proportions. I sincerely hope that someday most people come to understand that.
Until then, please, if you can, be aware of and perhaps think twice before belittling me.
While I obviously haven’t presented my direct arguments in support of it, I hope this comment has been enough to convince you that there are indeed rational, skeptical people who have learned through observation and intellectual rigor that those arguments do exist.
It ain’t just bleeding hearts and “political correctness”, two phenomena which seem to be orders of magnitude more prevalent in conservative imaginations, and conservative media punditry, than they are among real-world liberals as I’ve lived among thousands of them for close to 50 years. (Granted, yes, there’s a loud lunatic fringe on the left where you can find all that stuff easily. The right has an analogous and equally unflattering one, I shouldn’t have to remind you. It’s not the majority or even a sizable minority.)
And, besides, I’m not sure it’s fair to criticize lack of depth in political opinions, from—I presume—the side of the playing field that just picked perhaps the most factually truth-averse, anti-analytical, reason-disdaining major party nominee in American history. Sorry, your team handed your critics that card; expect it to be used frequently for a while 😛
You sure sound like a liberal, friend.
Unfortunately, the paragraphs of self-praise in between “Please reconsider painting liberals (or anybody) with a broad brush” and “Sorry, your team handed your critics that card; expect it to be used frequently for a while ” aren’t enough to prevent people from spotting the contradiction– but they’re enough to make us positively gleeful when we pounce on it.
For what it’s worth, I’m dubious about Black Lives Matter because it’s not inclusive enough. Not only does it leave out that the police are dangerous to white people though not as dangerous on the average, but the police are more dangerous to Native Americans than to black people.
@M. Qtips:
Could you give us a hint as to where to find all these allegedly-good parts of BLM? I didn’t even realize it was the sort of thing that could have coherent arguments for it. Most of what I’ve seen flying under that banner has seemed anti-rational, uninterested in evidence or argument in favor of outrage-mongering and a general plan along these lines:
(1) We are outraged!
(2) We will express our outrage!
(3) ???
(4) Things get better…somehow?
In short, my perception of that elephant has all been consistent with what you call the “loud lunatic fringe on the left”.
I grant that there might be a there there and I grant that you believe you’ve found it, but I haven’t found it yet. So: where should I have been looking?
As an example of where NOT to look, consider the BLM’s list of misconceptions:
“misconception” #2 is that it’s a leaderless movement. The document says no, it’s a leaderfull movement by which they mean it’s got LOTS of leaders! A half dozen component subgroups or vaguely affiliated groups – they all have leaders, and every local chapter’s got leaders and, heck, you could be a leader too if you join! Which is…pretty much exactly what anyone would mean in saying “it’s a leaderless movement”.
“misconception” #3 is that BLM has no clear agenda, which also seems to be true. And no, the fact that a half-dozen vaguely related affiliate and/or component groups each individually have some “demands” does not mean that BLM itself does too. Since nobody is in charge, there’s no way to definitively say what the group wants or tell if it’s making progress toward getting it.
There’s a decent New Yorker article on where is BLM headed, but much like the “misconceptions” article it seems to reinforce the impression that BLM contains way too much toxoplasma and selection bias.
There are some really important points that need to be made about police accountability and police brutality and police militarization…but there’s nothing specifically black (or trans, or feminist) about those problem and trying to force it into that mold – using these incidents as an excuse to fight the culture war – seems like a bad idea. Turning actual social problems into racist and/or gendered social problems is great if you gain power and status from being on a certain side in that conflict, but not so great if you want to actually improve either the social problems or the race problems or the gender problems.
“Not only does it leave out that the police are dangerous to white people though not as dangerous on the average”
It might be true, but Scott had a pretty detailed discussion of the evidence here a while back, and it wasn’t at all clear whether police discriminated, on average, against blacks.
I think you mean “systemic.” The two words have wildly different meanings, and it really irks me how often people (often, but not always, knowingly) conflate them.
@M. Qtips:
That’s not the standard around here. Everybody in this comments section is smart enough to come up with cogent arguments for a conclusion they start with and are unwilling to give up (because, e.g., doing so would lose them friends, status, or jobs).
Hell, J. Random Lawyer can come up with good arguments on either side of any given issue: it’s their job.
The question is not, “Can I find a good argument for this position?” — it’s: “Is this position actually correct?”
I’ll leave it to others to interrogate your self-congratulatory performance of Not-a-Liberal Liberalism. I can’t do it nicely enough to avoid the Reign of Terror.
@ Jill
You get people radically altering their bodies, experiencing pain and trauma from the surgery– and from it being nonreversible. And people believing that this surgery and these treatments are going to make them into the other gender.
I have this same sort of feeling about a lot of surgeries (and other radical treatments). But if there are rules from the Right-wing side such as “All penises must go in the men’s locker room” — that’s pressure to go ahead with the surgery asap.
It seems to me you are putting too much trust into the wisdom of crowds. After all, we know there are cases of various bad groups taking over governments and wreaking massive destruction and suffering, and just hoping since it’s coordinated it can’t be that bad is not a very big hope. Taking your example, a Jew can very well be very worried about people and groups talking about oppressing Jews by coordinated means, exactly because it has already happened, so the promise “oh, it is very small chance it will happen here” is not really convincing – unless you can prove very convincingly why the chance is indeed very small and will remain small forever. In fact, a Jew probably should be worried more about that than about “beating up” group because beating up would be easier to counter-act than coordinated governmental oppression – if somebody tries to beat you up you can counter-organize, use weapons, involve police and public shaming, etc., but your options are much smaller if the state does the same.
Historic examples also show you do not need to convert 51% of the population – more like 10-20% that are active and passionate enough to make silent 60% decide it’s better not to oppose them and suppress the opposing 10-20%.
It is refreshing to have a board’s moderator expect people to act nicely in general. We could use a LOT more of that in political debates, gatherings and discussion. It’s ridiculous how childish the candidates and their supporters have gotten, in insulting people.
I was not in favor of Ted Cruz for president at all. But I really felt sorry for him when someone at one of his political gatherings told him “You look like a fish monster and you’re a horrible person.”
The guy can’t help the way he looks. And if the person thought there was something horrible that Cruz did, he should have been specific, rather than slamming him as a person.
And of course there is the 24/7/365 Obama bashing and Hillary bashing that keeps going on all over the Internet and the TV., radio etc.
I prefer to see political discussion that is about how our country can become better in various ways, and our problems solved as a nation. The insult fest seems to have crowded most of the constructive discussion out of the picture.
People are making some interesting points here about calling people by their desired gender pronoun, or not. Food for thought. Certainly if someone demanded that everyone address them as “Jesus Christ” or else their feelings would be hurt, that wouldn’t fly. So there is a question, in what circumstances does a person have a right to be addressed the way they prefer to be?
Personally, I have no problem with calling a person by the gender pronoun they prefer. For people who object to it, I think perhaps, for them, it is similar to the “Jesus Christ” request. They feel like they would be agreeing to pretend something that is not true, i.e. agreeing to tell a lie so as not to hurt someone’s feelings, since they see gender in terms of birth gender only.
I think it might be useful to separate “has the right” and “it’s nice to”. I.e. if somebody insists on being called “Our Lord Jesus Christ” and I really like him and/or don’t want to upset him, I might just do that. Or might not, if I don’t care for his quirks. But when somebody insists it’s not mere matter of politeness but it’s his/her right to control my speech, I would certainly object. Not because I like being impolite, but because I don’t see how it’s a right in any sensible understanding of rights.
Now, of course, there’s an issue of moderation – the moderator can say that being nice to the person requesting use of certain pronoun is much more valuable to him on this venue than ability of other commenters to use whatever pronoun they like, and that would be completely legitimate. I wouldn’t call it “right” though – it’s just the decision of the moderator. Just like if the decision would be that you should not use the seven dirty words in comments would not mean you have a right to never hear those words – it’s just in this venue the rules are such that you should not use them.
So it sounds like the rule isn’t “Be nice”, but rather, “Minimize resulting entropy.”
Coordinated meanness sounds a lot like justice: it looks fair from everybody’s view, not just the one with greatest motive to be mean.
This is the point where sokmeone can legitimately bring up Hitler. He did an awful lot of coordinated meanness and it certainly didn’t look fair from everyone’s view.
Technically he did a lot of his worst stuff in secret. He didn’t publicize the killing programs; neither did a lot of other totalitarian regimes.
Of course this rule breaks down when you get to Pol Pot or Rwanda…
Don’t mention him again, or Godwin will appear!
Recommending this brilliant Argentinian sports channel ad for the Copa America using Donald Trump’s speech (the conjunction of Messi with that particular phrase is hilarious).
LOL; that is wonderful! Thank you.
Makes the speech a lot more enjoyable if you imagine The Donald is talking about the necessity for a solid back four when he’s talking about building a really great wall 🙂
The more I think about this, the more unworkable it seems.
A universal call to “be nice” runs into problems as soon as we have rivalrous claims of what it means to be “nice.” It may not be “nice” to keep Trans people’s out of bathrooms of the gender they identify with. Others see it not “nice” to enter a bathroom that some had expected and were comfortable only with those who are anatomically of the same gender.
So, to make this system workable, we have to invalidate one of the claims. Instead of negotiating a compromise, those with the most cultural power have a total victory. Not only must those concerned about unisex bathrooms lose on this particular issue, they must also have their concerns invalidated as bigotry, hatred, and fear-mongering.
And, I don’t think the proposed solution of “organizing” meanness makes things better. It seems this leads to things like passing ham-fisted laws rather than working things out on an individual level, and raising the stakes to the point where each side feels they have to dig in. My suspicion is that the people of North Carolina could have worked out better arrangements than the current Last Stand of the Culture War we’re witnessing now.